corpus/Angels Michel Serres

DAWN

Angels as messengers.
The angels of the monothest
tradition (lewish, Christian and
capable of becoming visible. They
appear and then disappear. it is said
that they move through space at the
speed of their own thoughts. Tobias
12:15-21: 'I am Raphael,
one of the seven who are sways in
the presence of the Lord... it is
time for me to return to Him who
has sent me.... With these words
he disappeared from before them,
and they beheld him no longer.'
Rembrandt (1606-69), The Angel
Leaving Tobias and his Family, 1637.
Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.
The artist portrays the departure
of the archangel after he had
guided the young man on his
journey.
A supersonic messenger: Conxorde
ANGELS
Out of the blue, Pia asks: "Do you believe in angels?"
"Can't say that I've ever met one. Never met any-
one who has, either," Pantope replies, with a chuckle.
"At school we used to giggle over whether angels were
sexed or not. Personally, I find the whole notion rather
bizarre."
They're at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris,
with the air crew off the incoming plane, standing by
the baggage reclaim for the Osaka flight and waiting for
his bags to come down. She's come to meet him, as she
often does, and she saw him materialize out of the flow
of passengers at just the same moment as he caught her
eye among the crowds of friends and relations jostling
around the arrivals gate.
ㅗ

Aircraft carry letters, telephones,
agents, representatives and the
we Use the term
communication to cover air
transport as well as post. When
people, aircraft and electronic
signals are transmitted through the
air, they are all effectively
messages and messengers
"Still the same old dreamer," he says to himself.
"Thanks for your postcards and phone calls while
you were going round Asia…. and the faxes and the
e-mails... And now here we are, you and me, large
as life and talking face to face."
He's a traveling inspector for Air France; he's per-
manently on the move. She's a doctor at the airport
medical center; she stays in one place while everything
else moves around her. Her job is to see to the medical
needs of people in transit. She'd met him some time
back when he'd come for a yellow fever jab. While Pan-
tope travels the world, on his own, Pia has the traveling
world flowing around her: between the two of them a
whole universe flows.
"That's a curious sort of welcome!" he thinks.
"For ages, all I've had from you has been words and
messages; but now here you are, I've shaken your hand,
and you've finally arrived."
"At last!"
"Airmail letters and electronic messages over the
ether-and then you arrive in person. From letters to a
presence-what a difference!"
"Any particular reason why you're talking like
this?"
"I think it's rather important. Unlike you I see some-
thing in all that 'transmission' of things. I see angels-
which, incidentally, in case you didn't know, comes
from the ancient Greek word for messengers. Take a
good look around. Air hostesses and pilots; radio mes-
sages; all the air crew just flown in from Tokyo and just
about to leave for Rio; those dozen aircraft neatly lined
up, wing to wing on the runway, as they wait to take off;
yellow postal vans delivering parcels, packets and tele-
grams; staff calls over the tannoy; all these bags passing
in front of us on the conveyor, endless announcements
for Mr X or Miss Y recently arrived from Stockholm or
Helsinki; boarding announcements for Berlin and
Rome, Sydney and Durban; passengers crossing paths
with each other and hurrying for taxis and shuttles
while escalators move silently and endlessly up and
down.. like the ladder in Jacob's dream... Don't you
see-what we have here is angels of steel, carrying
angels of flesh and blood, who in turn send angel sig-
nais across angel air waves...."

"Crazy," he thinks, "completely crazy, why don't I
just tell her so, straight out?"
Then, out loud, with a touch of irony: "And what
about all these people crowding round and pushing
and shoving so that we can't even see our bags?"
"Take a closer look. The same thing applies. They
represent the worlds of business, government, media,
management, science... They're all messengers, every
one of them.."
"Even these immigrant workers?"
"They're carrying messages too. SOS messages to
the rich."
He falls silent, momentarily at a loss for words.
"But," she continues, as if musing to herself, "the
job of angels is only to bring messages.
"So?"
"...bringers of the Word, waiting for the mediator,
until, in the end, here he is, finally arrived, in the flesh."
"Eh..?"
"Don't you see ...? All we really are is intermedi-
aries, eternally passing among others who are also
intermediaries? But the question is, where is it all lead-
ing? Because I spend my life here, in this never-ending
flow of passengers, communications, conveyors, mes-
sengers, announcers and agents, because my work is at
this intersecting point of a multitude of networks all
connected to the universe... I hear the sounds of these
clouds of angels..."
"In a manner of speaking..!"
"...but without ever seeing their final destination."
"As for me, I'm here today and gone tomorrow," he
replies, a touch morosely.
She returns to Pantope's reply to her first question:
"Angels are legendary beings. I don't know whether
I believe in them or not. But how else are we to read and
understand these sounds, in this hurly-burly world
where nobody actually lives and everyone's just speed-
ing through?"
"T've an idea that you're using the word legend'
like the legend' that mapmakers put under maps-the
key that you have to study in order to read them. Am I
right?"
"Yes."
"So you're talking about legends' in the sense

A focal point of messages in
transit. The main Paris airport,
wthere Pantope has arrived and
where Pia works, provides the
stage setting for our dialog
on angels and messengers. In this
place of partings and reunions,
the architecture echoes the ways
In which messages transit and
circulate in space; it has diagonals
traversing a circular intersection,
in the shape of transparent
tunnels, travelators and baggage
conveyors. Automated messengers.
While it mimics the circular form of
the world and the universe, this
miniature model also seems
aircraft which the passengers are
waiting to board. It could be read
as a layout for the story whik?
we are about to tell.

DAWN
not only of mythical stories, but also that of maps?"
She smiles approvingly. And then continues, with
hardly a pause for thought:
"What is the news that these angels are bringing?
Who are they waiting for? ... What are we looking for?"
"Power, perhaps. money..?"
"... which are also transient. in circulation…"
"...and which, in addition, speed up all this move-
ment even more--where's the point to it all?"
"Who or what are you looking for when you travel
round the world, Pantope?"
"Who or what are you waiting for when you're
working in your sick bay, Pia?™
She stops, as if suddenly roused out of her reverie:
"Well at least I knew who I was waiting for.... I'm
so glad you're back!"
"So do me a favor, why don't you just come down
to earth again?" says Pantope, just a shade too abruptly.
'That's funny, coming from you, seeing you're the
one who's just landed."
They laugh. A hit, a palpable hit! What's more, like
any common-or-garden male, he feels vaguely flat-
tered: first the phone call to tell her he was coming, then
his arrival from afar, and now here she is, extending
this curious kind of welcome. As if he was the Messiah!
"I guess I'd better humor her," he thinks. So he plays
along for a while: "Oh, I'm sorry, I was forgetting..... In
the original Bible scene it was the Archangel who did
the Annunciation, not the woman….. Excuse me..."
He bows slightly: "Hail Pia, thou that art highly
favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among
women."
She too bows slightly, looks slightly taken aback,
and half raises a timid hand.
The perfect message: the
Minneson to the viroin
Mary transforens the Word into
a flesh that is living. thinking and
divine. On its own, language
is a chattering noise, hollow and
empty, it means nothing until it is
embodied, made flesh. The perfect
messenger. the archangel Gabriel
enacts the Annunciation,
announcing to the Virgin that
she is about to become the mother
of God. His word exists doubly,
as both word and act. it is this
perfect dual embodiment that has
made the scene of the
anne tron one on the no,
frequently represented-and
perhaps the most beautiful--in all
Van Eyck brothers (1666-1426;
1385-1440), The Ghent Altar-Piece,
The Annunciation, 1426-32. Detail,
upper left panel when closed.
Belgium.

SUNRISE

As a message bearer from the
nito dos rountnwatdtdwh
"udenteetoust
fundamental time and existence
which history lessons in our
country have never taught. More
Wet doek one he Wratn
the absolutely destitute of the
eorth risk seting even the seeds of
humanity destroved in them and
around them by the horror of this
assault. Can we say that the only
true man is the man who chooses
to stand up and confront the risk
of the destruction AN ARCHANGEL
calls him the archangel, in the
sense of the original meaning of
arche-crigin, beginnings. We are
all born from poverty, and to it we
Moawteorn
Lo wtat eatrenes of éestitution
must we be driven for our soubs to
become visibly apparent on our
hands, our faces, our eyes, in our
oureordour suoumared
bodies-as if emanating from
every part of our bodies?
"euoneioelsiaheno
Holding a Soul, Museo Civico,
Padua, Italy.
There's a staff announcement over the tannoy: a nurse
is needed at the first aid center. .. Could the airport
doctor...?
With a look of concern, and moving lightly, she
leaves him. As if swimming through the crowd. Its
compact mass is hard to penetrate.
When she arrives at the airport medical center, she's
met by the sight of a man on a trolley. He appears to be
unconscious. Ageless— probably between forty and fifty.
The smell of the man hits you from several yards away. A
dirty black beard and tangled, matted hair. His feet are
wrapped in ragged bandages tied on with string. He
wears a tattered old raincoat. His hands are red and
swollen, marked with the pale scars of chilblains.
프

"Where did you find him?" she asks the two male
orderlies.
"At the boarding gate for the Boston flight."
"Airlines don't usually carry this kind of passen-
ger," says the second orderly, laughing.
Pia checks him over quickly: no sign of accidental
injury, visible sickness or shock.
Pantope arrives, case in hand, and pokes his head
through the open door.
"What's the matter with him? Is it serious?"
He enters.
"More dangerous than sickness, my friend: poverty,
abject poverty, destitution."
She turns to one of the orderlies:
"Did you say he had his ticket for Boston?"
"Yes, doctor, he was holding it when we put him on
the stretcher."
So saying, he hands her the ticket:
"The authorities in big cities sometimes hand out
railway tickets to their homeless-one-way tickets,
needless to say. The idea is to send them off to other

From Rio to Osaka, from Paris
to Brazzaville, in all the countries
of the world, rich and poor alike,
there are men and women with
no nomes, no nearths, no roots
over their heads. Abandoned,
and with nowhere to live.
The ancient Grock cynic
philosopher Diogenes lived in a
barrel on the street; St Francis
traveler; and Jesus himself
roamed the highways--the
Gospels don't suggest that he
actusily had an address.
Homeless person, Rome, Italy.
cities and dump them on someone else's doorstep. Do
you think they've decided to start sending them abroad
too?"
"They get thrown out of their houses, out of their
jobs. No kind of shelter, no place to eat. Now they're
even driving them out of their own towns and coun
tries.."
Pantope: "Do you often get scenes like this?"
Pia: "Airports are built on the outskirts of cities, in
the suburbs, what we call the ban-lieue: a place of ban-
ishment. Excluded and pushed to the margins, the
down-and-outs end up here. It's almost a law of
nature. When they arrive, they're amazed to discover
that they can actually sleep here, in the dry, on benches,
like ordinary travelers. And isn't that just what we
all are?"
"Do the police send them back?"
"Of course. They spot them by the fact that they re
not wearing socks. But their movement is like the
movement of passengers arriving and departing—it
never ceases. They stay for a while and then move on,
like everyone else."
"So you're the ones permanently in residence, and
they come to stay?"
"Sometimes we get to know them by their first
names."
As Pantope is about to leave again, one of the male
orderlies comments: "Is there a human group any-
where in the world existing without poor people?"
"If rich people only ever lived with rich people,"
Pia observes, "how would they ever get to know
humanity?"

SUNRISE
"They'd spend all their lives in the same way that they
do at the airport, sheltered from life's problems, waited
on hand and foot … chatting.."
"While waiting for the boarding
ment..
"In order to go where?"
At that moment, as if he's just heard someone ordering
him to move on, the tramp opens his eyes and tries to
sit up.
"How are you feeling?"
The reply comes back in a muffled groan.
"Are you hungry?" she asks.
In his silent, lucid eyes she reads an extraordinary
calmness of spirit. Pia realizes that this man is about to
die, and that he possesses something which the world
does not: peace.
Various thoughts cross her mind, although she says
nothing: I've always known that love has knowledge
far above any science; you now show me that absolute
destitution brings a knowledge even higher than that of
love, but which has never found language-except,
perhaps, the language of revelation.
"He's dying." Pantope cries, dropping his bag.
"Quick, an injection.
The orderly busies himself; Pia fetches a syringe
from the pharmacy, with gestures that are swift, precise,
measured and calm; she kneels down and pulls up the
man's sleeve to bare his forearm.
"What's your name?"
A trace of blood trickles from his right nostril; she
imagines that she hears him say: "Gabriel."
"He's stopped breathing; his heart's stopped..."
The wretched of the carth are
messengers of an extraordinary
state which is unknown to us. They
roam the streets, they keep a low
profile, they don't say much, they
reen bar stairstr
disappear... and then suddenty
re appeur on a surcet corner. ihey
are phenoms der they are o
the sense that they pierce through
our sendes
Homeless person, Rome, Italy.
She leans over him:
"Goodbye, Gabriel."
At this moment, the fetid smell which had previ-
ously filled the room suddenly gives way to a sweet
perfume the like of which Pia has never smelt.
"It's strange, you sometimes find that," she muses.
Pantope, standing, and Pia, on her knees, look at each
other, with the dead body between them.

"As I asked before, who are you waiting for?"
"Him?"
Still on her knees, as if in a dream:
"Poor hungry wretches suddenly set in front of a
banquet... thirsty travelers discovering a spring in the
desert... lovers who are cruelly rejected and then at
last welcomed back... Sometimes I've seen them liter-
ally faint with happiness... Would we faint in the
same way, faced with paradise?"
She pauses for a long moment, and then adds, emo-
tionally:
"Unless it's the other way round. Maybe natural
death only finally occurs when we suddenly glimpse,
in an instant of supreme insight, the supernatural
beauty
of
that other
world.. the promised
world …
"... the same world as here?"

The archangels of the biblical
tradition: St Michael, in his armor,
on the left. carries a sword to
accomoany and protect the
guiding angel Raphael, the young
Tobias, and Gabriel, who is
portrayed as the bringer of the
good tidings at the origins of both
Christianity and islam. Having thus
been announced, life incarnate
begins, in the shape of this youth,
who walks, accompanied by his
guardian angel, towards his death
and the blade that awaits him.
Francesco Botticini (1446-98),
The Three Archangels with Tobias.
Uffizi, Florence, Italy,

In the most ancient traditions,
messenger-anges don t necessary
take on only human form; they may
pass by in a breeze or a ruffling of
the water, or in the heat and light
of sun and stars-in short, in any of
the elementary flukes and
movements that make up our
Earth. When angels breathe out, by
so doing they reveal their message
twike: what they produce, and what
they are. Here the breath of angels
waits over the scene of the birth of
Aphrodite: Nature, doubly
presented, as both physical and
human, breathes into the
emergence of life and love.
Sandro Botticelli (1447-1515).
The Birth of Venus, 1485, detail, top
lett Until, Horence, Kam
When a tree moves in a gust of
wind, physical attributes of beat
and cold, as well as living elements,
monumene on tar-rechine
messages is it recehing and
traromitting in this exchange of
fluxes?
FLUXES
Roissy. A storm.
They watch through the window as the red and
white wind-sock swings horizontally in the air, taut on
its axis, indicating the direction for aircraft to land. The
wind is roaring and rattling the windows.
Pia, stubbornly:
"In this down-to-earth world to which you are so
partial, are you aware that angels don't always take on
auman form, but may conceal themselves in the fluxe
f nature: water currents, rays of light... and wind?
Pantope, ironically:
"That's strange hiding themselves in things that
are transparent!"

SUNRISE
Pia, stubbornly, again:
"It makes me shiver, but I can't do without it; my
skin loves to feel it, but sometimes experiences it as
agony; it's delightful and agonizing at one and the
same time; for me, wind is life.
"Without waming it may turn suddenly from a
gentie breeze to an icy blast; it may be friendly, bringing
and giving; like a mother, it may warm and caress; sen-
sually, it may please, seduce, stir and inspire... But as
a wicked stepmother it deprives us of rest; and as a
demon unleashed it violates, lashes, plunders, freezes,
pushes, disheartens, and leaves us with our nerves jan-
gling.
"One minute it gives us the good life, and the next
it steals it away. When and how does it make the transi-
tion from giving to attacking, from angel to devil?™
Pantope, gently mocking:
"That depends on the health and constitution of the
person who decides to venture out in it."
She feigns naivety:
"Where does the wind come from? Where is it
going?"
He is eager to share his knowledge:
*It derives from the fact that the Earth rotates, and
from geographical differences in the distribution of
heat and cold…. It blows regularly along the equator,
in the form of the trade winds, the monsoon, the
simoon, the scirocco, the mistral and the tramontana,
leaving pockets of calm or what they call doldrums...
In the old days sailing ships always used to travel in the
same direction round the Earth, so as to keep the wind
behind them."
"When there's a wind, whether it's a breeze or a tor-
nado, what does it bring? What does it take away? Is it
stealing or giving? What is it bringing? Support for air-
craft taking off? Clouds of pollen and the lascivious call
of spring? The destructive power of typhoons?
"Just to please you, I'll call them intermediaries or
messengers... No system without things being trans-
mitted.
"Ah! So no world without wind?"
"No world without all the fluxes interacting!"
Pia, with an air of sensuality:
"I love swimming in rivers; the caress of a gentle
breeze; gentle sunshine; and the feeling of fluid earth in
a mud-bath: the four elements in movement."
Pantope, with a professorial air:
"Could we perhaps use one word to describe all
these bearers? Winds creates flows of air in the atmo-
sphere; rivers make flows of water across land; glaciers
make solid rivers, cutting their way across mountain
and valley; rain, snow and hail are flows of water
through the air;
marine currents are flows of water
within water; volcanoes are vertical flows of fire, from
Earth into the air, or into the sea; lava flows and mud
flows are liquid earth, respectively hot and cold, mov-
ing across land; and drifting continents are moving car-
pets of land floating on fire; right at the heart of the
Earth, scientists have identified flows of fire within this
subterranean fire … and up in the atmosphere and out
in space fluxes of heat and light.
"One element passes through others, and they, con-
versely, pass through it. it supports or it transports.
These reciprocating fluidities create such a perfect mix-
ing or kneading that few places lack at least some
knowledge of the state of others. They receive this
knowledge by means of messages. Also, the act of
kneading dough makes it homogeneous. The universe

A message or messenger coming
from the Atlantic. A piture of a
storm approaching the north-west
unpredictable intermingling of air,
heat and humidity, turbulence and
core the swine need
atmospheric disturbance provido
The dinner wind certain
such movements, the excesses of
cold at the poles and heat at the
know it. Thus fluxes which are
apparently disordered serve to
Crownre the oorthor
necessary to life
imman Granted do the arutal
photograpns taxen by sate ne

FLUXES
is made of these bridgings which extend out over
space."
"But what do these currents bring?"
"The Gulf Stream warms Brittany; Etna scorches
Sicily; the White and Black Glaciers of the Oisans cool
the pastures of Madame Carl; at Baikonur, the rain
evaporates before it touches ground; and when the tri-
angle of India met the mass of Asia, the Himalayas
thrust up their eternal frozen heights to where they
now tower over the world."
"What a let-down! If winds, glaciers and torrents
derive simply from differences in temperature, and just
distribute heat and cold around the place, where's the
excitement in that?"
"We're talking global distribution here! If the
scorching heat in the Central Australian desert changes,
it affects the winds at the equator. All of a sudden the
Nino may blow up, and this plays a role in creating the
Planet Earth is solid but viscous;
its structure is created by the
movement of tectonik plates;
woman curtis swine
depths of our oceans; the
atmosphere derives its stability or
instability from the corresponding
stability of the winds. More or less
slowly, fluxes of every kind
Carrorm and consere the
universal order of elements
Might we think of our planet
do an immeroe interconnecting
switem of messaces?
A chart of the winds over the
Facilk, on september 14, 1978
based on data supplied by satellite.
The arrows indicate their direction,
and colors show their speed. Blue,
0-14 km per hour; ourple and oink
15-43 km per hour; orange,
44-72 km per hour.
These soeeds increase in storma
occurring in the southern roaring
forties and towards the
climate of Peru, as well as helping in the formation of
cyclones in the Caribbean, which in turn affect the Gulf
Stream, which then goes on to influence the weather in
Western Europe.
"Working through a combination of fire, air and
water, these flows bring the news of Alice Springs to
Sein or Origny; I admit that the coded message isn't
exactly easy to decipher, but we're beginning to crack it.
As the wind hits Cape Jobourg, it informs the first
French person it meets about events that are happening
in Florida and Australia."
"Come to think of it, less of a let-down. I can
already see angels there."
"Oh?"
"Wind is a messenger that may be good or bad, a
giver or a stealer, chubby putti or devils incarnate.....
Thanks to the wind, any of those places that you just
mentioned echo with the totality of space.... One
breeze bears and announces the whole universe."
He continues, as if he hasn't been listening:
"Each flux breaks down into myriad single parti-
cles, but they all go to make up the world. Each of them
bears little bits which, when put together, make the
larger whole."
She translates this, instantly:
"At any given moment of the day, the breeze plays
on your cheek, and since it carries codes from every-
where, it's telling you about the state of the body of
the world. If it is able to construct a universe in this
way, it follows, conversely, that a universal reason
blows in tiny particles, in legions of angels as numer-
ous as the multinational crowds passing through our
airports.
"Don't forget that in Latin the words spiritus and

anima refer to wind, the breath of life, as well as to the
soul."
He's taken aback:
"You're trying to jumble up the human sciences
with the science of things. That's all we need!"
She admits:
"That's because I find the science of things rather
lacking, Pantope. But by the time we've finished the
two of us will understand the world!"
"When, though?"
"So, can we say that currents create the universe?"
"It seems so ..
"In the same way, do Angels-as workers or opera-
tors of the universe construct God in his Oneness?
Like your fluxes, they move, they run, they fly, in a
flurry of wings, music and good news, to announce the
glory of the One.
"And in this way huge message-bearing systems
are created. Systems which are characterized by a circu-
lation of messengers- bearers of messages which can
be understood.
"There we have the constructed networks in which
we live, and all the various forms of circulation; there
we have the world of physical fluxes of which you just
described the possible unity; and, finally, there we also
have my divine legends: is it possible that there exists
one single language which is capable of reconnecting
these three levels which we have kept separate for so
long?"
While Pantope hesitates, she continues:
"If winds, currents, glaciers, volcanoes etc., carry
subtle messages that are so difficult to read that it takes
us absolutely ages trying to decipher them, wouldn't it
be appropriate to call them intelligent? What human
could ever presume to speak a language that was so
precise, refined and exquisitely coded?
"Don't you think it's rather arrogant of us to
assume that we're the only intelligent beings in this
world, when the River Garonne and the south wind
carry with them and express more things than I would
ever be able to write-and express them better? They
read instantaneously the messages of other fluxes, filter
them, make their choice, combine them with their own,

Here elements and flures join
and mix: a liquid flow in which
igneous solids. water, air, land and
fire fuse in one sinole cruc ble
What information is being
distributed by means of this
extraordinare coney
exchanger?
translate them, and write them on land or water. They
conserve them for a long time. They express themselves
through explosions, roarings, noise and murmurings,
tinkling and lapping. The movements of these fluxes
need nothing to inspire them, because they are the
inspiration!
"How would it be if it turned out that we were only
the slowest and least intelligent beings in the world?
Tradition says that above us there are the angels....

