Where Seas and Fables Meet (3 page)

After a crisis you can tell the extent of the psychic damage in people by how quickly they respond with a joke. If people immediately tell a joke about the crisis, then you know they're processing the trauma. If the jokes surface slowly – or not at all – then you know that the wound is deep.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

1,711.

An ion beam etching machine can engrave a two dimensional angel on a pinpoint. The tiny area can accommodate 1,711 angels. The process is called microfabulation. The ion beams can etch out forms on a microchip that are so detailed and minute that even that notorious theological conundrum can be answered.

This process demythologizes and re-mythologizes – or disenchants and re-enchants – simultaneously. It shows that through technology an old question can have a practical response: and it shows that technology creates new conditions. How much more could be put on that point?

To Richard Dawkins: you say in
The God Delusion
that there is and can be no God. There is no empirical evidence. You call such belief in a higher being a delusion, something much worse than an illusion. You rail against church institutions and against religion, decrying the ignorance of their bigots and zealots. You point to fanaticism and to the wasteful expenditures of energy on faith. I take a breath, and step back from reading your book, and then surprise myself with my reply, with how much I agree with many of the things you say.

What are we to do with the restrictions of dogma, the weight of institutions, the contradictions and holes in religious texts, the excluding sometimes excruciatingly smug emotional blackmail of the faithful, the willed ignorance of the zealots, the territoriality of the convinced, the credulity of those who wear their God like a wall.

Then I have to say, there's an area where I must swerve away from you.

When the oceanic rolls over me...

When I touch a rose flowering in spring...

When the wind rustles the Maples and Birches...

When the sky is awash in rippling clouds...

When my children dash screeching happy through our house, and then down the street...

When I look to the horizon...

When I touch the coffin bearing my best friend into the earth...

When I read Walt Whitman or William Blake...

When I listen to Mahler's Fourth Symphony, to Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, to Beethoven's last string quartet, to Mary Chapin Carpenter's “Bright Morning Star”...

When I find myself praying to whatever may be there... When I read the last page of Saul Bellow's
Seize the Day
...

When I read Milton's evocation of “unawakened Eve with tresses discomposed, and glowing cheek... [And Adam] with looks of cordial love/Hung over her enamoured, and beheld/Beauty...” and then I remember love...

When I watch spring buds spurting again into green leaves... When my heart moves to the stars moving...

When I'm touched by something I can't see...

When I find delicate white dust on a butterfly's orange- black wing...

When the butterfly's wing grows, becoming something that seems like the edge of an angel...

When the signs of the day say travel – go – feel – sense what is around you...

When I sense a bare-bones outline to the cosmic X-ray... When I love...

And then, Richard Dawkins, I'm not with you. I'm elsewhere, though still here, in the present, where something I can't explain leaves me changed, never again to be sure that there's nothing but mass and energy.

The feeling of the oceanic is missing in you. (Freud was engagingly honest in his essays,
Civilization and its Discontents
and
The Future of an Illusion
: he admitted that he'd never felt such an emotion, this presence.)

Often I don't know what to make of the rumblings, the vibrations, the hints, the whisperings, the signs, the breaks or spots in time, what comes up and between the letters on a page and the rose petals left scattered on my counter. All this, and yet the wind moves, is moving. There.

I suppose we could do without words like God or religion. Maybe we'd be better off without such grand terms. But I can imagine replacing those words with these: sacred, source – correspondence and beauty, the origin, the now, and inspiration – and I can imagine asking that they reverberate in solitude, and in the subtle yarn and unexpected yet welcoming communions and gatherings, when standing on a bridge over a river, when sitting beside its current.

And so we go (you and I, my stranger friend), staggering a little, but confident at times, searching within and without (in the imagination and its realms; in all the realities you find outside), sometimes reflecting in the quiet of your heart the wealth of impressions, the opening that comes in the bright morning, taking the rose you dreamed of last night and somehow finding a way to place it beside the current, that is poetry and life together, encountering more, and more, traces of what we'll hope will be illuminations of the larger soul.

The angel visited the boy in his small playroom. She came in the morning and stayed with him until he had visitors. The main visitor was his nanny, his caregiver. His parents were too busy to spend a full day with him. They reserved a special hour or two with him at night before he went to bed, before they uncorked a new bottle of Merlot.

When the angel entered his room, William said: “Hello.” “Hello,” she said. And she folded her huge white wings and knelt beside him.

“What do you want to do today?” she asked.

“I want to be a soldier,” he said.

She smiled kindly because she'd known soldiers. She'd often appeared to them during battles. Many soldiers once saw her in grey barrage smoke. They'd stopped fighting for the moment, looking on in awe at her size and beauty. But today she was small. She'd muted her magnificent light so that the boy would be at ease.

“What kind of soldier?” she asked.

“A brave knight who fights dragons all day,” he said. William held up his toys so that she could see them. He had dragons, puppets, clowns, horses, unicorns, and many medieval soldiers with plastic swords and helmets with visors that could open and close. One of the soldiers had a sword that flashed red and white lights.

“Let's do that,” she said.

The angel and the boy played until it was lunchtime. Then the nanny appeared. She was a friendly soul who truly liked the boy, but her English was limited, and most of

the time she had to gesture to him or utter basic words. The boy liked her, too, because she served grilled cheese sandwiches and sweet pickles for lunch, and these were his favourites.

