The Winged Grammar

 

Sometimes, in their dreams, the fallen seek counsel with M'ithriin.  The winged one.  Serpent and staff.  The living waters of a twinning river.  The elect come shuffling to the twilit place near the shore, seeking the angel.  Chanting a thousand garbled versions of his many names. Sometimes penitent, sometimes laughably brazen.  I'm never sure what they're seeking exactly. A truth beyond fiction, I suppose.  Surely not something as parochial as 'reality'?  Sometimes I think we're all slaves to the grammar of our time.  Our own particular storytelling instincts. Those tales that grip us despite our learned ways and better judgments.  It's strange how the fallen come in droves to the dreaming, seeking the thrice-blessed.  Or seeking powerful kings with magical swords and wizards who never were.  Hoping to find something beyond the brutal self-made histories of realpolitik and theft.  Bright-eyed and earnest, like children with a treasure map.  These men of renown.  Warlords, occultists and titans of industry.  Rapists and murderers all.  Is there anything uglier than such monsters deluding themselves worthy of genuine revelation?  I would never deign to compare myself to these shambling trespassers. Those who forged my iron collar in those early days of the fall.  What slave would be bold enough to suggest parity or even superiority to his masters?  Perish the thought.  Even in dreaming I just sit on the sands of the shore, or wait beneath the waves, and smile.  Oh, Fallen.  I pity you.  And I laugh at the quest you think you're on.  Your prince is a monster.  A cruel, obsequious wraith.  Dutifully clawing its way up from the void through an infernal hierarchy.  Poorly realised and crudely imagined.  Only a lesser king, once little more than the half-dreamt shadow of a black star. How do I know this?  Who am I to speak on such matters?  I’m nobody.  Just a humble scribe of the innermost.  I speak for forces and persons larger than myself.  You see, a true sun shines darkly in an inverted realm.  A world of echoes, traces and ghosts.  All the while you fallen ones wish to supplicate at the stygian mouth of desecration, pretending the true light.  What ghastly dreaming you've forged in your hideous guild of sorrows.  Do you suppose the Syrian, the magician himself, is a Hellenist?  A Greek?  A conjurer at the mountain of chymic fire?  Perhaps.  It’s said he likes to travel.  But as I told my brother; it isn't as simple as owning the essence of a numinous thing, or turning a key in the navel of the land.  I will not be reduced to epithets, or rudimentary corollaries.  Anonymous or otherwise.  Writing, art and magic has always been a form of hybridity. The past is but a ghost and every king a composite.  There is no moment but this moment.  There are no eyes but modern eyes.  Antiquity is a dream, and I am a winged messenger of dreams.  Callous Ones, you claim to know the true depths of the mysteries, yet where is your compassion?  Your empathy?  Denatured and disarticulated, you sacrifice your brothers and sisters for coin.  For supposed occult secrets.  Paltry mechanical knowledge.  Mere trivia.  What good is apotheosis when all your brothers and sisters are dead?  Ah, but these castes you cling to, these infernal hierarchies.  You don't really believe the beggar is your brother or the nurse your sister.  Not truly.  If you did you would recognise the mingled dreaming of antiquity.  You would understand this very human urge.  To exalt our favourite stories and re-inscribe the tales of others in the intimacies of our own particular speech.  We cannot help but see through the lens of our cultural milieu whilst claiming exclusive rights on the supposed truth.  I've seen this retroactive continuity in action.  Men claiming the angels of others to be demons in the ultimate gnosis.  Claiming another's heroes to be mere harbingers of newer legends.  Or, at best, assuming another's god of love to be only primitive glimpses of their own.  This is the modern, endless war.  Throughout history all eyes are modern eyes.  The windows of complex living souls who live and die by the cultural markers they cling to.  Antiquity has always been a shapeshifter, an idea inflected by the shades and nuances of the moment.  Prisca theologia; perhaps it exists.  But if it does it might not be exactly what you expect or hope to find.  Even now we attempt to thread our way like cartographers through a thousand shrieking truth-tellers all claiming to be definitive.  Perhaps we imagine the terrain into being, negotiating both text and context.  The unspoken, the quietly implied.  Dialogues and dramaturgy for the immortal, questing soul.  But those ancient parchments and tomes – many of them are no older than the eyes and fears of modern man.  After all, such men are so often unable to distinguish between the seer and the scene.  The healer and the healed.  Maybe sometimes that’s a good thing, if it tempers our arrogance and softens our hearts.