UAES
The word breeze connects with
uWonewriorerAsune
breeze is broken up, it divides into
smaller particies. The words have
wwaie orlein sne toreeetr
same experience, because, as we
see wrom the suntace of the sed,
each wave is edged with a
multiplicity of smaller waves. When
a ssror says that treres a tres
wind blowing, he is, usually
without realizing it, using a word
that relates to tractions, tractures
arxtredoue trocuethus
"fresh' doesn't mean "cold", but
broken down into increasingly
mire we monsorsordeeuixe
these waves, with their smaller
wavelets.
Supposing we were to go along with tradition, and say
that we also run a poor second to rivers and winds?
"Breaths of air are rather like life. Without a breeze
to bring it to life, the sea lies cold, flat and indifferent. It
needs the wind to write on it, to stir it up, to make
waves. Sailors and boats travel by means of wind more
than by the water itself. It is in choppy seas that little
putti are to be found in their greatest numbers. Wind is
what constructs the universe, life, human spirit...
"I find that the process of thought is rather like a
large, unitary, fortuitous moment of being carried away,
which is broken down into little squalls and flurries
which have no particular relation to each other but
which all come together in a greater overriding move-
ment. At a level above the myriad angels, puffing away
with their chubby cheeks and creating chaos and confu-
sion, a great archangel advances, flying with the wind
behind him, and it is his will that pushes me in the
direction in which I wish to go.
"T'm rather alarmed at the idea that thinking might
end up being like the destructive seizure that had St
Paul falling off his horse. In the same way that a sudden
gust of wind and the pitching of a boat can send us
sprawling across the deck. A slap in the face, a sharp,
heavy blow, exactly applied, which makes the body
unsettled, makes it lose its balance, and draws our
attention to the proximity of death."
"And at that point something other begins."
"What's that?"
"They say that deep down in oceanic gulleys there
are volcanic craters where fire still mixes with water.
Here, in the absence of air and light, igneous earth
mixes with the dark, black waters, and scientists have
apparently discovered here the formation of large

molecules of the kind that originally gave rise to pri-
mordial life.
"That's wonderful! These stirrings, these knead-
ings, these interminglings, have the effect not only of
constructing a single unified system, but also, in this
primordial soup, of enabling the emergence of some-
thing new.. of life, of good tidings... First came the
angels, next came Christmas!"
Pantope, who is partial to a neat idea, waxes lyrical:
"We scribblers, troubadours, scientific explorers,
composers of romances, go naked to the sea. We stand
with nothing save a surf-board, sometimes alone,
sometimes in serried ranks, before all the oceans of the
world. The biggest seas you can imagine. In Hawaii,
perhaps, or Australia.... We stand before vertiginous
walls of crashing waves that have been created by the
wind out on the ocean. Meanwhile poor people have
not much more than mediocre lapping. We get up early,
come rain or shine, and put ourselves through our
paces, without ever leaving the beach. Slaves. As if
moonstruck.
"Every work of art or science, however large or
small, consists in catching the wave just right, and fol-
lowing it all the way down the line, for as long as possi-
ble, riding the crest, surfing, until we come to the
inevitable final fall. If inspiration is in short supply, we
fall straight away, or don't even get moving in the first
place; but a masterpiece travels fast, moving but immo-
bile, in a long horizontal plane, just slightly off-balance,
on invisible lines of force that are etched imperceptibly
on the wall of water.
"One might say that it is the act of creation that
invents them, but true discoverers see the little wrinkles
written on the liquid— in the brief moments before they
In many languages, the words
signifying spirit, soul and God
breath and light: perceirable fluxes
whose message-bearing circulation
transforms and reorganizes bodies
She their iron
Are there angels blowing
through this chapter, in the same
way as the wind passing through
the agitated branches of these
trees with the onset of spring?

disappear—and then spend all their life forces and their
efforts in tuning-in their eye, their bodies and the pitch
of their surf-boards in pursuit of this poised equilib-
rium that will carry them speeding ahead, surfing, on a
line that will end only with death.
"What flux or current is it that draws out or follows
a successful musical score and provides it with contin-
ued uplift? The delicate, fine tuning of the surf-board to
the curling wave is what enables the surf artist to main-
tain his equilibrium and surf on it, and to follow the
flux.
"A work of creativity glides and planes along a
fluid roller; and it writes on the wave, as its perilous
roarings transform themselves into music, and the
breaking of its wave will become volume uncoiled."
Pia opposes a breath of air to Pantope's flux:
"One day, a day lost in ancient memory, but from
which all our history has subsequently developed, the
more intelligent of our desert-dwelling ancestors
became tired of having to carry the heavy statues of
their myriad gods around in the desert-the golden
calves, the hollow plaster goats.... They decided to
drop these pieces of marble and metal which obliged
them to pursue the localized life-styles of sedentary
populations. They decided to travel light.
"Their bodies were suddenly freed of shackles; they
had free hands, unladen shoulders, and all at once it
seemed to them as if they were flying: across the plain,
beneath the vast empty spaces of sky-which their
newly-raised heads could now see for the first time—
and they sang, because all they had left was words and
music:
"the gentle breeze which makes the moving wall of
the tent quiver in the desert;
"the fresh wind that drives a sailing ship on the
high sea;
"that transparency of air which can lift you above
the summits of transcendental mountains;
"the smallest of elements, flake, smoke, vapor,
atom, bubble, tiny flux, minute turbulence; the tiniest
inclination, invisible, intangible, barely audible,
infinitely weak and fragile, faded, ethereal, airy-—a liv-
ing breath, a genesis, which sows with its absence the
totality of the universe, light issued from light, the only
God, the true God."
The wind is making their eyes water, and intelligence
shines from those tears.
쓰

MORNING

The labor processes of what we
aolcondwotantn
wer wean tooorah
Iivestock rearing, agriculture
MnowsthePromeheonsooette
which in turn were the mothers of
our own. Here we have an early
kesoodsweeed
blacksmith, using a hammer and
aril to beat out iron that hao
furnace. Nowadays we are
employed principally in
Krenniitine wusee
Hercules, with his club, and
Atlax the bearer of the heavens, as
well as Prometheus who gave fire
to mankind, give way to
messenger-angels.
Peter-Paul Rubers (1577-1640).
Vultan, 1636-70, Museo del Prado,
Wonorstnin
MESSAGE SYSTEMS
Cray X-HP/48 computer installed
"une Cehcontdlm
Geneva: the Latest stage in the
development of human tools and
Cnaloew
At this hour of the morning, the crowds of men and
women who work at the airport mingle with the
crowds of passengers arriving on flights or about to
leave.
Pia is one of the former; Pantope is one of the latter.
"How can I tell whether I'm leaving for work or
returning from work?" asks Pantope, with a chuckle.
"My work's coming towards me. What about
yours?"
"I travel from country to country, collecting infor-
mation on the cost of living in each locality. This helps
us to maintain identical standards for our employees all
over the world, adjusted to take account of local prices
I put all this information together, sift the figures, add

MORNING
up, multiply and divide, analyze them, draw conclu-
sions, travel the world endlessly, and report back to
HQ."
"Do you work, Pantope?"
"See for yourself, Pia. A lot."
"On the contrary, I see nothing of the sort. My
grandfather was a peasant, and he used to have to carry
sacks of flour, branches of trees and bundles of wood.
My uncle was a blacksmith, hammering out red-hot
iron on his anvil. This is one of my early childhood
memories-seeing them sitting down to get their
breath back, or stopping for a drink because they were
sweating.
"Do we really work, in comparison? We sit down
indoors, in the shade... we go to meetings... we talk
…..we watch the countryside roll by..."
"But we do get physically tired!"
"The history of our families provides a whole line-
up of historical figures. Do you remember the name for
the figures who used to carry temples?"
"The caryatids?"
"Correct. Men and women. Atlas and Telamon. I
could imagine my grandfather as one of them-strong,
muscular and patient. They bore things, in the same
way that they bore what life had to give!"
"Porterage in the ancient style: the holding-up of
unmoving forms!"
"No. There was more to it than that. Take Hercules,
striding across the countries of the Mediterranean with
his club over his shoulder. His work consisted of hitting
things with his club and, I would imagine, using it as a
lever to open the Straits of Gibraltar.
"It's even said that he enlisted the help of the per-
son who held up the sky, to help him row when he set
off in his boat for the Garden of the Hesperides. It is
said that Hercules rowed between Atlas and Telamon."
"Just like us, then, setting off on their travels."
"Except that they had to sweat to watch the coun
tryside roll by ….!"
"Why is it you're only talking in images, and about
heroes and gods?"
"I'm just looking out for keys to help us decipher
our maps better.
"When the Industrial Revolution came, my uncle
was in a good position with his forge. His stock in trade
was the transformation of things: iron ore became
ingots, and these in turn became the machines which
now people the world."
"All right, then. Allow me to add another ancient
god to your gods-namely Prometheus, the giver of
Porterage Ar the end of the
gigantomachy, or War Agalrat the
Gods, the mountain collapses and
buries the giants alive. As
punishment for his part in the
battle, Zeus sentences Atlas to
carry up the heavens on his
shoulders.
Giulio Romano (1499-1546),
the whole tanYalere
del Te, Mantua, Italy; detail from
the Giants' Wall. The wall was built
between 1525 and 1535, for the
Duke of Gonzaga, Frederick Il, on
the basis of sketches by Romano.

The classkal Labors of Hercules:
Greek mythology tells that when
he also stole the 'cup' which the
his expedition to steal the oxen of
Geryon, he set up two columns on
either side of the Strait which
divides the rock of Ceuta
(formerly Abyla) from that of
Gibraltar (Calpe), which thereafter
came to be known as the Pillars of
Hercules in ofor to toutn home.
had reached the ocean in the West,
to travel back to his palace in the
tax. This photograph, taken by
produced in the Mediterranean by
the teethe neit
trase curved, message oconne
waves propagate and generate
fire. And also a modern demon-the great particle sep-
arator which Maxwell invented in the nineteenth oen-
tury to demonstrate that heat and cold could not of
their own accord be separated.
"According to those definitions, neither you nor I
actually work!"
"But nonetheless, when we talk about work, we
still use the same word, 'form', which has remained
identical throughout history. Once we go beyond the
simple porterage of these forms, after their transforma-
tion comes information: communication, interference,
transmissions, translation, distribution, interception
and atmospherics….. Transmissions and messengers."
"So we work in the same way as angels, an image
which is at once ancient and modern. Look at this

MORNI
NG
crowd in front of us. Not many Prometheuses there, let
alone a Hercules or an Atlas, but many, many angels, all
setting off on their travels, all bearers of messages.
"We no longer work on the same raw materials.
Earlier forms of work consisted in holding up forms
that were solid and unchanging; later forms trans-
formed things by liquefying them; whereas our world,
which is fluid, fluent, even fluctuating, is becoming
increasingly volatile."
Pia says, laughing:
"Volatilis is the Latin word for things that have
wings. Volatile is also used of a substance capable of
changing very rapidly from one state to another. It can
also be used for something which appears and then
suddenly disappears. And I believe that I'm right in
saying that these are three attributes of angels.
"Why do you find it scandalous to talk about angels
in the era of information and flying money, whereas
you were happy to refer to Maxwell as a 'demon' in the
era of the forge, or of Atlas, previously?"
Pantope, seriously: "Perhaps if we want to act and
think nowadays, this is what we have to do. We have to
pull together the static, statuesque, solid, well-founded
stable-formed systems-ie. Hercules and Atlas; then
we add transformation or genesis via the power of fire,
which is where Prometheus comes in, surrounded by
devils old and new; and finally the world of informa-
tion, which is complex and volatile, and the fabric of
which is woven by message-bearing systems-of
which Hermes was the forerunner, and which is now
crowned by your angelic hosts. Is that right?"
"Skeleton plus metabolism plus nervous system:
and there you have life!" says Pia, happy to have her
position confirmed.
"

MES
EM S
The beginning of the Age of
wesownwelnethetor
messenger god, the forerunner of
the angels. With his winged
neodewrne dxcoltonese
charlot in which stands Aphrodite,
the goddess of Love, together with
fros, and Pryche, the soul, The
wheel flles over the ground. Love
also flies, with wings outspread.
yent te oo, onlowemo o
transmitting signals from her
extended right hand. The souf and
nsouowneoolust
hermaphroditic alliance....tn
short, the human persona flies, a
wer wonmes.oeh
Terracotta relief from Locri,
Bruttium, in present-day Calabria,
suuetlw.t44w

"And, if we want to write history, we have to pull
together at least three kinds of time: the reversible time
of clocks and mechanics, all to do with cogs and levers;
then the irreversible time of thermodynamics, born of
fire; and finally the time of what is called 'negative
entropy, which is what gives rise to singularities.
"History no longer flows in the way we once
thought."
"A small world history of work in three acts, three
times, three figures or actors, three states of matter, and
three words which are in fact only one, by Pia, the fly-
ing doctor!"
An angel passes...
A long-exposure photograph of
the constellation Orion as it moves
across the sky: three blue stars
form the famous hunter's belt: the
red super-giant above the beit is
Betelgeuse (meaning shoulder or
armpit in Arabic, beneath the belt.
Rigel (foot, also in Arabic) shines,
white and steely-blue; not far from
the sword, the nebulous patch; and
finally the pink center. The
constellation of Orion, situated
close to the celestial equator, can
be seen from almost everywhere in
the world

MESSAGE SYSTEMS
"A pert observation, but pertinent!"
"Pardon the impertinence."
"The final time, that of the Annunciation, trans-
forms the world, whereas Atlas, Hercules and
Prometheus bring nothing new, is that it?"
"I would say so."
"The angels bring the good news... Maybe one of
them passed over.."
"Our ancestors stayed put in one place."
"That's true of Atlas and the caryatids, as porters.
It's less true for Hercules and Ulysses, who were travel-
ers to unknown lands. It's also true for Maxwell's
demons, little gods of local technologies, keeping an
eye on the counter."
"While information constructs the universe, by
means of networks."
"Our artificial message systems encompass the
world; and the world in turn is constructed by mes-
sage-bearing systems: currents of wind and water
transmit information far and wide."
"You see: my angel-messengers pop up all over the
place," Pia insists, doggedly.
So we have three classes of workers parading
before us: first the Atlantic, headed by Atlas, which is
sometimes also Herculean; then the Promethean.."
":. and finally the angelic, whose job it is to con-
nect the local to the global."
"T was coming to that."
"Yes, on angel's wings. And there you have the new
Universe, its strange time, and its epic unfolded."
Pantope doesn't give in so easily.
"I can go along with applying the name angels to
message bearers: travelers, messengers, announcers of
various sorts, all that I can understand…... Even, if you
insist, the world's flows and waves ... but aircraft!"
"Do you believe that humanity are the only ones
who have the ability to emit or transmit?"
"Humans are the only beings that communicate
with language!"
"That's rather arrogant! Dolphins and bees commu-
nicate, and so do ants, and winds, and currents in the sea.
Living things and inert things bounce off each other
unceasingly; there would be no world without this inter-
linking web of relations, a billion times interwoven."
"But it's not capable of meaning."
"Narcissistic vanity! For the Ancients, who were
wise people, certain angels, the ones who were messen-
gers or couriers, looked like men; but others resembled
waves, winds, the sparkling of light, or twinkling con-
stellations. To this we add the wonders of our technol-
ogy."
"You mean follies."
"I mean reason."
"No and no again! Science says that there is a dis-
tinction between the subject, which is thinking and
active, and the object, which is passive and thought of."
"That displays total ignorance of the act of know-
ing! Objects know in a different way to us, that's all."
"That's untenable."
She points towards the window.
"Look at those children out there, playing ball. The
clumsy ones are playing with the ball as if it was an
object, while the more skilful ones handle it as if it were
playing with them: they move and change position
according to how the ball moves and bounces. As we
see it, the ball is being manipulated by human subjects;
this is a mistake-the ball is creating the relationships
between them. It is in following its trajectory that their

MORNING
team is created, knows itself and represents itself. Yes,
the ball is active. It is the ball that is playing."
"That has nothing to do with knowledge."
"Yes it has. The spindle of the sundial, using the
sun, but acting on its own, marks the hour of the
equinox and the position of the given location; memory
is found, dormant, in libraries, in museums, behind the
screen of my computer, and in language, both written
and spoken; this memory is awakened and brought to
life when the power is switched on; imagination lights
up, goes out or fades on our television screens... a pan-
pipe warbles, a clarinet sings, a violin weeps, a bassoon
sobs, the sensitivity of brass, strings and wood..... No,
we are not so very exceptional. What old books used to
call our faculties are to be found here, outside of us,
scattered about the universe, both the inert and the
man-made."
"Images! Fancy words!"
"Do you really think that machines and technolo-
gies would be able to construct groups and change his-
tory if they were merely passive objects?"
"They're technical objects, and that's all!"
"That's like saying a white blackbird-it's a contra-
diction in terms. These biros, writing desks, tables,
books, diskettes, consoles, memories... produce the
group that thinks, that remembers, that expresses itself
and, sometimes, invents. Maybe you're right, maybe
we can't call these objects subjects. However, maybe we
could call them technical quasi-subjects..."
"As if they were endowed with the same qualities
as us?"
"Almost! To consider them purely as objects derives
from the basic contempt that we still have for human
labor-the abiding error of those who, because they've
An admirable synthesis of an
angel in human form together with
the flux of light from the sky. The
sundial is usually seen as a clock
designed to measure the passing of
the day, but this is only a
comparatively recent usage. In its
carliest days, in classical Greck and
Babylonian times, It was used as an
instrument of scientific research,
and particularly of astronomical
observation. Specialists used it in
order to read equinoxes, solstices
and the latitudes of places. Bya
suitable inclination of its spindle ce
gnomon, which was arrived at by
rigorous calculation, the signais
which it received from the sun
provided the necessary information.
It was partly with the help of the
sundial that the Greeks were able to
construct a geometric model of the
world.
Chartres Cathedral, France
(1174-1260).
쓰

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"Artificial intelligence has only just been invented."
"Not at all! We've always been artificial for nine-
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write and think; we take them and make others so that
they can think for us, with us, among us, and by means
of which, or even within which, we think. The artificial
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Two products and preconditions
of the message age: our message-
bearing systems function by means
of machines which, by themselves
connect up and interlink as
message-bearing networks. The
simple, ancient labors based on
to labor processes of great

derives from the term 'plex, as do
sojectives such as douore, triple,
all of which refer both to large
numbers and to loems which are
characterized by nodes and
networks that are extremely
"complex". From the least complex
to the host Comply eleanor
Tom Wedo enter ont
right, micrography of the surface
of a microprocessor or integrated
seems to me as idiotic and unfair as saying that slaves
and women have no souls, that servants have no needs,
and that children don't need freedom. In other words,
giving no rights to the world ... all from the arrogance
of seeing ourselves as the only ones who matter."
"So you're saying that we're not the only subjects in
the world?"
"Like laws and legal rights, intelligence is also
shared, as are memory and consciousness... I'm not
saying that contemporary technologies have pene-
trated the universe of thought all by themselves, but

MORNING
throughout the ages they have occupied a space which
was close to that of subject: the stone axe, the anvil, the
hoe ... work for us actively; they are not merely exten-
sions of our hands and arms. The violin draws the artist
forward, my pencil writes for me, my language moves
ahead of me."
"So why bring angels into it now?"
"In the oldest traditions, angels do not necessarily
take on human appearance; they may also inhabit the
universe of things, whether natural or artificial."
"So you see angels everywhere….?"
"Their lot, with all the august title of subject! The
light that comes from the sun and stars brings mes-
sages, which are decoded by optical or astrophysical
instruments; a radio aerial emits, transmits and
receives; humans do not need to intervene here. As they
say, when something's working, leave well alone."
Pantope continues, as determinedly as Pia: "If we
become angels, will we still work?"
"Probably never again in the same way as yester-
day, when our forefathers were out there toiling on the
land, or laboring over a piece of iron, forming it,
reforming it, transforming it with their hands, using
tools and machines."
"We exchange information with objects that appear
more as relations, tokens, codes and transmitters."
"What's more," says Pia, seriously, "in this new
world of increasing interconnectedness, the old kinds
of work are fast becoming counter-productive. They
pollute, they produce crises and unemployment for the
societies organized around them; they are allowed to
outlive their usefulness, and become dangerous, waste-
ful. As a core activity, they enlist and mobilize the
whole of society in the same way that religion once did,
The modern ervironmental
consequences of cartier kinds of
work. The greenhouse effect, one
of the possible results of
polluting the atmosphere with its
high-temperature gassy exhausts,
traditional society threatens a
global warming of the dimate. The
general conditions for biological
survival thus become endangered.
A sinister photomontage
shows planet Earth offering itself
up as vicum to the noxious
outpourings of a factory.

or, more recently, war. Disasters always seem to derive
from things which had an initial usefulness, but which,
even though they have outlived their time, we then
continue to operate, despite their enormous costs in
terms of death and catastrophe."
"The best becomes the worst!"
"I remember the moment when I became aware
that work had crossed from the realm of being a sacred
value to the point where it had become a problem.
Already we are really only working to repair the rav-
ages wrought by that work!"
"You're making me nervous! Do you mean that
unemployment awaits us all?"
"Certainly, and we're going to have to face up to it
as cheerfully as we can."
"Impossible!"
"For hundreds of years science has been working at
lessening the hardships of labor."
"Would you say that it's succeeded?"
"You'd have to be blind not to see it. Why work any
more? So as to do something less well than a computer
could do it? Why build a refining plant-wear out work-
ers, destroy the environment, create crises and inequality
of income, amass vast fortunes whose consequences
leave the poor of the world hungry —when some micro-
organism could actually do the refining process better,
faster, cleaner and more economically than we can."
"So building things gives way to computers?
Amazing!"
"Do you need something to tell the time with? Why
make watches when nature is swarming with
molecules, atoms and crystals with vibrations beating
in exactly the rhythm that you want?"
"Where do we find the dial, though, Pia?"
"Everywhere: in the sky, in hunger, in tiredness....
It is an irreversible fact that our advanced tech
ologies are producing unemployment in the old labe
processes, whereas they should be busying themselves
with giving us a life like that of the shepherd Aristaeus,
who had his nourishment provided by the bees. The
week which began in the neolithic era has now come to
an end, and here we are, with weeks of Sundays and
entire sabbatical years.
"We have done enough in transforming and exploit-
ing the world! The time has come to understand it!"
"You're reversing the old slogans!"
"Data is more of a known quantity, and when it's
well chosen, it will do."
"So what will we be left with, in terms of ordinary
life?"

MESSAGE
SYSTEMS
Work in tomorrow's word?
Substances in nature sometimes
recol more counte erodenis
than the substances that can be
produced by human labor. Instead
of making things, will we one day
be refing on natural suostances
to make things for us? Nature
produces certain liquid crystals
when new in the curren
maintain ordered structures, like
solid crystals. They are light
sensitive, changing with the light,
and have rare optical qualities
which we would find hard to
reproduce by industrial processes.
"Knowledge, culture, welfare, art, conversation.
the life of angels."
"An inconceivable Utopia!"
"Our world-the world of communications—-has
already grown old, and is giving birth, at this very
moment, to a pedagogical society, that of our children,
in which education will be carried on continuously
throughout a lifetime, and the fact of having a job will
become increasingly rare.
"There will be open universities all over the place.
Long-distance learning will take the place of campuses,
which at present are closed ghettoes for the children of
the well-to-do, concentration camps of knowledge.
"After agrarian humanity came homo economicus,
industrial man; now a new era is opening, the age of
knowledge. We'll be living on knowledge and the cre-
ation of connections, and we'll live a lot better than we
did when we lived by transforming earth and objects
(which, by the way, will continue by automated pro-
cesses)."
"Everybody is scared of this new world, Pia. But
what's going to happen in the meantime?"
"We're so keen on hanging on to old things, even
when they're obviously obsolete or going badly wrong.
... As a result, before this new world can come to
fruition (even though it is actually already here with us)
there's going to be a lot of disaster and suffering-ali
deriving from our tardiness in understanding the living
present."
"More of your Utopias!"
"Do you know of any single important change in
history which was not initially derided by some people
as Utopian, while others saw it as a miracle for which
they prayed?"
"Well, my dear, I would say that we haven't got all
day. Enough of the fantasies, let's get to work."
The crowds swirl around in the vast interchange that is
the airport.
"We're a long way, now, from the lone field and the
crowded workshop. Our message systems nowadays
affect whole populations... All of humanity, virtually.
There you have the heroine of today's tragedy: no more
actor, no more choir, no more God, nor class.... The
whole of humanity in a state of interconnectedness."
"It's true to say that it is a state of communication,
but what is it saying to itself? And, once again, why?
And can you tell me how the plot's going to work out,
and how it will end?"
"We don't live in a theatre, or in the cinema!"

