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Angels: A Pragmatic Investigation
Jan. 21st, 2022 02:28 pmI recently found myself at the confluence of two strange currents. The first was a Youtube video featuring folk singer Willi Carlisle performing his song, “Angels,” in a bar in Laramie, Wyoming. The second was William James’ Pragmatism. The narrator of the song, in between vivid verses that suggest he’s having a hard time of it, insists in the chorus that, “I’m waiting, I’m waiting, I’m waiting, I’m waiting for angels to carry me back home.”
To the pragmatist, truth is spelled with a lowercase “t”. All I can know of the world is what I experience through my senses—themselves, rough translation of phenomena—and my inferences about those experiences. Everyone sees with different eyes. The words we use to communicate our experiences are themselves abstractions. Sounds or shapes that contain no inherent meaning, but require a recipient to bring their own. To the extent that we can agree, and dismiss the inconvenient experiences we can’t express or agree on, we can communicate. But it’s hard to drive the nail that hangs a capital Truth.
Most of what we think of as absolute truth is received dogma, meaning assigned to experience after the fact, or an educated guess. In Alfred Korzybski’s terms, it’s a map of a territory that we can’t know directly. The pragmatist is just fine with that. Inasmuch as the word can be useful, he defines truth as a belief that confers some benefit to its holder. If I believe the thing I call the “ocean” lies a short distance away in a direction I call “south,” and I walk for a short while, I end up with wet feet. My experience corresponds to the constellation of events that I file under those words, so I hold that truth to be evident.
In fact, any notion that causes a person to act differently, with more accuracy, and greater benefit than some competing notion can be said to be more true, in pragmatic terms. If a tribe in Papua New Guinea believes that mischievous ghosts inhabit large old trees in the forest, and so insists to the white researcher from Cambridge who hired him as a guide that they don’t camp under them; and if the researcher believes that to be nonsense, we can test this for truth pragmatically. It turns out that certain native species of trees, when they’re old have a nasty habit of shedding large limbs if not just toppling over, and people have been killed on many occasions, like the researcher who decided to camp out under one, anyway. We Westerners might say the native tribe was wrong. The truth was that certain species of trees have a low but significant probability of spontaneously giving way, and had the researcher known that, he may have listened to his guide’s advice.
To a pragmatist, that’s like saying it was an “arbol” (Spanish) that fell on the man, not a “baum” (German). If we told a tribe in Papua New Guinea that there was a 0.01 percent chance of someone being killed by that tree—that if it fell 10,000 times, only once would it land on someone—it might sound just as bafflingly superstitious to suggest that a single tree can fall 10,000 times, and that we know what will happen each one, when we as a people can’t even get out of the way of the one that mattered. An elder might reply that there is no probability, only what happens or doesn’t happen. The pragmatist would say that both can be true, if they provide us with actions that map to our predictions. If they cause us to waste energy, run in circles, or harm ourselves and others, they decidedly are less true.
With that in mind, I got to wondering whether the beliefs of narrator in the folk song “Angels” were in any way true.
William James, in all probability, would suggest that belief in angels can be entirely true, if that belief allows the man to navigate his life with greater skill than a disbelief. It matters, of course, what exactly he thinks angels are, what functions they can be expected to perform, and how (or if) he should expect to interact with them. These are the events of experience associated with angels. If the belief did nothing but give him a warm glow from time to time, and caused no damage to anyone, it’s pragmatically true. I don’t mean provisionally, pending further evidence, or any other qualifying word. I mean true in the sense of the laws of gravity.
My concern arose not with the man’s belief in angels, which I gathered gave him some solace, but with the conviction that they were going to “carry him back home” at the end of his waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. A mere belief in angels that gladdened his heart might be true, but by the same pragmatic test, if that belief involved certain association and expectations that caused him to act in a way that brought harm into his life and caused him to become lost in a mental wilderness, bumping against the hard trunks of experience without changing his approach, it might turn out to be false. More accurately, less true than an alternative.
