whatever you love, you must cry out for it to bless you.

these hours wasted with Angels are precious, divine things: they are your becoming.

dear little voice,

is there a single thing in beauty that can approach the absolute perfection of a young man named Jacob wrestling an Angel at sunrise, first, then howling: “I will not let you go until you bless me”?

we are surrounded at every instant by sights that ought to strike us the same, leaving the unbenumbed person limb-tied, mute, and barbaric with gratitude and terror.

but, little voice, the truth is that there may be three looking people on earth at any given time: and if you got the chance to ask them how they do it, they would not understand the question. i think they might just stare at you with the embarrassment of trees. or maybe smile the way you do when a child, unknowing, reveals in a question the secret of their origins, or asks the reason for the sky: carefully, as though not to cause shame. 

Jacob Wrestling With The Angel (1865) by Alexander Louis Leloir

on the contrary, theirs is only a response. and Jacob’s is only the ecstasy of walking somewhere in early morning and noticing, for the first time, something he had been asleep to until then. was it a maple tree, broad and unapologetic in broad daylight? a sparrow’s subtle quiver? was it the passing shadow of the morning that went straight through his heart?

and yours, little voice, is only a question: you are still alive but why? or: did you have a life until you used it? or: do you just need a good wrestle with it?

after all, it’s not your fault: a long time ago you left somewhere else, and the next thing you knew, you woke up here. and, after all, they’re just angels: things that carry out tasks for god: daylight. a sparrow. a shadow. photosynthesis. magnetism. gravity. condensation. 

they’re beautiful. they’re everywhere.

i will tell you a secret, little voice: sometimes, when I am careless, i think that survival is simple: you just continue to move forward. we call this productivity. but Jacob knew: whatever you love, you must cry out for it to bless you. you must grasp it with both hands. you must stop in your tracks. after all, it is an Angel. the only civilised response is to remain enchanted and afraid.

Rosso Fiorentino (1494–1540), Musician Angel, circa 1520. Tempera on Wood.

here, among the brief 28,835 days of a long human life, a single moment may strike you by surprise in its standing still. this is because it is carrying out a task for god. this is because it is an angel, demanding your attention.

you have permission to take your Time with two hands. you have permission to demand it bless you.

here, among the 28,835 days of a long human life, a moment may stand still and become an angel: the sun shines. it is raining. you sleep. you wake. a child laughs. you brush past a rose at dusk. you walk up and down the road. you prepare sandwiches. you reach out to touch the face in the mirror. you brush your teeth. you side-step the puddle with a sudden fascination with its reflection. you think of proust. you are concerned. you spot the hazy white too-soon thumbprint of the Moon. you are content. you bite into a vanilla biscuit. and it stands still.

Mary Oliver, "Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?", Poems (Devotions)

it is only 800 of mankind’s 200,000 years during which our sense of Time has not been threaded by Angels, but rather upon the use of mechanical clocks and words like hours, minutes, and days. during which we no longer took our Time, but that we ordered Time take us.

but Angels are measured in units that humble this human measuring tape: not minutes, months and years, but the thunderous applause of the heart, its skipping beats, and its sprouting shudders. Angels are millennia, epochs and aeons. Angels are rock, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments, and the drift of tectonic plates. Angels are a deep time, a shared time, where things come alive in the heart that once seemed inert. where new a responsibility declares itself: not of productivity, but of presence. where Time does not need to be earned, but belongs to us already. where the soul springs up like a sudden dew-coated sprout upon sudden, spontaneous enchantment with what it means to be alive. and, suddenly: ice breathes. rocks have tides. mountains rise and fall. Angels illuminate the restless earth.

but it came one day that many of the human beings began to look with suspicion upon the Angels. Angels, after all, don’t earn or spend. they have no need to. they don’t produce anything obvious, are not easily quantifiable, resist measurement, and aren’t simply named. Angels are unproductive. they are not utilitarian. they do not earn their place or bring in a paycheque.

and so, little voice, this is what happened: one day, human beings woke up and decided that Angels were not enough. and so they arrived one day at Time’s Door dressed in white waistcoats and polite formalities and, with extreme precision, began to rattle off in military progress about days, weeks, and years. they began to measure and to organise. and so it came about that when they weren’t making a thing called money off of Time, people were quite violent toward Her: constantly spending Time, saving Time, killing Time, buying Time, in overTime or in downTime. they began to look with suspicion upon what they called the ‘wasted hours” spent with Angels.

and everyone knows that Angels are like people, really: they want to be wanted. and so when the people stopped looking for the Angels, the Angels stopped looking for the people.

“I refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs. The world I live in and believe in is wider than that. And anyway, what’s wrong with “Maybe” ? You wouldn’t believe what once or twice I have seen. I’ll just tell you this: only if there are Angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.”

- Mary Oliver, The World I Live In.

season-seeker William Faulkner, in his novel The Sound and the Fury, locates this in the mind of his Harvard undergraduate protagonist, who first breaks, and then refuses to repair, a watch:

“because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”

you have been taught, little voice, that to pause a moment to observe the sun shine is wasteful; to extend your tongue in private rapture to capture the rain, to awaken before the alarm and instead roll lovingly over into another dream, to stretch the body as though thrushes across grass upon wakening, to listen to the child’s laugh without scolding its quiet insurrection, to miss the convenient train to commune with the rose at dusk, to walk the road not for imminent destination but for stars stars stars, to prepare an unnecessary sandwich for a lover with hands absurd in their patient tenderness, to indulge in quiet, sacred communion with the gaze in the glass you cast each morning, to perfect the angle of the maples in a roadside puddle, to think too long on the passage of proust until the mind sighs ah, to feel, to observe, to taste, to be still is wasteful, wasteful, wasteful.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota, by James Wright.

wasteful; a word that contains its own fullness. wasteful; a word that cannot even commit to containing emptiness. a wasteful hour spent confusing the sun for an orange, or the air for music on strings, throws Time to the air like wild seeds and sends it soaring like the dust from a dandelion. it proclaims: my hour cannot be measured. my hour cannot be spent. my hour is an Angel, revealing herself to me. and i will wrestle with Her. I will cry out for Her to bless me.