The classical attributes of humar!
labor are found again in the new.
The Latin word pagus meant the
field which the farmer ploughed: a
term so ancient and venerable that
religious and cultural terms such as
organism, pagans, peasant and the
French pays and paysage all derive
from it.
"neare on whiler
reading-the oldest form of
storing information that we know,
and one of the first circuits-
derives from the same word, Lines
of writing seem to imitate the
the microchip take the page and
the pagus to a further stage of
development, rendering them
more complex?
Raoul Ubc (1910-). Terne
France.

Today, urbanization is moving
space and Inwading the entire space
of the planet. It invades not only its
surface-where cities are growing
and increasingly merging into
conurbations and megalopolises—
but also vertical space, the province
international purveyors of
information operating by means of
orbiting satellites. Like the cities of
antiquity, this new, single, global
city is divided- between the upper
quarters, which are wealthy and
well-appointed, and its nether
zones of abysmal poverty.
A vew of Rocinha, the largest
shanty town in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
AJready by November 1987 its
inhabitants numbered more than
200,000.
An office block in the Défense area
in the west of Paris.
LOS ANGELES
"Now, tell me about your trip."
"The trouble is, everywhere's beginning to look the
same," he replies, wearily.
"No," she says, "everything is different. Earth is
moving increasingly towards becoming one single city
of interconnecting messages, but each local area within
it defends its own distinctive identity."
"All right, let's imagine that we're taking a trip to
Newtown, an invisible city which has its center every-
where and its circumference nowhere. We shall visit its
upper reaches; in addition we shall also visit the nether
regions of Oldtown."
"Prepare for take-off," she says.
"Fasten your seat-belt, my friend. At night, above
으

The city of angels, whose bright
consteliations illuminate the face
of the Earth: the whole of
Western Europe, with the
the North of Spain; the East coust
of the United States; Japan; the
wethe Western delecte
mary other countries besides. The
picture shows the present extent
a nostalgia for earlier ages of
darkness, when our ancestors
could still enjoy the soothing
benefits of darkness and shadow.
A montage of night photographs
taken from a satellite.
our heads, you can barely see the stars, but when you
look down at Earth it looks as if all the stars have ended
up there, because by night the world's cities are all lit
up.
"The angelic hosts are coming in to land."
"An appropriate comment, seeing that were dis-
cussing angels from the point of view of humanity, work,
towns, language, and transmissions of every kind."
"You promise that later we'll get to talk about God
and the Devil?"
"For the moment, let's keep our feet on the ground,
if you'll pardon the expression. Let's fly over Holland,
or Honshu. Keep the map spread out on your knees.
Can you make out the cities that are marked on the
map? Amsterdam? Osaka? No, because all we can see
on the ground below us is houses and factories, with
hardly a break between them. The cities marked in our
atlases no longer match up to the reality on the
ground."
"So, seeing that our cities are becoming one big

urban sprawl and you can't tell one from the other, !
suppose we should redraw our atlases."
"For instance, Holland could be the name for the
urban sprawl that takes in Rotterdam, Haarlem and the
Polders; Japan becomes the name for that single city
that runs from one end of the island to the other. Urban-
ization means that cities are now taking over from
countries."
"It would be good to see this from even higher!"
"For sure! Let's suppose that on a fine June night a
satellite passes over Strasburg in France. What does it
see? The interlinking blocks of light of the super-giant
megalopolis Europe, beginning in Milan, crossing the
Alps via Switzerland, running up the Rhine through
Germany and Benelux, going off at an angle through to
England and crossing the Irish Sea to end up in Dublin.
A great herd of creatures ranging from Geneva to Lon-
don and beyond, from Italy to Ireland, as if congre-
gated by the light, with Paris seeming to stand guard,
like a shepherd, at a distance. This vast, dense, yellow

sprawl of ever-increasing connectedness is reproduced
in North America, along a line running from Baltimore
to Montreal; it can also be seen in the Five Dragons of
South-East Asia. Viewed from a satellite, it stands out
clearly. Electricity has driven darkness out of the
West."
"In days gone by, people used to think that the stars
were armies of angels. Now they've come down to
ground level. Like I said before, we're living like angels."
*They say that cities developed out of clearings in
forests; now these 'clearings' appear like 'darklings' in
between the cancerous growths of light from the city.
The pale mass of Mont Blanc and the Alps become oblit-
erated.
"One single city per region or island, then one per
continent, and finally one for the entire world. New-
town, with its interlinking brilliances, tends to become
one single entity.
"This slow filling-in with light is increasingly
encroaching on the remaining black patches of fields,
mountains, lakes and forests. while at the same time
remaining invisible for those who live in it, because its
lattice-work supplies, invents and multiplies every
kind of light, illumination, aerial views and science.

Solitude, silence, calm, serenity....
overcrowded cities that oulse with
the noise of motors, chainsaws,
pneumatic drills, radios and
loudsocakers. The onslaught of
lighting in every available space.
The proliteration of the written
word. Strident advertaing
Increasing speeds of journeys. The
agitation of human intercourse.
And the lightning passage of
time.... Are we willing to lose
peace and life, come what may?
an anonymous cowice monk
standing in the park of the Abbey
of Camaldoli, Tuscany, Italy, 1992.
"We now live in Newtown-under-Light. This city is
new, will soon become the world's only city, and will
have as much light as you can imagine ... it is like liv-
ing in the center of some huge bright eye; being blinded
by the light, we cannot see it."
"Contrary to what the Scriptures describe, where
the light shineth in darkness, here we have light exclud-
ing darkness."
"Caught in this web of light, we have no choice but
to live in it, try as we may to take refuge in secluded
valleys, or pack our ropes and go climbing up sheer
rock-faces in the mountains."
"Unlike the olden days, when prophets wailed in
lamentation over the fate of cities that had been
destroyed, today we weep for the loss and destruction
of forests and deserts, of monasteries and places of
retreat, of the silence and solitude which is so necessary
for thought. The city of light penetrates the shadows,
thrusts its disturbing presence into the midst of tran-
quillity, violates the silences of nature with its written
matter, eradicates species.... We can no longer hear the
chanting of our new lamentations, because we are
deprived of that ancient silent space which once lent
itself to transporting the clamors of despair.

MORNING
"Our culture has never taught us the phrases to cry
out against the death of the countryside, where it's
strangled by the horizontal and vertical cancerous
spread of this universal Newtown."
"How has it suddenly become vertical?"
"Has anyone ever calculated how many hundreds
of aircraft there are, at any given moment-and here
I'm talking about all the time—-hurtling round at two
thousand meters above the earth?"
"Millions of human beings— here are your angels,
Pia-inhabit the upper reaches of this city, which
remain absolutely stable, albeit moving at subsonic
speeds. I too number among their legions! Do you want
my address? A340; OSA-CDG; 14F. Decipher that, if
you please!"
"Type of aircraft; direction of flight; seat number."
"The people change, but the airline remains the
same."
"What should we call this upper zone?" Pia asks.
"Angeville, Agen, Angers...?"
"No, I know..! Los Angeles!"
They laugh.
"An upper zone which is reproduced at an even
higher level by rings of orbiting and stationary satel-
lites, launched from the equatorial suburbs of Kourou,
Baikonur and Cape Canaveral, and by a hundred net-
works for the communication of electromagnetic mes-
sages."
"The new aristocracy live less and less in the lower
zones, and increasingly inhabit these world-encom-
passing zones of airline flights and airwaves."
"They sleep there, and they eat there. Lo and
behold, the biggest restaurant in this aptly-named aerial
Los Angeles. In flight, day after day, it distributes hun-
dreds of thousands of identical, insipid, sickly-sweet
meals, which are eaten simultaneously by real neigh-
bors, all strapped in, sitting at identical troughs and
going through identical motions, as if by some predeter-
mined harmony. Who can I say is my neighbor? While
my neighbor is flying and drinking over Labrador, I'm
lunching and sleeping over Spain or New Zealand.
We're both close and distant at the same time."
"The Universal Supper. How would you paint that,
Leonardo? Who would ever have imagined that the
banquet of angels could be so banal?"
"We also have one identical auditorium, spread
across a thousand mobile locations, reproducing one
single video show which, whether in one's own home
or elsewhere, whether up in the air or down below, only
permits us to see the outside on condition that we stay
inside. Soon, Angel-Newtown will produce only one
single spectacle. Close the portholes against the Earth's
splendid landscapes, so that we can drug ourselves on
low-grade movies!"
"Urban space is gradually taking over the world at
the horizontal level, and now it's revolving too."
"It's taking off and flying. Is it the rotation of the
Earth that sets this ascendent sublimation of history in
motion, by centrifugal force? Having taken over the
world horizontally, Newtown is now taking off verti-
cally."
"The cities of earlier ages vied with each other in
constructing pyramids, ziggurats, skyscrapers, cathe-
dral towers and spires, reaching ever upwards as a way
of affirming their mastery, their pride, their yearnings
and their piety: a race to see who could get highest,
using the weighty forms of stone, iron, glass and con-
crete. Now, freed from substantiality and weightiness,
쓰

Will Newtown succeed where
Babel failed? Gathering together
every language in the world
Wore construe ton of tu
universal city ... that same city
networks-cover the entire faxe of
an Earth which may now be seen as
one single entity, by virtue of its
necessary interconnectedness. The
present-osy counterpostion of the
local and the global, of
multiculturalism and scientific
way, the story of the Tower of
the building or the lower o
Babel, sixteenth-century Flemish
painting. Pinacoteca Nazionale,
the inhabitants of Newtown have taken off and are
reaching heights that are almost literally astronomical.
"Are we now living at the top of the ladder of the
angels?"
"Let us go lower, to take a look at your ordinary,
average traveling mortal: the carpet that leads from the
side of his bed takes him downstairs into a hallway
which leads to a garage, where he finds the car which
will take him down the street, to connect with the
motorway which takes him to the airport, and a flight
to somewhere or other, during which he is able to
phone anyone who may care to talk to him, or he may
receive e-mail on his portable computer, via a link to the

LOS ANGELES
computer terminal that is sitting next to his bed.
"Nobody leaves interiors any more: of the hotel, of
the bus, of the station, of the aircraft … even of the her-
meticism which protects messages. As was the case
with the films, just now, so it is with Newtown. It has no
"Newtown is organized around a single ribbon, the
outside of which is indistinguishable from the inside, a
road which goes from a pedestrian footpath to a wide
boulevard, or, if you prefer-I click or zap-an airport
runway, or, if I choose differently—I zap or click—to a
fax line, a radio or a television... It interconnects with
such diverse media— the body, one's car, wings and air-
waves that one can say that it reproduces the curve
which passes through all the points of the variety
within which it develops, by penetrating through dif-
ferent dimensions."
"Isn't science amazing!" Pia cries, with mock ingen-
uousness.
"A path with a choice of options, which gives you
Mobius Street, Von-Koch promenade (he was the
Some places in the world
resemble a holary, the books of
which describe the world itself. To
pile up separate sheets, portolanos,
plans, maps and networks... one
on op or the outsieh
these intercommunikations? Since
we are now beginning to have
intercommunication, does this
mean that from now on we
than getting them to communicate
an astortment of kattered
among themselves. However,
countries?
A slate quarry in Alta, Norway.
inventor of the graph that passes through all points)
and Macintosh Avenue all rolled into one.
"By means of this single highway, the intersections
of which are constructed out of our multiple choices,
Newtown creates linkages between all spaces, whether
concrete or abstract, of this world and of any other: it
creates links between towns,
houses and othoes,
women and men, science and information, ideas and
notions... But also, and more particularly, between
cities and men, women and emotions, offices and
ideas.…."
"That's exactly what I've been looking for, Pantope.
Why is it that angels can pass everywhere? Because
they have the facility of this single universal highway.
You'll soon end up talking like me."
"Present-day communications break down every
obstacle: we now know how to join together things that
are very different — dots to words, spaces to discourses,
things to signs."
"So now we have the abstract mixed in with the
concrete, down to the tiniest of fragments! The word
has indeed become flesh!"
"The transport systems of previous ages were rec-
ognizable by the flatness of their networks. They con-
nected positions which were of the same nature and
within the same dimension: a map of Roman roads, for
instance, or the locations served by an airline company.
... These layouts were almost naturalistic, comparable
perhaps to rivers on a map— in fact one used to take the
coach in the same way that today one takes the plane,
and in other instances people took boats on rivers.
Cities as we have known them thus far, as ensembles of
streets, form one such independent grid.
"The new media traverse spaces of an entirely

different nature: physical space, yes, stones, peo-
ple, languages, the encyclopedia of knowledge ..
and they have us moving from the worldly to the
spiritual, from the earth to the alphabet, or vice
"Yesterday's media formed a mille-feuille, in which
the various different sheets, piled one on top of the
other, remained separate, isolated in their own dimen-
sion, while today's interconnectedness pierces verti-
cally through the stack, or punches through between
varieties, thus enabling them to intercommunicate."
"Pantope, what we have here is a pantopia taking
the place of Utopia. Imaginary travelers used to describe
the islands of Utopia-from the Greek ou topas-which
meant 'Nowhere'. But our angelic city is to be found
cvnneicre"
He is pleased to have his position confirmed. He
laughs.
"In the old days, when we left the countryside, the
square of the village where we lived or the yard where

The new city of angels bears
a striking resemblance to the
symbolic heavenly Jerusalem of
antiquity, our problems are similar
to the ones that exercized the
mind on the Mie doo
which Dante addressed in his
Divina Commedia: where, today,
wthin ches gloeal ey, are we to
find hell, purgatory and paradise?
The anawers to this question are
moment, painful, obvious and
crying out to be recognized.
tweifth-century fresco from the
ceiling of the Church of
Saint-Theudère, Saint-Chef near
Bourgoin-Jallicu, Isère, Franxe.
we worked, we were always tied to a particular net-
work of transport. But now we have the ability to
travel from any one point to any other.
"It is as if there exists everywhere an interchange
which is stable, universal and mobile, whose nodal
points connect things which, previously, were not
related
tinct realities."
"This invisible Newtown conceals at least two dis-
"An earthly city? Certainly, since, moving beyond
localized patches of terrain, it is invading the Earth as a
whole sea, continents, mountains and the very atmo-
sphere-in short, the entire planet, and not just the
humus from which we get our designation as 'humans'.
"A heavenly city? Yes, that too, because it is invad-
ing the upper regions of the stratosphere and reaching
out into the suburbs of interplanetary space, to Mars,
Venus and Jupiter. But above all because it is pursuing
a new vocation that is abstract, scientific and informa-
tional.

This tree-a Tree of Knowledge,
perhaps-had its roots in a lowly,
wretched shanty town; then it
grew, straight and upright, to soar
above the city. its sparse foliage
the wealthy upper city. it is
emblematic for a rescing of this
chapter, and for a reading of the
world as it is today.

LOS ANGELES
"In short, and interchanger or intermediary city. A
purgatory or transitional space between the hot hell of
old-style labor processes and the speculative paradise
of new technologies.
"Is this twin-reality Newtown constructing the
House of Angels?
"Should we rewrite Dante and St Augustine?
"The philosophers of classical antiquity made a dis-
tinction between things and signs. This separation is an
obstacle if we're looking to understand the world as it is
today.
"Newtown industrializes signs,
manufactures
things with information, constructs the universe with
wind, does not remain obtusely materialist within mat-
ter, but goes beyond and carries materialism into soft-
ware."
"Here the word becomes flesh—in other words
glass, steel, concrete, machinery, world. In techno-
logies the techno comes to be replaced by the logos."
"The population of Newtown no longer goes to
work—to the factory, or to the office-as you might
think, but to school. From the moment the day starts,
the teaching never stops, not even at lunchtime or at
night. Television, radio, mass media and telecommuni-
cations, never cease their endless chatter..."
"As a pedagogical society, Newtown only obeys
bosses and politicians if they become teachers."
"The industrial revolution has encroached on the
realm of the spirit, and is transforming this global city
into an intellectual cloister."
"Thus, once words come to dominate and occupy
flesh and matter, which were previously innocent, all
we have left is to dream of the paradisaical times in
which the body was free, and could run and enjoy sen-
sations at leisure. If a revolt is to come, it will have to
come from the five senses!"
"So Newtown is an unimaginable mediator, invisi-
ble and all-embracing, informatic, pedagogic, stable in
its rapid intercommunications- cars, aircraft, satellites,
transmissions and messages may circulate as fast as
they like, but there still remains in movement a more or
less equivalent number, which makes the city and with
which it hums-realizing intimate proximities across
immense distances. I never leave the woman who waits
for me, and whose voice I hear all the time wherever I
go, and whose face I see likewise, in image: invariant
albeit varying, moving but not moving-Newtown has
its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere.
"We have built a world city."
"Given that it's relentlessly invading space, does
this mean that it loses the possibility of history, which
previously progressed by means of exploration of
unknown territories? Does the end of extensivity mark
the end of our adventures? Have you noticed how
nobody has time any more?"
"It's not as simple as that. These spatial dimensions
presuppose violent movement; they presuppose enor-
mous forces at work, reserves of power to produce
them, as well as reserves of knowledge to liberate them.
Nowadays we live not so much in houses as in our sci-
ences: in mechanics since the classical era; in thermody-
namics since the nineteenth century; and in information
theory in our own century."
"Begotten by writing, scientific and technological
knowledge construct this new city, and at the same time
the city destroys anything of antiquity that remains
within it. Just take a look: industrial suburbs taking
over more and more of the countryside, to the point of

MORNINO
suffocation, and the aggressive hell of commercial
advertising-violent, gaudy and howling with ugli-
ness."
"You're exaggerating, Pia."
"Once, not so long ago," she says, "we placed our
hopes in the City of God, because we recognized that
human constructions were potentially so evil that one
day they might end up destroying themselves, or
destroying each other. Now here we have something
new in our history: this new city is a single, indestruc-
tible, universal entity which allows us to place our
hopes only in itself and in its achievements. Further-
more, people can only enter it if they know how to
access it everywhere. But, in former times, paradise was
only conceived and imagined as the elsewhere of inac-
cessible hope.
"Neither the great religious traditions, nor the
genius of Dante ever foresaw that one day we would be
able to communicate instantaneously all across the
world, by technologies resembling the Golden Bough.
"Once upon a time men were mobile, errant adven-
turers, heroes, half-gods or born of men; and in those
days they traveled through dangerous lands and rivers,
through meadows of asphodel and the fire of God. By
strength or ingenuity they would overcome a thousand
obstacles, or span in an instant the distances between
Earth and heaven. In any event, they were required
either to defy death or to seek salvation by pursuing a
life of charity.
"Nowadays the city even works for everyone. This
Newtown is a vertical city, a new purgatory, which
comes close to paradise, but in the process produces
hell."
"No!"
What value do we we set on
these flying angels, these gods,
these highest inhabitants of the
hypertechniel verdest city,
Astronauts in a state of
weightlessness.

"Yes! Its sciences and technologies, its movements
and its motive forces-animal power, muscle power,
coal, oil, electricity, atomic energy-bring it to the
point of occupying all space on Earth, whereupon it
then reaches up, instantly, into the sky, as high as it
can. It develops by means of savage competition,
rivalry, dispute, emulation, fighting, assaults, wars
and never-ending internecine conflicts. The flames of
all this feed and fuel its incessant rise, while at the
same time ejecting downwards, by way of exhaust,
the debris and dross of increasing numbers of spaces
and men-obsolete, beaten, overtaken, defeated, con-
victed of errors, faults and crimes, and reduced to
ignorance, to miserable poverty, to disease and death.
"This intermediary Newtown, firing off into the
heavens like a comet, produces a heaven that is avail-
able for fewer and fewer people, and an increasingly
extensive and substantive hell. And it leaves human
cities destroyed in its wake. Is it the bottom of the lad-
der, or the denouement of the action?"
She continues, warming to her theme:
"Our cultures contain no text, either literary or reli-
gious, to enable me to sing the modern lamentation that
I'm wanting to put into song:
they're in their death throes, about to die, crushed
under the weight of their growing population;

how many towns and villages of Africa are suffer-
ing the horrors of famine and the nightmare of epi-
demics;
how many cities of the Americas are laboring under
the pressure of huge shanty towns, exponential growth
and the prostituted delinquency of millions of children;
cities in Asia with no refuse disposal services,
invaded by rats and threatened by plague;
cities in Bangladesh, drowned under biblical rain-
storms because they have no flood defences;
a hundred unnamed communities living with the
threat of Aids…
...and Newtown itself, penetrated, breached and
... Compared to the value of
these dead humans lying next to
each other, in the horizontal,
flooded-out city down below?
After the monsoon, near the
village of Balvadar-Palli, Bengal,
todia, November 19, 1977.
invaded by the Third World in the form of the Fourth
World: unemployment, drugs, poverty, destitution,
indigence, migration, dirt, delinquency, dereliction.
Here we see it, before our very eyes-Oldtown of the
Archangels. It too is one single city today, embodying,
summarizing and incorporating the destroyed cities of
earlier phases of our culture and our memories. It is
vaster in extent even than Newtown itself, and is inte
grally linked with it, except that it cannot hope to rise
so high towards the stars. They reappear before us—
new and ancient Troys, destroyed; Jerusalem, demol-
ished; Rome, conquered, sacked and ravaged; Con-
stantinople, burned; Hiroshima, bombed ….. as lowly

A NI
E L E S
old quarters of Newtown. Here, most particularly, we
have our most ancient history, unmoving now, as if
strung out in extensivity, for a general repetition, deso-
late witnesses of the era in which, being subjected to
the empire of old necessity, we did not produce our
misfortunes by means of science.
"The time of history now appears frozen, as if
immobile in space, like some Dantean scale of degrees.
"In this ancient city, our first parents are dying. Our
originary, religious founding culture is dying of famine,
dirt, disease and dereliction among the actual and pri-
mal chaos which Newtown carries within it and pro-
duces by its rising.
"There's an answer to the question, my friend: what
are we talking about, across the networks which form
the universe?
"Of this primordial death, the node of the tragedy."
"A city of the most ferocious inequality?" he asks.
"Yes," she says, "a ladder of injustice."
The Trojan Wars, the sack of
Kome, the dekructions ot Aiba.
Jerusalem and Athens, the fire of
Alexandris, the taking of
Constantinople... In history and
was terreineohcurooew
built on the ruins and destruction
of these primitive cities.... The
nolaKeinurtohhtreon
London, the sun of Hiroshima…
Is this history being perpetuated?
Which America was the basis for
the disappesrance of the primitive
CwrcooewenuYant
Over what ruins does the new and
universal city now fly?
Undecorated royal houses,
close to the prison quarters,
woenu ticen.2e thertn
high up in the Andes,
Peru.

Jacob took of the stones of that
place, and put them for his pillows,
And he dreamed, and beholda
ladder set on the earth, and the top
of it reached to heaven: and behold
the anges of god sscending and
ord stood above it, and said, i am
the Lord God of Abraham thy
father, and the God of isaac."
(Genesis, 28:11-13)
Iacob's Ladder, Avignon School,
Musée du Petit-Palais, Avignon,
LADDERS
The messages carried by our voices
are made up of various
components: a basis consisting of
background noise; then a musicality
of sounds accompanied by
phonemes, varying according to the
language that is being spoken; and
finally meaning. For what
realia ton die michae
message-bearing ensemble of these
scales or ladders unceasingly
Ha nade ternaton dos commu
our world-fashioned as it is by the
word-our writings and our words.
A spestrogram of the human voice.
Pia says:
"My brother Jacques is arriving from Rome; do you
want to come with me to meet him? He's traveling with
his daughter; she'll be missing school.... We could
make up for it."
"No, I'm going to get some sleep to catch up with
my jet lag. I'll meet you for lunch."
She gives him the key to a room at the hotel.
Jacques materializes out of the crowd, and as he tells
her about his trip Pia holds the little girl in her arms and
asks if she saw any angels on the way.
"Oh, lots," she says, snuggling up half asleep on
her aunt's shoulder.

