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Show 1st not remain as perpetually indecisive and helpless as I felt /jrrsanen unless someone was holding them &own». I felt that I was being led, if not literally, then subliminally into a darkness as irredeemable and deadly as the Gulf of Mexico. I was being coaxed into hell, and I didn't even know the face of my tormentor. Was it some sorcerer, perhaps Ervil, who poked tiny pins in my effigy? Or was it the ghost of my own conscience, all the unresolved confusions of a lifetime which would not allow me to be at peace with the thought of death, with the thought of losing my loved ones? Was I my own deSade, my own Hitler, my own Satan, sitting in judgement of myself? Where was my faith in resurrection, my hope for the Millenium? For lack of clarity, I focused on Ervil as the demon of my dreams. After all, he had declared himself to be the Destroying Angel, the divine executioner. He proudly accepted authorship for the death of his brother, Joel, claiming that he had acted in the name of God. And he had showed up in my roughly-crafted short stories as the villain, the monstrous, Blue-Beard side of polygamy, the antithesis of my father- •For in the last days, there shall be opposition in all things.' Surely Ervil could not miss the scriptural connotations of his personality. He had killed his own brother - Cain and Abel all over again! 'And the old shall be made new and the new, old.' Still, he could see himself as God's instrument, just as Joshua could justify the mur-dor, the genocide of native peoples. Ervil spoke with the voice of authority, just as my father had done, standing on Mosaic Law. But there was more to a person than myths and dreams and Biblical patterns. |