Angel Poetry

There is an ancient gnostic legend that tells how angels fell so much in love for the beauty of earth’s bodily world that they dove into it while looking for their own reflection. They gained in the process a body that imprisoned their immortal nature, becoming, thus, human. What they gain (and lose) in their newfound humanity are feelings and the strange connection between emotions and an individual body.

When we look at how both angels and ancient gods are depicted, they offer us a common lack of feelings, being feelings human by nature. Going a step further, feelings could be seen as a learnt layer that channels emotions, giving a psychology to them. Being a layer sitting between reasoned thought and emotion, they are also the perfect ground for morals.

Emotions, being immediate and potentially impersonal, do not accommodate principles and rules easily - they appear and take, with or without them. Discursive thought, on its turn, is only called to speak after the immediacy of the authorless emotion was allowed to manifest itself.

Some relatively recent views of angels tend to present them as intrinsically good – no good angel would destroy Sodom and Gomorrah; no good angel would manifest jealousy of the benefits that god granted to men; no angel could ever fall from the divine grace and fall, a little like Prometheus. Drawing a parallel with the Classic gods, we can see wrath, anger, lust and, at times, a short-lived tolerance towards the acts of humans, but none of the morally nice feelings that seem to guide the life of their human subjects.

If we look at feelings as something that is learnt and imposed upon us as a tool for social conformity, they become a socially accepted response to a given emotional wavelength, repressing emotions or channelling them into compensation strategies regarded as harmless, or, then, frustration. Feelings introduce into the equation words in their standard dictionary sense, creating, thus, a dimension of time (and strategy) for our actions and thoughts.

If emotions are so mutable that they seem to disappear or change while remaining there, feelings try to remain in sameness of state and intensity. Their perpetuation tends, however, to be self-induced, trying to satisfy our craving for identity and permanence. Feelings are history; emotions are the moment. Feelings develop strategy; emotions don’t project into the future (or time). The eternity of the angel is an eternal present of vibrations of the same selfless emotion in its multiple colours and oscillations between what we perceive as the most absolute kindness and the most intolerable cruelty.

Angel poetry becomes the work of the angel in us, an unblinking and uncompromisingly attentive stare at the moment seeking that magic intensity by which the woven fabric of reality is revealed. Poetry of the angel is amoral, carries no concept of right and wrong but looks at the world and sees everything with a newness as it has never been seen, because each moment is irrevocably different, and when truth is stated as a state of sight, there is no point in reasoning about it; we either see or we don’t.

This view of the essential matter that feeds and threatens feelings is direct and wordless and needs forms of verbalisation analogous to the symbolic forms of thinking found in myth and magic to guide its transgression of the everyday use of language. The poetry that attempts to capture the wordless moment of revelation, oscillates between light and darkness, redemption and fall. It is the poetry of the angel. It is the poetry of the damned, condemned to commit their lives into a chase that will never be taken to its term.