Hermes, the messenger god of
Classical antiouty, hes shattered on
Tr tioor uh ththies troor
painted on a ceiling): we recoonize
him by his statt and his winged
helmet. The Christian medistor
takes his plce on the pedestal.
soth Meercuty and Chnist are at the
point of death, their limbs wracked
and their bodies torn. Messengers
cioappese in célation to then
understanding their death agonies
Teiocawhane hett
Chabeeee, der Kne tcirenine
of this book, Gabriel, the traveler
and passenger, dies similarly. He
bears within him the <ontents ot
this book. As Pia and Pantopo
speax, they lsten to his sierke, or
Tewetree wentn wrilenre
Mwe totht
(c 1500-1602), Triumon of
Christianity, or The Exaltation of
the taith. Kaphsel Stanze

MORNING
Jacques says:
"On the ceiling of the last Raphael stanza in the Vat-
ican, there's a picture called The Exaltation of Faith. It
depicts a statue of Hermes lying shattered on the floor."
"The mediator replaces the messenger."
"Was our vast multiplicity of angels spawned from
the scattered limbs of the shattered idol?"
"We might imagine so, but I'm not sure."
"From then on, they began to appear everywhere,
filling every conceivable space. Rome is absolutely full
of them: you find them sculpted, in bas-reliefs, painted
or embossed, every shape and size, of each sex or of no
sex, naked, half-dressed, showing a knee, a shoulder,
sometimes even a bottom, all chubby and dimpled.
Immodestly modest. There are infants, portrayed in
cloned series of winged heads, and adolescents, and
tall, serious-looking adults.... They pass by in clouds,
armies, legions, bundles, sudden gusts, multitudes...
"They bring back, reject, underline, overflow the
pagan polytheism….."
"You're talking heresy, dear brother," she says.
".. which is maintained and tamed within
Catholicism, a monotheism less logical or rigorous than
that of its competitors or reformers, but of an unrivalled
anthropological wealth. The baroque art of Rome and
Prague is totally immersed in the chaos of their disor-
der."
"Again!"
"And just imagine, if they were to drop all the
solemn, draped bodies which they bear up as if on ele-
vators... That would be a fair old ruckus—a collapse
of stout parties all round!
"Are these rascals already laughing up their feath-
ered sleeves at the prospect?"
"What are they? Truants?"
"God must be crowded out. There must be a terri-
ble crush at his court; there seem to be more and more
angels all the time. Innumerable, in fact. I counted
ninety-seven angels inside and outside one single rere-
dos. Why the devil so many?"
"I don't see where the Devil comes into it."
"Angels are charged with the maintenance of order
and proper behavior, but they behave pretty abom-
We use the word infant ofo
inably. Rowdily, even. Their jostling disturbs the unity
person not yet able to speak
The infant gurgles, babbles,
of God and the rarity of saints!"
murmurs, croons..... On the other
clusters, little cherubs or putti,
provide an excellent
representation of the ground
of hubbub which precedes all
"Unthinkable!"
hand, a gathering of people
"True, though! Their chaos overflows and crosses
buzzes and a crowd clamors. Flying
Jean Honore Fragonard
the edges of pictures and paintings: a vaguely defined
among this configuration of fluffy
(1732-1806), Groups of Children
crowd which both accompanies and precedes religious
douds, is the thunder threatens, a
in the Sky, 1767. Musée du Louvre,
portrayals, exemplary figurations, every image that is
crowd of infants grouped in little
Paris, France.
seen and every text that is narrated.
쓰

Music is so called because it is the
every art-no art excels without it
As an acoustic support and a
precondition of meaning, music is
a constant worsting presence
beneath our dialogs, our
exchanges, our communication of
messsges. K buries our bodies
even before we speak. it is
universal, in the sense of being
collectivities. Would there be a
world without it? it is a
and all orders. It is necessary to
beauty and unites works of artistic
creation. In the painting, thei
orchestra is portrayed at the side
of Eve. Located symmetrically in
relation to god. thes oin chot
reading the sheet music at the
lectern, is situated next to Adam.
Music and song take their rightful
place back at the origins of things
along with God, Christ, the Virgin
Van Eyck brothers (1366-1426;
1385-1440), the Ghent Altarpiece:
Making Music, 1426-32. Detail
upper right corner. St Bavo

"Yes. While the messenger angels are out on the
highways, the hooligan angels are hanging round on
street corners and climbing over railings. From down
below you always see a bit of a knee. Street-kids, they
are. They climb up columns, hang around in bunches
round balconies, and outwit the authorities. They get in
to see shows without paying, they make a mockery of
the law, and they're not much inclined to obedience.
Space is their property; they make it theirs by inundat-
ing it, by growing assemblies of waves and numbers,
by slipping adeptly through the interstices.
"Off the street, angels pass through walls and slip
through the bars of palaces and prisons. They send jail-
ers to sleep and set prisoners free. They don't stand still
for a moment, and nothing can stand in their way.
"They are invisible and visible, silent and thunder-
ous, concealed and light-bearing. They don't just come
through doors-they can even pass through windows.
In the same way that sound does. For sure, they must
be made up of waves."
"Listening to you, anyone would think you'd heard
them..."
"I have, I have. When you listen, you might hear
the sound of a yowling cat, or the hurly-burly chaos of
a waterfall."
"You're deafening me!"
"This riotous assembly unstitches harmony and
creates charivari, makes disorder out of order to surf
once again on primal waters."
"We must be coming to the Flood...."
"By good fortune or by a miracle, God is not capa-
ble by himself of instilling order in his assembled
angels. His spirit is still surfing on the angelic waves, as
if he had never left the inceptive minute of the big
noise. Angels in cathedrals: an originatory Big Bang, a
gigantic, silent explosion of sound and number.
"God presents himself everywhere at the same time
in the form of absence; this is where angels arrive, tak-
ing advantage of this lacuna of ubiquity-divine small
change, lieutenants of this absence.
"They gather in innumerable murmuring multi-
tudes. They dance and sing in choirs. They raise cheers
and acclamations. In their silence they make noise visi-
ble in peaceful basilicas."
"Oh come on, you can't make noise visible!"
"Yes. These angels enable us to see the basic noise of
the physical world, that of heaven and of theology.
"And then only the sound of psalteries and
organs."
Above the constant but fluctuating noise of the free-
way interchanges surrounding the airport, they hear
the bass roar of aircraft taking off, one after the other,
interspersed with the baritone sound of other aircraft
landing.
Snatches of song reach them from the bars, mixed
with the announcements for planes arriving and leaving.
"The way that these angels assemble in their multi-
tudes is represented as chaotic. But certain angels stand
out. These are the ones who play the trumpets, lyres
and lutes... or the ones who sing in choirs. ... Mean-
while, at a higher level, there are the archangels. They
are fewer in number, and are no longer anonymous.
"They have names. They bear messages, and
among these messages is one, only one, which becomes
dialog, and announces that the Word will be made
flesh. What we have depicted here is a ladder, which
쓰

MORNING
begins with noise and moves upwards to a reality
which is living, fleshly and personal, passing via the
necessary intermediaries of music, song and dance.
"At the bottom of the ladder, therefore, we have the
swarming multitude of the world's big noises, whose
chaos precedes music, and the universal harmony of
music in turn precedes meaning.
"On the way down, the flesh comes down from the
Word; this in turn descends towards language; and this
goes further downwards into melody, which may then,
on occasion, spread itself as noise.
"Plunged into chaos, the angels construct the Word
and the body, by means of song. The fluctuating multi-
ple mounts, in procession, towards unity,
which
descends again towards multiplicity, when the flesh
loses its unity in words, and words in the repetitive and
sonorous blah-blah-blah.
"I have spent my whole trip contemplating these
never-ending climbings and descendings."
"Your Jacob's Ladder makes up for the preceding
one. However, it seems rather triangular, since it begins
from an infinite number of assemblies and rises to a sin-
gle oneness via intermediate stages of increasing rari-
ties."
"That's just an effect of perspective, when you see it
from down here on earth!"
"I have a sense of these same degrees existing in the
body: the hot life of the body makes a confused hub-
bub, the noise of which resolves into a delicate interior
music. If I pay sufficient attention, I can detect its con-
tinuous and singular tonality... I hear the primitive
vocalization of my flesh which is what creates my exis-
tence, my time, and then my identity.
"I hear that, therefore I think."
In Van Eyck, religion installs
harmony as one of the premisses of
creation. Here geometry provides it
visual pattern, arrived at by means
of differential equations. Each
representing these things. Pia
proposes to Pantope a translation
of religious reocesentation into
rational statement, or of the Ghent
Altarpiece into the mode
portrayed on the facing pagt, and
vice versa. Needless to say, the
representation would appear far
more chaosk. it the bockground
noise were allowed to intervene:
the picture which Pia would then
obtain oy her propoxe translatior
would perhaps look like the full-
page picture which follows
overleaf.
Computer model of a sound
"This scale is what constructs me. I must not allow my
noises to be destroyed by external interferences ... by
listening to too much music. It is on the basis of this
harmony (often broken) that my words, my verbaliza-
tions, are constructed-the first phase... I then pray
for the second phase to catch on...
"So where is your scale or ladder to be found,
then?"
"In the external world, the world that is chaotic and
ordered, proliferating and sensate, harmonious and
describable in algebraic formulae."
"From base noise to unit equation?"
"And there you have physics."
"And then, in my internal consciousness, from the
biochemistry of cells to insightful invention, from the
burning stuff of life to thought.
"Thus, both within me and outside me."
"Finally it is to be found in technological commu-
nications networks, and in conversations, ranging
from the hubbub of amusement arcades to dialogs

and collectives that are productive of new things."
"And here I hear the sound of aircraft and the
crowds in the airport."
"On this single ladder with its four exemplifica-
tions— physical, individual, technological and social—
angels are constantly rising and tumbling down; thus
they fill the space of our world and our spirit, our pro-
ductions and our collectives. They swim around in
them like small fry, diving in and coming out again.
They fly in them like birds. And in so doing, they fash-
ion and weave, construct and maintain."
"What?"
"... the universal principle of individuation, per-
haps? Beginning at the bottom of the ladder, angels
without bodies, innumerable and non-individuated,
move slowly upwards, until the point where they
emerge, recognizable, at the top."
"No. The act of transmission in itself cannot create!"
"Yes it can-in transforming the bearer and the
receiver of the message."
"No, not at all, because the act of transmission does
not always create: as the angels disperse in order to sing
of God, the creator of all good, they may in fact conceal
him."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The expression 1 believe in God the Creator', fac-
torem coeli et terrae, means, among other things: If I
believe in Creation, which is the only good and all
good, and thus divine, I cannot believe in the transmis-
sion.'"
"You're eliding the term 'Maker' from the actual
maker to the transporter. Like the French facteur, both
maker and transporter."
"As they multiply, the legions of transmitters or
commentators may hide creation-the only good and
all good- settling on the fields like clouds of locusts,
dimming the sun and devouring all living things in
their path.
"The fall of the angels comes in the passage
from creation to copy; from production, which is

Order emerges from the disorder
of chaos... Music flattens the
prickles and spikes of noise and
raises itself as a universal quality
abore the hubbub….; good angels
sound trumpets while their fellow
angels battle with fallen angels
and the forces of evil, lashing them
tumbling down from the light-well
misshapen... One may either
choose between these three
versions, which appear as separate
and distinct realities, or one may
attempt to grasp the single truth
which is corcealed beneath these
translations: the book which you
are reading is such an atempt.
Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525-69),
The Fall of the Rebeflous Anges,
1562(7) Musée Royal des Beaux-
Arts, Brussels, Belgium

MORNING
divine, to commentary, which is base, and to para-
sitic transmissions. The good tidings can do without
a bearer, since the body and blood constitute the
meaning of the message. Create! Make meaning
with flesh, or make flesh with the Word; death to
bodily effort! God creates, the Devil does not create,
there's the difference: it is only Creation that distin-
guishes good from evil. The act of creation makes
goodness. God is the Devil, he more or less creates
the world."
"Get up that ladder, avoid the Fall!"
"The living person whom you described earlier,
replacing the shattered Hermes on his plinth, then goes
on to die on the Cross: the mediator is a figure in his
death throes from the beginning to the end of time.
Both these gods are actually dying together, both the
old and the new. If the message and the transmission do
not die, they do not bring creative fruition."
"I like this ladder of yours, of creation, both human and
divine!"
"What if we were to speak the language of angels?
God is unique, only God is God. Do angels announce
monotheism?
"The answer is yes. As messengers, they propagate
everywhere the glory of the one God, radiating from
the centre to the periphery:
"However the answer is also no: we are monothe-
ists, but all of us, whether Jews or peasants of the
Garonne, remain inveterate pagans. Can the same be
true of angels?
"Yes. Gabriel, Raphael and Michael, as named
archangels, detach themselves from the hordes of
saintly cohorts, to fight or to act as guides. They take on
The upper extremity or final
in both image and text, how the
ascent of that ladder constructs the
symphoni, fitting, harmonious,
composed of human forms and
connectined inumen
surrounds the Word like a halo,
and the Word is itself flesh and
messege corn or woman, bot
portrayed at the center, here.
In other words, more than
existing to be heard, musid
furnishes a vital nourishment,
indispensable to body and soul
The Concert of Angels, Flemish
school, sixteenth century. Museo
de Bella Arte, Bilbao, Spain.
a defined role within religious history, in the same way
that the multitudinous gods of antiquity each had their
particular places. Do angels represent a passage from
one divine regime to another? Does Lucifer thus reign
over these polytheist powers?
"For pantheism, everything is divine. Trees and
stars are gods. You are a god too, you whom I love and
who are now listening to me. So are angels still panthe-

ist? Certainly they are, because by the fact that they
pass everywhere and occupy all space, they enable
divinity to be seen at all points: your guardian, who
shadows you like your shadow, makes me see that you
are God, just as my guardian, who abandons me, makes
me forget it every day. There are so many angels, they
exist in such extraordinary numbers, that one finds
them everywhere, testifying to divine ubiquity:
"So here we have the arithmetic plain and simple:
one, several or all. Angels create confusion in this naïve
logic of numbers, as applied to theology.
"They slip nimbly beneath theories of sets, they
are able to pass through the walls of rigor as easily as
through the walls of prisons. The body of angels goes
beyond limits; their number makes a mockery of
counting: their logic abhors inflexibility. Or rather,

they inhabit quite distinct levels, but they move nois-
ily up and down from one landing to another, swamp-
ing the intermediate space with the clouds of their
presence. Are they capable of slipping in and out of
dimensions?
"So, they testify to polytheism in the face of the one
single God; they affirm one single god in paganism;
they spread pantheism everywhere, in singing in the
fields... They testify to the hazy in the face of exacti-
tude; they represent homogenous law within raggedy
Al ritual manuscrics of the Jewish
episodes from the leaving
ot Laypt and the exodus. moses
stands on Mount Sinai with the
Ten Commandments in his hand,
ready to show them to the
Hebrew people gathered below
him; above, three winged angels
D
emerge from the clouds,
blowing on trumpets.
Again we have that same
legend: music assists in the
process of the emergence
iltuminated Haggadah, 1583,
Crete.

LADDERS
space; they stitch together tatters, tear the monotone,
men before women, males before females, breaths and
flows of the world, light of stars, life of animals, spirits
of language, they connect the unconnected, disconnect
the connected, and between them tie up and untie all
orders.
"Never irrational, they create confusion in the ratio-
nal, which is still going down the straight line of logic
and exactitude.
"Angels have always been successful in something
that I have been trying to imagine for a long while: a
universe which is mixed, dazzling, rigorous, hermetic
and Pan-like, serene and open, a philosophy of commu-
nication, traversed by systems of networks and inter-
ferences, and demanding, in order to be able to estab-
lish itself, a theory of the multiplicities, of the chaos,
hubbub and noise, that come before all theory."
"Explain yourself," says Pia, slightly mystified.
"A theory deploys, essentially, a system of mono-
tonal ideas. In Greek the word means 'procession': a
parade of modest virgins in white skirts, followed by
serious-looking beardless youths and doting old men
engaged in some ritual; exposed, set to the step, a sweet
crowd.
"When necessary, angels are quite capable of
arranging themselves and aligning themselves, form-
ing theories or spelling out positions; but under normal
conditions their disorder forms a pre-theory, a scattered
stock awaiting systematization.
"Before the ordering of turbulence, or after it, what
rules is the distribution of hazard and chance.
"Out in the playground, the ringing of the school
bell and standing in rows at the classroom door is pre-
ceded by the hubbub of playtime; a second ringing of
the bell, at the end of lessons, breaks the same ranks,
and the hubbub begins again."
"That's a lot clearer," Pia murmurs, brushing her
hair back.
Archangels come bringing the annunciation of the
flesh, and they speak; they come from a space which is
peopled by angels singing; these angels too are in tran-
sit, coming from another space, where other angels play
on lutes and trumpets, producing a divine music; they
in turn emanate from a space which is sown by a noise
produced by myriad multitudes of other angels...
On this fluid ladder, God, the One and Only, is per-
manently in the process of unmaking himself into a
multiplicity of gods, idols and ideas, which, in their dif-
ference, are permanently in the process of unifying
themselves into one single god. The angels, the world,
you and me, men and history all move within this ris-
ing and descending flow.
With weightiness, we always tend to descend
towards polytheism. Angels enable us to see it, and
thus defend us from it.
Pia continues:
"Since you have so skilfully constructed this gentle
ladder of the Word, may I ask you a question?"
"Are you setting a trap for me?"
"Not at all. Look: we all speak different lan-
guages-French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese.... Then,
in each language, we all express our various trades: the
carpenter,
the
sailor, the florist, the cook, the
astronomer and the pharmacist's assistant all have spe-
cific terminologies proper to their trades-prescrip-
tions, plants, speeds of working, planks of wood, and

MO & N I NC
so on. ... This terminology is sometimes so specific that
people from outside the profession may find it a closed
book. Now, imagine that you're homing in on people's
everyday desires on the boss shouting out orders, on
all the various different ways of expressing hope, law,
fear, truth, love, wants, hatred ...
"... this makes a highly rich and complex mosaic,
which is the very raw material of writers."
"Could l imagine pulling all this together, all in one
go?"
"Do you mean speaking in tongues, like on the day
of Pentecost?"
"Not like that. Differently. Let's try doing a sum."
"In what dialect are you intending to do it?"
"In plain language. So, what strange act of lan-
guage is it that links all other states of language, by
links, arms, bridges, and relays, whether fluctuating
or stable, like in a floating unknotted sheet? For exam-
ple:
"the calm of complete silence, the desert, the night;
"patient and attentive listening, utterly penetrating
through all muteness;
"drowning in a sea of meaningless background
noise;
"the fire, the heat of life;
"the chaos of wild shouting, the raucous roaring
following on a wound, the savagery of the appeal, the
imposing cruelty of need, the plaintive crying of
desire;
"new insight, and the coming of rhythm;
"a psalmody with a repeating tempo which beats
its head against a wall;
"the melancholy of musical uplift;
"the construction of a well-blended choir;
The entry of the human
community of the primitie
Church as represented by the
Apostles-into the order and
concert of the angels. The
definition, aim and puroose of
ecclesiastical liturgy is to imitate
the gestures, dances, music, songs,
wore orders or deeds in tire
presence of God.
Enquerrand Quarton (c. 1410-
66), The Coronation of the Virgin,
1453, detail, School of Avignon.
Musée de l'Hospice, Villeneure-les-
Avignon, France.
"the acute need of communication within dialog:
"a plummeting loss of one's self in some other,
whether present or absent;
"the desire to seduce, and to tell the truth at last.
"But also, and on the other hand:
"the avowal of the secret;
"desire and emotion in a state of upheaval;
"the emergence, expression, presence and constitu-
tion of the body and of consciousness by means of
sound and meaning in their nascent state;

"the ritual accompaniment of gestuality, ranging
from sedate dance to frenetic convulsions;
"the total choreographic performance of the body
in all dimensions of the workd;
*the contemplation of things objectively des-
cribed;
"the exact and lucid statement of things just as they
"the assumption of the future within global history.
from the Creation until the end of time;
"the magnificence of the present and the enchant-
ment of time:
"the lightning brevity between the now of saying
and the hour of death;
"the call of one's relations, of others, of neighborli-
ness, of the federation of hominids;
"the pathetic evocation of exile.….
"What strange state of language associates, in one
single and unique emission (which we could call uni-
versal all its statutes, known and found, including:

MORNING
"supply and demand, the gift, exchange, remorse,
regret, pardon, the desired option;
"the loving self-abandonment of good will;
"juridical formality, the excellent rigor of formal
proofs;
"the performative act;
"the formation of a collective network out of the
most intense solitudes….?
"So, do you recognize the integral sum of acts of lan-
guage?™
"No."
"Let yourself sink into prayer.
"How can we understand prayer, since it is all-
embracing and envelops, in the totality of its language,
everything that is real, me, others, the world, history
and God?"
"Can we say that it is indicative, in short, of the way
of writing philosophy?"
"In constructing the word from its elementary
beginnings, one arrives at its end — that is, at the sum
which one calls prayer.
"Did you know that the best definition of the
liturgy recommends imitating the angels?"
"The stalls of monks form a horizontal ladder,"
Jacques concludes, laughing.
"Because they construct the Word. Whether they
behave riotously, make noise, sing, dance, play music,
speak, dialog, announce, or finally participate in the
creation of flesh. angels are praying all the time."
"And philosophizing?"
The word 'monk' derives from
the Greek monos, which means
"alone'. Since monks live in
communite history
dictionaries draw attention to the
curious contradiction between
mone sur Old code and the odin
of the word. Now, drawing on the
same root, the philosopher
define solitary elements which
had no relationship with any
were nonetheless constitutive of
the world. There we have a
satisrectory non contradictory
definition of mechanical order
and social life such as the practice
seclusion: those who separate
themselves enjoy the best
understanding. To whom should
messages be addressed, if they are
to be most effective in gathering
us together? to others, or to a
third but transcendent party?
Matins in a monastery, 1991.
The Chartemouse Of Valerite

As the bearer of the message.
the messenger appears... but he
himself out of the picture, in order
that the recipient hear the words
of the preson who sent the
woode one or tweenem
When the messenger takes on too
much importarke, he ends up
diverting the channel of
transmission to his own ends.
Ween than undersho
sin and the fall of angels, who are
normally faithful intermediaries,
by the good of bad, successtu
or unsuccessful functioning
of their message-bearing
Max Ernst (1891-1976), The Fair
of an Angel, 1922. Ernst O. E.
Fischer Collection, Krefeld,
Fra Angelico (1387-1455),
Annunciation (second scene of the
Armadio degli Argenti), c. 1450,
tempera. Museo San Marco,
Florence, Italy.
APPARITIONS
Jacques asks, ironically:
"So what about the fall of the angels? Do they all
come tumbling down the ladder?"
Pia replies, seriously:
"Don't confuse the construction of an order, of a
meaning or of the Word, with the hierarchy of power
deployed by Newtown and its message systems. All our
crimes derive from a desire for power and glory, where-
as angels sin in their role as messengers."
"What kinds of indiscretion might be committed by
an intermediary?"
"If he's not happy with his brokerage fee or his tip,
the courier who's carrying the gold or the silver might
decide to help himself."

