The Fool and the Angel, part 2: On angels

A long way below me is the Atlantic ocean. A few hours ahead of me is New York and an encounter that I believe will change my life: I will meet the Angel for the first time. She will save me, and I will save her, because I could sense she was in pain. I will mend her broken wing and help her to fly, and she will heal my troubled, guilty soul and help me to love again. We will touch each other lightly, with barely concealed desire, in a shy silence surrounded by all the words we have already exchanged and pregnant with those to come, and we shall tenderly undress one another and embrace joyfully under soft, white sheets, smiling and laughing as we slide and roll together into an ecstasy of love and salvation…

Did the Angel exist? I know now that she didn’t, but when I flew to her in the late summer of 2007 I had placed my faith entirely in her existence. My romantic adventure demanded full, unwavering commitment. The Artist, despite fully approving of my act, nevertheless advised me to draw up a plan B. But what could this plan B possibly be? I had little money, I had never before been to New York and I knew nobody there, and, besides, to start devising back-up plans ran counter to what I deemed to be the necessarily full commitment to flying to the Angel. It was barely thinkable, but if there was no angel then I imagined I may have some sort of breakdown in Brooklyn and throw myself on the mercy of others, and of fate, to manage my personal disaster. But this was only a dim idea, since I had little doubt that the Angel would be there. How could she not be? For she was an angel, and angels guard and save.

She first contacted me on Valentine’s Day of that year. I had placed a personal ad in a literary journal, the details of which I no longer remember except that it included an intended witty reference to Sweden. ‘Take me to Sweden’ was, in its entirety, that first message sent by the Angel. Of course, I replied, let's go to Sweden and skip our way around the Baltic. And so it had begun.

We asked offbeat questions of each other and gave offbeat answers. We explored in the manner of the sightless, feeling and probing carefully and attentively. Flirting shimmered at the edges. She described herself as a Persian princess trapped in Brooklyn and in need of rescue. I was not a knight, I told her, but an academic in London gradually emerging from my own private nightmare. She seemed pleased and curious. We discussed politics, the Iraq war, swans, love, creativity, yoga, food and books. I learnt that she was a writer trying to finish her first novel. She told me about her creative writing teacher in New York, an Englishman named James. She seemed to be infatuated with him, possibly in love, but hadn’t seen him for a long time and was finding it hard to adjust to his absence, particularly now that he was in Europe for an extended stay. She was convinced that James loved her, but also admitted that there was nothing between them and never had been anything. So the emails danced lightly back and forwards, a welcome pastime, to which I gave little serious thought, while I was focused on moving to a new flat, to a radical change in my life, to solitude.

At the time I was reading the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. I mentioned this to the Angel. She replied that I sounded just like James. This was a good thing, she wrote: ‘Let’s meet. When? I’m sick of the solitaries…’ A few minutes later a new email appeared in my inbox: ‘I’m serious!’ And then another: ‘I think you will come here in June. That’s what I think…’ A little more time passed before another email arrived: ‘I want to cuddle and read in bed and have sex.’

The Angel in the mind of the Fool

Was that all it took? The Fool, becoming ever more reclusive, struggling with guilt over the mess he has recently made of his own life and those of others, and a mysterious woman he knows only as the Angel and who wants to hold him and have sex with him—is it really a wonder that he might suddenly be gripped by the prospect of love and salvation? Did he not need an angel?

Angels are divine messengers; angelos is the Greek word for a messenger. They carry out the will of God, linking the human and the divine. It is an angel who tells Hagar that she will bear Ishmael; an angel who intervenes to stop Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac; angels drive Adam and Eve out of Eden and angels destroy Sodom and Gomorrah; the angel Gabriel who tells Mary that she will bear Christ; an angel who moves the stone from the entrance to Christ’s tomb; an angel who frees St Peter from prison. They are everywhere and they are numberless and, so Revelation tells us, at Armageddon they will do battle with their fallen brethren.

In the most prevalent and influential medieval systematization of angels, stemming from the fifth-century De coelestia hierarchia (On the Celestial Hierarchy) by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, there are nine orders of angels, ranked in three triads: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones; Dominions, Virtues and Powers; Principalities, Archangels and Angels. At the top of the hierarchy, the Seraphim eternally revolve around God in attentive worship—they have nothing to do with humanity. It is only

Angels comfort, love and save...
(Carl Heinrich Bloch,
An Angel Comforting Christ in
Gethsemane, 1873)

the Archangels and Angels who ever have contact with humans. In the Bible that contact was extensive; wherever the divine will is operating, there invariably are to be found angels.

But what happened to them? Where did the angels go?* In the Old and New Testaments they are busy conveying God’s will, healing, saving, fighting, killing and destroying. But miracles cease and the angels disappear. Or, rather, they reappear as something different—as objects of contemplation. They drift off into the ethereal sphere; left alone, humanity sought consolation by filling religious art with depictions of the angels. The almost obsessive attention to portraying angels in art is evidence of how much humanity seeks a bridge to the divine. In 1586 a papal Bull affirmed that everyone had their own celestial companion, and in the early seventeenth century the Catholic Church instituted a universal feast of the Holy Guardian Angels. At best, however, angels now only guarded and loved, but they did so at a distance. Dreamers and prophets still received angelic messages. A few adventurous souls attempted to communicate with the celestial order. The English mathematician, astrologer and occultist, John Dee (1527-1608/9), conversed with the angel Uriel via his scryer Edward Kelley. Blessed with knowledge of the Enochian language of the angels, Kelley conveyed to Dee Uriel’s message that the two men were to share their possessions, including Dee’s wife—a message Dee dutifully obeyed. Dee may have gained divine knowledge from his conversations with an angel, but his life was one of hardship thereafter, meeting suspicion and hostility from all around and declining into ever greater poverty until his death in Mortlake.

