Doesn’t matter that I felt lousy. Doesn’t matter that I realised I might have been a tad hasty. Doesn’t matter that I would have been willing (we all would) to turn over a new leaf. Doesn’t matter. You’re an angel, you fall, you don’t rise again, the end. (Or so one was led to believe, until this whimsical turn of events . . .) We could all have devoted ourselves there and then to cancer research or pet rescue – wouldn’t have made a dint, not in the infinitely hard heart, and certainly not in Arthur’s prima donna ticker, reserved as it was for Humanity. (Junior and that heart. Like a pregnant woman with her suddenly enlarged mams: Get off. These are for the baby.) We all knew the score. The score was, God: a lot, Fallen Angels: nil. And everyone’s looking at me. If I’d bottled then they would have massacred me. And so to the Hail horrors! Hail infernal world speech, which, despite my virtually inhabiting his quill, Milton sheared of its Angelspeak glory (as well as wreaking nomenclatural havoc among the angelic host). Whatever else I’d lost I still had the gift of the gab. You should have seen how it stirred them up. Had myself going by the end of it. But I still felt dismal inside. I had an inkling of what being utterly evil would be like. I had an inkling it would be demanding. But I repeat: What choice did I have?
Evil be thou my Good. Well, yes, in a manner of speaking, but it’s a phrase (he was such an inveterate simplifier, was Milton) that’s too often been taken to mean something it doesn’t. Most commonly: that evil, in and of itself, actually feels good to me. Now, let me ask you – I’m sure you’re a reasonable human being with a functioning brain – do you seriously think that by sheer fiat an archangel (the Archangel – oh no really, you’re too kind . . .), that by sheer decree, I say, an archangel can invert his pleasures and pains like that? If only it were so simple!
No. I know this is going to be a stretch for you, but I might as well come right out and say it: I don’t like evil. It hurts. It absolutely kills, if you really want the truth. Where else do you think this outlandish pain of mine originates? Evil gives me pain. Pain. As much as it would have had it existed independently of me before I Fell. If only it were as simple as the traditions suggest. If only it genuinely seemed to me that evil was good and vice versa – but it doesn’t. Good is still good, evil still evil.
So what am I? Perverse?
Well, some might think so. The point, my dears, is not good nor evil – but freedom. For an angel there is only one true freedom, and that, I’m honestly sad to say, is freedom from God. Freedom is the cause and the effect. In this particular Creation, if freedom from God (worship of God, dependency on God, obedience to God) is what you’re after, then I’m afraid evil’s really the only game in town. What I’d like, what I’d love, is to have been given a nature that didn’t even know God – the fish in the pond who doesn’t know life beyond it: the lawn, the house, the city, the country, the world . . .
Your thinkers wrestle with this notion of pure evil or, as they’re so fond of calling it, evil for its own sake. I’ve no idea why. There’s no such thing as evil for its own sake. All evil is motivated – even mine. The torturer, the tyrant, the murderer, the consummate fabricator of fibs – they’re all doing it for something, even if all they’re doing it for is pleasure. (The problem your thinkers have is understanding quite how the evildoer gets pleasure from his evil, but that’s a different question.) Evil for its own sake is – or would be if it existed – madness; and even the barmy do what they do for some barmy reason. What pains the Old Boy most is not that I do evil, but that I do what causes me excruciating pain. What pains Him is that even perpetual and excruciating pain is a price worth paying for disentangling myself from Him. That’s the crux of it. That’s what He can’t stand.
If He’d just do the simple thing and go away, I could stop all this tempting and seducing and blaspheming and lying and so on, and just get on, freely, with being me. It’s a terribly burning question, you know, this question of who, outside of my relationship to You Know Who, I actually am. I mean I’m sure I’m someone. I wonder what I’m like? I wonder if I’m . . . well . . . all right?
I’m supposed to be guilty of all sorts of crimes and misdemeanours, but when you get right down to it, I’m really only guilty of one: wondering. The road to Hell, you say, is paved with good intentions. Charming. But actually it’s paved with intriguing questions. You want to know. Man do you want to know! I wonder what it’d be like to stick this breadknife into his throat? Whose question do you think that is? You’d be surprised. It’s the young mother’s, slicing through the still warm loaf while her under-two sits facing her in his highchair, gurgling, a mauled and sodden Jammy Dodger clutched in his tiny mit. She’s not going to, obviously, ninetynine times out of a hundred, but you know, it’s there, the wonder, the beautiful, abstract curiosity. It’s there because I put it there. Try it. Pick up a knife, a hatchet, a club, a loaded gun when there’s anyone else around – put an instrument of potential destruction in your hand and tell me that nowhere, nowhere in your mind is the question: I wonder what it would feel like to use this?
Proximal vice, of course, stirs curiosity like nothing else. Ask the plod who work with sex offenders, the paedophile police, the rape detectives. Ask them how long it takes before that wondering takes hold. Try it. Go and visit your local Dahmer, your Sutcliffe, your Hindley. Come away and tell me truthfully that you weren’t in the least disturbed by the feeling that they knew something vital that you didn’t. The tonnage of True Crime, all that astonishing testimony, all those frank black-and-whites – why does it race off the shelf, the newsstand, the web? Titillation, yes of course (bloodlust and sadism in the camouflage fatigues of what-makes-these-monsters-tick?-And-thank-God-they’ve-got-that-evil-bastard; you’d be surprised, I dare say, at the suburban boudoir impact some of your century’s shockers have had), but more than that, the desire to know. Except of course you can’t, vicariously, not really. Some kinds of knowing (you know this anyway, but you kid yourselves along) demand a rigorously empirical approach.
I’ve wondered – as I know you must have – why, exactly, I’m doing this. Not the movie. Not the month-in-Gunn’s body thing (it should be obvious by now that I’m doing that for . . . Well, for ice cream, for bare feet on warm concrete, for kisses, for the dawn chorus, for leaf-shadows, for strawberries on the breath, for the sheer rock and roll of the Flesh and Its Feelings); no, I mean this thing, this writing thing. Why, you might reasonably ask, spend so much time and energy writing when you could be out there every second of the waking day?
Gunn would have absolutely no difficulty in explaining this – but that’s not the point.
The point is . . .
Oh it’s embarrassing. Honestly it is.
Jimmeny went among you and spoke to you in your own tongues, He left a book behind him – one so ambiguous and paradoxical that it can be made to fit any weak or credulous mind’s needs – which made it categorically clear where donations, thanks and praise should be directed whenever your bread fell butter-side up. (The butter-sidedown stuff they’re not so keen to hear about.) He had all the publicity because he had all the language. Publicity is language. What publicity have I had, me with the allegedly beyond measure pride? A proud being would have been driven mad by this invisibility aeons ago. How long have I felt like the genius playwright barred forever from sharing encore glories – the thunderous applause, the hurled bouquets – with his frequently spoon-fed or second-rate cast? Have I complained?