Like I said, he seemed to be having a hard time of it. The lyrics were full of nostalgia, pain, and a lot of “ifs” not followed by action. Maybe an atheist would be inclined to pick himself up by the bootstraps, and if so, that might be the more true proposition. So what did he think an angel was? How would one arrive, in what garments, to carry him home? Would the arrival be announced by a heavenly host of trumpets, or a gentle knock on the door? Every aspect of the belief can make subtle or significant alterations to his course of action that will change how events play out.
I don’t claim to know how angels operate, and if he’s anything like me, he has to admit to a certain range of possibilities. It’s clear he thinks one or more will arrive at an appointed time. That means they’re not always present, or not always ready to act. Something triggers the decisive moment. An action, or sequence of events. At the least, a recognition that someone has come. Here is salvation. Would he expect to be scooped up, or to swing a stout blue jeaned leg into the angel’s arms?
He’s never been picked up before, so the whole process is shrouded in mystery. If he also believes he’s fallible, which is apparent in the song, he might begin to wonder, after long years of suffering, what was holding the angel up. First he would turn down the volume on the series he was binge-watching in order to hear what might be a quiet tap on the screen door. He might turn it off altogether, and if it stopped there, we could argue his belief conferred a great blessing. But being long-suffering and aware of his ignorance, I imagine at some point, he would kick down the footrest and rock out of the easy chair to peer through the blinds into the night.
It’s possible he already missed the knock, or that the angel wouldn’t knock at all, but stand on the doorstep awaiting a small act of faith. Our man might choose to open the door, and finding no one, squint along the driveway. If he had reason to believe the angel may have confused the address, he would walk outside and check that the messenger of God wasn’t standing expectantly outside his neighbor’s place. If he were impatient, he would walk to the end of the street and peek around the stop sign. At this point, the man who ascribed a quality of perfection to angels would likely retreat to his home with a sigh, while one who stood convinced that only God was infallible may begin to worry that something had held the angel up, or at least that he could shorten his tribulation by running into the host along the route.
He might walk a few blocks downtown, and look a little longer at the faces setting up their sleeping bags in the alcoves of closed shops, in search of some angelic quality. While the song offers no hints, he may believe that his salvation requires him to pass some cursory test, or at least to behave like a decent friend would if their guest was running unaccountably late. Maybe the glory of an angel is so great that its unfiltered light would rend a man’s eyes, its hum shatter his ears, unless he made the sacrifice of taking a temporarily human form—a limitation not without its dangers. He could have been jumped, or spun around by the labyrinth of one way streets that defies geometry and theology. So our humble, disheartened narrator might quicken his step past the bars and late-night take-out joints where he often sought absolution. Regardless of his theories, I can’t help but think he would begin to question whether or not the angel ever intended to come at all. That for all his good manners, he may end up once again alone as the restaurant closed and the staff took pains to avoid showing pity for the nice guy at table eight who got stood up.
There are a lot of places someone can wait. His usual haunts work just as well as home, so we can forgive him if he canvasses the streets he often seeks in his despair, as an angel may prefer to find him where he’s lowest. His spirits may even soar when the bars let out and he studies the stumbling crowd for one who doesn’t quite fit. The disappointment of deserted lanes may shake his courage and tempt him to turn in, but beliefs have a way of shifting when they encounter the new. They don’t change, mind you. William James would point out that our beliefs are among the most conservative aspects of our character. Tectonic movements are as exhausting as they are disorienting. So we can expect he would still hold true that he was waiting for an angel, maybe several, to save him in some barely predictable manner at an unknown time. But the foray could expand his idea of the term “waiting.” He might wait the next morning at his job, because it’s as reasonable for an angel to find him there as anywhere else.
At this point, it’s prudent to abandon the conditional tenses that threaten to bog down this essay as the multitude of possibilities play out to conclusion. Simple past, present, and future will suffice as long as the reader keeps in mind that anything spoken of with certainty can be regarded as a potential. One thing, in a sea of probabilities.
