The Flatland Chronicles for Sunday, July 16 [part two!]
Journal. A correction from Mr. Rumcove himself
At last, after a certain amount of arm-twisting by e-mail Mr. Rumcove granted me the boon of a telephone call. During the course of our conversation, he reminded me, not without a note of rebuke in his voice, that while some people who live in Essex (such as Mr. R) have an estuary accent, not all people in Essex have an estuary accent. The real and authentic Essex accent is different. He said that the pure or original form of the Essex accent mainly exists these days above the Crouch (a river, if you're not a Brit). He said with some annoyance, "I told you that before, you know!" And it's true, he did---in, what was it, 1998? But I do remember, now that he has reminded me.
So I am publishing this amendment, but I am NOT going to go back and edit my Estuary Englishman publication. I shall link to this amendment and call it a day.
No Angels for Me!
After a spirited discussion with a group of women friends about whether there are angels and--if so---what angels are like, I took a look at a few sites that purport to deal with angels. I came away with a distinct feeling of envy and dissatisfaction; why are there all these people who get to have these reassuring supernatura/religiousl experiences and I never do?
A couple of sites deal with the nature and appearance of angels. I wish I still had the links because they were fascinating; also bizarre, but in a fascinating way. One woman who claims to have met a certain number of angels said that angels all look different and that their 'appearance' tends to reflect their personality. Her personal angel was called 'Bernard.' She talked about how some are feathery, some billowy, and many enjoy a joke just as much as you and me. I forget which sort Bernard is.
Why don't I get personal visits from angels?
ANGELS: Girl, please.
Okay, I admit that I am ambivalent about angels. I do not live in a milieu that is receptive to such entities. Nick is an atheist; Rumcove an agnostic; and my other friends quite pragmatic people. My family, who are all religious to a certain degree, would be quite embarrassed, I imagine, by a serious discussion of angels.
The Gnostic Gospel called The Book of John discusses angels. It also sets forth an account of the creation of the world that is quite a bit different from the one in Genesis. (For one thing, God has a wife.) There are a lot of angels in that book. Eventually I intend to take a closer look at it. But I would not like to meet any of the angels mentioned in this gospel, even if I believed in them.
The most convincing account of angelic encounters that I've ever read is Martha Beck's Expecting Adam. Beck is a Harvard educated ex-Mormon who now writes a column for O Magazine. I love her, at least as she presents herself in her books and in her columns; and I like her books; while a bit more kaffee klatsch in tone than I generally prefer, she's good at getting across both the experiences themselves and her resistance to them. At the end of it, I felt very jealous of the strange experiences she had while pregnant with her extraordinary child, Adam. She tells the tale convincingly. Furthermore, her beliefs tally with my own occasional intuitions about what such an experience could be like.
Anyway, to cut a long story short---I am really not ready to deal with either Martha Beck or angels---I am interested, in an abstract skeptical way, in people's accounts of their meetings with angels. I don't feel any obligation to believe in angels myself.
But my own conception of angels, to the extent I have one, comes from a very cool story by Flannery O'Connor---I can't recall the title at the moment---in which a self-satisfied (and very bigoted) nominal Christian farm woman in Georgia who gets a much merited rebuke through one of the Lord's mouthpieces. Afterward, she has a vision in which she sees the sky full of spinning eyes.
This concept was reinforced by A.S. Byatt's The Conjugial [sic] Angel, which deals with a 19th Century spiritualist, Tennyson, his sister Emily Tennyson, Arthur Hallam (the subject of In Memorian), and Swedenborg. It was probably this story (the second novella in Angels and Insects) that first made angels interesting to me. I didn't care much about them before.
For reasons I am unwilling to explain, it is my thought that the eyes of angels are invariably green. It is full of the sort of personal angels I would have if I had any.
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