APPARITIONS
Lonty, faithful window glass:
does it let the rays of daylight
pass... or do the painted design.
the colors, the beauty of the
change the white light of the sun
and spread it into the spectrum
of its secret composition?
The Annunciation,
as depicted here, asks the same
window alass.., the question of
the intermediary: if he is too
magnificent, he may intercept
the message; if he is too discreet,
he won't make it heard.
Must he appear or disappear? Both
The Annunciation, latel
thirteenth-century stained glass
window. Kloster-Neuburg
Monastery, Austria.
"Stop thief!"
"That's why certain bills are made payable to the
bearer', whereas we protect others with a signature."
"In order to defend them from the messengers?"
"The message bearer who passes on a message
might retain some of its information."
"Parasite!"
"That's why we seal letters, and put despatches
into code. We do it to protect them from indiscretions."
"From interceptors, rather..!"
"An interpreter may actually obstruct a conversa-
tion."
"Traduttore traditore, as they say. The translator as
betrayer."
"And a representative may pass himself off as the
authority that he represents."
"Out in front of the procession, the little drummer
boy is taken for the emperor!"
"The most commonplace and least serious lie
—because it is the most tangible and easily spotted—
affects only the content of messages: a simple lie....
Whereas the one which we are discussing is invisible
and more perverse, because it changes, bends and dis-
torts the channel itself.
"Since he controls the channel of communication,
the delegate, the envoy, lies better than the liar, and
deceives better than the swindler, because he assumes
the power and the glory of the person who sent him.
What's more, he remains invisible, because he only
appears in order to speak of another."
"So we have the angel passing himself off for God?"
"Is it possible to control the betrayal, the para-
sitism, this sum of lies produced by the obstruction of
message systems? Can we propose a code of practice
for messengers: how not to steal the thing that is trans-
mitted?"
"Easy to spot the problem, hard to supply the
ethic!"
"The answer is that one should be prepared to fade
oneself out behind the message. Have you ever had the
experience of talking with somebody whose language
you don't speak, and who doesn't speak yours either?
You use the services of an interpreter, who slips in
between you as a third party. All of a sudden the con-
versation takes off and communication becomes easy
and fluent. You and he are no longer talking through a
go-between. You look each other in the eye. You no
longer really know who's talking and who's replying,
because the body, voice and intonation of the inter-
preter disappear, suddenly merged into direct trans-
mission. You have the impression that you are under-
standing the incomprehensible, that you've come close

MORNING
enough to touch it! This dissolving of the intermediary
comes close to the mystic experience."
"Should the one who is doing the transporting
never appear?"
"How many moralities demand annihilation!
Here's another disappearance: the body and voice of
the teacher disappear in relation to the text that he's
expounding in the lecture theatre. A lecture only suc-
ceeds if philosophy herself appears, in the flesh, to take
the lecturer's place, and he lets her have it. Imagine it, a
dazzling woman enters the hall by a secret door and
despatches the teacher who had summoned her up in
secret and who was speaking in her name. A miracle!
"On the other hand, there are scoundrels who pre-
tend that they themselves are philosophy, and whose
disciples are then obliged to speak only of them, never
of her.
"The body of the messenger appears or vanishes.
The intermediary writes himself out of the picture. He
must not present himself, or dazzle, or please... or
even appear.
"That's why we don't see angels."
"That's why their mouths are dumb!"
"I'm not joking. And that's why the question of
their sex is extremely serious. It has to be answered in
the negative, obviously. If the messenger gets pleasure,
the transmission becomes obstructed."
"Marry the brothel madam? Sleep with the pro-
curess? Never!"
"The first duties of the transporter are: eclipse, step-
ping aside, flight and withdrawal."
"I see: the worst angels are the ones which are seen;
the best disappear."
"Guess who appears in apparitions. The intermedi-
ary? God himself? Or Satan, the fallen angel and liar?"
"Too difficult, dear sister."
"Apparitions take place all the more rarely because
they are a serious infringement of the obligation of dis-
appearing."
"This has become difficult to understand--it's
downright contradictory!"
"The fact of appearing makes for a fall, even though
it remains necessary!"
"If the angel or the messenger has to withdraw, dis-
sipate and vanish, how can he appear?"
"In the sixth chapter of the Book of Judges, the
Angel of the Lord appears to Gideon and speaks to him.
Replying to the young man, the Lord himself speaks
... there is this hesitation, occuring several times, over
who is the interlocutor, God or the Angel. Is it the Angel
or is it God?
"Some commentators claim to find here a dual
aspect of the text: an old text, which is polytheist, main-
tained within the new, which is monotheist. Never
listen to interpreters who try to get between the lines
and you: they are fallen angels themselves! Read
directly, because the Bible and the good books provide
better enlightenment and instruction than their com-
mentators! These latter merely put up obstacles."
"Captors or interruptors!"
"Take a good look around you at the myriad
crowds of messengers in this new world of ours that is
so overflowing with message systems. Listen to these
legions of Angels, these bearers of messages: news pre-
senters, popularizers of science, representatives of
authorities, administrators and counter-clerks... Very
quickly-most often without intending it, but by the

The world of brothels abounds
procuresses and ponces...
the costly parasites of desire
"oh, now tone door
human relations take on the form
of women or men, of money or
animais ..- good of bad angels.
How does the angel come to be
an animal? is whomicin
and Inadame both sit there.
bloated on food, their eyes not
meeting, the little dog yups and
serves ds on inserncolary
between them. Would they know
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec
Monsieur, Madame
and the Dog, 1893.
white loubuse Loutrec
Albi, France.
simple fact of their position on the channel-they take
on more importance than the news, whether good or
bad, that they are presenting, more assurance than the
science whose discoveries they are popularizing, more
strength
and dexterity than the athletes on whose
defeats and victories they are commentating, more for-
tune than the economy whose wealth they are evaluat-
ing, more glory than criminals and heads of state...
They steal the value which they are transmitting, they
translate messages to their own profit, and maintain a
parasitic hold on the channels.... They appear, unceas-
ingly, instead of disappearing.."
"I remember when the first interviews were shown
on television. The person who was asking the questions

MORNING
stayed out of sight! Nowadays, when people are grilled
on TV, they're lucky if they get four seconds in which to
reply. Now all we admire is the interviewer.
"However it is necessary for him to appear and
speak, in order to deliver the message! It is the fact of
message systems that produces the perverse effect, not
the perversity of individuals as such.
"The same law applies to language: critics are get-
ting the upper hand over authors. And to music: our
composers are down at heel, but their interpreters are
wealthy. And the same goes for fruit and vegetables:
the peasant who produces remains poor while the
wholesalers and transporters become rich. ... Not to
mention the advertising industry..
"So here we have it in a nutshell: circulation takes
place a lot more fluently in a channel which is empty;
when it fills up and becomes congested, the parasite
that blocks it takes on an enormous importance. In the
world of communications, power belongs precisely to
those who control the channels."
"So does the communication of messages-at once
both angelic and fragile— fall into the hands of fallen
angels?"
"Good angels pass in silence and we forget them.
Others become visible, and they become our gods."
"How?"
"There are a thousand mechanisms for fabricating
false gods."
"Like what?"
"I'm coming to that. If the transmitter does his job
properly, he disappears. A true transmission is charac-
terized by elimination, a false one by presence: a curi-
ous paradox."
"One could say that truth and falsehood flash in
In order to be sure himself of the
authentkity of his mission as
saviour, Gideon demands a proot
from Yahweh: that the dew should
fail only on the fleece, and that the
ground around it should remain
dry, the following day the ground
all around should become wet with
dew, but not the fleece. The two
signs are given and confirm that
God has called on him to liberate
his people from the yoke of the
Midianites. (Judges 6:36-40) The
meerane the wher town become
The Miracle of Gidhon's Fleece,
anorymous Provençal artist,
c. 1490. Muste du Petit-Palais,
Avignon, France.

the night like the flashing light of a lighthouse: pres-
ence, absence, presence again... Existence, non-exis-
tence.."
"So angels are what they are not, and they are not
what they are. Philosophers used to say the same about
conscience: does it mime our guardian angel?"
"The relation thus goes deeper than being."
"True. By the way, I hope we'll get a chance to talk
about guardian angels!"
"In a world where message systems dominate,
those who set them in motion are also in a position to
switch them off. We only realize how important they
are when they stop."
"In other words, it looks very much like a machine
for manufacturing gods."
"There is thus a strong possibility that true mes-
sages are not going to get through. The universe of
communications becomes deflected towards illusion,
narcosis and enchantment. The only way to free our-
selves from it is by inventing new channels, which, for
the same reasons, soon also become blocked. Or by
heroic standards of morality.
"Which is where we see the difference between
good and bad angels: the humble angel disappears in
the face of the message; the other becomes visible, in
order to derive importance from it.
"In the passage which I cite, and in other sections
too, the Bible reveals quite precisely the mechanism for
the manufacturing of the gods of polytheism."
"Do false gods manufacture themselves by the fact of
appearing? Or are we to take 'false in the sense of some-
one who lies both about the value and the channel?"
"Read on. The holy text wavers, hesitates, blinks,
caught between the voice of God and that of the angel.
It thus enables us to hear and see the minimal distance
between necessary appearance and the obligatory dis-
appearance of the intermediary. This is why visions
often happen when one is asleep, and in dreams-
another way of showing that God or the angel vanish in
the process of showing themselves, and vice versa. Yes,
the Angel of the Lord appears in order better to disap-
pear before the Word of the Lord which he brings; he

When we go sunbathing, ona
beach for example, who can say
Whether ver ard inmersine our
bodies in the sun itseif, of which
the light is part or whether our
intermediary rays issuing from the
mass of the sun and coming across
trougn spuce to reach us?
The infinite distancing of a
transcendent God necessitates the
exotence of angeis or radiatrial
enemier twas emanat
can do without them.
fades himself out so that it may appear in its turn.
"But all it takes is for some lieutenant to stay put
and remain in place, without this vibrating lightness;
then the mechanism is under someone's control, and it
produces false gods.
"In these texts the Bible expresses the basic problem
of message systems to perfection.
"I think I may have said too much in referring to
morality: no system can function without this precondi-
tion. Ethics is here reduced to technique, and responsi-
bility to functioning."
Jacques attacks with renewed vigor:
"Since God is present everywhere, since he can
make himself present anywhere he wants, why does
he need to send an angel?
"The TV presenter doesn't divide himself into mil-
lions of people just because millions of people are
watching him on the screen. The same sound and
image are simply repeated. He needs no intermediary
to speak in his place; the channel carries him every-
where of its own accord.
"All of a sudden we no longer know whether the
(named) archangel or the (anonymous) angel exist indi-
vidually, or whether they express an attribute of God:
his beauty, his glory, his voice, his rainbow-like
light…"
Pia screws up her eyes, as if against the sun.
"When I lie on a beach exposing my body to the rays
of the sun, can you tell me whether I am receiving, direct
and distinct, rays which are sent by the sun over millions
of miles, carrying its various messages of light, heat and
energy; or is it the case that I am lying in the sun itself, as
if contained within a fruit comprising a plasma core and

At the moment of the
Annunciation, Fra Angelico gives
his angel wings that are banded in
ranbow coloes.. A man can only
"uen Khe teeyorewolmens
soneptoer wie tre toowuts
analog of what happens with
taniguage. when an author thinks
Whe te nes otetoine te sya
before speaking or writing, his
body, as it filled with love,
won olnre ond wortee
a rainbow. He doesn't yet know
where his idea will settle, or in
which direction it will go, or in
what shades it will be colored. The
bodily state which precedes the
emergence of an ides in sooken
form begins in an aurora borealis,
a kind of totality shaped Eike an
opened-out fan, ascompanied by
such an emotion that the body
experiences the word "emotion'
itself as that movement of soaring
flight, enraptured and suspended,
wnien ttctent herdehett
wings which beat like those of a
bird fluttering over a fixed point
Without yet hanng decided on
direction, and which are shaded in
every possible color, of which, at
the end, only one will remain. That
is what intuition sees before the
thing actually comes into sight.
Museo San Marco, Florence, Italy.

MORNING
successive outer layers made up of fire, light and life?
When the Bible hesitates or flickers between whether it is
the angel answering or God, is it the Bible asking: is this
the rays of the sun, or is it sun-bathing?"
"Scientists calculate the immense distance from
the Earth to a dense and abstract point where the
weight of the sun would be concentrated.."
"...but we terrestrials, pathetic earthlings, chil-
dren of flesh and blood, know that we and our Earth lie
lock, stock and barrel within the globe of the sun, as it
burns red, white and blue with flames, in the everyday
vision of its glory."
"Scientists speak of radiations."
"But we know that we live our lives immersed in its
living pool of translucidity.
"So infinitely transcendent that it appears to us as a
god, and we bathe in his immanent breath.
"Maybe when all's said and done we don't need
angels."
Jacques asks, ironically:
"So what are we talking about now?"
"We are talking about a diaphanous or epiphanic
light..."
She suddenly turns round and points to a repro-
duction of Fra Angelico's Annunciation hanging in the
waiting room.
"...of the third person."
"In relation to whom?"
"Caught by surprise, facing the angel who has
arrived like a sudden gust of wind, Mary hears the
Annunciation, sitting on the viewer's right. The scene
follows the orientation of the written text, which, in our
case, reads from the left. Only our meaningless words
fly about hither and thither, when they have meaning,
they conceive; and if they conceive, they have that
meaning, and that alone. The Word becomes flesh."
"Our only discourses which are of any value are
those which penetrate the female body."
"Our adroit phrases solicit the male body."
He falls silent, surprised. She resumes, delighted,
because she enjoys good symmetry:
"She bows before the archangel; he bows before
her, she shows to Gabriel the same respect that he
shows to her; she thus leans slightly towards him; he in
turn leans subtly towards her; she waits, anxiously, to
hear the newcomer's strange message; he, in turn, is
attentive to her and listens to hear her response to what
has been announced..."
"You're making me dizzy."
"What is revealed by this interconnecting mobile of
bowing heads, shoulders, bodies and necks?
"It reveals that an ordinary mortal, going about her
daily business, bows meekly before the unexpected,
exceptional and saintly creature who is bringing her-
all unworthy as she is—the Word of God... And that
the archangel, for his part, bows respectfully before her
who, at this very moment, is becoming in her womb,
the mother of his God….. And that this queen-in-wait-
ing is reverencing the divine sign brought by the atten-
tive messenger... who in turn is reverencing the divine
conception received by the Virgin... who is bowing
before the call of God … announced by this figure who
is bowing before the fleshly incarnation of God.
"These reciprocities are visible and represented,
and in their endless interaction they reveal a third pres-
ence, which is immense, invisible, and is not repre-
sented."
"Namely who or what?"

"It is God, covering the scene with his bright
shadow. Beneath the appearance and the image of an
interaction between two people, it all takes place as if
God was face to face with God: in potency on the
angel's side, because verbal; in act and end of meaning
in the woman's womb. Our physical eyes of flesh see
Mary and Gabriel, but faith contemplates, in spirit, the
apparition facing the incarnation.
"God-the-Word becomes God-the-flesh. In travers-
ing with its transparency the colloquium between the
angel and Mary, the third presence invades the figures
with its compact reality: two holy beings pray, for him
to bow before himself. Albeit visible, the angel and the
Woman disappear.
"The archangel appears not to be looking at the face
of the Virgin; she also does not look at Gabriel, since the
third party present is dazzling their eyes, which are
miraculous in supernatural attentiveness, and are
calmly fixed on him.
"The present comes to a standstill for an eternity."
"Then the scales fall from our eyes, at the sight of
and in the presence of the transfigured figure.
"We contemplate, ecstatically, the divine beauty on
which their eyes are fixed. Our eye follows the curious
direction of theirs, out of the field of vision, beyond the
figures in the picture, but in their figured sense they
discover meaning itself!"
Jacques says derisively: "But angels are fictitious
beings."
Pia counters, learnedly: "Take them in a figurative
sense. And remember that both your 'fictitious' and my
'figurative' come from a similar Latin root. But let's for-
get these figures for a moment, to speak concretely of
US."
TO NY
She turns to address him face to face:
"If I show you respect, I incline towards you. Why?
When you address me, my body, head and shoulders
move slightly in your direction; with my hands calmly
crossed, I seek to hear your voice. I allow myself to be
encompassed by the meaning which you are directing
towards my body.
"And when I then address you myself, you lean
towards me and your posture bends slightly in my
direction as your goodwill allows itself to be encom-
passed by the message which I am directing to you."
"In order to produce it, one needs to explain this
contract of mutual peace without which no dialog
would even get off the ground; pious wishes and pure
goodwill are not enough to bring it into being or main-
tain it..."
"From where do they come? Always watchful,
powerful and renascent, pegged to our bodies, our col-
lectivities, our cities and our works of every kind, vio-
lence watches over its permanent breakdown.
"I don't offer you respect so readily. My culture
does not tolerate yours, which in turn does not tolerate
mine. In personal and societal terms the 'other' is a
being come from hell, and that's where he's bound. A
dialog which takes place between two parties, and only
two, always collapses into war (which exists perpetu-
ally as a third party), for the power and glory of only
one of the two of us."
"A contract can only come about through the con-
stant presence of another instance, of a third party. I do
not ask that you show me respect, because I am well
aware that I am unworthy of it, but at this moment my
words are not speaking to you of me, but of something
else, towards which 1 am signalling: therefore would

The fan-like pattern created by
the wrinkles of a smile plays a part
in winning over the man who masy
still be resisting his friend's
assertions; the other elicits his
interest with a gesture of his hand
But there's nothing to beat a good
story, a handsome exploit, a
sensatonal tact winich has noching
directly to do with either you or
me. There's nothing to beat a third
party between us. The truth is that
we will only truly live together
through him, with him, and in him.
Ine third person precedes the
first two
you please direct your gaze to accompany my gaze,
towards it. I hear your voice as you speak to me about
someone who is other than you and me; I see your face
radiant with that of which you are speaking-
"T respect in you this absent presence: God behind
you gives his global name to it."
"When the spoken word orders, despises, apostro-
phizes, insults and kills, does it remain sterile?"
"It leaves behind merely corpses."
"So from where does it derive its fecundity?"
"When it is reciprocal, it conceives, constructs, moves
from meaning to flesh, and brings to life.
"Humility alone produces this symmetry. Transparent
in relation to the Word that he bears, the angel pros-

trates himself before she who is already becoming the
object of the cult of hyperdulia, who prostrates herself
submissively before the destiny that is announced by
the message-bearing Word. As fellow angelic beings,
they both humble themselves before God. She also
bows before the child which, already; she is bearing in
her womb, and he bows before the Word which he him-
self is bringing.
"When we speak, we efface ourselves in relation to
the meaning which our discourse transports. In Fra
Angelico's portrayal of the Annunciation, God is the
meaning: when we converse with each other, it is mean-
ing that becomes God.
"Then several kinds of good tidings come about:
beauty, inventiveness, novelty, unexpected time... the
fruit-bearing of peace.

This chapter presents the authors
interpretation of three great frech
novels: Les Grands Chemins by Jean
Giono, Rameau's Nephew by
Far from breaking all the rules, a
card-sharo simoly follows rules that
are different. His rules may be
remote from our own, but they are
governed by a ruchiess logk. where
the honest player risks only a money
stake, the card-sharp stakes his life,
because if he makes one false move
he may end up with his throat slit.
Who is the irvisible presence who
Mode theor meth
GUARDIANS
guardian angei of the law. And the
second? The angel of death. The
only truly shameful people in this
world are fraudsters who are always
confident of their own safety. For
example, those who speak without
responsibility.
Georges de La Tour (1593-1652),
Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.
Bartolomeo di Bologne, Panegyric
of Bruzio Vikonti, Zoroaster and
Dialectics. Muste Condt, Chantilly,
Hones
"Now you have to keep your promise, Pia." Jacques
returns to the fray, suddenly turning round as if to sur-
prise his own shadow. "I don't believe in guardian
angels. Simple-minded stories for kids!"
"T've been reading a book today. Giono's best novel:
Les Grands Chemins- On the Highway"
"A story about highwaymen?"
"No. It's the author himself, speaking in the third
person. He tells of how he wandered the roads and
mountain paths, wearing coarse woollen trousers, fur-
nished with a knife and a good pipe, and in the perma-
nent company of a kind of Artist.... That's the name he
gives to a Bohemian that he meets in a wood some-
where. The man's sobriquet is suggestive of his particu-

MORNING
lar talent. He's a card-sharp, with a penchant for card-
tricks, a fraudster of appalling looks and equally
appalling character."
"A sponger, another parasite?"
"He eats, sleeps and lives at the narrator's expense,
and the narrator effectively becomes both his host and
his nursemaid. In the course of the story, following a
particularly monstrous card swindle, the losers dis-
cover the hoax, beat the card-sharp, and smash his face
and his fingers. The author cares for him, and defends
him to the utmost.
"A freeloader?"
"No, not as simple as that! He makes the reader
want to ask: 'Giono, where does this come from, this
need to have such a rogue traveling with you? To such
an extent that you even risked your life in running to
protect him! In the same way that he lives off you, is it
maybe the case that you couldn't survive without
him?'"
"You mean they're symbiotic."
"Could be....I would say to Giono: You only
embarked on this road to adventure in order to trail this
fascinating phantom. You follow him right through to
the last night when, in a dark forest, after a spiraling
pursuit in which your trail ends up becoming confused
with his, in the midst of dark undergrowth you dis-
charge your gun full in his face-just before he (or
maybe you) was taken by the police."
"Enemy twins?"
"Despite this darkness, the author of Les Grands
Chemins sees how criticism, like the police always
associated with each other, because they both run
detective operations- indecently tracks down the pri-
vate lives of creators, but always arrives too late."
"Parasites again!"
"Voyeurs, snoopers, shameful investigators must
not know the true secrets. So therefore, before the police
or theoreticians manage to arrive in these dark, gloomy
places, no sooner said than done, the artist kills the
Artist."
"Are these two homonymous or identical, dear sis-
ter?"
"You choose, dear brother. Now, let's switch book

he swinster and the crest. """
winishing cork ball that the actor
Both have a hidden treasure of
Which the public never becomes
aware. Thes chapter opens the
does his sleight of hard
basket which the actor has
hanging from his belt, it is not seen The Conior. Musee municinal
by the ten gawpers, because they
Saint-Germain on Lase,
dre more toronated by the
and author. Take Raman's Nephar, in which the
nephew accompanies Didenx....
" Another double?""
"He found him in a tavern, and then preserved for
the rest of his life the contersation which they had,
Manuscripts that one isn't prepared to part with are the
next best thing to confessions, wouldn't you say?"
"Who is confiding in whom? The author, or the
closest relation of the greatest artist of the time?"