...and they kill and destroy
(Guido Reni, The Archangel
Michael, c.1636)

It is a dangerous business to talk with angels. What seemed to have been forgotten by Dee and everyone else in the centuries after Christ’s resurrection, was known to Rilke: angels are powerful, fearsome and terrible. Nor did I know this. Like Dee, I scarcely knew what I was doing by communicating with the Angel.

But communicate we did, the Angel and I, voraciously and incessantly. Over the course of seven months we exchanged nearly 6,000 emails. How could I begin to describe this body of correspondence? It was beautiful, it became the centre of my life, it gave meaning to my days and to my nights too. Many of the messages were brief, no more than a few words; others took on essayistic form. We exchanged playful messages, often only minutes apart, and long messages that explored literature, philosophy and love. We discussed writers, music, spirituality, Sufism and God. We exchanged photographs and I discovered that she was beautiful, genuinely and stunningly so. Sometimes we argued; occasionally there were online rows. But affection, romance and passion flowed through our words. We signed our messages with kisses and promised each other there would be real kisses soon. Each morning, after waking, the first thing I would do was sign into my email account to read and respond to the messages that had floated overnight from the Angel. The next few hours were time passing as I waited for the earth to turn and bring morning to New York, and with it the first messages of the day from the Angel. I would ache not to hear from her for any extended period; I suspected she also ached, for occasionally I would receive the message ‘Where are you?’ 

I was in love with her. We discussed my coming to visit her. But we did so tentatively and nervously, for we were both lonely and fragile and secure in the pure atmosphere of our virtual romance, unsullied and untroubled by reality. Eventually, however, the Fool has to step off the edge of the cliff, to make the leap of faith. So I booked a flight to New York—and then something happened that might, and maybe should, have sounded a warning bell.

Not long after buying my ticket to New York, on what happened to be the hottest day of the year, I visited my children before they went on holiday for a couple of weeks, after which I met the Artist for a drink. By the time I returned home I was fit for nothing but to collapse into bed—I would have to write to the Angel in the morning. When, first thing the next morning, I checked my emails I was greeted by a stream of messages from the Angel. At first affectionate, the emails quickly turned to questions about where I was, and then rapidly descended into angry invective about my silence, my ‘sadism’ in inflicting pain on her by not responding, until they culminated in expressions of near hatred towards me. Calmly, reassuringly and lovingly I replied with an explanation of what had happened. But this did little to appease her, for, when she wrote later that day, she accused me, bitterly, nastily and with growing irrationality, of spending the night with my ex, of being cruel, of being a liar. My repeated endeavours to persuade her that she had the wrong idea were failing ever more spectacularly until, in despair, I questioned whether it was a good idea that we meet. She didn’t reply to this. Her silence, and the exhausting and, to my mind, incomprehensible craziness of the correspondence that had preceded it, led me to question whether it was sensible to meet her—how could I be the guest of someone who clearly now thought so little of me? I investigated the possibility of obtaining a partial refund on my flight, and I resolved that, next day, I would cancel my booking.

The following morning I woke up to an email from the Angel. It contained no message, only an attachment—a photograph of her breasts, bare and beautiful. Relief, joy, anticipation and desire coursed through me. I laughed as I reflected on how in love with her I was. I banished for good any ideas about cancelling my ticket.

Possibly it seems strange now that I was not more alarmed by the Angel’s volatility and her capacity for anger—an anger that, virtual though it was, came tinged with violence and destruction. Yet I regarded these characteristics as simply the reverse side of everything else she was: spirited, passionate, creative, unusual, exciting. That she was challenging was obvious, but surely, I reasoned, what is most worthwhile in life is usually what is also most challenging. And I felt ready to take on the challenge. I wanted to feel enriched and alive, and the Angel held out the promise of both. It had crossed my mind that she may be mad; yet I concluded that, more likely, she was precisely the type of eccentric, unpredictable spirit of fire I was seeking and needed. If she destroyed me, I decided, then so be it. The Fool has to take a risk. I had to be brave.

And so we continued with our messages. One trivial row about the Iraq war aside, an eerie calmness descended upon them as the day of my flight neared. She seemed a little distracted and frustrated by her writing and work, and both of us struggled to disguise the traces of apprehension about meeting after such a long and intense correspondence. Would this be, as I fantasized, the most beautiful moment of my life? What would we say—for we had never spoken to one another? How, after the countless written words, the virtual and textual romance, would we be able to interact away from our computer screens?

It was only as the plane made its final approach to JFK that I really began to consider the chance that there may be no Angel—that she might not exist or that she might not be who she seems (‘it would be a bit of a disappointment if she turns out to be a large Mexican wrestler’, the Artist had once

JFK airport

reassuringly commented). I was to phone her after landing so that she knew I had arrived, and then I would hire a taxi to take me to her apartment in Brooklyn. After the slow crawl through passport control and baggage reclaim I was finally able to step outside to smoke a very welcome cigarette.

I took three or four deep drags to calm my nerves. I found the Angel’s number on my phone and pressed dial. It started ringing… I looked around, feeling the unfamiliarity of my surroundings; I observed the snappy, brusque manners of the airport officials and the taxi drivers, the worldly, tough, no-nonsense tone; slithers of wonder shot through me, wonder at what I was doing here, with little money, listening to the ring tone on my phone, in this huge, fast, aggressive city, where the only person I knew and the only place I had to stay might not even exist. I let the phone ring a little longer. I waited. There was no answer…

_______________________________

*These questions are asked, and given an interesting answer, in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, trans. by James Anderson (London: Portobello, 2008).