Angels of Exile

The story of Odysseus picks up in Book 5 of The Odyssey with him exiled for years on the island of Ogygia in the middle of the sea. He is held captive of by the love of Callypso, the sea-nymph who is in thrall with him. Though she lavishes every sweetness upon him, Odysseus’ only thought is of returning home:

Though he fought shy of her and her desire,
he lay with her each night, for she compelled him.
But when day came he sat on the rocky shore
and broke his own heart groaning, with eyes wet,
scanning the bare horizon of the sea.

-- Odyssey V 162-66, transl. Robert Fitzgerald

The angelic Hermes is finally dispatched by Zeus, whose heart against Odysseus has been softened by Athena’s persuasive words, to compel Callypso to free Odysseus from his exile.

***

I, John, your brother and companion, in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus, was on the island of Patmos because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. On the Lord’s Day I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me in a loud voice like a trumpet which said: “Write on a scroll what you see and send it to the seven churches ...”

-- Revelation 1:1, 9-11 (NIV Study Bible)

__

from Rilke’s “The Lord’s Words to John on Patmos,” transl. Franz Wright:

... Satan has servants to bludgeon
whatever grows with most fragility,
and so for a while yet I must
support man in the image he has come to understand;
but I think I will stir up my beasts:
because there is this yearning in my works
for incessant metamorphosis.

Humans are attached to concepts
they were long in fathoming
so for a while, let ships be ships
and houses houses.
And the chair, the table, cupboard, chest
and hat; and coat and shoe --
let them remain as they are:
but these forms are not mine.

Whenever they cry that I am mad,
I’m happy to send down my fire
over those who have.
I like to test one of their things,
to see if I could possibly conceive it --:
if it catches fire it’s real.

If man only knew what most delights
an angel’s soul, like a waterfall pouring
down constantly over my oldest
commandments -- ... Long ago I should have
withdrawn things like camels and hacked them to pieces.
Civilization is not my concern
for I am the rain of fire
and my glance is jagged like the lightning.

Behold I will not suffer one man to remain.
Write: through the body’s dust
I hurl men toward the target,
toward labor or toward women
and I need women like I need leaves.
Only in the child do I pause a moment
for the spreading roar
to gather in its shell-like ear.
Behold, in the small narrow place prepared for me, I strike
order into the chaos of my worlds:
what perishes takes place there first.


__

The “angel” John -- a “being of spirit” “who inhabits a non-physical dimension of life” -- speaks prophetically to the New Age metaphysician David Spangler in 1980:

On our level, we naturally do not identify life with a physical body; consequently, to us, the loss of your physical form is not a tragedy in the way it might be for you. The death of millions of people is not in itself a tragedy for us, for it simply means their birth into our domains. What is a tragedy, however, is the loss of even one person because either lines of separation have been drawn, which shut out love, sharing, and human communion, or fear, neglect, and hostility have been allowed to determine your actions. When multiplied by thousands and millions of persons, it becomes a great planetary catastrophe which pollutes the inner, creative environment with vibrations of anger and fear, hopelessness and depression. All of you, and all of us, suffer from this. The lack of certain inner qualities, such as love and caring which transcend time and space, reverberate through the human species in ways that simple outer actions cannot. You do not face the ghosts of those who have died, but you do face the ghosts of neglected and forsworn opportunities to affirm your human wholeness and unity. You face the ghosts of those actoins and, most importantly, those attitudes that foster fragmentation and separation.

“Conversations With John,” Lorian Press, 1980

***


Angels are indeed messengers, with extraordinary things to tell us, but they do not come from the supernatural realm, from God, from what we sometimes call “the beyond.” They are from the human mind, including its unconscious component, and only from there. Thus they tell us about ourselves. They tell us about the motives that drive us to create a world of spirits and to indulge in rituals, or enactments, which magically empower and sustain us as we go about our business on the planet.

-- M.D. Faber, The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief, 13

***


... When I go back I feel exiled from it all.
And always there are two thoughts,
one cutting through The first until it isn't there.
Overlooking the narrow road that leads out of Porlone & the wild
Solitude of the South Coast,
Stunted pines & rock-strewn hills giving way to bleached grass,
And a longing for solitude rushing in
And replacing, a moment later, what I had thought
Was solitude-& the longing wilder
And more permanent, &,
Coming as it does in the wake of everything, the endless mimicry
In the gull's cry & the sprawl of a wave....

from "Elegy with the Sprawl of a Wave Inside It"
Larry Levis (published after Levis' death of heart attack in 1995)


***

.
There was an ease of mind that was like being alone at sea,
A boat carried forward by waves resembling the bright backs of rowers,
Gripping their oars, as if they were sure of the way to their destination,
Bending over and pulling themselves erect on the wooden handles,
Wet with water and sparkling in the one-ness of their motion.
The boat was built of stones that had lost their weight and being no longer heavy
Had left in them only a brilliance, of unaccustomed origin,
So that he stood up in the boat’s leaning and looking before him
Did no pass like someone voyaging out of and beyond the familiar.
He belonged to that far-foreign departure of his vessel and was part of it,
Part of the speculum of fire on its prow, its symbol, whatever it was,
Part of the glass-like sides on which it glides over the salt-stained water,
As he travelled alone, like a man lured on by a syllable without any meaning,
A syllable of which he felt, with appointed sureness,
That it contained the meaning into which he wanted to enter,
A meaning which, as he entered it, would shatter the boat and leave the oarsmen quiet
At the point of central arrival, an instant moment, much or little,
Removed from any shore, from any man or woman, and needing none.

from Wallace Stevens, “Prologues to What is Possible”

***

A chalice used by the Iona abbey was broken and Columba had it taken by one of his monks to the Celtic sea-god Manannan, who magically restored the chalice by blowing on it. Manannan sends it back to Columba with a question: Will the sea-god achieve Christian immortality? "Alas," replied the saint, "there is no forgiveness for a man who does such works as this!" The message is returned to Manannan, who breaks into an indignant lament: "Woe is me, Manannan mac Lir! For years I've helped the Catholics of Ireland, but I'll do it no more, till they're weak as water. I'll go to the gray waves in the Highlands of Scotland."