Mary Oliver, Upstream (Essays)

the body knows differently to the clock, little voice. rather: something happens that matters, it remembers, and it loves.

and i promise you, little voice: the body recalls its Angels.

you must believe me: it was once that in some folds of the Earth, we measured Time in the passing of these Angels: movements of toads and flutterings of moths, by the scent of clementine and coconut, by sparrow marriages and bear births and salmon deaths. that Time was still vividly alive and myriad in wind and leaf, bird and water, shifting with rain and moving with Sun, meeting the pace of the seasons, thundering to the rhythm of migrating geese, flowing with the pace of the Nile and Styx. that Time measured Herself in the opening of flowers and the closing of banks. and this is where She still does: in some folds of your Heart, you do not desperately race through your own Soul, earning Time, killing Time, Saving time- as though gnats and birds care for the minute or the hour- but let Her guide you in moments of seasons, of light, of dark, of sudden and luminescent Angels, where the calendar or the clock are tossed aside in ungovernable enchantment with the World.

the inordinate ticking and counting of numbers is not a measure of a Life, little voice: Time is not a straight line that must be earned. rather, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the patient steps of Angels on the other side. you do not need to race ragged through the ever-hurrying now. you have permission to seek your Angels. you have permission to cry out for Them to bless you.

these hours wasted with Angels are precious, divine things: they are your becoming.

Salvador Dali, The Meditative Rose (1958).

it is true that Marcel Proust, following these instructions, once even found an Angel in a biscuit:

“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.”
- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.

little voice, a fact for you: one second per second is the astonishing rate at which you are being borne toward your death.

you need no measurement nor metaphor to know that this is true. that Time will continue in all of its limpid astonishment, that it is up and doing in the past and the present all kinds of strange acrobatics. that no level of your abiding will abide Her.

there is no race. there is no earning. rather, there are these things you love. rather, there are sudden Angels.

these things that you love extend from one to the other in perfect moments; moments undulating rolling continuous as blue on water or as the broad moon’s pale reflection, or the shilling of sunlight by and through an open field, or as motions of rain that journey billions of times through the air to reach you, only to fold into another cloud.

“It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.”
- James Thurber, Poet.

as the poet and Angel-Seeker Annie Dillard says, “there are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times”.

and so the Life that relishes in Angels ornaments itself like this; threading itself not with Time, but with Infinity:

“I have felt infinity too. Like when I discovered a word in English I’d only ever known in Bengali. Or when I spot, with hours still left in the day, the moon’s hazy thumbprint. How the moon enjoys debunking the day. Or when I clutch my Playbill as I exit the theater, regretful that I don’t see more plays. I’m so vitalized in those seconds— all set to gulp more, to not speak but to stand under the marquee bulbs and grab the arm of my companion as if corroborating impact— that I’m certain, if I wanted, I could walk home from West Forty-seventh, across the bridge and back to Brooklyn. That spiked measure of awe— of oof— feels like a general slowing, even though what’s really taking place is nothing short of a general quickening. The sheer, ensorcelled panic of feeling moved. Informed by what switches me on but also awake and unexpectedly cured. Similar to how sniffing a lemon when I’m carsick heals.”
- Durga Chew-Bose, Essays.

Paul Eluard, “The Kiss”, Selected Poems (trans. Gilbert Bowen).

in this little cosmic journey, little voice, it seems that human beings are the only creatures that insist upon counting and earning their time. but there are no minutes, hours, or days to live up to: only Angels.

we are simply here to encounter each other, to meet, to love, and to share. these are the precious moments that the body remembers. the brief parentheses in eternity. the Angels whom you must cry out for to bless you.

Iranian mythology, little voice, gives the Angel yet another formulation.

according to Zoroastrian doctrine, each human creature, from birth, is guarded by a celestial Angel. these Angels have a name: daena.

the daena is a silent witness of each life It accompanies. however, the daena’s face changes- slowly, imperceptibly- over a life, with every gesture, word, and thought of the creature it guards.

at the moment of its death, the human creature is met by its Angel, which has been transfigured by the way the voice has walked through the World. the daena may have become an ethereal, fringed, celestial creature, or a strange and sore demon. the daena then whispers:

“I am your daena, the one who has been formed by your thoughts, your words, and your deeds.”

perhaps daena is another word for little voice.

perhaps our own little voices are Angels themselves that are crying out for communion with their reflections and partners in the world: startling moments. startling beauty. startling attention. startling awe.

perhaps it is your own little voice that beats with a thousand feathered wings- your daena; your Heart; your inner, enchanted Life- to speak:

“an angel … embraced me and whispered through my whole body: “Don’t be ashamed of being human, be proud! Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly!””
- Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robert Bly from “Romanesque Arches” in The half-finished heaven: the best poems of Tomas Tranströmer 

Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, Antonia Canova.

i cannot believe, even now, that Jacob was inclined toward violence: this rapacious youth wrestling with an Angel beneath the fantastic maples, his nerves ornamented as if with thread, crying out in humility for beauty to bless him.

crying out in humility for Beauty to bless you.

love,

ars poetica.

Angel Dominguez, Collected Poems.