The Silver-Tongued Devil and I

I Contain Multitudes and they All Want a Beer

The Romance of the Divided Self

On a road trip just before New Year’s Eve in 1999, I was introduced to the Kris Kristofferson song “The Silver-Tongued Devil and I.” The tinkling honky-tonk piano eighth notes and cheesy lyrical set-up about going to the bar and sitting down next to a girl suggested a self-parody or a novelty track.¹ “Tender young maiden,” Kris? Really? Give me a break. But then “the silver-tongued devil just slipped from the shadows” and seduces the poor girl, contrary to Kris’s own intentions. The pre-chorus caught my attention with the business about how he’s “everything that I ain’t / hidin’ intentions of evil under the smile of a saint.” And the all-stops-out chorus won me forever: “The silver-tongued devil’s got nothin’ to lose / And I’ll only live til I die / We take our own chances and pay our own dues / The silver-tongued devil and I.” It’s a great, and very bad, song:

If memory serves, I more or less stole the CD from my friend and promptly committed the song to memory. I sang it to myself, at open mic nights, and hanging around with friends after I’d had too much to drink. Though it bore no resemblance to my own life beyond the phrase “searching from bottle to bottle,” I adopted it as a sort of anthem. And while I did not listen to nor play it for many, many years, it would still pop into my head unbidden at the strangest times. “All he’s good for is gettin’ in trouble / And shiftin’ his share of the blame” I would find myself singing as I loaded a flat of mineral water into my Subaru at the Costco. But my doppelgänger, if I ever had one, slipped back into the shadows so long ago that I didn’t even think about getting the hard stuff instead (let alone trying to charm anyone into giving me a discount).

Doubles, doppelgängers, Jungian “shadow selves”: these are all enduring narrative devices and lyrical conceits for a reason. It’s normal for humans to experience inner conflict and contradiction, and it’s not surprising that people sometimes take the next step and turn the conflict into different personas. Sure, it’s “unhealthy” or “neurotic” to do this, and at a certain point of dissociation it could be called “psychotic,” but it’s an endemic illness. It’s probably worse to displace our own guilt and anxiety onto other people, real or imagined (it may not be purely coincidental that a revival of interest in the history of American slavery was quickly followed by a mass hallucination about human trafficking). And strictly as a narrative device, it’s very illuminating. Kristofferson basically gives the game away in the end. The silver-tongued devil and I are a team, one side effecting and the other rationalizing what Kris himself just wants to do. The conflict is only skin deep. “He’s a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he’s stoned,” he sings in a different song about a supposedly pious womanizing substance abuser. I used to sing that one a lot, too, and a fellow guitar player (and more experienced burnout) pointed out "aren’t we all problems when we’re stoned?”

There’s nothing special about having mixed feelings about one’s own selfishness, callousness, or self-indulgence. The romance of the divided self is, if nothing else, a way to make our lapses seem more interesting and less culpable than they really are. We rarely hear singers and poets puzzle out the mystery of their good deeds. It’s always the shabbiness that goes looking for an explanation, and why not give it one in the form of an intimate enemy: Me, but not me; a garden of my baser impulses, imperfectly weeded but reliably protected by my own better angels.

This Body of Death

It’s not just country singers and people who like gettin’ in trouble who experience the haunting doubleness of the self. The Christian tradition provides ample inspiration for seeing ourselves in just this way. Most famously, Paul the Apostle writes his own ballad in his letter to the church in Rome:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

I’ve always loved this passage, to the point of being rather indignant when I was visiting a Jesuit university and the translation, read at the daily Mass, was “principle” rather than “law” of sin. There is no winking in this passage, no self-admiration that laments even as it excuses its own actions. But there is an element of relief in the words, an acknowledgment so severe as to constitute its own form of resolution. “Wretched man that I am!” God and sin are at war within me, there is a thorn in my flesh that will not be removed, my inmost being is contested terrain. This insight can be secularized, as it is in Solzhenitsyn’s famous line about the separation between good and evil going “through every human heart.” Which is true enough as far as it goes, until you find yourself invoking it to praise the family Klansman as a great man because it’s simply too hard to renounce the evil. But this is not really Paul’s point at all. He’s not saying “I’m complicated,” he’s saying that his will is captive, and to the extent that he is captive, he is not complex but just, well, bad. He’s calling out for rescue, not understanding. Both bad and good—the Law of sin, and Christ working in him—are essentially outside of him, not fascinating facets of his own personality.

