A substantial collection of short prose (stories) with a markedly philosophical bias that follows on from 'A Visit to Hell' (1979) and signifies a rejection of the kind of Spenglerian pessimism that figured prominently in the latter volume. Here things open-out towards a future in which God or godliness (to distance the term from the various 'thingfulnesses' owing more to the concretions of the female side of life than to anything abstractly male) is the evolutionary outcome. Hence the title 'From the Devil to God', with implications that contrast the alpha-most of things with the omega-most or, at any rate, with what would be nearest to such an eventuality in conjunction with the actual omega of Heaven, the soulful fulcrum of the metaphysical context in which ego is 'once bovaryized' (compared to its physical per se) and therefore the super-conscious concomitant of super-psychic soul. However, the first piece in this collection is rather more alpha-stemming in its paradoxical... More > accommodation of the flesh.< Less
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By John O'Loughlin
Sep 23, 2011
"Concerning FROM THE DEVIL TO GOD" Largely following-on from 'A Visit to Hell' (1979), this collection of short prose, written on and off during the winter of 1980-81, starts in a relatively literary fashion with the account of a clandestine visit of a masseuse to a priest who can no longer cope with his celibacy, and ends in a profoundly futuristic manner with an account of evolutionary progress towards a definitive Beyond, as envisaged by a radical philosopher. In between, there comes a fairly balanced alternation between literary and philosophical subjects ... as we follow the voyeuristic pleasures of a man covertly watching his wife getting dressed from the comfort of his early-morning bed; explore the evolutionary revelations of a de Chardinesque gnostic in the face of atheistic unbelief; witness the horror of a Mondrianesque ascetic, whose rural day-trip out of London with some friends proves to be something of an existentialist nightmare; and go beyond conventional... More > concepts of the Millennium, as of Millennialism, with the aid of a revolutionary thinker who believes that only when, at some point in the future, human brains are artificially supported and sustained will there be any prospect of heavenly salvation of a definitive order. Whew! This is not for the faint-hearted, nor the weak-minded!< Less
