Demons, Also Saints, Scientists, and Love-Struck Sophomores
Like demons? Nobody does—well, scientists, yeah, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s look at some background first, starting with Saint Francis of Assisi, whose experience with the little fellows may be said to be typical of the time in that one night he sees
what he thinks is a housefly on his window sill but finds it has horns, leathery wings, and goat’s feet when he looks closer—worse, it spews curses and makes a display of its hairy buttocks, it being a scout for its band, the second of which
is as big as a bird. Then comes a demon as big as a hawk, then one the size of a pig, until the room is filled with creatures howling and cursing God. They flee when Brother Bernardo bursts into the room and promises to stay the night with Francis, and when a night bird
lights in the window, the terrified saint buries his face in his friend’s shoulder, though when the bird makes its familiar cry, the two monks murmur a prayer of thanksgiving, hoping to hasten the dawn. Quelle horreur, yes? The stuff of horror movies!
Which is our problem, not theirs, because the thing we forget about demons is that they used to be angels, meaning they’re smart. Read Paradise Lost. Demons fell before the start of the visible universe, and at that time they lost all the good of their natures,
but that doesn’t mean they’re dummies—true, they unsettle the senses, stir low passions, disorder sleep, bring diseases, fill the mind with terror, distort the limbs, control the way in which lots are cast, create the heat of cupidity,
lurk in consecrated images, and tell lies that resemble truth. They take on different forms as well and sometimes appear in the likeness of angels, but so what? No pain, no gain. Think young Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone
would have become Saint Francis of Assisi if he’d just sat in the piazza all day with a pretty girl in his lap, eating gelato? James Clerk Maxwell would have had an opinion on that subject. James Clark Maxwell hypothesized that gas particles
in two adjacent chambers could be filtered by a “demon” operating a tiny door that allowed only fast energy particles to pass in one direction and low energy particles in the other, causing one chamber to warm up and the other to cool down,
thus bypassing the second law of thermodynamics with its famous insistence on entropy. But Maxwell’s is not the only demon; there’s physicist David Bohm’s demon and philosopher John Searle’s demon as well as naturalist Charles Darwin’s demon, each of which is a placeholder
of sorts for theories or concepts not yet fully understood. Each represents a theory that violates the laws of time and space, hence the word “demon” in that the very identity of each suggests the workings of a mischievous force, as seen, for example, in the language used
by the bomb designers of the Manhattan Project, who slipped from their talk of quantum physics into that of demonic technologies, to annihilation and apocalypse. Reader, I’m guessing you’re not a bomb designer. But if you take “demon” to mean not just “the unexpected”
but “the unexpected of such a nature that it not only changes your original plan but changes it for the better,” then you’ll see what those scientists meant. If you’re a writer, you make a pot of tea, fix the lights, go over your notes from the night before, and curl your fingers over the keyboard,
when is when something—a phone call, a man at the door with a package, a memory from yesterday or forty years ago—barges in and changes everything. Or say you’re a love-struck sophomore who shows up at Veronica’s apartment
with your hair slicked back and a bouquet in your hand, and who does the demon send to answer the door? That’s right: Betty. Even gods act like demons sometimes. When Brunelleschi was building the dome of the Florence cathedral,
he told everybody he knew how to do it. He didn’t know how to do it. Sure, he had a plan, but nobody had ever built a dome like his before, so while he was telling everybody don’t worry, I’ve got this, you can count on me, I’m Brunelleschi, blah-blah,
blah-blah-blah, to himself he was saying “as this is a church consecrated to God and the Virgin, I am confident that since it is being built in Her honor, She will not fail to instill knowledge where there is none.” In other words, he was trying to get Jesus’s mom to do
what demons do. Good thing he had patience in addition to faith and architectural skills. It took sixteen years to complete that dome, but it’s there today, or at least it was there when I was. Let’s review. There are lots of demons out there, all different.
