Man and Demon.

Love the man....

He was a man you’d warm to, trust. Initially reticent, and becoming a beam of brightest light. He’d shine for you. For you, for people in pubs, coffee houses, eateries, or just drinking. He’d be talking visions, offering worlds to you. To anyone there really. He had devotees, lovers, followers even. He had intelligence. He was hip, like one of the ‘hood boys, the backroom boys. All street cred, all soul, all cool.

You’d fall for him. I promise you. Falling was the apposite word. You’d find yourself in the zone with him, warm and mutual. A kind of homecoming you’d think… or something like it.

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But even then there would be episodes, Drunken absences in mind, in body? Strange distempers, periodic and predictable. Like backstops to his loveliness. Increasing as time passed. Something sparked to burn in him, a wild exhilaration growing feral, mean.

You’d feel in a frantic kind of way that you had to bring him back. Reach down through darkness after a vanishing light. You had to love him back. You could do it too in the early days. You could bring him back and overlook whatever that was.

But you learned in time to face the indifferent, restless, hating thing that lived in him. When he was drunk or drugged or needing to be. You understood that thing (entity) came first for him. Was first for him.

I mean you left him when you understood what you were becoming to him. To something that had taken root in him. You weren’t love’s beloved at all in fact, but a kind of Familiar? To be pulled in, and over time, destroyed.

And now you’ve understood, you see it all the time. When you acknowledge what it is you’re looking at, I mean. In pubs sometimes, a man (or woman) coasting wild on a wave of drunken, disinhibited and savage exuberance. Or falling about invulnerable, oblivious. Or on the hunt. So many iterations of it! The light, I mean, that shines from addicts, autocrats, maniacal movers and shakers, drugged up useful tools. You see it in online videos of ‘avenging’ soldiers, whooping at the shot that got the child, wearing underwear from murdered women crushed beneath the weight of buildings. A video someone made on a smart phone in the moment, showing things you simply cannot credit or contain.

Like looking into an abyss, Tolkiens Palantir. The demon there looking back to pull in and seduce. Ah, turn away, you turn away as every human instinct insists. Yes, pull away and, simply, name him.

So hard it is for humans (wired to see only what is humanly possible)

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He told you how the drunk in him, the addict, hated you. He said you must not leave him there, abandon him. He cried. But you were glad to go at last, the man he’d been too far away to mourn or properly recall.

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He came back though. That happened. When he was broken, all used up. No purchase for a demon then. He clawed back ground, crawled on and lived. Long enough anyway to heal a little, reach out past the wasteland he had made, to carers randomers. To you.

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The AA people call on God to keep the addict safe, to keep him clean. Or suffering pins him here at last, to rest in the balm of human congregation. But we, we turn our back on man and entity both, denying evil, refusing what is captured there. How may we learn to name the demon, hold the human fast. To exorcise? Does therapy, love, or God prevail at all? Or only comfort that poor human thing, that suffering, finally, has carved?