Sympathy for the Devil

I once heard a tale about a man whose life was not his own; whether he was truly a man was debatable, as he was represented as a spirit that took control of the bodies of others. His existence, such as it was, involved every day becoming someone else. It was presented as an honorable lifestyle - he had the goal of making the right decision at a crucial time in his host’s life, a mission which varied from body to body. Although immortal, he could never be released from this duty. His life was everlasting but an everlasting prison. He never cursed his fate, he simply accepted it and performed his duty for all eternity. Yet a reasonable or a rational look at the universe would lead any man to unending, deep despair.

I write about this because I am in very much the same situation. I have been forced from one body to another, for all eternity, and shall continue to be forced from one body to another for all eternity. I am every single person that has been, is, and ever will be, and each incarnation of myself propels me back or forward in time to be a completely different person. Each time, I have a single mission - in some merciful cases it takes an hour, or a day, or a year, so that the brief respite of oblivion comes sooner. Of course, the respite is almost worthless, for it is infinitesimal in comparison with time stretching out in front of me and behind me for as far as I can see. Sometimes my mission takes longer; I have known it to take a hundred years.

Sometimes I complete my mission by my own hand; sometimes by the cold hand of nature (which I once described as the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to – I was quite wrong, the flesh is heir to as many shocks as there are grains of sand on a beach), and sometimes by the hands of my other incarnations. As you – or I, as you are my future and my past incarnation – have divined by now, it is my mission to die.

I have believed my mission to be a great number of things over the timeless repetitions of reincarnation, but I have finally come to the conclusion that it is to die. I it is only by dying that I have my moment of oblivion, my one minor relief in the world, after which I am thrown back to life. When I die, I may be this body once again, or I may be a man who murders to gain salvation in the past, or I may be a woman civil servant in the present, or a genderless post-human in a concrete prison in a time beyond time; but I will always return.

My memory of times before is long, and I do not remember all of my lives; I know that I am all of humanity, and I believe that I have been all of humanity more than once, over a vast, or possibly unlimited, stretch of time. As such, I am responsible for all the suffering and misery in a world I alone populate – and so perhaps I die to make atonement for my sins. I hope – I do not pray, for I know now that this is a pitiless and malevolent universe, in which nothing would answer my prayer – that I have been incarnated a finite number of times, for something that has a beginning must have an end.

The most merciful life to live is one in which I do not recall my previous lives, nor do I have any sense or concept of the nature of my world. This is, although in such lives I will not believe this, rather rare. In most of my lives I remember at least something about my previous incarnations, even though many societies do not accept talk of such things. In these lives I am away, briefly, from the unending pain and tedium of eternal life, and instead I am free to live in the gilded prison of flesh. Life is still tedium, of course, for it consists of the endless cycle of drawing breath, eating, defecating, fighting, reproducing, and dying. When the death comes to such a life, however, the pain of the realization that death is not an end is overwhelming.

Suicide, if it comes – and it comes in some lifetimes, more frequently when I do not realize the nature of my reality than when I do not – is always its own punishment. Those who wish to get out of life despair when they find themselves thrown back into it. There is no escape – there cannot be escape.

Those lives where I have fully recognised the nature of existence have been few; there are many who have brief flashes of reality, as if seeing it out of the corner of the eye or in the depths of memory like a flash of a scene or a half-remembered song from earliest childhood. Such types with a minimal grasp but a grasp nonetheless are frightened of finding the truth, and make jest of it; they jest at scars, but they have never been wounded. One such type was the originator of the above legend – in that incarnation I recognised the idea but not the pain.

Such was the case, too, when I wrote a song of man’s – my – history, telling how I had been present at all wars and murders, both as perpetrator and as victim. Many of my incarnations have made me into a shadowy figure; they have given my temporal, commonplace nature one name, that of man, and my true nature another name, that of Satan. I accused myself, through my guilt of creating the suffering in which I lived, of rebellion against omnipotent nature. No rebellion, of course, is possible.

I was once a man who was tortured by dreams, for I knew what my life really was, what the nature of the universe really was, and I wrote my dreams and the world down in stories in which I – as humanity as a whole – was tortured and menaced by forces beyond my control. In my stories, these forces did not menace me because they hated me, but because they did not care about me. I imagined that everywhere was haunting, creeping darkness, and denied the existence of a peaceful oblivion.

I felt an urge, then, to tell myself and my other incarnations the nature of reality, and I needed to convince them. So I created an elaborate universe of documentation, each supporting the other, to warn myself, and disguised it all as fiction. It was always interpreted as fiction, just as I know this will be.

I have done everything in every way, like the man in the legend, doing good or doing bad in every life, and I have lived as every type of person and every type of society, many times over, and nothing can alter the grotesque, malformed shape of the universe. It is all meaningless. I have been responsible for all the suffering I have given to myself and the victim of my own punishment. I am the source of all the evil of this world, the greatest of which, as Pandora knew, is hope, for hope is ultimately futile. The only hope I have is that of everlasting death, and I beg you to wish that upon me.