Saint Francis, you big crybaby—you scared the demons away! Come back soon, fellows! Or come back whenever you want to. I love you guys, and so do scientists, also inventors: you were in the Alps with Georges de Mestral when he was walking his dog and noticed that the hooks in burdock burrs attached themselves
to the loops in his clothes and invented Velcro, just as you were in China in the 9th century when alchemists on the trail of an elixir for eternal life accidentally developed gunpowder, which is pretty much eternal life’s exact opposite. Fun fact: Georges de Mestral’s second wife was Monique Panchaud de Bottens,
onetime fiancée of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. Bet you chuckleheads had a hand in that as well—demons, you’re welcome to frolic on my window sill whenever you feel like it, for surely it can be said of you what Theodore Roethke said of poetry, that you are what everything else isn’t.
Outfit Alert!
A woman in an outfit walks by with a man much older than she is, and when Barbara says, “Outfit alert!” I say, “Yeah, I have to admit, that’s some outfit,” that word being one our moms used to use. “That’s quite an outfit!” said our moms when a girl turned up in an outfit as well as
“Now that’s what I call an outfit!” and “I love her outfit, don’t you?” What is an outfit, though. For starters, it has to be eye-catching, so bright colors are a must. Its design should surprise, so if a dress is part of your outfit, the hem should be either very high or very low. Asymmetry is good:
think one bare arm or shoulder but not two or a drape on one side or the back. Think cutouts! Cutouts are the best! Slits or triangles above or below the bosom, diamonds at the knee or elbow or, best of all, on the side! Let’s see that rib cage! If the eyes are the windows to the soul,
the rib cage is the window to everything that is fabulous about the soul’s best friend and worst enemy, the body! Cutouts just scream outfit! And let’s not even talk about accessories—okay, let’s talk about accessories but limit the discussion to earrings, which should be gaudy, flashy,
and even garish, though never tawdry, tacky, or tasteless. Guys don’t wear outfits. A guy in a cloak wearing a hat with a feather in it is not wearing an outfit. Foucault says everything is about sex except sex, that sex is about power. Guys are about power. Okay, outfits exert power as well,
but it’s not the same. Outfit power is happy power. All the girls go by, dressed up for each other, says Van Morrison. Red-carpet attire is 100% outfits, even if most civilians dial it down a notch or two: you’d feel funny walking down State Street in Chicago or Sixth Avenue
in New York were you wearing the “swan dress” sported by Icelandic musician Björk at the 2001 Academy Awards that consisted of a crystal-encrusted body stocking surrounded by a puff of white tulle, with a long neck that draped around her own, the bird’s orange beak
resting on her chest, or the dress worn by Lady Gaga at the MTV Video that was made of raw beef and was referred to thereafter by the media as “the meat dress.” Actually, Old West cowboys wore outfits. Back then, cowpokes were known for their brightly colored shirts,
neckerchiefs, and bandanas. Too, rings, necklaces, and, yes, earrings were all fair game for the yippee-ki-yo set. And if your bronco-bustin’ buckaroos wearied of ropin’ and brandin’ and such and took a turn toward the shadier side of things and became outlaws, the groups
they formed to were known as outfits, examples being The Hole in the Wall Gang, The Wild Bunch, and my favorite, The Five Joaquins. So Jesse James had two outfits, the one he wore and the one he belonged to. Today there’s also the Chicago Outfit, which has declined since the late
twentieth century thanks to stricter law enforcement and general attrition but still continues to be one of the major and most active organized crime groups in the Chicago metropolitan area and throughout the Midwest. Yikes! If you’re reading this, fellows,
I’m on your side! Well, not really. But I’m not entirely for the FBI, either, since they probably pose a greater threat to my freedom than you do. In old Florence, when Savonarola called for the Bonfire of the Vanities, women threw their rouge pots onto the fire
along with their false hair, mirrors, perfumes, powders, and transparent veils meant to provoke inquisitive glances as well as their masks and garments called “masquerading dresses,” of which I have been able to find out nothing except that they sound to me
a lot like outfits. Women, are your outfits you or a masquerade? Does your outfit express your true self or is it as a sign is to a semiotician, that is, does it stand for something other than its own reality, as, for example, a traffic light is not an invitation for you
to admire the intense beauty of its red, green, and yellow hues but a mandate to stop, go, or hesitate, and if that is the case, could it possibly be that your outfit is a “semiotic black hole” or, in other words, no sign at all but an atemporal destruction of a sign,
an example of which, is, oh, never mind. It’s fun to say “semiotician,” though, isn’t it? Sounds like a much simpler word that’s wearing an outfit. Oh, look, here comes the woman in the outfit who walked by earlier with the man
who is much older than she is, back from wherever they were earlier, and when I say, “I wonder if she’s a sex worker,” Barbara says, “Not exactly, that’s her sugar daddy, which makes her whatever you call a woman who has a sugar daddy,” to which
I say, “You have to admit, that’s some outfit,” and Barbara says, “Yeah, she’s going to take off her outfit for him later if she hasn’t done so already,” and I’m thinking, well, then things will work out pretty much to everyone’s satisfaction, not that wearing
an outfit means you’re a sex worker or even a sugar daddy’s sugar baby. Outfits make everybody happy, even moms—maybe even especially moms, since they remember when they were young and wore outfits as well. Some still do.
Gerda Weismann is Putting on Her Ski Boots
You’re in an old shop in an old city that you have never been to before, and it’s just about to close, but you pick up a kettle, a bottle, a tobacco tin, and then a snow globe covered in dust, most
of which you blow away with one big breath, and you wipe off the rest with your gloved hand and turn the globe toward the window so it can catch the last rays of the dying light, and you
look at it and blink and look again, for what you see is not carolers or reindeer and a sleigh but young Gerda Weismann in the town of Bielsko in Poland in the summer of 1942, and she’s arguing with
her father as she is putting on her ski boots, of all things, because she promised him she would wear them even if the weather is still warm when the Germans come for her, which they do two months later,
shuttling Gerda and other women from one work camp to another till the war turns in favor of the Allies in early 1945 and her captors decide to evacuate and march her and 2,000 others west
through freezing weather. When the three-month death march ends at an abandoned bicycle factory near the German border, only 120 have survived. Most of those who died were wearing sandals,
whereas “I had my ski boots,” said Gerda, “and my imagination: if you were a person who faced reality, you didn’t stand much of a chance.” Genius is childhood recaptured at will,
said Baudelaire. Gerda Weismann wasn’t a child— she was 18 when she was taken—but she thought like one. She was playful. She made things up. “I started Early – Took my Dog – / And visited
the Sea –,” wrote Emily Dickinson, and then “The Mermaids in the Basement / Came out to look at me.” I bet she had fun writing that one, don’t you? I bet she had fun writing them all,
even the ones about the men who abandoned her, one of whom was God. “I always believed I would survive,” said Gerda as she was marched from one place to another, imagining her dead brother
would be waiting for her or planning in detail a party she’d host when the war ended—should she wear a red dress or a blue?—or making up stories for the other girls, telling them their rescue
was imminent. Gerda Weismann was writing a poem of hope inside the larger poem of the Holocaust, one in which the mind of an entire people is taken prisoner by a thing
that doesn’t exist. That’s what happened in Salem in 1692, said Arthur Miller as he gathered materials for The Crucible: “Poetry may seem an odd word for a witch-hunt, but I saw there was something
of the marvelous in the spectacle of a whole village whose imagination was captured by a vision of something that wasn’t there.” On the morning of May 7, Gerda Weismann finds her captors gone
and a jeep approaching, the big white star of the U. S. Army on its hood. She weighs just 68 pounds and her hair has turned white from malnutrition, and when the jeep stops,
one of the two soldiers walks over to her and asks her if she speaks German, and she nods and says, “I’m Jewish!” and Lieutenant Kurt Klein says, “I am, too,” and then he does something that Gerda,
who has been treated like an animal for three years, later said “restored my humanity, all of it”— Kurt Klein says, “May I see the other ladies?” and when she turns back toward the factory,
he holds the door for her. They fall in love and marry in Paris in 1946 and have a long and happy life in Buffalo, NY, where Kurt runs a printing business and Gerda works
for seventeen years as a columnist with The Buffalo News. “The devil danced happily into Salem” in 1692, said Arthur Miller, “and took the place apart,” just as civilization
officially ended in Germany in 1939, just as it’s ending now, is always ending, its death attended each time by hope and imagination, you think as you put the snow globe back
and turn your collar up and walk out into the darkening night. They’re always there, you say to yourself. You just have to look for them. You have to put them on.
David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. His collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for both the National Book Award and Canada’s Griffin Poetry Prize. He is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense” and was named one of Booklist’s Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010. His latest books are a poetry collection, Help Me, Information, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them.