No angel materializes. Work goes on as usual, with the addition of an anxious expectancy that hangs over the day. He pores over his tasks in an attempt to distract himself, and to pass the interminable hours until he clocks out. By now, no one could fault him if he counted his effort sufficient and turned for home. The arrival, if it’s coming at all, at least no longer seemd imminent. But something has been shook loose. Wound up and set spinning. He’s impatient, and desperate enough to press on. After a stop by home for a quick bite and a change of clothes, he’s drawn out again by the thought he had the night before, that an angel would be most likely to search for him in the places he felt lowest. Where would he look if he sought someone in trouble?
He spends three hours waiting in the emergency room, then slows the car past the sheriff's station. In the days that follow, every hour not assigned to work and basic life-sustaining functions is spent with a yellow tablet and a pen, crossing off item by item on a list of his of his most terrible memories and misdeeds. He visits a shoe store, the gully behind the mall, and the abandoned brick office where he used to rent his cable box and pay his bill. He parks as long as he dares outside his ex’s apartment complex. There’s a pair of coffee shops, a bowling alley, the route he used to drive on his deliveries. While sitting on a bench on the Fontana Street bridge, he was sure it was the man approaching in a long brown coat holding an umbrella. Then come the weekend trips to his birth city. Three schools, one closed, another extensively remodeled. In a single day, he swings by every house that his old friends used to live in, the zoo, and a drive-in burger spot and a movie theater where two of them worked and all of them killed time. It takes an entire weekend apiece for the pilgrimage to his own home, and surprisingly, the children’s museum and play area which at first he only recalled in a pleasant afterthought.
Visit after visit drags him lower—as if lighting a signal fire that even an earthbound angel can’t fail to see. He wallows in it. Returns by different routes, on different sides. Speeds past where he lingered, lingers where he sped off, and paces furrows when it seems socially acceptable. Some places can’t be found at all, and leave him doubting his own reconstructions. Others reduce him to tears just by the degree to which they’ve physically changed. This latter becomes a habit by which he measures the success of his trips, until it hollows and he ultimately dismisses it as misguided. By the end of the tour, he scrambles for places as trivial as a dumpster that once smelled very bad when he opened the lid.
It hits him. Maybe the error in his strategy was to wait for angel in places he’d normally expect to find its opposite. This ground was well-trod, and if there was going to be a being of light, it would find him not in the shadows, but where light could reach. He attends church. Every one he can find. He stays for coffee, helps to assemble care packages, and cleans up after supper on Wednesdays at one of their soup kitchens. He asks everyone he dares—rollicking Baptist, stiff Methodist, the gilded Orthodox—if they’ve seen an angel. There’s polite concern, of course, but at least a few assure him that someone known to congregation once had an encounter that could be nothing else. And a great many are happy to describe the hosts. They’re wondrous, and if a composite was submitted to police, somewhere between as short as a pinhead and great as the heavens, with blonde or auburn hair, occasionally clothed and quite ordinary or glowing with deadly radiation.
They’re said to be consummate protectors of the meek, destroyers of demons, to fly, to walk, to only deliver messages and never violence, to appear to the holiest among us, or only the damned, to appear as a bull, an eagle, and a lion, to help those who help themselves, and to have ceased their visits some time ago in protest of certain political and technological innovations. He consults books in the library that can only be examined with cotton gloves in the presence of a librarian, but a newspaper horoscope on July 6 belonging to the sign immediately after his leads him to extend his vigil beyond the holy structures to all places of wonder. His inquiries are met with even more unpleasant reactions at the city park and the local hiking trails, but rather than deter him, it gives him cheer. He almost feels as though he’s a member of some secret sect, guarding a mystery hidden in figures adorning billboards, public edifices, and tall trees for all to see. He finds clues in places as diverse as Independence Hall and the South Rim of the Grand Canyon; the Golden Gate Bridge, and the tombstone of Billy the Kid. Clues, but no angel, and all of them conflicting. It’s hard to say he has a crisis of faith. Some of his faiths are shattered, but many others grow in resolve.
