Paraphernalian

The belief in the possibility of being devil-possessed was an unarguable belief in the existence of a devil personified; a devil with hairy body, cloven foot, horns, toasting-fork, and all the rest of the devilish paraphernalian make-up; […]

I would have to remind her, counteringly, that you don’t pick the person who fronts your life—you get picked, you watch the picker’s ankles vanish into the scrunched socks afterward (his whole body going blank behind the blue-black of the uniform), and the picker goes off in the starkest of transportations: you keep an ear cocked ever after for the return of his van and its paraphernalian clatter in the gravelled driveway.

What he is saying is that unless a fuller spectrum is opened out, a larger horizon of possibility envisaged, human society will remain, in varying forms and according to various local colours, a cage. Either you escape from that cage and try to start again in a larger space. Or you stay within the cage, writhing and howling or else looking at yourself complacently in the mirror, stringing up half-solutions to badly formulated problems in the name of politics, piling up paraphernalian productions in the name of culture, tying coloured ribbons to the bars in the name of art.