Well, here I am! The devil, for whom you’ve all been waiting. I have brought the word, absurd, a fig for the end of the world and a bunch of grapes for you.

I’ve come to you who are mine. Not from here, nor from there, but I’ve scraped myself together from every dimension of fragmented time and space. However, I’m not incarnate this time round. I could hobble about, I could have hooves or wear a check jacket, from underneath which a fair-size donkey’s tail could stick out. I could be a right local godlet or an unmistakable Pannonian celeb. Take your pick... But, if I’m incarnate, you’ll only look at me and not listen to what I have to say.

Well, here I am! The devil, for whom you’ve all been waiting. I have brought the word, absurd, a fig for the end of the world and a bunch of grapes for you.

I’ve come to you who are mine. Not from here, nor from there, but I’ve scraped myself together from every dimension of fragmented time and space. However, I’m not incarnate this time round. I could hobble about, I could have hooves or wear a check jacket, from underneath which a fair-size donkey’s tail could stick out. I could be a right local godlet or an unmistakable Pannonian celeb. Take your pick... But, if I’m incarnate, you’ll only look at me and not listen to what I have to say.

It’s midnight on a Saturday in spring. It’s great to be home, down here in the bowels of the earth in the company of my old and loyal friends. I quite fancy this city Budapest, on the banks of the Danube. I’ve been here, there and everywhere over the centuries: Florence, Moscow, New York; Tuscany and all those little German principalities and every nook and cranny of North Atlantic ‘civilisation’; however, this is where I really feel at home, under this meat and two veg plate of a city.

There’s nowhere else in the whole world, where so many forms of suspicion and distrust can be found as in this disunited country. Endless squabbling and complaining, moaning and groaning, wailing and lamentation. This is the place where I really need to hustle and bustle. There’s hardly a moment when someone doesn’t wish someone else to hell, that’s to me. It’s endless, hither and yon I rush about, hell’s factory can hardly cope.

We’ve all gathered here plenty of us, my devotees with your twisted hearts, and so the devil’s work, the marketing of hell has come to pass. Because would anybody have come here if I hadn’t? Would anybody have come here for these dead gods, these symbols, or for this wandering angel?

But I, the traitor of so many thousand years, did not come here to live up to your expectations of a devil either. I’ve become obsolete as well.

Here, where we are standing, standing around in the darkness, isn’t hell, but a reinforced bunker. People used to seek the protection of the gods up above, but nowadays they tend to turn to an air raid shelter for protection. The gods have departed and taken the sky with them; so the air is all that is left and what is under the air: odds and ends, bits and pieces, breakable objects and useless crap. Mortal objects bearing the names of gods as memories. As signs. This is the post-historic Pantheon: a refuge carved into vaults of stone for the protection of gods and men.

Only an angel, the most fragile of angels, can save mankind.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen! (echoing in the background: Domini et dominae! Despotai kai despoinai!) This is my final press conference. I’ll be leaving the earth today at dawn precisely at 05.32. I am terminating every single contract I ever signed with immediate effect. Souls trapped in the underground pawnshop are now free to leave. No more of the old rules! Go wherever the journey may lead you; stop in the presence of Nothing, if you can.

So that’s how you are. You bump into one another in the morning, shouting out loud; you do this and that, natter-natter-natter, and in the evening after loafing around all day doing nothing useful, you leave not a wreck behind. ‘Nothing can come of nothing’. And all you do is mourn about that as well.

Uh, I have metaphysically exhausted myself.

So you could say: poor devil, no strength, no power, nothing...!

Well, that’s it! You’ll be able to say that the devil came to Budapest, not of his own accord nor on his own steam, and didn’t go anywhere else, just melted away like the snow in springtime.

Here I am! I come and go, a fleeting moment. I am the most fragile, but also the strongest, since if only a moment were left out of creation, the universe would immediately collapse.

However, if an individual is not capable of filling up his existence according to his own way of life and his own abilities, like any other living creature, what will happen to me? Who will give me a name, a voice, a soul? What will become of heaven and earth at the end of the world, which is my home?

Here I am! I come and go, a fleeting moment. I am the most fragile, but also the strongest, since if only a moment were left out of creation, the universe would immediately collapse.

However, if an individual is not capable of filling up his existence according to his own way of life and his own abilities, like any other living creature, what will happen to me? Who will give me a name, a voice, a soul? What will become of heaven and earth at the end of the world, which is my home?

Being a moment, I disappear.  Being an angel, ... 

...being the Angel of the Moment, I die. I will die (!). I am afraid. The headlong wind is coming for me. And words echo from this rushing, mighty wind, since everything moves back and forth in the origins of time at the end-points.

I see you. The foreheads of human beings and gods nearly touch in this overlapping, narrow time and space. And the Elements smell this out, and move on with bare heads.

It’s good to be given a name, a soul and a voice, and it’s good to give back even more voice, word and soul to each individual. However, no angel can perform a miracle on his own, but can only do his part.

So I’ll tell you my secret and offer my miraculous self to you: here at the end of the world and of life, eluding death – I am. I give miracles back to people; I give back the awe of Being, since the night is long and the journey before us is long and the way home is long.