Angelology

The angel is expanding at the interceded light.
Abraham flattered our time with monologue; intrepid
holoplast of God spoke back. Three visitors arrived at
the afternoon's hot-point. Wordless. Placid? A meal was set.
Fervently. Things are innumerable prolongations of
divine being. Star-sockets fizzle over generations
of the circumcised. Inwardness of fire soothes the burning
blade. Did Abraham reckon the life beyond life? Or did he
invent it? Since his contract with starlight, we live for
increasing an exemplification of the angel's
life, potential in the cycled horizon of time in
our chest-cavity, gained by an auto-intellection­:
prayer, interiority. We inherit Abraham's
power of seeing, obliquely. As a human tendency.
The angel is an emotion. He arrives out of
profound intuition. Not a higher but an inner order.

The terrain of the afterworld is your imagination
of it, which is to say an automatic impression
of nonequilibrium, of an unstable system.
Time is not what we perceive—some relativity—but
we are what time perceives through. Like spectacles. Irises.
Think of angels then as magnifiers. Binoculars
for the birdwatcher, Time. Like matter, Chronos is a self-
organizing maker of dissipative structures.
How can the Heavenly City from which these messengers
emanate be otherwise? The system of the universe
is an unstable empire, migrating inwards. Angels
activate the flux.
                           Perplexed by motionless time, outside
what is intelligible, they range inward in the push
of known time, in motion there. They are themselves bodies
wholly intelligent. The material elements
of the universe pass from one angelic body to
another, so that the creation is but a single
body. The intelligible is not eternal. St
Basil wrote: As the beginning of a road is not yet
the road, & the beginning of a house is not yet a
house, so the beginning of time is not yet time, not even
the smallest part of it. Creation—created time—is
instantaneous. Angels, arrayed in cyclic motion,
by function look inward toward God, never seeing beyond.
Abraham swelters on Mamre. The three angels cool on
paradisaical ice their eyes radiate, seeing XPC
several thousand years hence. Time jerks, a buckle on a bull-
whip, languorously snapped.
                                              The perfection of these angels
is Abraham's perfection. Seeing him they see heaven
uncreated; through him they bear perfect witness to time
unclotted at last. Abraham sets the meal, hurries jars
of water to his visitors. Sarah is rewarded
with Isaac, promised. Her laugh is prophetic seal. Goats &
sheep ruminate in moonless afternoon. Abraham con-
celebrates with invisible fires invisibly winged.

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What Could Be More Valuable than the Facts?

for Márton Koppány

Tibetan Buddhism is a dialect of English.
Sanskrit is a kind of English; or a part of its grammar.
Once, I was Jewish. Back in the 1800s.
Once, I was Persian, many centuries ago.
It's my Finno-Ugric roots that ensnare my limbic system in shamanism.
It's the smells of urine & paprika rising from the street — the Way of Kings, the city's oldest.
Religion is when you find a new vowel
in a book
on your tongue.

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Lepra

The leprous person is not a social threat because of medical contagion, threatening infection or epidemic, as we might imagine, but because of symbolic contamination, threatening in microcosm the very identity, integrity, and security of society at large.
—John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography

John 21

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