Zoran Gluscevic

Mephistopheles and He

MEPHISTOPHELES: Come on, what are you waiting for?! Get down to work, you don’t have much time anyway and no one is going to give you any more. Forget about everything, and get it through your head that you have already missed every possible deadline except this last one; now you live for it alone, for nothing and nobody else. If you weren’t always selfish enough while you were healthy, start being so straight away, now you have the right to selfishness. Time is not on your side any longer, Time is not the sundial that stops working when the sun goes behind the cloud for a brief moment, causing a timeless halt which is not affected by the deadlines and which, as our forefathers would say, has lengthened the lives of many if only for a moment. It does not go for you. Even if all the clocks on Earth stopped working, your time would still be ticking away. You are a hostage of Death, dead in advance, and that is the only sure thing. And everything else, including our arrangement, is but a lottery which you would give up on if you only knew what your odds are. But forlorn hope has made many a human life miserable –

HE: - or has saved them when there was no other hope of rescue!

MEPHISTOPHELES: Ah, but you who have frittered away your fate more than once have no right to hope –

HE: Isn’t the right to hope gained throughout life and not given to us by the birth itself, by coming into this inhumane world?

MEPHISTOPHELES: Forget hope, but pull yourself together and exert yourself - show us that you really do have the gift that you have boasted so much about, and even won some prizes and awards. Now you are taking our exam, which you here know absolutely nothing about. First of all, you have to finish you work on time, on the dot. Publishers will easily accept and publish it, considering who you are and what you have accomplished so far. And we are here to help. But only then will your Tantalean suffering begin. And nobody can help you there. Readers and critics alike, as well as anyone else who talks of your work without having read it, but merely repeating what others have said – they all have to agree that you have created a great masterpiece, a unique book and a red-letter day for your national literature.

HE: What is this megalomania that you are pushing me into?! No one here has ever managed to do that, and no one will, because there will always be some pretentious idiot who will deny public opinion out of sheer envy. It is practically impossible, it cannot be done.

MEPHISTOPHELES: Oh, it is very much possible and it most certainly can be done! Write in a way which will satisfy everybody’s taste, everybody’s need, everybody’s wish. Write for others, and not just for yourself - you are not the center of the world and the sole reason for its existence. Leave your ‘golden’ shell and go out into the world, look left and right, think about people and their needs, what worries them in their everyday lives and what takes their mind off spiritual paths and striving. Try to find out why spirituality has given in to such large interest for the material and whether the complex structure of the human society is to blame – a society where, for the majority of people, nothing is safe and secure and where minority and majority keep clashing with time - the majority because they do not know how to squander it, and the minority because they lack enough time to complete something in their lifetime successfully.

HE: And that is where the main paradox occurs: those who do not know what to do with their time use all of it on trivial things, not having the time or feeling the need to turn to the spiritual, whereas those spending all their time fighting for survival have to make time, steal moments from the time and their bare lives only to keep the spiritual in them alive. So how can we explain that?

MEPHISTOPHELES: You will have to work a little harder to get to the root where mysteries and paradoxes of the human soul occur and are unraveled and resolved. That is why we have given you an easy access to the astral – with the astral you can reach into everyone’s soul and heart, don’t forget that. And when you pass that exam as well, there is the most important issue, compared to which everything preceding it is merely a simple, yet unavoidable, exercise. As far as I know you, it would be best if you chose the Grail for the subject of your novel. But then I wonder: do you even know what the Grail is? And how dangerous a subject that is? If you step too deeply into the human territory, you will sin against God; if you get lost in the divine territory, you will separate the man from God. I know that you will explain clearly to the professor that the Grail also has an individual side to it, one based on the personal experience. But you don’t really think that this is what the Grail comes down to?

HE: I will give to everyone as much as they can take!

MEPHISTOPHELES: Now you’re talking! That is a clever idea, just don’t overestimate yourself by making a routine of underestimating others. I like you because you are vain, but vanity has little value here. Quite the opposite - as you know, it is very severely punished. You know that from the Bible. We from the lower regions still pay our debts because of the original vanity, and the punishment for the recently gained vanity is even harsher, heavier and more long-lasting. So, be clever, become more, much more modest, and devote yourself entirely to the Grail, rush towards the Grail, rush…

Translated by Sofija Milanovic