Page 57 - WTP Vol. X #7

it is imaginary. Although I can watch raindrops coursing and ramifying, hesitating, essaying, on a moonlit skylight, I cannot for the life of me imagine a way to argue with, plead with, or dissuade such an infinitesimal entity as a virus. Believe me, I tried.
~
While writing this essay, I received a golden angel medallion in the mail with a request for money
to support the work of Catholic relief services. The image stamped on either side is identical: a robed figure, winged, with folded, praying hands, as if Janus himself was an angel. It would make
a great coin for rigged betting: call “heads” and you could never lose. It brought out every hard- earned cynical response I ever had to the Catholic Church as an institution, that global real estate empire disguised as an instrument of God, that to my mind—and history I believe bears me out—is clearly a pathogen. At the same time, if a person
is thus moved to send money and if (a big if) the money actually helps someone in need, then has the respondent somehow made the angel real? Is that what wings represent? Are they to fly back and forth between our twin realities?
It appears that, like viruses, angels have no way to reproduce other than by entering into a host: in this case the human imagination.
I hope it is obvious that I am not arguing for a retreat into angelology (no Lourdes water for me, thanks.) I only mean to point to a rich reservoir
of metaphor and insist that our forbears were not all benighted, superstitious dolts. Our ancestors were imaginative artists who tried to understand what was happening to them. We think in meta- phors, explicit or implied, interacting with those metaphors in story, parable, allegory. At the same time, all our conceptualizing, our art, our language itself, seen against the vastness of cosmological time and the constancy of the virosphere, is only something that’s been thrown together in a mo- ment, a put-up job, a blurted reply to the questions and requirements of the world. Odds are we are much more likely on any occasion to be wrong than right and certainly unlikely to ever find our way to a comprehensive understanding of life, whether by scientific or metaphysical inquiry. Our autobiographies, no matter how detailed, are a mere epithelium. Everything, including ourselves is more complex and mysterious than we can
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“W
is shaped by our imagination, where encounters with unseen forces are interpreted, in personal terms, in one mode of language or another. The imagination is a vast realm where myth and music, stories and visions, hold sway.”
hat we
experience
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