His travels strain his budget and his job. He’s forced to abandon his house and seek work that supports his angel-oriented lifestyle. He renews his CDL and drives trucks. Through fresh contacts, he lands a gig as a port inspector, gets fired for reasons unrelated to angels, then works first as a millwright’s helper, then a millwright during the most stable period of his travels. When he’s forced to flee, he suspects it’s an opportunity in disguise. A popular author once told him that statistically, angels most often intervene when someone is broken down on the side of the road, or during a medical trauma. He tours regionally on the drums with an East Texas boogie-woogie outfit.
The cycle repeats itself. From the veil of promise, through mounting specificity, frustration and satisfaction, to giving notice, he takes up a series of trades in as many cities. Most of them are too boring to list. There are exceptions. He spends time as a campaign manager for a congressman, a farrier, and a designer of stained glass windows. He operates a podcast dedicated to solving murders, and later, an underground gambling den. He engages in philanthropy, meteorology, psychism, piracy, semiotics and psithurism, and the tanning of hides. In a dream, he encounters over a period of weeks a being named Azaturiel, man-like but black with downy feathers, the teeth and claws of a bear, a possum’s tail, and the posture of a lemur, who promises to held him learn to craft fine leather goods and start an Etsy store. The man declines.
There’s a two year stretch where he convinces himself that he’s actually fleeing the angel. He lives the life of a spy, which is one of many layers laminated to one another. Every pair of headlights or evening walker tails him. Locks are changed with frequency. A bag is always packed, and he spends his evenings going over every item in his home, every person he knows, every story he tells, in order to inventory and then dismiss all that he must leave behind if his cover is blown. No lunch can be purchased or car fueled without considering what an observer may glean from the event and all the gestures it contains. Though he lives in caustic distress, he notes there was no other time in his life when he felt the angel was closer.
This phase passes, too, and he resumes his waiting. By now “wait” and “search” have become indistinguishable. An optical illusion that’s a duck or a rabbit, depending on how one shifts his eyes. He forgets about the angel. But that’s imprecise. Nor is it quite right to say that the search, the wait, simply merges with his life so that the entire thing is a single opus of many movements. Were he capable of that, he wouldn’t need an angel. Nor does he go about life at times, and search at others. That would imply, as in the incomprehensible phrase “work/life balance,” that life was something separate that stopped for periods of search, and vice-versa. Most moments his rescuer never enters his mind. Instead, what weaves itself through the gyrations of existence is possibility, ever-present and remembered in brief spells between mundane activity, sufficient unto itself.
Before we conclude, it’s important to remind the reader that for the pragmatist, the truth of a belief lies in the actions that unfold from it. Those that lead to harm and confusion have something of falsehood in them. Those that bring the believer in closer relation with his world are more true.
Back in his old town, rumors spread like wildfire. An angelic being has appeared to credible witnesses, each of whom is known personally to the ones he interviews. Accounts disagree on how long ago, and describe experiences as diverse as a “streetlamp descending from its lofty post,” to a curious man with a candle aura visible in certain conditions of light near the beginning and end of the day. The lower he plumbs the strata of society the more vivid the stories grow. They congregate in bar rooms, back alleys, houses with many nocturnal visitors. A hunch leads him to the home he once occupied, and he finds it a squatter’s den, encircled with a sagging chain link fence.
At last, the man finds the angel, a thin, desperate creature curled on the floor in the back bedroom. The stench is fetid. His clothes seem little more than a grease stain on skin. The only sign of heaven left in the being is the faint golden glow that flickers around him like the last coals of a blaze. His eyes lift, and he says that he’s been waiting a long time. The man scoops up the angel with such strength and tenderness that the angel feels there is no separation—as if those arms are his own. Then carries him home.
