Or not in the literal figure of the Devil, but in the archetype of what his “wickedness” entails—we hold him in the highest esteem for his outstanding capacities. Capacities which, if I merely attempt to grasp them with my limited mind, unsettle it and drive it into a dull whiteout.
He is so astute that, at the mere thought of him and the desire to inquire further, I feel myself dancing along the edge of madness. And this, far from being his fault, is due to my constant state of mental fragility.
You see, I, like the Devil, am forever changing masks. Unlike him, I do not do so out of cunning; I simply loathe remaining too long with myself. From this springs the need to create different stages to wear—in this case: masks. I adore masks. And there is a demon who adores them as well; he has carried that taste to such exquisite and extraordinary heights that I, with my poor manual skill, could not achieve them in a single lifetime under this form.
That exquisite demon is playful, for he mixes the words I write just as he does my thoughts and actions, to the point that I dissociate from reality. And only those extraordinary masks are capable of capturing my attention. His hands, coarse and large, are like cameras: precise and swift in seizing the moment of ecstasy in human emotion. Yet he does not settle for the record; he tears away faces at the very summit of feeling. There, where human purity burns at its most intense, he slices through skin and sentiment alike.
He keeps the rictus of horror or the gleam of orgasm, petrified at their most honest instant. You understand me, don’t you? He does not want the flesh for its biological worth; he wants the mask that forms when the human being ceases to pretend. He is a craftsman who feeds on what we dare not sustain: the absolute transparency of a face that fractures and lets itself be dragged by the substance of matter and of many other invisible beings.
This demon lies in wait at all times, an artist awaiting a landscape to capture. And he has already captured me. Somewhere within his art I am imprisoned. I feel flattered by the honor, and profoundly weary as well. At this very moment I am becoming a kind of demon myself, just like him—but in human version, therefore limited and crude in the art.
One might think sentimental people are his favorite prey and, for obvious reasons, that he obtains many masks from them. But it is not so. Their expressions are as cheap as grass. They are forever weeping, accustomed to driving themselves to emotional extremes over trifles; they take everything to heart and, paradoxical as it sounds, that is something very different from feeling. Sentimentality is a soft noise, a mask already cracked and self-betraying. The demon has no interest in the cheap theater of those who overflow by habit. He seeks the jewel hidden in the reserved one, in the person who keeps their fire under lock and key until pressure makes it explode.
These are common masks and, especially to that demon, grass is distasteful. To me, in my circumstances, it could not matter less; whatever I catch is good. Only that, as I have said, I am unrefined in this art. In my beginnings, I believed that by tearing directly whatever I could from the face, I would preserve a mask bearing the expression I deemed pure. But I must confess that when you try to tear off a face, the process is exceedingly unpleasant for both parties.
My relationship with this demon is utterly contemptible; he has condemned me to live with his nature. He lurked at the height of dawn until he succeeded in carrying off each one of my masks. In my ecstasy of emotion, the demon seized the instant and took it away transformed into a mask. He took so much that now I am hollow. I have no base face. I am nothing. This is where I fall subject to his nature. Now I must hunt those pure emotions, extract them into masks, and wear them.
Once obtained, I put them on, enter into character, and interact more comfortably with reality. They are not lies meant to deceive others; that is why I am not cunning but foolish. I seek to deceive myself in order to endure the theft of my identity, for behind them there is nothing to sustain the bone.
Do you wish to know when or how you became a victim of this demon? It is easy to detect. You will know he has passed through you when being alone becomes torture: he forces you to confront the empty space left by the theft. He is a lover of existential boredom; he induces a state in which your mind feels fragile, vibrating with a strange and unpleasant tremor… like a lick upon the brain.
In that state, you lose control of your identity for a second. He waits only for you to erupt into a pure emotion in order to harvest and tear away the most honest expression from your face. In the end, what remains is a momentary relief, followed by total emptiness.
He leaves you a trunk of masks as both gift and constant torment, so that you may go out hunting your own and choose to change personality out of sheer necessity to flee. Why does this happen to you? Most likely that demon already has your “original face” stored in some collection, and you are operating only with the remnants that remained. The playful demon gives you his form so that you may become his new lackey. He compels you to return and try on new masks, seeking to see whether one might fit the hollow you feel within. And if the answer is yes, prepare to be assailed again.
Now that I share this intrinsic nature, I fall from the height of my void into a deeper one, and then into another, and so on infinitely until light becomes a feeble and incomprehensible myth. And only thus, from where I stand, wearing my exquisite mask—a soft and audacious melancholy—I realize that the Devil is a damn lazy creature. He cannot create anything new; he can only copy, distort, and collect what God, or human nature, has already made.
The Devil is “lazy” because he renounced the capacity to possess an essence of his own. Having no face that defines him, he is forced to become the Collector. His laziness lies in refusing to labor upon his own divinity and preferring instead to tear purity from others. He dedicates himself to gathering the most intense human moments in order to clothe himself in them. In passing, his sloth infects the human: he robs you of the will to sustain your own face until you yourself, out of existential indolence, surrender it.
That peculiar trait is contagious. It induces in you that “hatred of remaining with yourself” so that you alone perform the dirty work of stripping yourself of identity while he merely reaps the benefit. It is far easier to put on a mask than to build a soul. A short path—not because it is easy, but because of the penance of your own demonic nature. He harvests my purity because he is too lazy to cultivate his own.
Yet in his indolence resides his greatest cunning. He is lazy in creation, but diligent in waiting; he knows he need not pursue us when he can simply exhaust us. His intelligence lies not only in arranging pieces, but in being a parasite who knows the exact point of our fatigue. He convinces us that the weight of sustaining our own identity is a futile effort, a burden too noble for such fragile shoulders. In the end, his genius consists in making us believe that the trunk of masks is liberation rather than a cell. He grants us variety so that we do not miss essence, and while we lose ourselves in the game of being others, he rests, watching us labor for him out of the simple fear of remaining still in the silence of our own face.
From this condemnation, there is a raw beauty. The vitality of a living face is replaced by the sublime stillness of a moment captured forever. Each mask is a melancholic echo of another’s passion, a petrified sigh, a tear crystallized at the apex of its fall. There is a strange comfort in wearing them; it is like donning the ghosts of emotions you can no longer feel with the same purity. Longing, rage, disappointment, illusion… They are fragments of stolen glory, silent trophies that, in their artificiality, promise a glimmer of what we once were. A jade-like beauty, cold to the touch yet capable of reflecting a faint light in the darkness of what lies behind the masks we bear. And that, though I have ceased to feel as a human, hurts immensely…
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