on replacing the angel and devil on my shoulders with a gargoyle and butterfly
No matter how often you find yourself feeling at one with the fabric of the cosmos, you’ll still end up nuts-deep in a dichotomy a few hours later. So I decided to choose my dichotomy. Childhood indoctrination lumbered me with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. I grew to require a dichotomy that chimed with my atheistic buddhism. So I plucked my angel and devil from my shoulders, packed them into a Moses basket and left it inside the confession booth of a local church. I then installed my new shoulder dichotomy: a gargoyle and a butterfly.
The gargoyle doesn’t sit on my shoulder, he grows out of it. Much like how the gargoyles of a gothic cathedral are hewn from the same stone as the building, my gargoyle is made of skin, bone, gristle and hair. The muscles that bulge within his squatting thighs are purely ornamental. He never moves. Even his words, which are constant and manifold, appear directly in my mind rather than rising from his sneering, rictus grin.
The butterfly doesn’t talk at all, which makes sense. How could one begin to imagine what the speech of a butterfly would sound like? It revels in its existence and its lightness. It is so slight that it constantly melds into the moment it occupies. The colours and markings on its wings are always shifting in response to its surroundings. It accepts everything. It’s tethered to my shoulder by a very thin cable or thread, like fibre-optic spider silk. That said, the butterfly seems to be able to flutter as far or as high as it wishes without the slightest tautness registering on the thread.
They both serve a purpose. The gargoyle is great as a problem solver and at remembering things. He retains all of the necessary facts and is good at summarising all of the available options when the need for a decision arises. The problem is that he never stops looking for a problem to solve and the facts that he so effortlessly spews often snowball into epic narratives, grand theories and entrenched opinions. There’s always a point where his reliability becomes a kind of stuckness. He is a gargoyle, after all.
It’s easy to say that I should just be the butterfly, in the same way that one is meant to only heed the angel. But the free-fluttering bliss of the butterfly is just another subtle inertia. If I stumbled upon a serial killer’s basement, the butterfly would simply delight in the grime and viscera, flitting between the filthy hues of the floorboards and the bright red of arterial spray. It would revel in equal love and sympathy for the killer and their quarry. It is the gargoyle that howls in moral revulsion and recalls the quickest means of escape.
Even my poems come from the gargoyle, albeit when he’s most sympathetic and attentive to the movements of the butterfly. It’s not so much that he isn’t good with words as it is that he never bloody stops.
The one big difference between the old dichotomy and the new one is the role that I play within it. With the angel and the devil my role was key: I was the chooser, the actor, the moral agent. But with the gargoyle and butterfly there really doesn’t seem to be a role for me at all. If anything I am a figurehead, more constitutional monarch than Commander in Chief.
There’s a fair chance that neither of them notice me at all. To them I am a human face to point towards the other human faces with their own user illusions and tortured dichotomies. There’s an irony of course, that in choosing a new dichotomy I also chose my own marginalisation. But they’re better at the job than the old trio of angel, devil and moral agent. I just let them get on with it. It’s all out of my hands from now on. What is it that the Christians call it?
Oh yes, grace.