***


EXILE

Wild energies flee
approaching light
too conscious of itself,
too missionized by God.
When Manannan
left Iona the day
turned too sunny,
the sea smoothed
to brilliant glass.
Men saw themselves
in that water
and no one else.
History began its
holy fifth age
with no one to
blame but ourselves.
Patrick smiled
in his grave: No
worm battened on
his bone. The
sea-god was
swallowed by the
Book of Kells;
mere splashes
of cerulean ink.
Sometimes my
hazel eyes turn
that blue-gray
and all I hear then
is the mash of
waves, a laughter
in the roar of
surf, Highland airs
whistling keen
within the feral
octaves of the
wind. His home's
below, where all
my terrors and
delights batten
on the daily fuse.
I hear him when
no word can
suffice and the
page yawns down
below the last
impotent line.
At my wits' end
he begins, sweeping
far, the ocean fist
inside this well's
obfuscate mist.

- 2003

***


THE MERMAID WIFE

Shetland Islands

A story is told of an inhabitant of Unst, who, in walking on the sandy margin of a voe, saw a number of mermen and mermaids dancing by moonlight, and several sealskins strewed beside them on the ground. At his approach they immediately fled to secure their garbs, and, taking upon themselves the form of seals, plunged immediately into the sea. But as the Shetlander perceived that one skin lay close to his feet, he snatched it up, bore it swiftly away, and placed it in concealment.

On returning to the shore he met the fairest damsel that was ever gazed upon by mortal eyes, lamenting the robbery, by which she had become an exile from her submarine friends, and a tenant of the upper world. Vainly she implored the restitution of her property. The man had drunk deeply of love, and was inexorable; but he offered her protection beneath his roof as his betrothed spouse. The merlady, perceiving that she must become an inhabitant of the earth, found that she could not do better than accept of the offer.

This strange attachment subsisted for many years, and the couple had several children. The Shetlander's love for his merwife was unbounded, but his affection was coldly returned. The lady would often steal alone to the desert strand, and, on a signal being given, a large seal would make his appearance, with whom she would hold, in an unknown tongue, an anxious conference.

Years had thus glided away, when it happened that one of the children, in the course of his play, found concealed beneath a stack of corn a seal's skin; and, delighted with the prize, he ran with it to his mother. Her eyes glistened with rapture -- she gazed upon it as her own -- as the means by which she could pass through the ocean that led to her native home. She burst forth into an ecstasy of joy, which was only moderated when she beheld her children, whom she was now about to leave; and, after hastily embracing them, she fled with all speed towards the seaside.
The husband immediately returned, learned the discovery that had taken place, ran to overtake his wife, but only arrived in time to see her transformation of shape completed -- to see her, in the form of a seal, bound from the ledge of a rock into the sea. The large animal of the same kind with whom she had held a secret converse soon appeared, and evidently congratulated her, in the most tender manner, on her escape. But before she dived to unknown depths, she cast a parting glance at the wretched Shetlander, whose despairing looks excited in her breast a few transient feelings of commiseration.
"Farewell!" said she to him "and may all good attend you. I loved you very well when I resided upon earth, but I always loved my first husband much better."

-- George Douglas, Scottish Fairy and Folk Tales (London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1901), pp. 153-155


****


THE ANGEL
FRANKENSTEIN

Hell on earth too hath
dreams of Eve &
her six sisters.
Observe the monster
in the black zoot
with scary mug and
stones for shoes:
He’s mooning
like a prodigal
in the ever-noctilucent
boneyard, another
lonely revenant circled
back to Golgotha for his
passion’s sake. He finds
the door -- a crypt,
really -- and climbs down
into the mad doctor’s
bubbling lair, barking
and snorting and waving
his left hand in that
dismissively lethal way,
signalling that via
negativa where
only love and it’s
good lovin’ will do.
He’s offered bread
then wine -- mmmmm
good, he growls --
and finally, way too late,
he’s introduced to
the next Missus
Frankenstein,
her veins glowing with
a hearty shot of lightning,
dead juices
preternaturally revived.
Ah the doctored
and romantically
engineered pair -- big
lug to the right, dame
with seared beehive
to the left: the cusp
and heart of this
day’s predawn bouree.
She stares but for
a moment before
screaming like a
virgin at the stake;
and like a bolt
shot straight from
hell, our ugly hero
feels the horror of
good loving gone bad.
Heart split, our
raging monster
strangles the assistant
and tossed Igor
from the ramparts,
finally hauling down
the lever which explodes
the whole caprice,
the way that no love
is good enough
unconsummate or forged,
not even among the
grave’s defrauded goons.
In the end, the horrorshow
is pure melodrama,
the beast tragically undone
not by torches or
his own ghastly strength
but by a fool’s real heart,
immortaller than bolt
or sky-juice, more vital
than our conceptions of what’s
too dead. The film
ends enclosed in
his wings of flaming fire.
Shoot me in the head
while I’m in my
spread bride, and
by God I grunt
& come -- and smiling
-- before I die.
Bring me back for
news of that dark bourne
and I’ll berserk the room
for just one squeeze
again of her forever-
waylaid fruit,
my lips pursed for
a squirt of that
wild arterial juice.

- October 26, 2004