To the pragmatist, truth is spelled with a lowercase “t”. All I can know of the world is what I experience through my senses—themselves, rough translation of phenomena—and my inferences about those experiences. Everyone sees with different eyes. The words we use to communicate our experiences are themselves abstractions. Sounds or shapes that contain no inherent meaning, but require a recipient to bring their own. To the extent that we can agree, and dismiss the inconvenient experiences we can’t express or agree on, we can communicate. But it’s hard to drive the nail that hangs a capital Truth.
Most of what we think of as absolute truth is received dogma, meaning assigned to experience after the fact, or an educated guess. In Alfred Korzybski’s terms, it’s a map of a territory that we can’t know directly. The pragmatist is just fine with that. Inasmuch as the word can be useful, he defines truth as a belief that confers some benefit to its holder. If I believe the thing I call the “ocean” lies a short distance away in a direction I call “south,” and I walk for a short while, I end up with wet feet. My experience corresponds to the constellation of events that I file under those words, so I hold that truth to be evident.
In fact, any notion that causes a person to act differently, with more accuracy, and greater benefit than some competing notion can be said to be more true, in pragmatic terms. If a tribe in Papua New Guinea believes that mischievous ghosts inhabit large old trees in the forest, and so insists to the white researcher from Cambridge who hired him as a guide that they don’t camp under them; and if the researcher believes that to be nonsense, we can test this for truth pragmatically. It turns out that certain native species of trees, when they’re old have a nasty habit of shedding large limbs if not just toppling over, and people have been killed on many occasions, like the researcher who decided to camp out under one, anyway. We Westerners might say the native tribe was wrong. The truth was that certain species of trees have a low but significant probability of spontaneously giving way, and had the researcher known that, he may have listened to his guide’s advice.
To a pragmatist, that’s like saying it was an “arbol” (Spanish) that fell on the man, not a “baum” (German). If we told a tribe in Papua New Guinea that there was a 0.01 percent chance of someone being killed by that tree—that if it fell 10,000 times, only once would it land on someone—it might sound just as bafflingly superstitious to suggest that a single tree can fall 10,000 times, and that we know what will happen each one, when we as a people can’t even get out of the way of the one that mattered. An elder might reply that there is no probability, only what happens or doesn’t happen. The pragmatist would say that both can be true, if they provide us with actions that map to our predictions. If they cause us to waste energy, run in circles, or harm ourselves and others, they decidedly are less true.
With that in mind, I got to wondering whether the beliefs of narrator in the folk song “Angels” were in any way true.
William James, in all probability, would suggest that belief in angels can be entirely true, if that belief allows the man to navigate his life with greater skill than a disbelief. It matters, of course, what exactly he thinks angels are, what functions they can be expected to perform, and how (or if) he should expect to interact with them. These are the events of experience associated with angels. If the belief did nothing but give him a warm glow from time to time, and caused no damage to anyone, it’s pragmatically true. I don’t mean provisionally, pending further evidence, or any other qualifying word. I mean true in the sense of the laws of gravity.
My concern arose not with the man’s belief in angels, which I gathered gave him some solace, but with the conviction that they were going to “carry him back home” at the end of his waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. A mere belief in angels that gladdened his heart might be true, but by the same pragmatic test, if that belief involved certain association and expectations that caused him to act in a way that brought harm into his life and caused him to become lost in a mental wilderness, bumping against the hard trunks of experience without changing his approach, it might turn out to be false. More accurately, less true than an alternative.
Like I said, he seemed to be having a hard time of it. The lyrics were full of nostalgia, pain, and a lot of “ifs” not followed by action. Maybe an atheist would be inclined to pick himself up by the bootstraps, and if so, that might be the more true proposition. So what did he think an angel was? How would one arrive, in what garments, to carry him home? Would the arrival be announced by a heavenly host of trumpets, or a gentle knock on the door? Every aspect of the belief can make subtle or significant alterations to his course of action that will change how events play out.
