Transforming Demons
Around the time I was finishing The Arguer, I developed a debilitating pain in my right wrist. I don’t think the timing was a coincidence, but I’ll get to that later. All of a sudden, I found myself unable to open a cabinet or chop a cabbage or lift a pot of beans off the stove without pain. I couldn’t think what might have caused it. Had I slept funny in my hammock? Was it from when I’d slipped and fallen a few weeks earlier? Was it from typing too much, or painting too much, or playing guitar, or holding my phone the wrong way? Nothing I could think of seemed to fit, so I decided to spend some time exploring the patterns of the pain. I moved my arm and felt for tension in the soft tissue. There were knots of it inside the palm of my hand. I found it radiating through my forearm and around my elbow to my upper arm. It wrapped around my shoulder, through my armpit to my back and chest, spreading to the edges of my rib cage and spine. A pattern that extensive takes time to develop, so I knew this one must be old and deep, but I still didn’t understand it. After a week and a half of exploring and releasing tension, and some generous energy work by my friend Lea, the pattern relaxed enough to emerge into conscious awareness. I was sitting with friends in an outdoor restaurant among beautiful gardens. I reached across the table, and my right arm knocked over a glass of juice, spilling it onto me and across the floor. As I felt the ice on my lap and the cold, sticky liquid soaking into my bathing suit, a certainty came over me: my arm had been possessed by a demon.
I understand why that might sound nuts to you. Somewhere along the line, a lot of respectable people stopped believing in demons. I’m not sure why; it seems to me that we’re still just as likely to be haunted by the invisible; an idea can afflict a person every bit as much as a virus or a broken bone. We’ve invented new names for these invisible forces: habit, stress, phobia, trauma, mental illness. I’m not sure that renaming them has given us much more power over them than our ancestors had. In some cases, we might even have less power; for example, if we still believed in demons, we could believe in exorcism, and I’m sure you can think of a habit or two you might like to have cast out. I’ve dabbled in minor exorcism myself; saying a spirited “away wi’ ye” (with an Irish accent) seems to help at times, or sometimes a little incense or a blast of cold, fresh wind can waft away a demon or at least shut it up for a while. I didn’t inherit a continuous ancestral tradition for this, so I’m left to improvise, and I find that however silly the ritual might seem, the important thing is that I believe it could work. You might be able to cast out demons too if you set your mind to it.
But lately I’m not so sure I want to be casting the demons out. I remember seeing Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away for the first time and being absolutely enchanted by it. It took many years and many viewings for me to understand a core message of the story: there are no evil spirits, only spirits looking for something they need but are having trouble finding. Characters come into the story who appear scary or evil, but every single one of them is transformed into a friend by a courageous act of love. This is an unusual narrative. The much more common story arc is that characters who appear to be evil are in fact evil and are driven away, defeated, or killed by a courageous act of force. This is a narrative of rejection, and I believe it’s spiritually dangerous, because it tempts the audience into some comfortable but misleading ways of looking at the world.
The first temptation is to think that evil is outside of us. Of course we’re meant to identify with the “good guys”, who are shown to be pure in every way that counts, and reject the “bad guys”, and this gives us permission to ignore that both of them are human and have the same potential to be cruel or kind. A simple change in circumstances could so easily have turned one into the other. But we, the audience, know we are good people, we mean well, and our own little cruelties seem small in comparison. “Well, I may not be a saint,” we tell ourselves, “but at least I’m not evil like that guy.”1 We’re comforted by feeling good and heroic, and certainly not in need of soul-searching to find the places where we could be kinder. Living in an imaginary world of super-villains, we can ignore our own shadows, our own petty forms of villainy.
The second temptation is to believe that force works; that evil can be destroyed or banished so far away that it can do no harm. And yet, looking at history, it always seems to return in unexpected ways. Revolutionaries behead the elite oppressors with the guillotine, and, as if by some magic trick, the spirit of the oppressor is awakened in the heads of the judge, the executioner, and everyone who delights in watching the bloody spectacle. The Bastille is torn down and then rebuilt tenfold, but it never stands empty. Convicts rotting away in solitary confinement somehow become puppet-masters controlling the street gangs. Inside the self, it’s much the same: no matter what I do, my shadow remains a part of me and can never go away. If I try to lock away my anger, either the prison walls are weak and it comes out in a thousand little ways, or the prison walls are strong and my own power is locked up inside with it; I become harmless, but only by never doing anything of any importance.
When I buried my sadness,
I buried beauty
When I buried my anger,
I buried power
When I buried my fear,
I buried truth
I have become a grave-robber,
a rag-picker, a resurrectionist
I drape their bones
in patchwork clothes
They rise up clattering
and dance in me
—Jesse Crossen, Morelos, Mexico, March 2023So to return to the story, my right arm spilled a glass of juice all over my lap, and a few minutes later it flicked sauce onto my shirt with a fork. My right arm dropped money on the ground and knocked over a guitar. This kind of clumsiness was completely unlike me, and it almost seemed as if the arm was possessed and had a mind of its own. But I don’t think it was a demon arriving that caused the clumsiness, I think it was a demon departing. See, for most of my life, I had been using my right arm to reach out and control the world, to wield axes and hammers, skillets and sewing needles, pencils and paintbrushes. I had feared that if I didn’t keep a tight grip on reality, it would turn on me, and so the demon of control had wound itself through my muscles and tendons, always careful, always vigilant. But somehow, writing The Arguer had released something inside me, and now the demon of control was unwinding, and a new pattern was taking over, looser and more fluid, but clumsy from lack of use.
Change is often painful, and that’s one reason why my arm hurt, but I also started to notice a pattern in how the pain ebbed and flowed. Any time I began to worry about something not going well, or try to do everything myself, the ache in my wrist would get my attention. “Oh,” I would think, “I’m doing that thing again, and I don’t need to anymore.” And over the course of a few weeks, the pain gradually grew less and less as the demon transformed into a friend. I could use my arm again, skillfully and powerfully, but now it was moved more by love than by fear. I’m reminded of another Miyazaki film, Princess Mononoke, where the hero’s right arm is possessed by a demon of blind hatred. The demon gives his arm the power of brutal and efficient killing, but he must travel to find its source before it reaches his heart and kills him. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything if I tell you that the source of the demon is the way humans are assaulting the natural world and bending it to their will. There are forces out of balance, and this can’t be healed by destruction—neither humans nor the natural world can be easily destroyed—but only by bringing them back into balance.
Science and mysticism both tell us that creation and destruction are illusions, that we are patterns of energy, waves moving on the face of the eternal. Everything we are and everything we experience is constantly becoming something else. Life is transformation, and transformation is life. If this is the world we live in, I’m beginning to think there’s a different path that doesn’t require radical acceptance or radical rejection, but only noticing the way things are going, thinking about how they could be, and redirecting them, just a little bit at a time, until they become something new and wonderful.
It’s true that there are popular antihero narratives like Breaking Bad, but notice that for the story to work, Walter White needed to be juxtaposed with characters who take evil to a greater extreme, even to the point of being literal Nazis.