Gates of Darkness

I attended a meeting with some psychology students as for a long time I’d felt rather crazy. They showed me drawings I’d made as a child, and asked me about their meaning. They wanted to know who was king at the gates of darkness. “Answer us!” said the leader of the research group, who with his bloodshot eyes really seemed to be at the precipice of insanity. But my child psychology was a fantastic enigma and not so easily solved – neither through image therapy, IQ testing, or mysterious phrenological readings of the shape of my skull. Like when you put something in a safe place, not to lose it, and hide it so safely that you can’t even find it yourself, I’d outsmarted myself along with everybody else.

Instead I started thinking of the day I saw a sexy dad in the full force of the sun while I queued endlessly to pick up a package at the post office. Sometimes it’s so funny to be a man who looks at other men… especially now, when I’ve got a moustache, and because being outside of your home is a little taboo. My gaze penetrated his ass. Neither him, nor his Capri Sonne-drinking child noticed my lustful eyes. I felt the corona dust in the heat and combined with the sweet shame, it made me cough. On my way home, I thought about when Verlaine went to confess, and the priest said, “at least you’ve never had sex with an animal, right?”

I started thinking about tinder. All homosexuals nowadays seem to have very advanced names. Bollo, Trollo, Sonquisolo – those are your names! Without progress, life would be unbearable, and I guess the same applies to homosexual men and their names. This development makes me happy. Sometimes I just walk around in my flat with a glass of plum wine and pronounce their names: “Good evening, Bollo, and good evening to you too, Trollo,” I say to myself and have a good laugh. There’s no doubt about it – I really know how to have fun.

I started thinking about the darkness, about the gates of darkness. My mum once said to me, “All good things start by turning away from the gates of darkness.” But what about all the bad things? I’m starting to think they start with having good taste. The only reason I’ve done the things I’ve done is good taste. When I have sex it’s in good taste. I never lie there after sex is over and congratulate myself and my fucker on how good we’ve fucked each other. The sensation and pleasure quickly fade and often I feel quite alien from what I’ve just participated in. The appeal of the gates subsides as quickly when you’ve taken the step and found yourself on the other side of them – in hell. “Is everything okay?” asks he who lies next to me. I’ve grown tired of being my own life. A person is their life and your life is your self but I’m damn tired of it.

I thought about he who tried to shut the gates of darkness. How the endless light of the sun burnt his skin and turned him into a petrified pillar of salt in the desert. Then I thought about the guy in the döner kiosk downstairs and how his long eyelashes met the skin on his round cheeks, and I thought about many other guys I’d seen, and I thought about what it’d be like to live in the middle ages and maybe only see a new hot guy maybe once a year, like at some annual farmer’s market. What an experience it must have been! Maybe that’s why they wrote epic poems about heaven and hell while we write songs about how wet our pussies are, even though they’re not at all wet but dry like the desert.

Then who was the king at the gates of darkness? “Who can be lord over such a situation?” I said to these psychology students. Nobody can shut the gates of darkness, they can never be closed. No king in the world could have managed it, because the powers of darkness are as eternal as those of goodness, and they both press at the gates from each side. But we, at least, have the choice to turn away from the gates of darkness. Turn away from the gates of darkness, god damn it! I stopped meeting these manic psychology students, and my life once again seemed normal, but in the end nothing is normal neither is God.

Text: Ian Memgard
Image: Zola Gorgon