Two fierce foes vie for the human soul. Call them (for mnemonic convenience) the WEEZ and the MEEZ.

While different belief systems label them differently (Angel/Devil, Good/Evil, Utopian/Dystopian, etc.) the tension between these antagonists is endless and universally recognized. There can be no peace between them because their premises confute each other. Their contest unsettles the World and persists in every consciousness. We may pledge allegiance to one while pining for the other.

I sketched two lists of attributes:

You can play this game too – antipathies strolling hand in hand like Hansel and Gretel or Soup and Sandwich. No one belongs purely to either party, but each of us yearns in a direction. You can guess to which party I belong. I am writing to puzzle things out – that’s a clue. The MEEZ don’t pause to wonder why.

The superiority of our side (for you by reading likewise reveal your sympathies) seems so evident we wonder anyone could question it. Who on earth would prefer to be Alone, Harsh, Suspicious, Crude, Reviled? The evidence, alas, suggests many, maybe most: our “better angels” are forever waging a rearguard action. Morality, we’re told – meaning, good behavior – is for wimps. In America the tough guy, cowboy, mob boss is our beau ideal. Real men, word has it, don’t cry. Real men, in my view, must.

How come this discrepancy!

I write to dope things out. That’s my craving – to explore mysteries, not to declare conclusions. We are together in this adventure, bushwhacking imponderables, trudging toward tentative a-hahs.

But we must concede, first, that the opposing impulses are alive in each of us. I’ve no doubt in which direction I mean to bend: I would never enlist in that other brigandish brigade. But my heart is at least somewhat infected with, infatuated by, the trolls attributed to the MEEZ. The battle for civic betterment is, first, a battle for psychic betterment. Each of us is a microcosm of the strife. Even Jesus, we can be sure, had lurid thoughts.

Locating the enemy within, however subordinated, helps us understand our adversaries without. They are we. I and the Nameless One, while opposite in our conclusions, were not so different at the start. Born into privilege, to humorless parents, in the same moment and state, white male Caucasians, pampered like princes, we blossomed into monsters grotesque to one another. In affect and effect, the Nameless One is the worst human I know, whom I vow with my little might to smite – and he’d think the same of me if he knew my name (which God forbid). I’ve got my pen (rolling point, black, medium) and he his sword (mankind’s most murderous arsenal). The fight is ludicrously unequal – until you introduce the axis of Time and the dance of definitions. Jesus, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Saint Benedict Joseph Labre, were all losers in their hour and survivors into ours. And what, we may ask, does it mean to win? Do goods or goodness measure success? Is net worth worth? Is it better to be revered or reviled? – and by whom? Can a beast be best?