Gnostic Wrestlers
“It has been said,” Old Ernesto announced, “that to seek to know the mind of God is to wrestle with an angel.”
The assembly murmured agreement for a second and a half, then he raised his left fist and resumed. “To wrestle with an angel is no easy task. Joshua did it, and Elisha, but –”
(”Elisha?” I mouthed the question to Young Ernesto sitting next to me. He ignored it.)
“– nowadays men are weak. They ride, they do not walk. They buy, they do not hunt. They order food, rather than cooking it themselves!”
“Hear hear!” cried someone further back from us, and the assembly erupted into a sedate roar of agreement until Old Ernesto once more raised his gauntleted hand.
“Time changes all things,” Old Ernesto intoned, and at that moment the lights flickered and went out. The only illumination came from the screens behind him, and backlit with blue like that, he looked wise and mean and venerable. Like Odin or Noah or Santa, but with a luchador mask. “Time is the enemy’s tool. Time decays and weakens.”
(”I need some air,” I whispered to Young Ernesto. He acknowledged me with a glance, as I stood and made my way out of the hall.)
The Ernestos make me nervous. I don’t dislike them, I’m not saying they’re bad people, but they make me nervous. They’re foreign, and the way they do things is different. They have their own customs. It doesn’t bother me most of the time, but whenever one of them gets started talking about the Demiurge, or about pinning, or about pinning the Demiurge as a metaphor for transcending the limited mortal state and transforming our own self into the greater self which is inherent to the cosmos as a whole, not fragmented and carved and pared down to squeeze into a single fleshy body, or about the decadence of secular wrestling, which they claim is rigged and not an honest sport suitable for demonstration before the Lord… whenever, basically, they go off on a crazy tangent? Then they make me nervous. I shouldn’t have come tonight. Tonight Old Ernesto was going to pin the Demiurge and win fabulous prizes.
(Behind me Old Ernesto was still talking. He hadn’t yet gotten to the main point, which was that wrestling was the only pure sport and therefore the assembled crowd of venture capitalists should invest heavily in his new professional league, but it was only a matter of time. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be there when the Demiurge came down.)