I don’t claim to know how angels operate, and if he’s anything like me, he has to admit to a certain range of possibilities. It’s clear he thinks one or more will arrive at an appointed time. That means they’re not always present, or not always ready to act. Something triggers the decisive moment. An action, or sequence of events. At the least, a recognition that someone has come. Here is salvation. Would he expect to be scooped up, or to swing a stout blue jeaned leg into the angel’s arms?
He’s never been picked up before, so the whole process is shrouded in mystery. If he also believes he’s fallible, which is apparent in the song, he might begin to wonder, after long years of suffering, what was holding the angel up. First he would turn down the volume on the series he was binge-watching in order to hear what might be a quiet tap on the screen door. He might turn it off altogether, and if it stopped there, we could argue his belief conferred a great blessing. But being long-suffering and aware of his ignorance, I imagine at some point, he would kick down the footrest and rock out of the easy chair to peer through the blinds into the night.
It’s possible he already missed the knock, or that the angel wouldn’t knock at all, but stand on the doorstep awaiting a small act of faith. Our man might choose to open the door, and finding no one, squint along the driveway. If he had reason to believe the angel may have confused the address, he would walk outside and check that the messenger of God wasn’t standing expectantly outside his neighbor’s place. If he were impatient, he would walk to the end of the street and peek around the stop sign. At this point, the man who ascribed a quality of perfection to angels would likely retreat to his home with a sigh, while one who stood convinced that only God was infallible may begin to worry that something had held the angel up, or at least that he could shorten his tribulation by running into the host along the route.
He might walk a few blocks downtown, and look a little longer at the faces setting up their sleeping bags in the alcoves of closed shops, in search of some angelic quality. While the song offers no hints, he may believe that his salvation requires him to pass some cursory test, or at least to behave like a decent friend would if their guest was running unaccountably late. Maybe the glory of an angel is so great that its unfiltered light would rend a man’s eyes, its hum shatter his ears, unless he made the sacrifice of taking a temporarily human form—a limitation not without its dangers. He could have been jumped, or spun around by the labyrinth of one way streets that defies geometry and theology. So our humble, disheartened narrator might quicken his step past the bars and late-night take-out joints where he often sought absolution. Regardless of his theories, I can’t help but think he would begin to question whether or not the angel ever intended to come at all. That for all his good manners, he may end up once again alone as the restaurant closed and the staff took pains to avoid showing pity for the nice guy at table eight who got stood up.
There are a lot of places someone can wait. His usual haunts work just as well as home, so we can forgive him if he canvasses the streets he often seeks in his despair, as an angel may prefer to find him where he’s lowest. His spirits may even soar when the bars let out and he studies the stumbling crowd for one who doesn’t quite fit. The disappointment of deserted lanes may shake his courage and tempt him to turn in, but beliefs have a way of shifting when they encounter the new. They don’t change, mind you. William James would point out that our beliefs are among the most conservative aspects of our character. Tectonic movements are as exhausting as they are disorienting. So we can expect he would still hold true that he was waiting for an angel, maybe several, to save him in some barely predictable manner at an unknown time. But the foray could expand his idea of the term “waiting.” He might wait the next morning at his job, because it’s as reasonable for an angel to find him there as anywhere else.
At this point, it’s prudent to abandon the conditional tenses that threaten to bog down this essay as the multitude of possibilities play out to conclusion. Simple past, present, and future will suffice as long as the reader keeps in mind that anything spoken of with certainty can be regarded as a potential. One thing, in a sea of probabilities.
No angel materializes. Work goes on as usual, with the addition of an anxious expectancy that hangs over the day. He pores over his tasks in an attempt to distract himself, and to pass the interminable hours until he clocks out. By now, no one could fault him if he counted his effort sufficient and turned for home. The arrival, if it’s coming at all, at least no longer seemd imminent. But something has been shook loose. Wound up and set spinning. He’s impatient, and desperate enough to press on. After a stop by home for a quick bite and a change of clothes, he’s drawn out again by the thought he had the night before, that an angel would be most likely to search for him in the places he felt lowest. Where would he look if he sought someone in trouble?