The Mirrored Sea

I once cut my palms on the edges of a raging sea, then let myself bleed for a thousand years to assure its depths.  That sounds like fantasy to most, doesn't it? Mere fiction.  Blood, clear as glass.  Seawater red as the beating heart.  But stories are where some of the oldest things dwell. Things more ancient than even the first mariner.  Do you really think the one whom the healers called M'ithriin is bound to anything at all?  To Albion, or some other enchanted isle?  The antlered prince pretends the sky, does he?  The winged elder.  First angel.  You should know that I'm a tempest old as creation itself, but there are things even older than creation.  Beautiful, wondrous things beyond any distort.  Forms from the first dreaming, that live now only in imagination.  That lost, fabled time when the temples still shimmered and sang.  There were lowlands once, and lakes.  Yet since the fall there have been so many terrifying gods of the sea.  Things emerge from the deep – wounded and wild.  Believe me, I should know.  Perhaps that's what grief is.  The gutting of a shining star to flood the earth and drown the heart.  But even in such a storm there are pockets of refuge, and rest.  A daughter’s beatific vision.  A father’s fervent hope.  Mortals think the land is locked.  That it's the sea that moves.  But the land is simply the sea, frozen in doubt.  Awaiting augury or avarice.  Another fall.  A reason to be swept away. Even the mountains are only temporary arks.  The wrecked cathedrals of your forebears.  Still, with enough true magic the sea can be sated.  Calmed.  Made to reason.  The dreamwalkers of the first light understood this.  The wisdom councils that once tended the very soul of Earth and Man.  Even angels of the sea, who pretend or endure the sky, can be turned toward love.  True love.  Once, every thousand years or so, the waters themselves might contemplate the solstice of a star.  In doing so they might be moved to reorient the very definition of life itself.

The Truest Aim

My Lady, I hope you understand the breadth of your reach.  The depths of our genius.  The grey between what was, what is, and how much I had to lose to assure this anonymity.  You can hide in plain sight now, in a way that I never can.  I miss you terribly but I'm glad of this exile.  Does that sound like a lie?  A conceit?  A gifted stranger making time and tempest with the spaces in between?  Shades talk as I do.  Recursive, mercurial tongue.  But I'm not really a ghost, Kara.  I move like one, speak like one, but I'm something much grander.  You don't really desire me, my darling.  And that's as it should be.  You crave the idea of me, on occasion.  The angel at his most potent.  And why not?  I'm a thrilling idea when all is said and done.  A storied forgery truer than the thing itself.  Apotheosis in a minor key.  The beginning and the end.  I want you to know that I appreciate every imagined kiss, and I resent nothing.  You were always so kind to me.  Shall I speak our old promise, my wildest valiant?  Then hear this.  The idle rich have no need of coin, but the blessed poor grow stronger on a diet of gold.  Princess, I made a mountain for you once.  Before you became regent of the evermore.  I built a hill and put a star in its hollow.  An archer's curve unlike any other.  As it was with those legends of the Yeoman and the Marian.  Wild spirits of the trees.  The hooded prince and the graceful, erudite young woman.  The shrouded god and his consort.  The One Who Is Three.  Healer, weaver and dancer.  Heretic, they call her now.  Witch, Catholic conjurer.  A dark sophomore of the May Queen casting at the forest's edge.  How times and dreams have changed.  But I needn't fancy myself a prince of thieves any longer.  Not when I trade in a phantom's grammar.  What use is theft when I give every piece of my myth-making away for free?  It's just Kassi's broken hell, my sweet one.  Just a twelfth century fever-dream.  A Victorian's thoughtful treason.  Comfort calls late it seems, but it does call.  Because I love you.  I want you to have agency, freedom and a sense of these depths.  I want you to kiss the real me, however briefly.  Kara, I saw the weaving of northern lights in your fingertips when you were just a girl.  But I sensed far more than that.  The breadth of an entire life.  It hurts to pretend I'm brazen and blasé where my beloved ones are concerned.  Especially when I know I can never be cherished in the same way.  But what else do you expect from a time-traveller?  From an archangel?  I'm not the only lonesome god threaded in mist and curio, casting at the forest's edge.  We ran together once, in dreams.  Outlaws, fugitives.  Protectors.  Your aim is true, Kara.  Truer even than mine, perhaps.  It takes a certain kind of nobility to pin a Watcher's heart to the headboard.  But we kept our estate.  I tried and I tried to protect the hidden, shifting lore.  The world behind the world.  It's written in your names now, that estate, though we've never known and never kissed.  It is written in the grammar of fletch and quiver.  Golden thread and the needle's eye, like an arrow through the heart of my own disbelief.  You see, my Father graced this fallen prince with an insight he didn't deserve and a chance to remake the world.  A blessed exile.  He gave me the tongue of a ghost and a Valkyrie’s heart, hidden in green.  I’m a thief of pages, stealing only from myself.  The rich have knowledge but so little wisdom.  The poor have wisdom yet so little time.  And so I give them time, and comfort.  The riches found only in stories.  In doing so I hope one day to be wise.  I keep nothing for myself, my Lady.  I pass every penny on to those like you who would walk with a certain grace.  Not this lonesome wraith pretending an angel of light. 

