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