GUARDIANS
From out of the cornucopia heid
by the conjuror a hundred silk
iwiodthoh@od
wroe Xrowetherwnen
meters of pink ribbon, a flight of
doves, three naked women and
Tounoolmireenr
shimmering of illusory reality.
Around this Escherichia cofi is
colled its ribbon of DNA; its folds
are a thousand times longer than
the cell itself; here is all living stuff,
Predestination written in the book
of destiny?
cowtet:wtwtox
of Escherichia coli, a normal
bacterium found in the human
inten tiner teeeewiln
Chayme to weken te menoore
Photographic library of Dr
Gopal Murti.
"You choose, my brother."
"Who are you? Who am I?"
"Who's talking to whom, if they are one and the
same? Giono's Artist is called Victor André, mother and
father unknown. Two more forenames for the author
himself?"
"This orphan resembles him so much that he could
be his brother."
"The artist, in other words the writer, knows that he
is in fact the Artist, who is so named by way of derision,
but also pompously."
"Giono fishes in popular language; and Diderot in
family descendance. Two false geniuses, by proxy!"
"The nicknames of these two characters illuminate
their relationship with the person who holds the pen
and does all the talking. It's as clear as day. How can
one express oneself without a theatrical impostor or a
pathological liar? What producer can eschew having
near him the person who lives off of him—a parasite, of
course, as you rightly say, but also a precondition of his
creativity?"
"His director, so to speak?"
"In a manner of speaking, yes."
"His double faker?"
"The creator is not Giono-as-subject, nor the mad-
man who travels with him, nor Diderot, nor Rameau's
nephew, but the active relationship between artist and
Artist."
"I don't understand. Explain yourself."
"To what frauds does this fraudster Other devote
himself? On the table, here we have a pack of fifty-two
cards, kings, sevens, picture cards and numbers."
"So we have a conjuring card-sharp, then.."
"By numbers and figures, God created the world.
He or the artist... shuffles, cuts and deals.... in this
world we find the hand dealt..."
"Pia, you're becoming seriously...."
"Let's imagine the general dealing-out of life's
cards, as it goes on all the time. We are each dealt our
portion of destiny, in a series of fortuitous chances and
necessities. The ace of unhappiness, the five of talent,
the knave of good luck.."
"...and the occasional discreet queen, formally
appearing, by a miracle, in the middle of a friend's gar-
den...."
"And that's how history goes on-yours, mine,
ours... real history, in which kings are less common
than sevens."
"Who does the dealing?"
129

MORNING
"Who knows? God, Nature, Chance, Providence,
DNA and Fate? Or maybe our parents, getting together
one evening for a few drinks before settling down to
procreate.
"The hand that is dealt is unseeing. It rains equally
on the just and the unjust."
"But the just and the unjust are extremely similar."
"Now, once we realize that the swindlers who pull
the best numbers always seem to come out on top, why
don't we admit that we would like to get our hands on
the choosing process once in a while, and maybe even
take the place of the person who's doing the deal-
ing...?Or rather, not that, because rain, and the lottery
wheel, and the man who's dealing the shuffled pack
actually know nothing. .. We'd like to take the place of
whoever it is behind them, making the permutations,
arranging things, combining, alloting.."
"Assuming that such a person exists."
"And since we're quite incapable of performing
acts of true creation, let's at least learn the wherewithals
of the faker and the imitator."
"Who is imitating whom?"
"Giono roams the highways with a fraudster, and
Diderot hangs out in bars with a man who pretends to
be a musician and composer."
"Who's teaching whom?"
"Here you have two writers. They are both fasci-
nated-one with card-tricks of which he is duly envi-
ous, and the other with the acting abilities of a
vagabond. Having something to say means nothing if
you're incapable of showing it. If one lacks the ability to
use forms, knowledge produces nothing."
"So the false teaches the true to the true. The double
imitator teaches the honest me. Strange, immoral!"
"Then, arrangements and combinations tell of
imbroglios of love and jealousy between queens, kings
and knaves, a whole comedy of stories and novels, of
roaring successes. Yes, of card-tricks and play-acting.
"The card-sharp makes himself master of the false
deal, because he does not know the reality of the deal."
"No true art without a false brother, Pia. Shameful!"
"Therein, my brother, lies the work of the Artist: of
Giono's double and of the novelist himself. The man
who holds the pen as he tells his exploits has them by
courtesy of his tricksterish guardian angel. Are you
going to believe this, at last, Jacques?"
"I believed it more veracious!"
"Wait. What could be more dull and dreary than an
ordinary game, a mediocre existence, filled with fives
and threes of hearts? On the other hand, a major hoax
produces a good story and a good show. People love
recounting their exploits."
"T've got you there— your wicked angel is tempting
you, Pia!"
"If I had to create, would I be able to avoid dabbling
in the process of permutation: liar…. novelist..
swindler. story-writer.. fraudster.. artist.. patho
logical: liar ... politician?"
"Do you take yourself for God... or DNA... or
Destiny?™
"Not for God, who truly does create; rather for the
Devil incarnate; because, without soul or flesh, paper
tigers, abominable hypocrites, characters seek fortune,
domination and the spilling of blood."
"How much do we pay to follow our angels of col-
ored paper?"
"But, good heavens, don't they look dapper!"
"Lies that are far more fascinating than the pale

GUARDIANS
truths of long highways and the broad light of day.
"He who enacts falsity cannot attain goodness. He
has to content himself with evil. He stains everything
with blood, the spilling of which is all that interests this
fine world of ours."
"The double of every Artist, madman, liar, and
abomination, tells only of …
"...and deserves only, death. The true cre-
ator becomes good by creating something that is
real."
"I maintain, decidedly, the counterpoint of the twin
brother. God is the Devil himself even to the extent of
his true works."
"When he tells a story, sculpts, paints or composes
a tale, every artist blends together a thousand ele-
ments-a killing, a hat, a woman, a landscape...."
"Someone who produces needs to have a faker,
fraudster or swindler, an evil double, to show him how
to fix the deal."
"Giono has his fraudster on the broad highways of
his work, and Diderot has, for a whole lifetime, the
impostor Nephew. So who is doing the creating here?"
"That couple there, you said it! Maupassant and his
Horla; Mr So-and-So and his angel; married for better
or for worse, a worse which is as terrible as the better is
inspired."
She hesitates, but then resumes:
"Ordinary players are happy enough with the hand
they've been dealt. They resign themselves to it, and
they expect that everyone is going to be like them and
obey the rules of the game. These are mediocre but hon-
est existences. At the other extreme we find the card-
sharps. They're prepared to stake their lives against this
accord. However high the stakes may rise-and often
they rise to heights that are truly scary—at worst ordi-
nary players risk nothing worse than financial ruin. But
when you make a profession of cheating, you risk your
life, because your partners are likely to kill you the
moment they find out. This is playing for real, playing
for the big time!"
'The last pair: to create is to live! But one may die of
it."
"Not to cheat is not to play! This becomes the most
dangerous of games, because it might cost you your
life."
"An austere morality or immoral fraud! The rules
of the game turned inside out like a glove!"
"On life's crooked highways, the Artist and the
Nephew pursue their high-risk existences; they take
along with them the Narrator and the Philosopher, who
could not be what they are without them. What would
they have to narrate, or to philosophize, without this
sense of ever-present danger?"
Our friends are speechless.
At this point Pantope enters, well rested and ready for
what the day might bring:
"Can this game be played three-handed, Pia-you,
me and Jacques?"
Pia replies:
"Surely you don't think we're alone in this world,
Pantope? We're the devil incarnate, and each of us has
his own guardian angel!"
They laugh.
One of the men says: "Now, for a conjuror to perform
some brilliant card-trick or pull off a spectacular card

MORNING
swindle, at the very least he's going to need a good pack
of cards, and he's going to need to be skilled in using
it-either that, or he'll need to be a pretty good actor."
"So, Pia," says the other, "show us the cards. Show
us the Artist's pack. Not the card-sharp's pack, because
anyone can see that, but the pack used by the novelist,
the painter..."
"The painter keeps within easy reach his palette or,
at the back of his secret garret, sometimes even
unknown to himself, the masterpiece, the capital, the
sum total, the reserve or the source of all his possible
production.
"At the end of his Chef-d'auvre inconnu, Balzac
reveals to the reader a picture which up until that
moment had remained hidden at the back of the studio.
The picture
displays such a mingling chaos of
colors, tones and shapes, such a mish-mash, that if one
could hear it, it would, of its own accord, give off the
background noise after which La Belle Noiseuse is
named.
"Let's take another look at our guardians: de Mau-
passant's The Horla gives us a kind of spirit, a phantom,
a vapor, a breath of wind or spirit of places; Giono
shows us an unobtrusive object such as a pack of cards;
Balzac shows us a canvas, a more complex object, but
already supplied with a woman's name, the quarrel-
some one, La Belle Noiseuse; Diderot and Giono place
their doubles side by side with them: the Artist and the
Nephew of an Artist.
"A definable character begins to emerge: an orphan
dressed in black who resembles me like a brother, and
who is born out of the movements of air, of the chaos of
the picture, or of combinations of number cards and
picture cards."
Here is every author's ideat
sleeping, dreaming, forehead and
elbows resting on the table while
the inspirational guardian angel,
with the simplest gestures,
cottones the works conoredo
The mirror repeats the form of
the double, no doubt a reversed
image, as the sleeper seems to be
the inspiration of the worker.
Pablo Picasso, The Muse, 1935.
Musée national d'Art moderne,
Centre Georges-Pompidou,
"The spectral apparition of the guardian angel!
Well done, Pia the artist!"
"By their sides, painters keep this palette, where
they prepare, in secret more than in the open, all colors
and shades. Sounds from noise to harmony, in the
case of artists. But the artisans of the written word also
have a bank like this, for all words in all meanings, a
treasury of acts of language, the most wildly divergent

contradictory opinions, contrary truths of every kind,
including those which one will not or cannot say,
behaviors, vices or virtues, and social or biological
species, plus the ability to make use of this total sum!
"Depending on whether we're writing stories or
portraits, thoughts or opinions, is it the case that we
draw on a reserve, an account, a storehouse, which will
be different for each, but which are required to exist and
function, as a precondition for creative life-that black
pit in which are mingled men and objects, true and
false, good and evil, reason and madness?
"In the same way that, in their studios, painters mix
a kind of greyish paste, a result of the colors and shades
which overflow from their tubes, a final palette which is
symmetrical with the original, in what clay of the same
kind do men of ink paddle?

MORNING
"Does there exist, before fixed opinion or truth,
before the character that is drawn or finalized, a paste,
a capital sum or masterpiece, in nascent state?"
"A kind of bellowing or roaring noise sound and
fury-emanates from this pit."
The fact that the airport is built in the shape of a cylin-
drical crown means that the sounds of the people inside
it can be heard simultaneously with the sounds of the
aircraft and the winds around it.
They fall silent, as if listening, within themselves
and between themselves, to this gaping pit.
Jacques leaves to go and wake his daughter, who
has fallen asleep on one of the sick-bay benches. Pan-
tope steps in to take Jacques's place.
"Do you know why angels spend most of their time
composing or playing music?"
"Did I even know that they do?"
"This music rings out, thunders, vibrates without
speaking, makes noises or declaims without us being
able to make out what it is that it is seeming to want to
say: is it passion, ecstasy, pain, thunder...? Light,
mobile, fluctuating, it dances the entire range of the
possible. Using notes that never have a fixed meaning.
the music expresses universals that come before words
with meaning."
"Now, in the silence, I hear Rameau's Nephew play-
ing on an absent harpsichord or an invisible violin."
"Pantope, imagine a huge fan, lying open. At its
centre, where it comes to a point, is where fixed mean-
ing resides: that is where we find the sciences. Further
out towards the circumference is where music begins.
Between this area, of indeterminate meaning, and the
The prychopomp angel, the angel
that accompanies the souls of the
dead during and anter death
appears both in the polytheist
traditions of Greece (where the
role is played by Hermes), Egypt
and Rome and in the monotheist
religions of Judaism, Christianity
and klam. As in the rules of the
game, in life and in artistic
creation, our death calls on the
services of somebody to help us.
Israfil the Angel of Death,
Sounding his Trumpet. British
Library, London. The popular
tradition-although not the
Koran-assigns to this particular
angel the role of restoring souls to
bodies at the moment of their
resurrection. Israfil is the Arab
equrvalent of seratin

center, where words say only one thing, the intervening
space is governed by language— by meaning which is
half fixed and half free.
"The Nephew, a close relation of Rameau, dreams
of composing, plays extremely well, and teaches music
to young girls; Giono's Artist plays the guitar; Balzac
abruptly leaves Fernhofer and his painting in order to
make us hear, and no longer see, the noise of beauty, La
Belle Noiseuse."
"What writer has not dreamt of freeing himself
from meaning in order to compose music? What is the
point in writing if one hears nothing?"
"Filling the entire surface of the fan, style may
range from vocal exercises or evocation to exact knowl-
edge, and vice versa."
"Thus the musician angel guards the writer, who
dreams of imitating his guardian."
"Now, question: do you know why angels dance?"
"Did I even know that they do?"
"At Delphi the oracle sat on a tripod over a hole in
the ground. Out of the hole came smoke and flame. The
oracle gesticulated and uttered words which were either
devoid of meaning-musical, perhaps or were so
filled with meaning that they needed an interpreter
to decipher them. In the same way, the gesturing
arms of an orchestral conductor act as a semaphore,
indicating without words the spatial and temporal
directions of a score which, on its own, makes no sense
as discourse.
"When understanding and the voice are incap-
able of saying or expressing something, then the
body itself moves into action, in order to express
what the first two cannot. It enters into trance or into
dance.

On the stage, ballet dancers
display their bodies in movement,
following the rhythms of the
music. But what is it that they
indicate as they gesture towards
to transport cmore.t
surrounds them as they dance?
When we watch a piece of ballet.
are we ske naive simpretors viro
look at the finger of the person
who's pointing, rather than the
object at which it is pointing?
Dancers signify something.
But whom, and what? The
side deles or these orde
fade away, disappear, and that
invisible thing to which their
gestures allude suddenty
Kelemenis.
"Dance is transparent. It is indicative. It suggests
and describes. It signifies the universals that precede
meaning. A woman dancing may become a writhing
snake. A man dancing may, with the movements of his
body, imitate the arms and hands of the orchestral con-
ductor. Dancers have the ability to assume a thousand
and one positions. They have bodies which are know-
ing, which move, which can choose between ten thou-
sand different positions and pass with ease from any
one to any other. Their bodies are omnivalent; they are
white since they are capable of all colors, and formal-
ized— since they contain all virtual forms.
"The dancer, being inarticulate, precedes articles.
Adept at all positions, he expresses pre-positions. He is
as supple as a hand or a finger exercising on a piano
keyboard. He indicates towards, to, on, by, in, out of,

The bodies of dancers have the
ability to assume hundreds of
positions.
associates and combines these
codes, signs and physical forms in
the same way that tanquaces dol
with letters and phonemes. In order
to be able to assume all these
posetions with esse, doncers put
themselves through a hard and
demanding process of gymnastic
training which ensures that theis
muscles and joints are supple. Thus
disposed or, perhaps, pre-posed,
the body inflects or is declined, to
match any positions that may be
required. Since it is before
movement. can one say that it is in
a state of pre-position? A grammar
decodes dance, and vice versa.
Europa ballet company.

GU A KOIANS
behind, before, close to, under, between, during, after, before,
despite, against, except... All space, all time, all circum-
stances, relations and relationships. A universal media-
tor.
"Dance shows us a body which is pre-posed, in the
same way that music enables us to hear pre-posed
meaning, so that we can, at leisure, think, act and work
with meaning or without meaning, with Being or with-
out it, I mean exclusively by communications: mime."
At this point Pantope gets up. He stands in front of Pia,
and she laughs uproariously as he begins clapping his
hands and singing. Holding out his arms, he dances
and comes across to invite her to follow him, while all
the time muttering in a kind of recitative:
"...On the stage, in front of us, during the ballet,
or in the pure air in which the couples gambol, the
young man flies and leaps over the boards, as if
launched or sailing in the air and uprooting himself
from the ground to the sky, all of a sudden, seeming to
fly through space; then, suddenly crouching, flattening
down to the ground, lost or destroyed by the emotion of
melody, at the feet of the female partner sharing in his
pas de deux, pressed up against him since their first
encounter, and himself as if coiled up with her, both of
them, now separate from each other, under the pressure
of trumpets and horns, to soar apart from each other,
light, playful, still following the rhythm of the music,
indicating with their arms, their limbs, their bodies and
heads, some invisible event taking place above them, or
in the space around them, or, perhaps, drawn down
below, perhaps to Hell, by Fate, or drawn to the left by
hope, or driven back from the right by some fear, rush-
ing forward, dodging in order to avoid some danger, as
if the whole of reality existed outside of them and
between them, and as if they lived with neither weight
nor substance, but solely occupied in indicating
... while they themselves are empty, white, transpar-
ent, devoid of all stability, and thus in an ecstasy of exis-
tence, floating, insensate, outside of all meaning, and
thus capable of evoking, universally
"...body-as-music before body-as-word, situated
in space and in movement by time, posed in the world
and outside of it, preceding meaning, surrounded by
prepositions and playing with them, toying with them,
like so many white ribbons floating, colored, around its
virginity."
He acts out the words as he speaks them; she willingly
plays along with him, leaping about and laughing....
When they are finally out of breath, they stop.
"In the case of a writer—a midwife of singular lives,
immersed up to his eyes in meaning-the palette has to
be transformed into a person, a double, whose own sin-
gularity is precisely the fact of not having singularity: of
being capable of everything.
"Before anything at all is produced, the palette, the
invisible spirit or the hidden object here take on a role
as that thing through which I pass in order to enter into
relation with everything and everyone: a universal
mediator-philosophy is always a procuress a Her-
mes, an intermediary, a medium, an actor, or rather
mime, a double who accompanies me, or a Horla who
is first outside of me. I have to feed it so that it can
finally make me live and think—a dancer, a parasite, a
hermaphrodite, a guardian angel.
"Since music expresses that which precedes mean-
128

MORNING
ing, a writer-music's successor in meaning and lan-
guage-thus always finds himself close to a musician,
his distant predecessor, and to an actor, his immediate
predecessor. The Nephew, agnate or cognate, of
Rameau, a composer, becomes his neighbor, his double,
his brother, whom he cannot do without if he has aspi-
rations to thought or creativity."
"He has to feed him and house him. There you have
'his parasite."
"He cannot write without him: here is the source of
his inspiration."
"The guardian angel who lies between us and all our
neighbors both near and far thus preconditions all our
relationships."
"This orphan who resembles me like my own
brother dresses in black; alternatively, invisible, this
double becomes white and transparent. Black or white,
colors that are simple but omnivalent."
"Pia, do you remember the rotundas or round-houses
that they used to have on the railways?"
"No."
"When locomotives went in for repair, they were
shunted off the rails and placed on circular, rotating
platforms. In this way, once repaired, they could be
spun round to take any one of a number of possible
directions according to which rail option was chosen.
"Left or right, forward or backwards, to Strasburg
or Bordeaux, after or during, take your pick, these loco-
motives led their puffing existences in the realm of the
possible. The platform could turn in all directions; it
had no direction in itself. It was like a weather-vane,
pointing towards all positions
"..and since genius is ready to think of every.
The french oreposition verd
indicates a direction: to go vers
Tokyo, to fly wers Rome or Ria....
were doine, thee
verto, means to turn, to turn into
"we Wonder
wonders! The same word is used to
define both a movement of
rotation as if in the spreading ofa
fan. When we say that a thing or
an idea is uni-vers-sl, presumatly
we mean that it can turn in all
directions. On the ra ways, in the
old days train divers would use
rotunda in order to turn their
locomotives and point them in the
to carriages that were marshaled
on the fan-like array of rails

Here is the reality of the process
of writing: a small glimmer
Illuminates the initial moment of
creativity-next to the writer,
outside of him, outside of his body,
his pen, his page, his table...
Who is the shadow that holds it?
Is this an angelic figure that
remors him literat
a demon seeking to put him to
Seth or it the owner at
a storchouse or treasury in which
he can fish, before then, in turn,
taking his place as an
Gabriel Metsu (1629-67),
The Letter Writer. Musée Fabre,
thing, it contains the capacity of every personage.
"Preceding all signification, genius is the musi-
cian—a rotunda man if ever there was. And before all
gestuality, it is the mime and dancer. Before all truth. it
passes for a liar and swindler, because it is capable of
guaranteeing all demonstrations. Before all opinion, it
passes for inconstant, in so far as it's able to maintain as
many opinions as it needs, from every conceivable
angle. Before all personalite; for Harlequin, multiple
and inconstant. Before all morality, it is the cynic or he
who practises the usages and customs of all, concerned
only to cure his stomach cramps when he's hungry:

GUARDIANS
above all things possible and created, here he is,
changeable and different, rotunda and weather-vane,
white and transparent."
"The rotunda is round so that, moving through its
circular range of possibilities, one can choose from
among ali directions the direction one wishes to
take."
"Doesn't Diderot thus personify the En-cyclo-pédie?"
"This thing or this man give cause for fear, because
they are alienated or possessed by others. Madmen:
Rameau's Nephew, and Fernhofer; madmen: the Horla,
the narrator, the artist; possessed by others: Hermes,
the Hermaphrodite, the Parasite, Harlequin..."
"...And you, Pia, who attend to everybodys
ills..."
"…. And you, Pantope, who travel the world..."
"The sum of others equals a rotunda and tends to
the universal."
"An individual without the principle of individua-
tion, a sum of possible individuals, a palette-man, a
spectrum of all colors coming together in a white
apparition.
"Never posed or still, dancing like a flame, mobile,
roaming at random, we see it with difficulty, because it
is not easily available to simple minds, which, in any
case, are dazzled by it.
"White and translucent, it dogs the heels of anyone
who produces, like his own shadow or his incandescent
angel.
"In the most naïve or the most scientifically
definable of senses, an archangel guards the inventor.
I say archangel because arche means the capital, the
well, the reserve, as well as the beginning. The
guardian angel always places himself between us
and others, as a rotunda, in order to open up our
capacities. But the archangel also embodies and offers
this storehouse.
"Such a piece of writing, in meaning, with mean-
ing, and through meaning, in it and for it, I was almost
going to say follows the meaning, of necessity, even if,
sometimes, it creates it, but the double who precedes it
in the night, precedes meaning and does not follow
meaning."
"Thus a musician. Thus a mime and dancer. Thus a
weather-vane and rotunda. Thus depraved. Thus mad-
man. Thus parasite. Thus very clever. Thus supremely
intelligent. Thus white. Thus dangerous for morality
and none the less necessary to the upbringing of chil-
dren."
"And there, large as life, not lacking in a single
hair, nail or human characteristic, we have Rameau's
Nephew in person.
"Let's play a guessing game. Who is he, then? A
parasite, for sure, a disturbing companion, but also a
noise and music which sound in the ear and enchant
the hearing, a constant tonality which is forever in occu-
pation, as a parasite-in the triple sense, as an unin-
vited guest, as a dangerous pest, and as transmissional
noise— and finally as a white dancer, who is able to imi-
tate everything: prostitutes decked with silver, way-
ward thoughts, chess players pushing their pieces,
actresses both good and bad, the financier or farmer-
general, as well as the public figure or politician,
mimes, masks and personifications of the capacity of
omnitude.
"Everything is possible, hence his name: he is walk-
ing on dangerously thin ice.

y bow lie go leo, urse sy
U se TUOyo> puR sadeys palesages
witneston tenomum

MORNING
"Another guess: is it an object? Here is the fresh
pack of cards, the notes, the gestures, the palette or the
dancing of flames during a house of fire; starting from
fire, everything is possible, because there lies the source
of energy-the rotunda of the sun.
"If he is a man, there is the parasite and his succes-
sion of masks and doubles; it's a bit shocking, isn't it,
that we can only produce with the presence of another
party who does not produce.
"The producers stake the content, and the parasites,
who always win, stake the position. No, I am not
engaging in wordplay when I call them pre-positions.
"If it is a word, then there are more prepositions.
They put into a relationship the two ends of an inter-
vening space, as procurers; these latter act as go-
betweens between prostitutes, the wives of all men, and
male clients, the husbands of all women. Prepositions
are language's pimps and go-betweens, as thoughts are
for philosophy."
"Thus Xenophon's Socrates-the voice of the out-
sider, that of the guest, of the parasite -defines philoso-
phy.
"Is Rameau's Nephew also the procurer in relation
to Diderot's thoughts, to his whores of the Palais Royal?™
"He is a spirit, here he is, invisible, dangerous, com-
ing from everywhere, capable of everything."
"Is he a good angel or a bad angel?"
"Both, but a guardian angel in any event."
"Are we all producers?"
"More or less. It depends on our guardian angel:
simple, or, on the contrary, deploying all the riches
which we have just detailed, thanks to the more honest
among those who have been willing to show it.
"And genius reaches heights of divinity when the
Cervantes' masterpiece- which
I would say is a masterpiece of all
humanity- leaves us in doubt as to
who twould oddersoni
Is it Don Quixote or is it Sancho
Panza. Who wrote our present
dialog? Pantope or Pla?
Honoré Daumier (1808-79),
Don Quixote, c. 1868. The Burrell
Collection, Glasgow, Scotland.
double then becomes duplicated, to produce, in a subtle
interplay of mirrors, images that are identical and
reproduced, to infinity. Here we have the omniscient
Don Quixote, perched high on his verbal knowledge,
and the realist Sancho, even more of a dreamer, with his
nose firmly in everyday things and his head in the
realm of proverbs. Cervantes wrote the most perfect of
works of human creativity, with and against all others,
and in producing multiplicities of doubles."
"Which angel is it that guards and inspires the
other. the baleful figure of the knight, or the fat-bellied
donkey-driver?"
"The one or the other? The one and the other? The
brightly archangelic discourse of their mutual relations?
"Guess, Pantope."
"Were I to discover that, I would become a writer," he
replies, humbly.
Blushing, she takes his hand.

Préposer: to put somebody in a
position to carry out a function by
gming triem the mears or the
etrotuyte tomi te trh terun
préposé in french may refer to an
toddt.0 1Commonh
uotottedman
When messengers are
comirone o rampor mne WINGED MESSENGERS
through messuge-bearing systers
they require some means of
transport: Hermes and the myriad
angeis trawel on wings; the postman
carries his bicycle-or is it the other
way round?
Jacques Tati (1908-82),
Enter Jacques and his daughter, hand in hand.
"We've come for the French lesson," says the girl.
Since Pantope already knows about grammar, he
leaves.
Jour de Fête (1948).
Mathis Grünewald (1460 or
1475-1528), Isenhewm Altar, 1512-15,
detad of the Katrity, with large
nunoemortreeen
in attendance....
Unterlnoen Mereum, Colmar,
Germary.
Angélique sits next to Pia and asks:
"I'm called je when I say 'T love you', and me when
you love me. Why is that? Sometimes I'm also called
moi. Three names in addition to my own!"
Pia, revelling in her new role:
"Those are what we call pronouns. You're called tu
or te when I'm talking to you, and you might also be
called toi, as in pour toi."
"The words change but I don't."

MORNING
"Here you are, standing in front of me. Now turn
around. Now bow."
Angélique takes a bow and says:
"You see me from the side, from the back, and from
the front. In the process I move but I don't change! I
incline towards you."
"Look at this book-open flat on the table-and
then look at it from the back, closed and standing on a
bookshelf. Is it the same book?"
"Yes and no, Pia."
"Before coming to Rome, you passed through
Berlin. In Germany, people have this way of changing
their words. For instance, the word Kamerad, meaning a
friend, changes depending on whether you're talking
about the friend, about his character, about the person
who knows him, or about the woman to whom he is
being introduced.."
"And how do you and I say that sort of thing in
English?™
"We have a number of neat little words which we
place in front of the noun 'friend'—of him, to him, for
him, by him... What does your teacher say about all
this?"
"She says those kinds of words are called 'invari-
able: they have no gender, so they're neither masculine
nor feminine, and they can't be plural either."
"That's prepositions for you. They don't change in
themselves, but they change everything around them:
words, things and people."
"Like multiplication signs when you're doing
sums?"
"Almost. You don't say Pia offrir gâteau Angelique
Pia gives cake Angélique', but Elle le donne à sa nièce
'She gives it to her niece'. Words would be incredibly
Prepositions are préposes which
work at inflecting and declining
the verbs and nours of our
language. They are small, like
bend and inflect rough timbers in
and keel of a boat. They engage in
operations which may escape our
watchful eye.
Jack Scher, Gulliver's Travels
(1960).
stiff without these little tools to make things supple and
pliable."
"Like when you're kneading dough for bread?"
"Yes. This molding, this mastication of words is
what makes meaning. Open your eyes, my lovely: see
the cake, and its cream and its fruit; see your aunt,
wearing her white blouse; observe the gesture of giv-
ing; now, do you see how there are certain words flying
around between the volumes of things? These are the
words which make our hands stretch out, make the
cake pass from my hands to yours, make people bow
and dance and give and receive?"
"So there are big words, which are visible, and oth-
ers which are invisible, like fairies, dwarfs and goblins?"
"All that most people- even grand philosophers-

usually concern themselves with is the big, fat, impor-
tant words: verbs, which may be active or passive, and
substantives, which are full of substance. Only children
know how to laugh and tumble with the leaps and som-
ersaults of the little words! These grand people think in
the same way that people used to talk in telegrams in
the old days: Pia gives cake Angélique', and when they
do that they strip the pace out of the dance of meaning,
the supple interrelations between these stiff, lumbering
skeletons."
Angélique doesn't quite follow this, but she says
dreamily:
"I imagine the big words being like God, the Pope
and the Saints. Rather stilted, starchy, stiff and awk-
ward, as if they were at the coronation procession of the
Queen of England, with her pumpkin-shaped coach.
But all the time there are tiny little words jumping
around all over the place, and they have the ability to
change Cinderella into a princess. What do you think,
Pia? Are those the same angels that are in my name?"
"You're understanding all this very well, An-
gélique, my pet. You've just explained it perfectly!"
"Pia's like a donkey..."
"That's not very polite!"
"No, Pia! Mummy told me about the donkey in the
Bible. It saw an archangel standing in its way, but the
donkey's master was blind and he just kept hitting it
with a stick to make it go."
"I suppose we do have to be a bit like that donkey,
to see dwarfs, prepositions and angels at work."

MORNING
"So now I want to know everything about my
angels. Their names, their number, their type and their
gender!"
"You're asking me for the moon!"
"And the stars too."
"All right, you shall have them. The biggest of your
angels is called de —OF. It's used all the time in French,
and you find it everywhere. The minute we open our
mouths, there it is, buzzing round our lips, like a bee in
summer."
"Why?"
"Because it can mean all sorts of things, and carries
an enormous number of messages. Listen to it hum-
ming around: à l'aéroport de Paris... la nièce de Pia ….
partie de Rome aux vacances de Noël ... mange sur la table
de bois ..
"...un gúteau de riz."
"Because we hear it so often, we no longer really hear it.
And since it blows in all directions, in itself it says
almost nothing and is virtually silent. White, transpar-
ent and invisible, like an angel."
"So it's invariable, like my teacher says. Neither
boy nor girl."
"Or, if you prefer, both boy and girl! Put a long dress
on it."
"I see it pleated at the bottom, with colored smock-
ing on the yoke."
"Good. Almost as frequent and transparent as de is
the second one, which is à —AT. Listen to it: Arrinee à
Paris à dix heures ... dans son pantaion à pois... pour ren-
trer à la maison... Angélique me parle à l'oreille.. avant
de jouer à la balle et de s'endormir à poings fermés.."
"... You forgot the tarte à la framboise."
he ohilosooher and ohysicist
Lucretius theorized a very slight
curvature, which he called
ocoiroonorireire
(kilinamen), and to this he ascribed
a determining role in the origin
ocoines. Intorths orme
divergence brings about the
formation of a whirlwind. In this
me teedeeroow trewter
prepositions (which, in language,
are operative of declension)
dee sreseetne onworo
curvatures of dimatic turbulence.
Angeis, which are the préposts
otooiten tuwietwnrones
both verbal messengers and
elemental fluxes. This satellite
protoplopn sows Xormy
whirlwinds in the process of
formation, viewed from the south-
wcewe cnot wes ati
We ace at a latitude corresponding
to the Ivory Coast, at the interface

"After these big angels, which are more numerous
than all the stars in the sky, come the middling ones,
which are used slightly less frequently, like on, by, in, for,
under, between, towards... They still fly fairly high.
"...Then come the swarms of little ones: before,
behind, beyond, against, among and according to.... These
are adverbs more than prepositions. Finally, very close
to the ground, we have the tiny ones: except, excluding,
given, pending, during, following, encompassing... these
are participles.
"So there, dear Angélique, you have the names,
number and gender of these angels, which are boys and
girls, but at the same time neither boys nor girls..."
"Are they neuter?"
"I prefer to think of them as white. At the top of the
ladder or the list we have the brightest and most
sparkling one of all-de-which means everything and
says nothing. This word produces a sum total of colors:
white. Such is the stuff of life as far as verbs and nouns
are concerned. On the other hand, the lowest ones on
the scale show hardly any color at all."
"It all sounds like a rainbow, Pia. How were you
able to count all these prepositions, and classify
them?"
"By putting our whole language through a giant
computer."

A group of mourning putti weep
and lament the death of lesus
Christ. A similar group of angels,
whose function is to mourn,
surround the cross at the time ot
his death, and, since their function
is and joyous, attend his
resurrection on basker morning
The positions of their bodies
suggest a ballet directed by
a skilled choreographer.
Giotto frescoes.
a meteonen
Arena Chapel (1302-6).
Padua, Italy.
"Tell me something else. You've told me the names
of each of these angels, but you haven't explained how
they come to be called prepositions."
"Think of the postman who comes knocking at
your door in the morning. In French he is referred to as
a préposé."
"That's the word that my dad uses for the man who
looks after the park next to the Town Hall. And the man
who checked our bags at the customs."
"At the coronation of the Queen of England, when
you see all the bishops and peers and stuffy nobles fol-
lowing after her in the procession, wouldn't you say
they're sort of 'posed', sort of stuck in their ways?"
"A bit, Pia. Yes. Smug and contented, with their
big bellies."
"And then we have other beings, who fly and run,
who are more or less invisible, and who have the power
of inclining the stiff and the stilted towards declen-
sion—forcing stiff things into a state of flexibility. These
beings hardly settle or become 'posed' at all...."
"Light as a feather. Like birds."
"When nouns and verbs hold court, they sit on
thrones and big chairs, surrounded by their ministers.
But prepositions are lighter. They're like postmen run-
ning down the street to distribute letters, or like cus-
toms officials watching over ports, or like traveling
14S

MORNING
salesmen, all of whom we refer to as pré-posés— pre-set-
tled, if you like."
"They travel the roads and highways; they create
them if they don't exist; and their messages serve to
transform fat-bellied stick-in-the-muds."
"I know, Pia-angels are God's prepositions."
"Yes, I think angelology could agree with that."
"Oooh that's a really ugly one—lolo!"
"You don't keep still for a moment, do you,
Angélique….!"
"What do you take me for, a prépose?"
She laughs, and then yawns.
As Angélique falls asleep again, Pia turns to Jacques,
who has been eavesdropping on the conversation:
"The relationships and forces which sculpt lan-
guages, in declining them or inflecting them, mold not
only the words, but also their syntax.
"So angels are representations of the Word, their
forms as messengers can be seen as types of metaphor:
hosts or legions of angels suggest liturgical repetition
and acclamation; a visitation of angels can be indicated
by euphemism or hyperbole; disappearing angels are
represented by ellipses and litotes. and finally angels
playing the lute or psaltery enact the sublime interces-
sion of the Word. As personifications of prepositions
and figures of the divine rhetoric, they create God's
style."
"Functionaries in the service of the Word?"
"Already present—always and everywhere-when
the need of a transformation begins to be felt. Weaving
space, constructing time, they are the precursors of
every presence.... In fact, dare I say it, the pré-poses are
there even before the fact of being there.
Poitioned in a multiplicity of
posed around a trompe-"'all
skylight set high in the ceiling-an
called Panoptes in ancient
mythology, in other words the all.
seeing one. Here is the eye of all
Cresolen trom the descense
This multiplication of viewpoints
expands the intimate chamber to
14S

WINGED MESSENGERS
set it on the scale of the outside
everywhere. Thus prepositions
adapt language to the world, by
decining it
Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506).
decoration of the Camera degli
3005, 140/-14, Ducal Palace,
"Here is the world in which we live, as I see it: the
space-time of communication, the metaphysics of the
service industries... the all-embracing environment in
which we exist ... the intercommunication of message-
bearing systems!"
"So something which appears almost imaginary or
abstract becomes, in fact, entirely practical and con-
crete."
"Finally, have you noticed how circumspect angels
are, and how their messages are always brief? Like
prepositions, they say very little, but they affect the des-
tiny of all whom they visit."
"Messengers, to be sure; but more than that-
kneaders of human dough."
"Prepositions transform words and syntax, while
the pré-poses transform men."
Jacques still has Rome and Prague in mind:
"When we look at altarpieces, we see angels every-
where-outside, inside and beyond them. Behind altars
and in front of them. On the ceilings of churches, and all
around. Simultaneously close to us and God, and also
distant. Against us, with us and despite us. Next to each
and every one of us. Good or bad. Traveling by means of
or through space. Towards heaven or coming from
heaven. Always among or within everything and every-
one. For example, within or among the One, through
him, with him and in him, the multiple and the totality,
from the beginning to the end of time, before, during
and after events, following the living present, both out-
side and inside and beyond systems..... They construct
and subtly describe local spaces and times, and end,
finally, by invading the universe of communication and
becoming visible in order to initiate dialogs or bring

MORNING
company to those in solitude: the contrary of a ladder of
power…. as long as the child remains there."
"You are able to speak of angels thanks to preposi-
tions, just as Angélique spoke of prepositions thanks to
angels."
"To each age its word."
"Its discretion and its sleep."
As the little girl sleeps, her face is the image of those
chubby, red-lipped putti that are such inveterate dis-
turbers of ecclesiastical tranquillity. They fall silent,
caught in the brilliance of her spell.
Standing there, they can still hear their grandfather,
before he died, declaring his love of children:
"Ever since the evolution of species invented sex,
love has always gone hand in hand with death. Giddy
youth intermingles with its passions both suicide and
murder-death both received and given. Old age is
fully aware of the proximity of the Grim Reaper, and it
transforms that presence with love. Here it is, powerful
and pure, living in me and strong as I have ever known.
"The love of little children is free from this over-
weening concern with sex," he says. "It bears us away
on the river of eternal time, as we cling to a drifting tree
trunk that has been uprooted by the rising waters of the
tide. I already hear the foaming of the current, the back-
ground noise whose chaos absorbs me as my life begins
to ebb. I do not know whether my lineage will continue.
In the line that stretches from Angélique to me, the flex-
ible flowerings of the possible transform into the crack-
ing wooden knots of my arthritic joints.
"Here I am now, carried along by the current of
flux. In the central axis of life, time flows, all alive. And
through the backbone of that time passes a vibrant
upwelling of love. Now, the closer it brings people who
are of the same age, the more it burns with flames of
passion and sickness, all of which derive terribly from
death. When it brings together those who are furthest
apart, it divests itself of all that. Envy, hatred, jealousy
and suchlike ignominies fall by the wayside. What
remains-transparent, white, incandescent, light-bear-
ing, gentle, hot without burning, flying— is the love of
young children, of whom it is written that their angels
see God face to face.
"Angélique shows me their place, the place which
will soon be mine."
As Pia gazes at the sleeping child, she says out loud:
"Who is it who exposes little children to all this-the
children of the South to famine, sickness and crime, and
those of the rich North to drugs and never-ending
depictions of murder and violent sex? Do we hate them
so much, even when their very presence answers so
many of our questions?
"Why are there so many sciences if not for these
angels?"
Chidren think it's important to
be big and grown-up, and some
adults, if they've never grown up.
think the same. There they stand,
as cardboard puppets, or wax
dummies. The process of growing
ittle ones-the ordooses-so oliant
and mobile that they seem to have
wings are more important than
the big ones, stuck in their
posedness.
El Angelito, 1987, Morella,
Spain.
14s

MIDDAY

Three times a day, the bell rings
and commemorates the
Arnune.won
Anee wonartawitwrwe
The Angel of the Lord spoke unto
Wary
And she conceived by the Holy
Spirit
Behold the handmaid of the Lord
Fist mihi secundum verbum tuum
Be it be unto me according to thy
word
I?wehtm Catn yactum ner
Rno trweoysmode thh
Et habitavit in nobis
And cwelt among us.
The widespread popul arity o
this daily ritual, which celebrates
the bringing of the good tidings—
as also the great popularity of
Millet's picture in its time—have
their modern equivalent in our
ttwweltC
news on TV or radio several times
a day.
Jean-Hangois willet (1819-75)
The Angefus, 1857. Muste d'Orsay,
Paris, France.
Recing result, Wales.
ANGELUS
Angélique and Jacques have taken a domestic flight
and by now are well on their way home.
Pantope and Pia sit down to eat, in one of the air-
poot restaurants.
le sound on the television is turned up so his
at they have difficulty hearing themselves spe.
Pia, harking back to years gone by:
"Morning, noon and night, the angelus bell would
ring to mark the passing of the archangel. It rang out
the news of the Annunciation: the conception, incama-
tion and birth of our hope.
"We were constantly apprised of the divinity of our
flesh, the recommenced commencement of Christ's

coming into the world, the wondrous event that saves
us from death.
"Morning, noon and night, with the meal that
accompanies it, a message rings out announcing the
good tidings, that joyous mystery of life.
Pantope, very much in the present:
"Morning, noon and night, we do better than the
believers of yester-year, because we never miss see-
ing or hearing the world's news. At every meal.
He points at the television.
Pia, doggedly:
"It was an angel that brought the good news of the
Annunciation; we don't call our TV announcers angels.
However, behind the two words 'announcer' and
'annunciation', which have a similarity, there continues
the same very ancient function, of transmitting mes-
Alla
sages, of reporting, as promptly as may be, things that
are happening elsewhere."
Pantope, confidently:
"The ethereal bodies of angels traveled at the
speed of their thoughts; their successors travel at the
speed of light: the game's a draw, a dead heat."
She, uneasily:
"From where? To where?"
He, triumphantly:
"Progress! We see the faces and bodies of ou
announcers, whereas the angels of antiquity didn't
show themselves at all or at least only rarely."
She describes what she sees:
"Human suffering, morning noon and night! Disas-
ters, wars, earthquakes, volcanoes, epidemics, fires,
famines, crises, scandals, civil unrest, coups d'éta,
crime, injustice, trials, murder, dead bodies, corpses,
corpses, corpses.... The same endless train of bad

19:36:44
LA GUERRE
3H02
news... Always tragic. And in all these just one theme
is repeated, in a hundred different forms, reiterated
since the dawn of our time. Death. It's as if we've been
taken back to ancient times."
She continues:
According to Aristotie and the
their favored image. It matters
"Has anyone ever counted the number of deaths
dassical dramatists, dread and pity
little how the bodies came to be
which fill our ears and our eyes, our plates, our glasses,
were the two principal recourses of
dead-wars, accidents, revolutions,
even our mouths, as we eat?"
tragedy. Religions which ban
murder, assassinations... People
He waxes scientific:
images hold that all forms of
who have studied these things tell
"If you read the statistics, they say that by the time
figurative representation tend to
us that nowadays far and away the
he reaches the age of eighteen a teenager will have seen
drift towards the exhibition of
dominant image on television is
eighteen thousand murders-at least three per day.
death. Given the efficacy of death
that of dead bodies.
Morning, noon and night."
in drawing a crowd, our TV news
She asks: "Do you think this saturation will change
programmes nowadays apply the
precepts of. classical times and
feature piles of dead bodies as
Television images: China, June
1989 (left and center); France,
January 1991 (right).
the course of human history?"
He, visibly concerned:
"What hell is being prepared by this visual force-
feeding?"
쓰

MID DAY
She spells it out in detail:
"A minor screenplay of the world's lesser localities,
where fire explodes and blood is shed. Seeing that it
displays only people who've been killed, the so-called
'global village' is nowadays divided into a host of small
places, whose reputations only reach the world at large
if they ve been the scene of mass murders or something:
and once the lesson is learnt, everyone applies it. Tele-
vision lies at the active centre of this spiral that has
become self-perpetuating."
He, in a juridical aside:
"Who benefits from these crimes? What end do
they serve? And why?
Pia, self-assuredly:
"Power and glory."
Pantope, disgusted:
"A bad sign, when people vomit in their own
plates!"
She, thoughtfully:
"So what happened at the point when the new
announcers took over from the angels? Have we only
kept the fallen angels? Are we now only interested in
the glory of death, the orders of murderers, the powers
of the earth, the throne of glory and the dominion of
men?"
He, forlornly:
"In among these dismal repetitions of the world's
ancient miseries, when are we going to get a real piece
of news, and one that is good?"
She replies with a question:
"Will one alone be sufficient to save us?"
He, assertively:
"But our televisions don't transmit good news any
more. With every meal, we're forced to eat dead bodies
and drink spilt blood."
She picks up the menu:
"We've become cannibals again. Man is devouring
man, in untold numbers. Human beings on the
butcher's slab."
He turns away.
쓰

Lite a birth which regularly
begins anew, each meal restores
lite: bread and wine restore blood.
she odd
Lubin Baugin (c. 1610-63),
see du route
Paris, France.
She, resolutely:
"Morning, noon and night, henceforth, in me and
around me. I shall sing the divinity of the flesh and the
miracle of life."
She passes him the bread, and he pours wine into
their glasses. Then, both together, they ask:
"What shall we have to eat?"