He spends three hours waiting in the emergency room, then slows the car past the sheriff's station. In the days that follow, every hour not assigned to work and basic life-sustaining functions is spent with a yellow tablet and a pen, crossing off item by item on a list of his of his most terrible memories and misdeeds. He visits a shoe store, the gully behind the mall, and the abandoned brick office where he used to rent his cable box and pay his bill. He parks as long as he dares outside his ex’s apartment complex. There’s a pair of coffee shops, a bowling alley, the route he used to drive on his deliveries. While sitting on a bench on the Fontana Street bridge, he was sure it was the man approaching in a long brown coat holding an umbrella. Then come the weekend trips to his birth city. Three schools, one closed, another extensively remodeled. In a single day, he swings by every house that his old friends used to live in, the zoo, and a drive-in burger spot and a movie theater where two of them worked and all of them killed time. It takes an entire weekend apiece for the pilgrimage to his own home, and surprisingly, the children’s museum and play area which at first he only recalled in a pleasant afterthought.
Visit after visit drags him lower—as if lighting a signal fire that even an earthbound angel can’t fail to see. He wallows in it. Returns by different routes, on different sides. Speeds past where he lingered, lingers where he sped off, and paces furrows when it seems socially acceptable. Some places can’t be found at all, and leave him doubting his own reconstructions. Others reduce him to tears just by the degree to which they’ve physically changed. This latter becomes a habit by which he measures the success of his trips, until it hollows and he ultimately dismisses it as misguided. By the end of the tour, he scrambles for places as trivial as a dumpster that once smelled very bad when he opened the lid.
It hits him. Maybe the error in his strategy was to wait for angel in places he’d normally expect to find its opposite. This ground was well-trod, and if there was going to be a being of light, it would find him not in the shadows, but where light could reach. He attends church. Every one he can find. He stays for coffee, helps to assemble care packages, and cleans up after supper on Wednesdays at one of their soup kitchens. He asks everyone he dares—rollicking Baptist, stiff Methodist, the gilded Orthodox—if they’ve seen an angel. There’s polite concern, of course, but at least a few assure him that someone known to congregation once had an encounter that could be nothing else. And a great many are happy to describe the hosts. They’re wondrous, and if a composite was submitted to police, somewhere between as short as a pinhead and great as the heavens, with blonde or auburn hair, occasionally clothed and quite ordinary or glowing with deadly radiation.
They’re said to be consummate protectors of the meek, destroyers of demons, to fly, to walk, to only deliver messages and never violence, to appear to the holiest among us, or only the damned, to appear as a bull, an eagle, and a lion, to help those who help themselves, and to have ceased their visits some time ago in protest of certain political and technological innovations. He consults books in the library that can only be examined with cotton gloves in the presence of a librarian, but a newspaper horoscope on July 6 belonging to the sign immediately after his leads him to extend his vigil beyond the holy structures to all places of wonder. His inquiries are met with even more unpleasant reactions at the city park and the local hiking trails, but rather than deter him, it gives him cheer. He almost feels as though he’s a member of some secret sect, guarding a mystery hidden in figures adorning billboards, public edifices, and tall trees for all to see. He finds clues in places as diverse as Independence Hall and the South Rim of the Grand Canyon; the Golden Gate Bridge, and the tombstone of Billy the Kid. Clues, but no angel, and all of them conflicting. It’s hard to say he has a crisis of faith. Some of his faiths are shattered, but many others grow in resolve.
His travels strain his budget and his job. He’s forced to abandon his house and seek work that supports his angel-oriented lifestyle. He renews his CDL and drives trucks. Through fresh contacts, he lands a gig as a port inspector, gets fired for reasons unrelated to angels, then works first as a millwright’s helper, then a millwright during the most stable period of his travels. When he’s forced to flee, he suspects it’s an opportunity in disguise. A popular author once told him that statistically, angels most often intervene when someone is broken down on the side of the road, or during a medical trauma. He tours regionally on the drums with an East Texas boogie-woogie outfit.
