The remaking of angels, their rank and sweep
Constantly greater beings, with which we may if we are spiritually fortunate, wrestle — these are Rilke‘s angels, and they fill the gap in the once-dominant Great Chain of Being paradigm, on a rung above human usualness, demanding, promising, skirmishing, delivering…
To be carried in the arms of an apsara, to be swept by the gale-force storm of an angel, these are human experiences of the transhuman kind, and we need words for them, both forgetful of any surrounding dogma and delighting in their strength as imagery — gandharvas and angels named as such, and constantly revivified by the poetic imagination.
Klee, Benjamin, Rilke, but also Jacob wrestling with — who? a man, angel, God? — and becoming IsraelGiotto, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo who wrestled form from Carrera marble, Dogen Zenji for whom mountains were the sages into whom, living among them, he blended.. Kalidasa with his yakshas in Cloud Messenger and perhaps supremely in the gandharva marriage in his Shakuntala..
Isaac becoming Israel, Shakuntala the mother of Bharata.. Of such are sacred nations born.
**
Yet this world is wide and deep, the beings above us multitudinous, and the humans touched by them more than a single mind can comprehend. And:
The problem of god is a problem in ballistics, Icarus discovered this,
that to shoot for the sun is to fall short of it, those who shoot
for beauty achieve prettiness, there is a gravity in aesthetics as there is
in physics, and theology too has its fall, the problem of god being
that the mind falls short of what is huge enough to conceive it, give
conception whatever relevant definition you choose, too vast
to think of, give birth to it — no, no, mind has sheer cliffs of fall, and
to shoot for a conception of god is full speed ahead to fall, fail ..
I bow, salute, prostrate, pranam, bow gassho.
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guillermo:
January 16th, 2019 at 7:37 pm
A most beautiful post. Angels, Benjamin, Rilke, Klee: the perfect constellation for your very insightful mind to meditate and enlighten.
(I would only object to “the likes of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett” being close to Marx and Freud… but I also believe in licentia poetica.)
Charles Cameron:
January 16th, 2019 at 7:46 pm
Well, Guillermo, there’s a century (identified in my post) separating late nineteenth Marx and Freud and early twentyfirst Harris, Dawkins and Dennett, and perhaps greatness has shrunk in the course of that century, eh?
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I must add a new Angelus Novus reference to this post, courtesy of my friend Val Vadeboncoeur — Listen, be enchanted! –:
.
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Lyrics here.
Derek:
January 18th, 2019 at 2:48 am
That last (Icarus) passage reminded me of this, from Augustine’s Confessions:
“Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God, a spreading limitless room within me. Who can reach its uttermost depth? Yet it is a faculty of my soul and belongs to my nature. In fact I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside itself and not within? How can it not contain itself? How can there be any of itself that is not in itself?”
Charles Cameron:
January 18th, 2019 at 5:39 am
That Icarus passage is the first eight lines (very slightly revised, and without the succeeding six lines) of a poem of mine from November 2013. The whole thing:
I actually have a whole series of long-line fourteen-liners from around this time, all trying to address the idea of omniscience, in a series called “the camera god poems”.