Poets and pundits are not necessarily accountable to Paul’s astringent self-analysis. There’s nothing inherently wrong with dwelling in the apparent contradiction, listening to it, seeking its etiology. We do, truly, tend to contain multitudes of half-formed or hypothetical selves hanging around the junctions of the paths we didn’t take, ready to tumble into the main road and cause trouble. I can look over my shoulder at a coffee-jagged political professional, a guitar player who might have had a lucky break somewhere, a writer of something more grand than occasional essays. The part of me that wanted to drink a bottle of whiskey and belt out Kris Kristofferson tunes didn’t vanish, it merely atrophied. If we don’t make our peace with these homunculi, let them walk with us for a stretch, they will have their revenge in other ways. The manqué political operative appears in the guide of a rage-addled Twitter superuser. The lovelorn schoolboy becomes the reckless lothario trawling the Tally-Ho Tavern, feeling not himself but someone else. He can even tell a story about exactly how it always seems to happen that way.

Being One Thing

Thanks to the second season of Cocaine and Rhinestones, I was introduced to George Jones’s late-career stunner “Choices.” A man whose hellish personal life became a bathetic, protective legend eventually produced a witness to just being an unlovely, comprehensive screw-up. No excuses, no extenuations, no winking at the roguish side of a complicated life, just “living and dying with the choices I made.” And Jones literally did have an extended period of what would today probably be called dissociative personality disorder! It would not have been an especially poetic stretch for him to say of some of his disastrous choices, “it is no longer I that do it.” But he doesn’t. It’s all me, all the way along, ignoring good counsel and making my choices. The honesty and sadness can stop you in your tracks.

But this isn’t the whole story, either. For Christians, the internal contradiction between good and evil, or hope and despair, should not be a conflict between personas but between past and future, or origin and goal. We use imagery of transit from the old world and the old self with its sins and oppression to the glory land, the promised renewal, the home where weeping and dying will cease. The old ship of Zion, get on board.

There is potential for deception here, too, because one does not traverse the distance from hell to heaven in an incremental, linear, progressive manner. One does not simply measure the distance between here and there. The essential thing is not the map but the movement. “Shake the dust off of your feet, don’t look back,” Bob Dylan sings in lines right out of the Gospels.

Nothing can hold you down

There’s nothing that you lack

Temptation’s not an easy thing

Adam given the Devil rein

Because he sinned, I got no choice

It runs inside my veins but

And this is the key point

I’m pressing on

I’m pressing on

I’m pressing to the higher calling of my Lord

Watch the video, it’s awesome.²

It’s good to be one thing. It’s good to try to be one thing, if it’s a good thing. And there are an infinite number of ways to be a single good thing. But few, or maybe none, of us can really do it. We will continue to contradict ourselves, pull in different directions, befuddle or horrify ourselves and those close to us. We will continue to mimic our best in the service of our worst, and trick even the people watching closely. The silver-tongued devil follows wherever he is led, and bounds along whenever he is invited. But at least for one pressing on to the higher calling, he won’t be able to arrive.

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Readings

If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.

But this kind of love is rare nowadays. I often see record labels promote new artists for all sorts of gimmicky reasons—even labels I once trusted such as Deutsche Grammophon or Concord. I’ve come to doubt whether the people in charge really love the music.

Maybe they once did, but at some point they lost faith in the redemptive power of songs. That’s the only explanation I can give for what they’re doing.

Ted Gioia, “What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble’s Surprising Turnaround?” Any application of this insight to the state of American Christianity is an exercise left to the reader.

Spying did not introduce me to secrecy. Evasion and deception were the necessary weapons of my childhood. In adolescence we are all spies of a sort, but I was a veteran. When the secret world came to claim me, it felt like a coming home.

John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel, which I’m reading to prepare for the new book of his letters.

I didn’t write down any quotes from it and I returned it to the library but I just finished Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible. I don’t know if I liked it, but fans of Station Eleven (or anyone who liked my post about it) should give it a look.

1. I only learned much later that the Tally-Ho Tavern is a real place in Nashville and not a too-perfect jokey country-song place name.

2. My thanks are due to the Know Your Enemy podcasters, whose episode on Dylan with the Jokermen (yet another podcast) introduced me to this wild high point in Dylan’s body of work: