The Abyss Also Stares

Lab Grown Angel

PLEASE MAKE MORE OF THIS ITS SO PRETTY

my uncle was somewhat of a rascal. we were hanging out on the roof of his barn when i was ten, and we saw some shooting stars. he told me they were angels carrying messages from god. then he handed me his old hunting rifle and taught me how to nick one out of the sky, even when it was travelling all fast like that, and how to triangulate its location — taking me out in his rusty truck down dirt roads, unerring and unceasing, until we saw that gleaming lantern. he pocketed the note from god and took me down to a pinboard where he was working on deciphering the language with his friend who was a linguistics major but got kicked out of grad school. after they shook hands, they held on for just a bit too long and i started wondering why my aunt doesn’t live with my uncle anymore, but then my uncle took me back up stairs and taught me how to fry the angel up real nice, halo and all. it was tasty

Railway Station by Jean Giraud (Moebius), 1984

Angeltober 10 - Thurible

食事

“we need to talk.” 

©Mio Im

http://instagram.com/cochlea1313

The angel came to me in a fever hallucination, perched upon my bed as I returned from the bathroom.

Honestly, if you see an angel that’s all eyes and wings and wheels of fire, you should be worried. Like, not because it’s going to hurt you or anything, but because scripturally, angels invariably appear to ordinary people in human form. In general, they only show their inhuman true forms to prophets – which means if you’re seeing them like that, they come bearing responsibility.

I woke up today with the phrase “spooky scary seraphim” in my head today, looks like we’re on the same wavelength.

i made a new christmas carol

The Snow Angel.

For this year’s Screamtober.

Thank you for reading!

Low key I’m kinda bored of and annoyed by the preponderance of works that have Boring If Not Outright Malevolent Angels on one side and Nuanced, Charismatic, And Honestly Not Evil Demons because it just seems like a perpetuation of the idea that good is fundamentally flat or banal or not even good at all, that Goodness is something performed to achieve something else, usually power or control. In fact, I don’t object to nuanced demons so much as the imbalance (only the “evil” side is allowed to be anything approching, well, approachable.)

But then I’m like “well identification with monsters is something that marginalized groups often feel because it forces us to question what is monstrous, so the idea of finding compassion and humanity in those deemed inherently unforgivable is actually very powerful and subversive”

But then I’m like “but is it subversive or is it laziness? It’s hardly revolutionary at this point, it’s like people making children’s toys scary. It’s supposed to have a tension between what something should be (childlike, innocent) and making it wicked. But now it’s so common that dolls are often considered inherently creepy. So where’s the subversion in a creepy doll? There’s none. Where’s the subversion in mean Angels or angels who have no interest in or love for humanity?”

But then I’m like “well but aren’t angels traditionally destroying cities and saying Be Not Afraid?”

And I’m like, again just to myself as I pace my kitchen, “I mean YEAH but they’re also like flaming wheels or whatever, I’m not sure how much these works are genuinely interested in angel mythology”

Then as I make coffee for myself, I think, “angels represent the traditional hierarchy, the traditional Christian dogma, and therefore are stand ins for the authority that we must question”

But then, as I realize we are out of sugar and my coffee is therefore ruined and am thus more susceptible to thinking there are demonic forces at work in this world, I go, “but demons in these stories aren’t systemically kind. They’re just cool. They’re individuals and help individuals if they feel like it. In these stories, there’s no mass concern for all of humanity really.”

And then I conclude, “maybe angels are written cruelly because the world seems cruel and therefore there cannot be a Divine force involved in our daily activities looking out for us. Demons are by their nature doomed to fail which makes stories where they try to do Good have a more natural conflict and also explains why things in the world aren’t better. For if there were angels, a legion of angels, always at work, shouldn’t things be better? But we don’t know how the world could otherwise be. But it seems hard to argue that this is in fact the best of all possible worlds. So demons make an easier to identify with protagonist while also being powerful and having cosmic impact. I believe many stories doing their own take on angels and demons would benefit from truly trying to imagine angels and beings of love, rather than the cold and distant figures I often see in fiction, but I understand the framework behind that conception.”

Then I add to myself, “of course since I’m mostly talking about like urban fantasy, it might also be that people just wanna fuck demons more.”

so i’ve thought this over and here’s my conclusion: TV and movies have to get funded and produced through the same kind of entrenched power structures that any genuinely involved, chaotic good, reformist angel character would challenge.

angels as a faceless, remorseless, uninvolved mass of Hierarchic Authority is boring but totally acceptable. heaven is a bureaucracy. god is unknowable but also non-negotiable. this divine schema asks very little of you but compliance, however half-hearted or resentful. established churches, established societies, established authority, is only ever served by entrenching this idea of what god and his forces are. this doesn’t rock the boat at all.

so many movies have the moral, ‘things aren’t great but could be a little better if we were nicer to each other :)’ and leave it at that.

so what about biblical angels? what about the ones that show up as heralds of genuine change, of harbingers of the collapse of unjust systems, angels who scare the shit out of kings because you don’t get angels if your people don’t need them? angels who are here to wreck your shit? angels who are the messengers of a God who is ready and willing to negotiate? angels who are ready to tear apart your city, your society, your kings, your temples, because you didn’t heal the sick, you didn’t feed the poor, you didn’t welcome the stranger, you didn’t talk to god, you talked for him, and now his voices are walking your streets and talking with your people and ready for the next chapter of history?

you’re not going to see those angels on TV.

you have to write them yourself.

i said something like this in the tags when i reblogged before but i want to reblog your commentary so i’ll try and say it more clearly now: the big difficulty with writing angels who are both good and involved is that this would completely remake the world. that is a LOT of worldbuilding to work out!

easier in a fantasy verse, where you’re building it from scratch anyway. still makes it a bit trickier to find where the edges of allowed conflict are. you have to decide if angels will go around rescuing people from dangers big and small, or only big (and then what counts as big), or only if the people are holy enough (which has uncomfortable implications), or do they only influence historic-level events like city-flattening earthquakes, or what?

but if you’re setting something in our world, you have to account for the Problem Of Evil, which is like… an entire area of theological study. many weighty tomes have been written on it. and religious people have many different stances on it, and all of them feel theirs is the only good one and all the others are fucked up at best. it’s a Big Damn Mess.

i got stuck on ‘metanoia’ because i couldn’t figure out how to have my angels and demons do their thing the way i wanted without wrecking the plot and/or making the human characters irrelevant. i had thought giving them the limitations of “can’t act directly on physical reality because manifesting materially would damage the world” was enough, but it turned out not to be.

of course, you can go with some variety of theologically-accepted angel involvement levels, like “can only intervene spiritually, and then only rarely, because free will is essential to salvation,” or, “appear physically and save people from various troubles but only if those people are saints,” but those don’t map well to the kind of characters and conflict you want in an adventure story, do they?

well, i was thinking of this even more, and i feel like the logical endpoint of ‘angels should be agents of change because it should be angels that champion free will as well as justice and mercy’ is that demons are the fascists. in this situation, demons don’t tempt people into the petty sins of ‘yell at your girlfriend’ or ‘eat more cake’, demons are backing the state, demons are sitting right behind the cops and the politicians, and demons are the ones who are telling you that submission to authority is virtue, strength, safety, and salvation.

why isn’t the world better? because the bad guys already fucking won. because we turned over our free will to people who despise us. because if we let there be a hierarchy at all, the worst claw their way to the top. because the solution to Evil Kings isn’t Good Kings, it’s No Kings, it’s that every single one of us matters just as much as royalty, and because too many of us aren’t ready to hear that. because lucifer built himself a throne and taught us to build our own.

angels get interesting again when they’re agents of anarchy and of freedom. angels are saying something we need to hear when they’re walking the street, saying god gave you free will. he wanted you to change, he let you reach the tree of knowledge and leave the garden. what are you going to build in this wasteland?

if angels are down here, working hard, why haven’t they won? we shouldn’t be afraid of the divine but we still feel so small against the night sky, because we forgot we’re made of the same stuff as the stars are. jesus was on to something when he said that everyone should be able to talk to god directly, that everything we do to the least of our number we do to the greatest, that there is no higher purpose we can serve god in but to take care of each other, and jesus got executed like a thief because he was stealing power.

so maybe the bad guys already won. maybe the demons stacked the deck and loaded the bases and rigged the game. the church teaches you to fear yourself and hate your brothers. the cops see you as an enemy combatant, and politicians don’t even see you as human. and they’re getting away with it. they won. they’re still winning.

but the dark side has to keep wining every day, against each of us, and we do–even at this dark and desperate hour– we do still outnumber them.

and maybe the angels are on our side.

its fun to enjoy things

this is a joke but in jewish lore angels are jealous of humans for our ability to create

@apocrypals

concept: angels but they look like stingray skeletons

wow good concept???

@apocrypals