Flemish Proverbs I - To be able to tie even the devil to a pillow. (Obstinacy overcomes everything.)

If God had found some comic peace in the end with his creation of the donkey then we must ask what the creation of the Devil might be? A jellyfish, let's say, or the magpie, seems an unsatisfactory answer.

One could also say man himself, and this seems particularly true after the Death of God – or perhaps this first appears with the Fall of Man. Otherwise, it may be said that, like the magpie, a fitting end for man would be his being sewn to the tail end of a donkey. This would, of course, reverse man's original law of the Golden Age: his birth as a centaur.

We thus gain a sense of that peculiar softness which overtakes man when he finds the New World – or perhaps even in his anticipation of it. Man as the tail end of the ass has only one commandment remaining: to find a suitable resting place for the Devil.

Here too we see the erasure of kings from the world. They first take prominence on eternal hills, then, like the head of a coin - which is really its tail end - plummet into the depths of the earth.

Man, the great usurper of the earth's softening core.