The cycle repeats itself. From the veil of promise, through mounting specificity, frustration and satisfaction, to giving notice, he takes up a series of trades in as many cities. Most of them are too boring to list. There are exceptions. He spends time as a campaign manager for a congressman, a farrier, and a designer of stained glass windows. He operates a podcast dedicated to solving murders, and later, an underground gambling den. He engages in philanthropy, meteorology, psychism, piracy, semiotics and psithurism, and the tanning of hides. In a dream, he encounters over a period of weeks a being named Azaturiel, man-like but black with downy feathers, the teeth and claws of a bear, a possum’s tail, and the posture of a lemur, who promises to held him learn to craft fine leather goods and start an Etsy store. The man declines.
There’s a two year stretch where he convinces himself that he’s actually fleeing the angel. He lives the life of a spy, which is one of many layers laminated to one another. Every pair of headlights or evening walker tails him. Locks are changed with frequency. A bag is always packed, and he spends his evenings going over every item in his home, every person he knows, every story he tells, in order to inventory and then dismiss all that he must leave behind if his cover is blown. No lunch can be purchased or car fueled without considering what an observer may glean from the event and all the gestures it contains. Though he lives in caustic distress, he notes there was no other time in his life when he felt the angel was closer.
This phase passes, too, and he resumes his waiting. By now “wait” and “search” have become indistinguishable. An optical illusion that’s a duck or a rabbit, depending on how one shifts his eyes. He forgets about the angel. But that’s imprecise. Nor is it quite right to say that the search, the wait, simply merges with his life so that the entire thing is a single opus of many movements. Were he capable of that, he wouldn’t need an angel. Nor does he go about life at times, and search at others. That would imply, as in the incomprehensible phrase “work/life balance,” that life was something separate that stopped for periods of search, and vice-versa. Most moments his rescuer never enters his mind. Instead, what weaves itself through the gyrations of existence is possibility, ever-present and remembered in brief spells between mundane activity, sufficient unto itself.
Before we conclude, it’s important to remind the reader that for the pragmatist, the truth of a belief lies in the actions that unfold from it. Those that lead to harm and confusion have something of falsehood in them. Those that bring the believer in closer relation with his world are more true.
Back in his old town, rumors spread like wildfire. An angelic being has appeared to credible witnesses, each of whom is known personally to the ones he interviews. Accounts disagree on how long ago, and describe experiences as diverse as a “streetlamp descending from its lofty post,” to a curious man with a candle aura visible in certain conditions of light near the beginning and end of the day. The lower he plumbs the strata of society the more vivid the stories grow. They congregate in bar rooms, back alleys, houses with many nocturnal visitors. A hunch leads him to the home he once occupied, and he finds it a squatter’s den, encircled with a sagging chain link fence.
At last, the man finds the angel, a thin, desperate creature curled on the floor in the back bedroom. The stench is fetid. His clothes seem little more than a grease stain on skin. The only sign of heaven left in the being is the faint golden glow that flickers around him like the last coals of a blaze. His eyes lift, and he says that he’s been waiting a long time. The man scoops up the angel with such strength and tenderness that the angel feels there is no separation—as if those arms are his own. Then carries him home.
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Date: 2022-01-22 12:47 am (UTC)This is very compelling. Thank you for sharing it.
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Date: 2022-01-22 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-22 01:51 pm (UTC)I love William James, and think the pragmatic approach is perfectly fine for interrogating the material realm. And I wouldn't dismiss that warm glow too readily. The question must arise, after all: What (or who) prompted that warm glow?
Axé,
Fra' Lupo
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Date: 2022-01-22 06:36 pm (UTC)Agreed, that warm glow, however prompted, has real value.
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Date: 2022-01-22 05:06 pm (UTC)Oddly enough, I am plowing through James myself. Let me ponder the rest of your post. Tons of meat there.
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Date: 2022-01-22 06:37 pm (UTC)