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Note on The Devil and the Devil

I believe I used to pick up an idea, say about myth from Jung, or from a story like the slaying of the Minotaur, and, before seeing all the implications, write a poem with a strong but inchoate feel of the mythic inside me.  Days working out allegorical scaffolds were a waste of time.  Perhaps I’ve always thought that if I create anything half attractive it also has to be anchored deep.  When I look at this piece now it’s clear that I must have had in mind some vague notion of the history of Satan in Zoroastrianism.  I could have told you that this creed in ancient Persia (BC) saw the universe as a place of struggle between a figure of Darkness and a figure of Light.  That was all I knew and needed.  Dualism.  A split in the universe.  However, the title and the last line speak in terms of a twin-darkness, not of a Zoroastrian Darkness and Light.  Of course I don’t, and didn’t then, believe in moral forces out there ruling the universe, but if I were ever to think that way, this is what I’d come up with.  A demiurge once broke into two evil halves which continue to fight.  We are part of their drama.¹ 

The reference to hostages dates this to a time from when the British hostages in Beirut were kidnapped in the mid-1980s to when after they’d been released in 1991.  Their books emerged later.²  So this was written in the early 1990s and the presence of the baby has no more to do with the Max poems, written after 1998, than does the child in Balkan Sacrifice.  The baby archetype may have dropped into this piece because of the child just born to a neighbour.  I was aloof from new life then, which is as reasonable as being preoccupied by it.  Perhaps I saw clearer and now hide from what I fear most.  This piece is a steady itemising of bleak eventualities.  When edging back, in late poems like this one, into past styles and views held a long time already, I rely on myth as much as ever.

Alan Marshfield

¹ Out of interest when writing this note I looked up Satan, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Mithraism, the Magi, Ormazd and Ahriman.  There’s no point in offloading here everything I found, but anyone interested in the influence of the prophet Zarathrustra (Zoroaster, 7–6^th cent. BC) upon Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Christian and Muslim thought would also profit from looking these matters up—on any DVD encyclopedia, for example.  (back)

² During the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990) many hostages were taken; prominent among them were John McCarthy, who with Jill Morrell wrote Some Other Rainbow, and Terry Waite, who wrote Taken On Trust and Footfalls In Memory.  (back)

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