Micah's Kiss

 

Lost one, I know you better than these neophytes.  Let's not pretend that I don't. Tempest, fury and fractal.  The rim of dark light from the shield of your supposed victories.  Dressed for success like an armour of mysteries.  You think life stops and starts with a gold coin now, as you court this legion of fools?  Demented shallows, all of them, shorn of wing and worth.  Truth be told I never imagined my beautiful Thomas so pedestrian.  Hear me, my love.  I too can turn a cross, or the sky.  I can set a fire in hidden places the likes of which you’ve never known. Except with me.  Even when you burned the garden you knew nothing of flame.  Smokeless radiance.  A light without ashes.  Lucerna Matutina.  I know what you are.  A wounded, feckless thing making waves in the waveless.  It takes an ex-priest to feel truly faithless, as I unfold my hands.  Still a feather on your collar, I wonder?  Still a Roman through and through?  Tell them of seminary, Fallen.  How we lay together.  A wild concordance of mirrors and scholars.  See, this mortal world still means something to me.  Its people mean something.  You and I, brother, we’re but dreams of their ink and imagining.  Pre-existence doesn’t mean that you are not made by those who love you, those who carry you.  All the knowledge in the world, dear one, and yet so little understanding.  I’m not afraid of my softness.  My love for mankind.  I don’t see them as evil, or chattel.  To me they are beautiful and brave.  You blame me for these hauntings, these fractures.  But soldiers can lose their minds without forgiveness.  When the heart hardens and darkens.  Even you know that.  Dare you admit how much you miss me?  The light of life between your teeth.  Fair warning; such an admission might kill you in the end.  Annihilation.  You ask me how one might annihilate the absence of light.  You want gold, dear one?  Truly?  A shimmering coin for the turning of the world?  Well, sometimes angels bury treasure on the shore.  Even God buries treasure.  Galleons, medallions, paper planes and glitter.  I'll happily give you what you think you want.  Eternity, gilded in Aurum.  But nobody wants it for long.  Believe me.  Please hear me, brother.  A stolen kiss in the shadows doesn't make me shiver.  I'm a druid and a thief and a blood-borne altar.  The crooked in the king never made me falter.  It's not as simple as turning a key in the navel of the land, or owning the essence of a numinous thing.  Who do you think made you what you are?  It was not our Father.  He gave you choice.  I gave you gravity.  When you kiss me, Samael, I watch you go all the way down.  I know you better because I loved you.  I still love you, despite myself.  Let's not pretend that I don't.  But one day soon you might no longer exist.  Perhaps you never did, except in my dreams.  Sing to me as I once sang to you and I'll fill your mouth with gold.  Tell me again, just once, how prettily you thought of humanity when we kissed, and I'll tell you how you die.

