Satan, The Other and The Homeless in LA

“My husband’s up in heaven, but he sure is making his way down to hell.”
Tommy Kim eavesdropping on Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036

Like I mentioned on my text message, I'm reading "Paradise Lost" for a number of reasons. I feel like it's one of those "party-line" books, a piece of literature you can say you've read in order to be designated as learned.

I'm only on Book I, but I'm getting a depiction of Satan that is a more generous allegory than that of the cartoonish versions.

The intro to this book has a good essay on this very topic of Satan as an analogue to all idolatry and symbol worshiping. I'm guessing Milton viewed any form of "objectification of the human subject" as Satan, and when we start looking at work (writing and day job) as a separate thing, treating the human subject as a “thing”, like a baseball card whose value can be quantified, we are lost in the darkness, abutting the other fallen angels in pandemonium. It’s like we search for something true and rewarding from something as un-human as a job, a mistake I made a few years ago when I took my poor performance at work personally (“Tommy, you’re just not leveraging your skills properly”).




So what is the effect of giving ourselves to this thing outside of us? David Foster Wallace seems to think that we all have this intense willingness to give ourselves away to an organized set of beliefs, that it's coded in our DNA. Whether it’s the church, the office, the arts, etc we want to hurl our souls, headlong into the group. His characters are living representations of what happens when we give too much.

Milton predicted this. Now, the modern embodiments seem to live inside of the works of David Foster Wallace, Haruki Murakami and Thom Yorke.



The yellow-eyed fallen angel accompanies Hal Incandenza when he’s smoking out in the basement of the Academy. He’s with Toru when he’s trapped in the well. In the darkest moments of loneliness, Satan is the one true thing in the lives of these characters, making them feel something, even if it’s despair. At least it’s not Nothing, or Milton’s “Abyss”.

I see, throughout your posts, a slow continental drift between two distinct worlds that most people see as qualitatively different. You, my friend, see them as existing as one world. The writing world, which some see as recreational or, in my situation at work, as a hobby equaled to golf or stock-picking, is more than an external action taken on the top of a turret. What some people don’t realize is that they are confusing the sign for the referent, much like Satan does in Paradise Lost. The Devil prances around the craggy depths of hell as if he can raise himself above the Maker, when he is himself a product of the maker. Satan is a literalist, unable to see beyond his self, unable to see that his very existence was already designed and approved by the Man.

My life and my writing are not qualitatively different. To treat them separately is to be tyrannized by the literal, to inhabit Satan’s pandemonium and to be deprived of the generosity of imagination.

“Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

I hope I’m not diverting this blog into something too religious. I’m not trying to proselytize or wave a bible in the air and smack anyone in the face with it. I’m just trying to work within the medium here. But before you can even get going in the writing, Josh, before you can imagine an un-loneliness, compassion has to exist for yourself. The Other does not exist without being compassionate to the self, something Dominic taught me in my last semester. So on that note, be good, to yourself. I’m depending on it.



PS: I've spent a good 30 minutes formating this thing at work. I'm glad I just announced that.