A puppeteer who died was surprised to find himself in Hell. "I don't understand," he said to the demon in charge of his eternal tortures, "I tried to be a good man, I held no rancor in my heart, I was charitable as I was able, I kept my devotions as seemed reasonable," and so on and so forth. The demon calmly waited until he was finished and said, "But what was your trade, sir?" To which the puppeteer replied, "Why, I delighted the young and the aged, not to mention those few fanciful souls of middling age with some imagination still about them, and as a paid performer I always strived to deliver my best each and every afternoon and night." "Yes, yes," said the demon, "but what did you do?" "I suppose you mean my puppets themselves, which I made dance so merrily for amusement, intrigue, and edification." "And there you have it," the demon said. "You travestied the freedom of the will! You taught your audience that they were always at the mercy of some unseen mover, that their life signified purposes and meanings not their own, and thereby robbed them of their faculty of self-government." The puppeteer was greatly distressed. "But I always thought my trade to be in honor of the Father of All Purpose, who guides each and every incident that transpires on earth to the perfection of his unfathomed design. Do you deny his existence, here in the life beyond? Or, ah ha! Is this merely death's threshold, a testing place, and you are a psychopomp here to provoke me to a final moment of perilous doubt?" "No on both counts," replied the demon. "Such an Omnipotence exists, and He has decreed His Authorship in the freedom of the human will. But be quiet now; I have to fill your mouth with hot lead." At this the puppeteer looked up at the demon, and in so doing saw the strings that trailed from its arms up into the darkness above. Thinking quickly, he jumped forward, causing the demon to spill the hot lead on itself as he clambered upward. For a hundred days and nights the puppeteer climbed, first ascending from the shadowed recesses of Hell, then through the perpetual dawn at the edge of the Earth, and finally into the bright clouds of Heaven. When he at last reached the edge of the lowest cloud and threw himself over, he was surprised to see at the end of the demon's strings, held taut at the lip of the cloud--
Only an untouched wooden handle. It had become caught on a potted Boston fern at the edge of Heaven that, thankfully, was heavy enough to hold his weight. "Oh fuck that," said the puppeteer. "I know where this is going. I'm gonna pick up that handle and then spend a bunch of time controlling the demon that tortured me, and then I'll wander off down along this cloud and find another handle that puppets the woman who gave me that cool mint tea when I was a boy walking home from the swimming hole on the hottest day of summer, and then one for that boy who bullied me--or did I bully him?--in school, and on and on until I finally find the last handle in heaven, and I will discover that now at last I control myself, from birth to death, from the beginning of my recent metaphysical adventure until now, as if recursion is somehow in itself novel and my experience is nothing but an existentialist paradox of the lonely human will, and life is what you make of it, or something like that. And I guess maybe we're supposed to take that as our closest approximation of godhead in the poor mortal life." The Father of All Purpose, who had been hiding in the Boston fern, was so pissed that someone guessed the twist ending of Heaven that he just sort of got angry and left, he walked out of the side of the frame and there was a sound effect of a car peeling out, and now, my dear child, the closest thing in creation we have to divinity is not even a god but a lost puppeteer, far from home, who refuses to engage his trade. How's that for a fuckin worldview? Now go to sleep