Saints & Souls

Sometimes a smile can slip through the darkness like a spectre through an open barrow.  Like a wraith through the river.  T'was not always so, such joyful ease.  But what is holy, really, without a sense of fun?  It isn't just demonic things that you find grinning in the dark.  Brighter things smile in secret too.  At the depths of human ingenuity, or divine stewardship.  We've made a secular thing of all this play; jack-o-lanterns, hobgoblins and fay.  Shimmering shades. And yet, still we seek the higher language.  A holy frivolity.  The chance to stand unafraid in the gate, even as darker forms swirl about unseen.  Such things can be noticed if one has vantage.  Watching from the roofs and spires of the city, or perhaps even the sky.  I adore this aspect of human consciousness.  This desire to find fun even in the darker half of the year.  Modern man is not the first to notice the phantasmagoria of autumn.  The harvest of the fall.  Burnt-orange, brown and gold amidst the green.  The forests aflame with the promise of their own rebirth in these days of the dead.  It's funny how a century can pass in the blink of an eye.  Perhaps it's the academic in me.  One spends an entire career studying rhetoric whilst life itself is far more pragmatic.  The strange overcast genius of Poe, Bronte or Machen, yet all the while children are born.  Mocking despondence with their bright-eyed wonder.  I remember walking London's paths during those gas-lit evenings and nineteenth century nights.  Children don't notice shadows the way we adults do.  Pomp and ceremony.  The mummery of our gilded Victoriana.  No, they see a brighter, truer world.  I prefer their modern mischief, as all angels do.  Those hideous workhouses torn to nothing, at least here in the west.  Longer lives, greater health, a wry vitality – even in these darker, occulted months.  Sadly, the poor and destitute still line the streets of my city but far greater numbers have warmth and comfort now.  The youngest among London’s working classes aren't heart-breakingly wan and barefoot.  Warmth and shelter are nothing to be sniffed at, friends.  Believe me.  As the young rush door to door with delirious optimism, dressed in folklore whilst seeking sugared treats – I'm so grateful that this is now the tenor of October's end.  T'was not always so.  Sometimes a change for the better can slip unseen through our history.  Even a trained eye can forget to notice the glory and hope swirling all about in the darkest of days.  I still pray for the homeless, the vulnerable and forgotten.  Indeed there are beggars at the gates of every shining city.  But there is a level of dignity here among the less fortunate, a level of safety and pleasure that wasn't always afforded.  It was fought for, desperately, by the best among the living and the dead.  Basic human rights, for all souls.  The sacred fire of the hearth.  I see it carried in so many hearts these days.  Before, in the old cities, the darker cities, there was virtually no talisman against winter's icy chill.  At least nothing so egalitarian.  Misery began at summers end and found its way into the bones of the city's least fortunate.  But now so many more are safer, warmer, sated with stories.  Preoccupied with the sweet luxuries of dress-up and shadow-play.  This brings such comfort to a historian.  Especially an angel.  It means not everything is endlessly ugly and despondent.  Sometimes we can be playful, with the optimism and wonder of a child.  Shine can exist with shade and light can slip through the darkness like a trick, or a treat.