Angels were invisible to her, but she believed in them. Just because she never saw one didn't mean they didn't exist. Many things existed in the world which she hadn't seen, yet she knew they were there. Like the Eiffel Tower. She'd never been to Paris, but she'd seen the pictures. And though she knew that pictures could be faked, the pictures could always point to something true. When she was a little girl, she liked to talk to her dolls. They listened, and she had often thought that her dolls could be angels. But when she came to this country, a teenager looking for work, she put her secret conversations aside.

After lunch and a walk with his nanny, the boy had a nap. After this he called his angel back. His little room felt wide and beautiful when she was there. It was as if his room became the universe. He could become a knight charging through space, battling with anything that tried to block his ride. The angel laughed, encouraging him in his dreams. She was happy to be with him.

One day the angel found that the boy had matured. He was going to pre-school. William learned how to sit in a row at a desk and look towards the front where maps and “ABC's” and “123's” and the flags of nations were placed. He organized his time.

He put his toys aside, though he kept them in his room. He kept them because he remembered they had a light around them. Whenever he looked at his toys, his heart glowed. But he couldn't see her. This happened suddenly. It was as if he'd opened his eyes to something else.

The angel hovered close. She was open to his call. But the more he sat in rows and faced forward and concentrated on the new instructions and what others said, the less he seemed to remember she'd been a presence in his room. She grew sad.

But there were times when the boy experienced strange things. A sun shower suddenly occurred when he looked outside his classroom. Sometimes a quick rain bathed him and his friends when they were out playing or walking or arguing or skulking around the schoolyard.

William found that he liked the sun showers. They made him feel warm and inspired. His imagination would start up. When it rained he told himself stories.

But over the years this stopped, too. He progressed from classroom to classroom, each room growing larger and more crowded. People jostled with ideas and views. He was interested in them, and sometimes distracted by them. The angel found she was never asked for.

She went away and returned to the source that created her. This angel came to be called the sad one, though she wasn't as sad as the mother who wept for the world. The angel brooded near the source. She sought its protective solace.

The angel had a dream one night. (The angels aren't human. They're a separate order of creation. Still, like people, they dream and yearn.)

She dreamed that she'd turned to stone. She was frozen in the posture of weeping. She could see herself becoming a sculpture called “The Sad Angel.” The sculpture stood on the side of a great cathedral. People paid to see her. They said: “Why does this one cry?” None of the other angels wept that had been turned to stone and placed on the sides and at the entrances of the cathedral. Maybe if she turned to stone she wouldn't feel the pain of her tears. Maybe she'd feel nothing. But in her dream this wasn't true. She felt everyone's sorrow. She could weep forever.

Then she woke up and what lingered from her dream was the trace of her grief. Like people, angels only remembered pieces of their dreams.

She thought the boy would call her back. He'd find himself asking big questions about meaning. And he'd crave enchantment again. Once you asked the big questions, you could see the ladder of angels, and nothing would stop your quest, your ride into the unknown.

She would come into his room, and he would ask her if she'd been present in the light of his play and in the summer rain.

“Yes,” she'd say.

And he would have to prepare himself for a new kind of fight – to acknowledge he believed in her.

But it was possible that he wouldn't call her back. That he would think she was a fantasy. It was possible he'd dismiss all such stories, calling them “hard-wired, genetic expressions.” The real world was here, now. This is what he'd know and accept.

William grew to be a man with a wife and two children. One day he and his wife decided to take a vacation to a city in Brazil. They took a guided tour so that all would be taken care of for them. They took bus tours through the country's greatest city, and then a bus tour out into the countryside, to a lesser-known city that was renowned for its cathedral.

William looked up at the cathedral. He saw a sad angel. The posture of the sculpture reminded him of something, but of what – he couldn't say. He stared. His heart was moved, but he didn't know why. He said nothing to his wife, because he wasn't sure how to describe his feeling. He went to another sculpture. There were more figures of angels in different postures. He studied his guidebook. He read about the impressive enigmatic stones of the cathedral. Then he rejoined his wife, and they went on, and then back to the bus.

In the plaza outside the cathedral a shower of summer rain began. It only rained on the plaza, nowhere else.

There were no clouds in the sky, and the sun was brilliant and yellow, close and hot.

Nevertheless, it rained.

An old gypsy woman was selling tiny wooden replicas of the cathedral and small metal replicas of the angels. She looked into the sun shower. She muttered to herself, and turned and muttered to those nearby. People stood in the warm mist that poured from the cloudless sky, wondering how this could be, commenting on the beauty of the moment. The mist carried small rainbows, dozens of them arching around the plaza and around the people who had stayed outside.

The gypsy had spent many hours in this place by the cathedral. But she never saw anything like this.

She said to no one in particular: “A sun shower means an angel close to God is weeping.”

A woman standing nearby (another tourist from another continent, also on a bus tour) asked the gypsy to repeat what she said. The old woman did so.

The gypsy crossed herself and said: “Hail Mary.” The sun shower stopped. The old woman shrugged and turned to the woman from the bus tour and asked her if she'd like to buy a replica of the cathedral.

The muses or inspirational figures (elements, angels, elders, saints) may visit, and abruptly they don't. When they pass on, they leave you gaping. If you take the moment they offered, and open to them, they offer gifts, sometimes strange, but gifts nevertheless. If you step away from the gifts, and ignore the offerings, they could move on to another. You may be beloved by them, but how do you live outside of the room – the space – where they sing and linger, press and infiltrate, inspire and lift, kiss and slap, singe and sting?

I have many voices inside me. I call them children, poems, lines, stories, essays, events, dreams, longings, the future, lessons, talk, advice, love, family, and friends. There's no sequence to their speaking. This I have to arrange for myself. They tumble in at once. Which voice to listen to and to know truly?