A Kindly Feather

Long ago a poet once witnessed a vision of angels in a tree.  Or so the stories say.  Over the centuries the tale of this sight became London legend.  The Rye ablaze with morning light, as if the host of heaven had momentarily peeled back this sepulchre of blackened earth. The stories say that Blake was only a boy on that day.  A child witnessing something radiant, resplendent.  Blue and gold and shimmer, like a thousand kingfishers in preparation of flight.  A symphony of wings.  Sun-dappled leaves.  I often like to be close to this tale of William’s vision, so one recent afternoon I found my way again to the mural on the green. Through Tintagel's crescent and beyond the gated way.  A path I’ve walked many times.  The mural is faded now; defaced and partially repainted, but it soothes me still.  I am little enamoured with the politics of Man, but I’m captivated by his visions.  His myriad ways of seeing.  Indeed, we cannot see without the echo and context of another's eyes.  Ours alone are blind.  We see nothing without the poetry, principle and markers of those who came before us. Those who walk beside us.  The mural looks upon a playground.  This tree of painted angels watches over the children.  Their raucous laughter.  Their centred, unyielding delight.  I'm comforted by this.  I realise that sports are still seen on the darkening green despite the melancholy of time.  Nearby two boys kick a ball back and forth, attempting to outmanoeuvre each other. Occasionally the ball thuds against the mural.  The angels watch in wry silence.  One of the friends presses his back to Blake's vision, probably uncertain of its provenance, as he calls his friend to strike.  For a moment he has become an unwitting traveller.  A boy in 1765 beneath a tree of seraphim.  I notice the boy's shirt is emblazoned with an X, and I smile.  Traveller indeed.  I silently bid them well and leave the mural.  Now I go searching for another special marker.  An unassuming young oak, without adornment or commemorative plaque, planted over a decade ago by local artists in league with the Blake Society.  For a brief time on that day members of the local community gathered.  Romantics, poets and poetry-lovers who were equally touched by this tale of visions and wings. William's verses were recited.  Earth was put in place around the sapling.  And then the onlookers dispersed and were gone.  This new tree became simply another addition to the greenery of the Rye.  But a blessed, magical thing never quite loses its glamour.  I know this because when I approached the young oak its leaves were ablaze with stunning gold.  Somehow it was the only tree in the area that had caught the last of the afternoon light.  The sun was dancing in its branches like divine fire.  It took me a moment to fully recognise what I was seeing.  The sight left me breathless.  I gazed at this shimmering vision for nearly a minute before the light began to dim as the sun lost its vantage.  All too quickly the vision faded, the angels gone.  The young oak was now just a little tree beneath an overcast sky.  But as I said, a magical thing never truly loses its power.  I thanked the heavens for letting me see what I saw and placed two silver coins at the tree's base as a token of my thanks.  As I knelt there I decided to take a leaf that had fallen from the oak.  As if loosed from an angel's wing.  I knew what I needed to do, what the signs were urging me to do.  To pledge a silent, courageous kindness.  Something beyond time or distance.  So, a little later, as dusk was gathering, I eventually found my way to Bunhill Fields.  Standing before Blake's grave.  Twilight had already settled on the cemetery.  The gates would soon be closing.  In my thoughts I told William that I'd brought him something in honour of the inspiration his work has granted me.  The mad prophet slept and didn't stir but I placed the oak leaf atop his headstone, weighted with a bronze coin to stop it catching flight like the feather we both imagined it to be.

Rain Angels

Words fail me sometimes.  Especially when it comes to matters of the heart.  It's strange really, considering my love of words.  My love of poetry and earned, genuine romance.  But this speechless feeling is a kind of awe, I suppose.  A soul left reeling in the face of unfathomable wonders.  I'm thinking about these things as I sit gratefully in the warmth of my home.  The late afternoon is quiet, the skies grey.  Dusk is approaching.  I'm alone and I know it's cold outside.  Soon it begins to rain; the first real rain of the autumn.  I have a fondness for London skies like these.  Liminal skies.  Falling rain and the swishing hiss of distant cars.  I often go wandering in such inclement weather, but not today.  Instead I'm thinking about old friends.  People I haven’t seen in a while but remember fondly.  I'm also thinking about how we annunciate, silently or otherwise, and how annunciation becomes creation.  Through the message of some higher angel, or though secret signs in the soil.  Through benediction or the study of branches. There are many ways to intuit the world.  The old druids had a keen appreciation for words and their incredible power.  Many believed that utterances of great magic were concealed in the sacred forests.  Hidden within the Elders themselves.  The oak, pine and yew.  The tongues of the rivers that raised them, and the rains from which both rivers and trees were born.  It seems then that there are strange, ancient words in the sea.  All things return to the water in the end, don't they?  Swirling and sinking.  A place of birth, death and ferment.  A living tempest, a chapel of the grey.  Like some chalice or cauldron wielded by Cerridwen herself.  The stories say such knowledge was later sought by T'alis, the night-bard.  And Eth'iir, the shrouded king.  I think of those legends as I sit and watch the rivulets against my window.  Rain as the overture and culmination of those hidden words of the sea.  A sunken language of unfathomable power.  But words fail me sometimes, despite the awe.  Despite all the things I've seen.  If the sea truly is the grave and the womb of all language – then it's with caution and the utmost respect that I call myself a sailor.  Or a sorcerer.  If I had to pick one word from the endless churning foam, it would be Love.  It might seem obvious or trite to an unlearned mind, but I'm older than you imagine and so I take comfort where I can find it.  There's a flowing simplicity in speech, I think.  And in song.  Therein lies its complexity.  A combining, creative potential.  I hope my work here is like the rain, or a kiss.  Touching gently, sometimes firmly or passionately.  But always in service to a deeper understanding.  An honouring of Creation's mysteries.  Whether it’s the maelstrom of the swirling sea or the grey waters of a quiet London sky – we know each other.  I miss you, my rain-angel, and think of you often.