AFTERNOON

Four feet and two wine.
Creatures with human heads and
the elements of several different
Doors word wealt
through the door, these monsters
announce that we are about to
enter another woeld. As walkers on
foot, we are about to fly, as dumb
animals with bovine neads, we are
now about to thick. Placed at the
entrances to temples and palaces.
the Assyrian winged bull oe kerub
fulfils the role of a guide taking us
in a new direction: the role of an
exchanger or interchanger.
Winged bull from the Palace of
Sargon at Khorsabad near Mosul,
wad, location of ancient assynd
Louvre, Paris, France,
A freeway interchange.
CHERUBIM
"Without them, what would I ever have learnt, and
who would ever think creatively?"
"Are you referring to anyone in particular?"
"T'm referring to you, who were just explaining
grammar to your niece, and the TV presenters who
reads the news, and all those whose announcements
transform our lives.
"These teachers or message bearers have two exis-
tences: the one down there and the one down here..
Of syntax and of the student.... They bridge two
worlds, in the same way as animals which both walk
and fly. The old human dream of becoming a bird
echoes the transition from the weighty to the volatile,
from feet to wings.
쓰

AFTERNOON
"Animals, machines, men: amphibious beings.."
"Take-off completed—pull up your undercarriage!"
"Not so simple! In ancient times, the temples of Baby-
lon were guarded by winged buils with the heads of
men, which the Jews in exile brought back to Jerusalem
to guard the Ark of the Covenant. The Assyrian word
kerub referred to these triple-natured beings, and that is
where we get the word 'cherub'."
"Angels and animals at the same time?"
"You may laugh, but listen to me! Have you ever
seen an animal combining two or three species?"
"Absolutely not."
"If a messenger takes you by the hand and changes
places with you within one same space, do you find
yourself any further advanced?"
"No. The train takes us from station to station, and
the automobile from one gas station to another, on the
same freeways. God, how boring!"
"Whereas birds, launched from the rooftops, soar
on clouds and aerial turbulence. They change element."
"Ah! I knew a bird once, Pia. A mountain guide
fixed a rope to my belt and opened another world to
me: ice and rock are more than slightly different from
ploughed earth and flower-filled meadows; a sheer
mountainside is something different compared with a
path in a forest. In mountains one's body is trans-
formed. Bread and tea don't have the same taste. Hum-
ble and ecstatic, aching but happy, a party of climbers
inches up a mountain; when they finally reach the sum-
mit, there is a rush of exhilaration, and what they see
resembles more planet Earth than mere ploughed
fields. Everything changes: sight, touch, breathing and
sweat. Silence. The closeness of air and sky. Life and the
closeness of death, your companion's smile, and the
uplift of your spirit.
"Tlove that bird who put wings on my feet. I didn't
become a flying creature by my own efforts, Pia-far
from it—it was thanks to him that I was able to pass,
surreptitiously, like a burglar, into this vast new world."
"So we feel a special gratitude to these extraordi-
nary pedagogues who make it possible for us to enter
new worlds."
"Pia, is it possible for an angel to lead a double
life?"
"An angel can even lead multiple lives, my ironical

Procerding as an interchanger at
the head of a climbing party, the
ounoinouieteikouehe wer
ahead, cuts steps, makes fast ropes,
advises and encourages.., and leads
his dlient nto a different workd
This world contains the conditions
that are necessary to the ordinary
wonld below. water, stored up in
snow and glaciers; rocks awaiting
erosion and disintegration in the
valleys, the onilians sunsnine that
transforms into gentier weather at
lower altrtudes.... Down there.
Hehonet dur voweetne
ouner trwse wioooner weainie
t0 understand conditions needs a
quide to the mourains neigns.
friend, because he may be a vulture or a kestrel—a crea-
ture of both heaven and earth, but also of flesh and of
spirit, of transparent abstraction and of visible concrete-
ness.."
".. like a geometric figure…."
"...of intelligence and of the senses.... of the heard
and of the unheard…."
".. like good music…."
"..of the visible and the invisible.."
".. like painting or mathematics..."
"I tell you what, Pia ... I remember the man who
taught me geometry. Let me tell you, he turned my

CHERUBIM
The phenomenon of aurora
boreals is caused by the interaction
between particles transmitted from
the sun and gas molecules in the
upper atmosphere. The sun's
corona emits a constant stream of
parties, Sometines known as
"solar wind, in normal
circumstances, the Earth's magnetic
blind. She took my fingers and placed them on the
piano, and its keys opened for me the white and black
grotto of sounds, in which the chromatic scale only
unfolds its colors to people with no eyes. I became
another kind of creature: a blind mole with long lobes,
from which hung harps, in curling clusters."
"When I'm in the mountains, trailing behind that
bird, I see myself as a dumb tortoise."
"We're monsters, we change species! Anyone who
doesn't become several animals at once is not worth
particles. However, sometimes
folent sunspots emit particles that
are sufficiently powerfully charged
to enable them to penetrate this
armor and ionize molecules of the
earth's atmosphere. While this
done ten may sethe
intellect, it leaves beauty deaf,
dumb and blind.
An aurora boreal's beneath the
Great Bear. Pekka Paniainen
Scientific Photography Library,
much."
"So is it the case that through angels we become
animals?"
"Yes, because they offer us a variety of specialities.
How are we to gain access to any of the thousand
worlds outside this one without these amphibious ped-
agogues? Their genius serves to create links between
things that have no necessary links.
"In imitation of the bird-bull cherub, a life that is
well-spent passes its time with both humble people and
kings, with the poor and the wealthy, with the ignorant
and those who believe themselves intelligent: it values
equally and joyously the wealth of the poor, the culture
of the ignorant, the incredible kingliness of simple folk,
world upside down! From that moment on, things were
the passive obedience of winners... It mocks degree."
never the same again. Everything changed-houses,
"I'm just wondering, Pia, what happens between
tables, the angles where the ceiling joins the walls, the the bird wings and the bull backbone of the creature!"
winding ribbon of a lane, the Gothic line created at the
"Between designates precisely the space in which
joining point of tall trees lining the sides of a road. Like- angels operate, the angels who create links between
wise the constellations studding the skies, and dialogs networks: between freeways and channels of sounds
with others.... That day a white aurora borealis and image... goat paths and computer circuits... rich
descended, the transparency of which has never since
magi and shepherds... the balm of death, myrth, per-
left me or disturbed my vision."
fumes the new-born child! As beings with a double
"The person who first introduced me to music was
nature, pedagogues, guides and cherubim enable us to

AFTERNOON
see the differences between worlds, and in so doing
they stitch together the unity of the new universe. With
them we are enabled to put together things that are dis-
parate. For instance, science and abject destitution..."
"...the theoretical and the concrete, the hardware
with the software.... So can we say that our more
advanced technologies are enacting the classic angelic
function of guiding?"
"More and more we are beginning to resemble
Tobias, walking behind Raphael."
"But where's he leading us?"
"Via a thousand interchanges!"
"Like the ones on freeways?"
"They embody and make possible our message-
bearing systems."
"Birds and frogs, aircraft and submarines, TV pre-
senters and professors... Do they cast down their bod-
ies like interchanges between terrestrial life and aquatic
or aerial life, on the one hand, and, on the other, the
known and the unknown?"
"Here's the answer to your question: between the
bird wings and the bull backbone of the creature there
are .... cherubim interchangers! Angels transport mes-
sages and passengers, but cherubim are amphibious
and embody a connection between two worlds."
"Correct. The guide knows both my world, and the
other world to which he is taking me. He can move in
two ways. He has two bodies: a weighty body in the
plain and a light body in the mountain. I swear that he
suddenly tucks up his feet and sprouts wings."
"Thus, more angelic than the simple messenger,
what the body of the interchange agent offers is a possi-
bility of intercommunication, a plasticity of message-
bearing systems."
As a living interchanger, the
guide or pedagogue has a double
body: one which is capable of
aderessng chiic noce, dna ahoaher
which leads childheed towards a
world in which, so far from
walking, one flies, or iratead of
staving sick orv becomes cured, of
where blindness is replaced by
dear-santedness and a woman's
Francesco Botticini (1446-98%,
The Archangel Raphael and the
Young Tobias. S. Maria del Fiore,
Florence, Italy. The young Tobias
here the want the tor yes
gall will provide a remedy for his
father; a concerted interplay moves
"wur chine one then
and between the aquatic creature
and the winged archangel-bird.
the dog patters siong at wee sect
The picture sets in play an
Interchange between the
pertormances of several species
which are connected by the two
held hands. A young boy, below,
sull at a stage before learning
contemolates the process of
pedagogy in action.
쓰

126 6 66
3912 to
1327
"If you travel in today's world, you carry with you
a multiple electric plug-round and female at one end
and square and male at the other. Hermaphroditic, in
fact. If you didn't have a translator like that you
wouldn't be able to shave in both France and America,"
says Pantope, laughing.
"These days, unless we have these amphibious
keys-teachers, or birds—how can we hope to make
anything function at all? And now businesspeople and
travelers, semi-conductors, inverters, transformers,
commutators, rectifiers, transistors,
silicon chips,
microprocessors... machines or devices that are
designed for connecting, transferring or translating a
thousand functions or machines one to another.
"Disparate networks can only be linked to each
other via a high technology of such interchangers.
Without these, there could be no long-distance travel
on freeways, or telephone conversations around the
½
C19
An interchanger connects
networks of different kinds:
physical, living, human, and
intellectual, And at all levels, from
the life-size to the microscopic. For
example, cherubim, in the genus of
the tesching of humanity's
children; clover-leaf interchanges
on roads and hichwavs intearated
circuit components of a network,

and billions of synapses at the ends
Onw wtatnn ttont.thtm
realms of manufacturing and
understanding.
Left, a picture showing the
comweeikoro nerwonet
rectangular shapes are integrated
circuits. Right, micrography of a
wohornoltora.inuhe
photograph grey matter appears as
yellow.
world, or links between computers—in short, no links
from one network to another.
"Scientists are even discussing the possibility of
implants in our brains, to connect with similar implants
in other people's brains."
"We were discussing earlier the sex of angels, an
old problem, once more resolved: sex, unfortunately,
has a name which suggests 'section', or a cutting-off,
whereas the interchanger joins together. Dare I say it,
cherubim live in a state of constant coitus, in an angelic
joy of mutual liking. Shall we live for all eternity in a
similar miracle of ecstasy?"
"We have other examples, nearer to hand: dictio-
naries serve as interchanges between languages . . .
together with grammar books and translators. Can we
perhaps think in terms of interchanges between human
lineages? Yes. Through the child who is chosen, adoption
brings together families and tribes with no previous

AFTERNOON
link: Oedipus connects a lineage of shepherds with a
dynasty of kings..
"Complex, this interlinking business!"
"Here's a health to it! Since Jesus is both the son of
God and a son of man, by his double nature he creates
an interlink between human nature and the Trinity. Our
species becomes universal at the moment that I am able
to call anybody, at choice, my sister or my father, and
not merely my biological parent or sibling. The legisla-
tion and practice of adoption brought about the most
astonishing revolution which worldwide humanity
had ever known. One can always opt, more or less eas-
ily, for a wife or a mistress, a husband or a lover, and
there you have marriage or one of its sexual equiva-
lents; but who would have had the boldness to offer his
mother or his brother in the realm of genital reproduc-
tion, a domain of necessity? Adoption performs this
miracle, in adding to the dispositions of Roman law the
mystery of incarnation.
"It has taken us a lot of science and a lot of time to
show humanity's unity, whereas all it needed to con-
nect it was a little piety."
"The interchanger provides a key for us to pass
between two worlds, and we now possess a whole
bunch or keyboard of them: semiconductor materials,
for inert matter; in our thousand-and-one advanced
technologies we have interchangers and microproces-
sors; among biological beings, coitus, whether her-
maphroditic or amphibian; in languages, dictionaries
and translators; in politics, ambassadors; in the sci-
ences, interfaces and interferences; in the sphere of law
and religion, adoption..."
"In short, the cherub. In himself, he embodies inter-
mediaries."
"In exchange for my ticket the check-in clerk gives
me my boarding card, a right of passage; in the same
way, Pia, when I arrived you gave me the key to my
hotel room, a place of transition... the key to my car is
another filter of the same kind.
"Thus one can construct a general message-bearing
system, by creating connections no longer simply bet-
ween static points, which is what the simple messen-
ger-angel does, but between networks."
"So, in terms of classification this represents a
higher level. As an aircraft with both wings and feet,
the cherub not only assembles individuals, but con-
nects great crowds, vast populations that are already
linked internally among themselves, species or families
of linkages."
"We only have to look around us to observe the
cherubim. A cohort of cherubim is to be found in the air-
port, which is an interchange in its own right, and a mul-
tiple key to other worlds. It treats it, it mobilizes it. Every
interchanger permits one to change between spaces, lev-
els and orders which may be heterogeneous among
themselves, and to construct a oneness of the universe
while at the same time maintaining local differences."
"It assists, finally, in the fulfilment of justice. The
sowing of several networks with interchangers enables
one to distribute and equalize flows in many locations.
Each one has its share of them, and all transmit it in its
entirety. Their position and their good functioning is a
necessary condition for a global equilibrium which
could tend towards equity."
"So how does it come about that our global New-
town produces a global vertical disequilibrium, such
ferocious injustice, seeing that it has message systems
that are swarming with interchangers, and which
170

1221
As an interchanger or means of
union, the erect penis could be
sen, undifferentiatedly, as an
organ of both the man and the
woman, according to whether the
word ordereste
(appropriately named) genitive, or
the subjective, by reference to
where derrot. onto
objective, by reference to its
intention. The vagina, by the same
token, as a melting-pot or a co-
ordinating conjunction, belongs
Cunt to the witnotone
man. scored to whether the
possessive is used in the sense of
ownership, or of an acquisition, of
a nature, or of a gift. An exchange.
then: the one who thinks they are
giving is in fact receiving, and the
one who thinks they are taking, is
giving... A positive spiral, a helix.
mutually and unceasingly seif.
feeding, which raises lovers to
heights that are sheer to the point
of vertigo.
A bas-relief from one of the
eighty temples of Khajuraho,
ancient religious capital of
Bundelkhand, Madhys Pradesh,
India.

CHERUBIM
should therefore permit both equilibrium and justice?
"Here I think one has to talk about fallen angels!"
"Is it possible that angelology—a word so ugly that
Angélique would have none of it-expresses the phi-
losophy of a universe in birth?"
"This is why we see these strange-bodied monsters
everywhere."
"Long live going on holiday by plane! Long live
guides and teachers! My fathers and mothers! Long live
chimerae!"
Pantope bursts out laughing: "The first builders of
aircraft called their art aviation, after the Latin word for
bird, because they believed that they would fly by flap-
ping their wings. Now the term no longer makes sense,
because an aircraft's fusilage looks more like the body
of a large fish, with wings that look more like fins.
"So, flying in the face of general usage, so to speak,
how about calling it 'pisciation' instead?"
It we are to believe that cherubim
got their name from the winged
bulls that guarded Assyrio-
Babylonian palaces and temples,
then it becomes entirely natural
testimony of God's promise, of the
pact between Yahweh and the
Hebrew people. Beings with
double bodies guarantee the
convention between those two
partners.
The Ark of the Covenant.
Ninth-century mosak in the apse
wood, should be guarding and
preserving (beneath the
Tabernacie, and then within the
Holy of Holies) the Ark of the
Covenant, since this block box (arca
"we Cotto
Carolingian church built by
Theodulf (c. 750-821) at
Germigny-des-Pres,

The love of cherubim transforms
the worst method consists in
battles and killings: like cheap sex,
valend theon toe
smtagonist come to resemble each
other. Love or hate? Is the beast
nat tormento which
dangerous or pitiable? What's the
difference between the archangel's
arm and the deagonix given that
they're both wielding weapons? Or
between the saint's spurs and the
monster's pointed beak? Between
ANGELS AND BEASTS
horns of the bull that he's
fighting? Do the scales which are
attached to the archangel's armor
and his wooden cross help in
deciding? Do the archangel, and
the Emerie win nish
spangled costume, tum into the
animals which they are killing?
Lieferince), St Michael Slaying the
Dragon. Musée du Petit-Palais,
Avignon, France.
Matador at the point of mulets,
"Chimera is the name of an animal that has two
arts of its body crossed in an X:'
ia comes back equally learnedly:
"Do you mean that in the case of cherubim, they
want to be angels but they're also beasts?"
antope puts on a funny voice
Do you mind if we have an end to these four
footed angels with their braying and squawking?"
Pia looks askance and observes:
"At least we might try to understand what all that
means."
He says, in a reference back to childhood:
쯔

AFTERNOON
"That the Beast becomes the Beauty, for example?"
And she, venturing into politics:
"The reverse-that power plummets from the
heights to end up in a court of law."
"So here we are at last, at the fall of the angels!"
"And their atonement. If mystics take up debauch-
ery, then Don Juan becomes a monk, as they say."
Pantope, mockingly:
"Of whom are perversion and conversion the twin
breasts?"
Pia cautions him and begins again:
"A movement of inversion, rather, and, we might
say, a tilting of a curious set of scales: there are people
who move from a very low point to reach the heights of
glory, but then they go beyond it, and finish by coming
out on the other side and plunging into ignominy. Have
they walked along the beam of a set of scales, and gone
beyond the pivot point? Is it that, having passed the
high point of ascent, now they come tumbling down?
Does the same force that raised them up now bring
them toppling down?"
*The image of justice appears to be tottering; are we
entering a realm of injustice?"
"Not necessarily. But let's describe the mecha-
nism."
He, remaining in the field of physics:
"Icebergs have a habit of suddenly turning upside
down. However, they are melting all the time: the sea
and the air create the two pans of the scales!"
She, in rather more societal terms:
"Ibelieve the Romans used to say that it was a short
step between the Capitol, the lofty heights from which
the emperors ruled the people, and the Tarpeian rock
from which convicted prisoners were hurled? A person
The right hand pan of the scales
is raised, to elevate the elect, wrae
the anger's lett hand seems to
weigh down on the pan of
damnation. On the side of
hand in greeting, whereas Eve is
positioned lower, on the side of
sin, in supplication. Neither St
Michael, despite the dozens of eyes
studding his wings, nor the
painter, nor anybody else is
surprised that the scales - the very
image of justice always tip in
favor of the right side, as is
required by our lanquaces, which
speak, unjustly, of diritto, droit,
Recht, ngnt. what would a nestory
fairness require? That the beam of
the balance be redcessed! That it is
set 'right again? But it ist
(c. 1400-64), St Michael Weighing
Sout, detail from the Palptych of
the Last Judgement. c. 1443-6
Hotel-Dieu, Beaune, France.
176

ANGELS AND BEASTS
In this picture the ocean is calm
and windless, and reflects a
symmetrical image which expresses
the constant condition of reversal
of these vast lumos of frozen
water, wren are worriest mo
in more clement latitudes. Then
tre lower hait a faned up, the
upper half cast down to disappear
beneath the waters. This cycle is
never ending, for both men and
things.
A flouting icebera, north of
Greenland, during the arctic night.
can be at the height of their glory one day and face the
worst of deaths the next, while another who has suf-
fered as a victim for a lifetime may suddenly find him-
self coming out on top.
"It's a short step from power to a fall, and right at
the midpoint this path has a point where everything
overturns, like a set of scales tipping over. Out on one
beam he rules, and on the other he dies. But it's still the
same set of scales!"
"You're talking of men, not angels."
"Of our fellow human beings, who seem not to
want to stay that way!"
"Of us, of course, but also of things: a sovereign
remedy may suddenly turn out to be a drug or a lethal
poison, without having particularly changed its make-
up. A given noise might send us to sleep one day but
wake us up on another. Or it is suddenly discovered
that a parasite which everyone thought was deadly,
dangerous or harmful, turns out to be beneficial. Com-
fort devours and bitterness delights."
She shifts from pharmaceuticals to health care:
"A person's health can be driven off course by eat-
ing too much, and then recovered by eating less; con-
versely, it can be lost through poverty, and restored by
sufficiency, as long as it stops short of over-abundance,
which would send it back off course again.
"This is the mechanism of inequality in our world:
on the one hand we have the wretched of the earth,
exhausting themselves in the effort of getting enough to
eat, and on the other hand we have the rich going on
starvation diets... And we have millionaires going
around dressing like bums and the so-called 'caviar
Left, which dominates, despises, parasites off and
betrays the people."
"Let us step boldly on: the solid block of a floating
iceberg sits in water, and presents a resistance to wind.
At the interface the conditions suddenly change, and
the whole thing turns topsy-turvy."
"As every child knows, the faster a top spins, the
better it stays upright."
"And now generalize: this interminable list of
reversible responses suggests that we are dealing with
one single class of questions."
"Governed by one constant rule of reversal. In the
bodies of angels and cherubim, and of all intermediary
professions, one might say that there exists something
like a swinging pendulum, a reversible metronome."
"Far from making a system fragile, this is what sta-
bilizes it. Every moment of organization that goes
beyond the naïve simplicity of a heavy, homogeneous
mass (like a sandbag sitting on the ground) has pockets
179

in which laws, by reversing themselves, far from decon-
structing the whole, actually contribute to its consolida-
tion."
"The 'no' is not opposed to the 'yes', but collabo-
rates with it in order to construct a system that is more
refined. One example among many: far from killing
mathematics, the ancient Greeks discovered the limit-
less sea of irrational numbers when they discovered the
contradiction arising in odd and even numbers. The
edifice of geometry was built from the fact of carrying
in oneself this metronome, this pitching and rolling, the
amplitude of which guarantees the stability of boats, all
the better if they're actually rolling from side to side."
"One also sees this in societies: Louis XIV had his
power of absolute kingship from God. In the name of
When Hercules fought the
Nemean lion with a view to killing
already concealed a man-god like
wire Anone the dine he
donned the lion's skin, when his
enemies sought to do battle with
him, were they attempting to
purge the world of a monster?
149
Does the hero in combat become
one with the wild animal? Animal
or god? Take your pick.
Dressed in a lion skin,
Hercules brandishes his club,
Corinthian vase.
Muste du Louvre,
Paris, France.

ANGELSANDBEASTS
this divine right, he ruled the subjects of his kingdom
arbitrarily. There was a bishop by name of Bossuet. He
used to thunder forth in severe and admonitory ser-
mons, in the presence of the king. The king would bow
his head before this thundering diatribe, and at the end
of the sermon he would admit that he was not all that
he might be. The royal rule becomes absolute and uni-
versal by means of its passage through the local hell of
its opposite, namely Louis's humility before the priest
officiating at the altar."
"A pleasing confirmation that he would find no
obstacle before him! Is it the case that the only true 'yes'
demands, somewhere, the existence of a 'no' to stimu-
late it, in the same way that the discord of the seventh in
a chord is what makes the chord's resolution all the
more enjoyable?"
"Both the physical and the human world contain
more spinning-tops than sedentary heaps of stones!
"As if a general equilibrium governed the smaller
ones spread far and wide."
"The 'yes' may imply a tragedy; Mary's devoted
acceptance of the Annunciation delivered by the angel
put her own life in danger: she would have risked being
stoned to death if Joseph had decided to accuse her of
adultery.."
"I hadn't thought of this danger of death occurring
before life was born."
"Would you like to see an angel become an animal?
When a long and hard-fought bullfight draws to its
conclusion, the toreador begins to become indistin-
guishable from his prey; consummate art requires a
fusion between the hero in his light-spangled cloth-
ing-the angel-and the black pelt of mortal forces rep-
resented by the beast. At that moment all you see is one
single living being, with hoofs of horn and shoulders of
gold: that's how the cherubim of antiquity were born.
"The vision of the prophet Ezekiel and the statues
of ancient divinities, half-man and half-bull, echo this
ritual rapprochement, in which people celebrate, with
cheers of admiration and cries of anguish, the memory
of that far-off day when human sacrifice eventually
gave way to animal sacrifice. What they are shouting is:
Which of the two in the middle of the arena will die?'
Will it be the angel or the beast? That's how our gods
were born. A man becomes a god if he is able to kill the
beast, but only on condition that it in turn has the
capacity to kill him: you see how this set of scales
works.
"Now for a different image. I can still remember a
picture in a book I had as a girl. It showed the demi-god
Hercules, wearing the shaggy pelt of the Nemean lion
which he had just killed. Is it Hercules hiding in there,
or was he in fact becoming the beast? Whoever chooses
to fight him might find it hard to decide: is he man or
beast? And whom had this skin concealed earlier, when
Hercules was victorious and took it for himself....
Again, was it man or beast?
"When he meets the hydra, the boar and the bull,
three encounters in all of which the outcome was
equally uncertain, nobody knows who's going to win—
the man or the beast. Who's going to kill and who's
going to be sacrificed, the animal or the angel sent to
cleanse the world of evil? The fact that he wraps himself
in the lion's tawny pelt shows, precisely, the undecid-
ability of the outcome of the fight.…. and of the muleta
passes and the final decision to recibir, when, in one
action, the bull's horns and the bullfighter's sword
thrust at each other, simultaneously, seeking the weak

The scales settle in equilibrium. in
the madle, with ho arm caboing
in the pool, Love plays, without
jealousy. He erases all frontiers,
even the most solid; those which
Tiban (Tizano Vecellio)
(1488/9-1576). Sacred and Profane
Love, before 1515. Borghese
Gallery, Rome, Italy.
points of each other's anatomy .. and once again we
have the law of the wavering balance..!
"... which is where we get the emotionality-so
like the emotion of war-which every week brings mil-
lions of people out to watch group sporting events
between the teams of opposing towns and nations.
Which of the teams-the chimera with its red and blue
shirts-will be the one to go down, in the event?
"Suspense. are you aware that at its roots the word
'suspense' relates to the Latin for 'weigh' or balance'?"
"Encore!"
"In his lion's pelt, Hercules, the hero or demi-god,
the angel and beast, the violent sacrificer and purger on
his travels of various monsters whose violence had
been infesting the world, becomes, all of a sudden, one
of those self-same monsters, when, wearing the tunic
given to him by Deianira and steeped in the blood
of the centaur Nessus (half-man and half-quadruped),
he is burned at the summit of Mount Oeta, as much by
the poisoned tunic as by the sacrificial pyre."
"He is a demi-god because his nature is simultane-
ously human and divine?"
"Or simultaneously angelic and animal!"
"Both sacrificer and sacrificed. Indistinguishably.
Dead in either event."
Pia smoothes down her skirt and asks:
"And what about us humans, weren't we once
dressed in animal skins, just to make people believe
that man is a lion or a wolf for man….. and so that we
could kill more assuredly those whom we dressed up in
this animal appearance?"
"If you want to kill your dog, say that it's got rabies;
then if you want to kill your neighbor, say that he's a
dog; throw the skin of some animal around his shoul-
ders."
"So that's the origins of our clothing: a lure for mur-
der….."
Patting her hair into position, she says:
"... or a cosmetic with a divine charm. I love you,

my angel: and the angel shows its feathers and the
transparent robe covering its diaphanous body."
"When Spinoza writes that man is a god for man,
he is describing how our loves and enthusiasms are
conditioned by the strange belief that one's beloved no
longer belongs to the human species, but to a divine
family. That is how false gods are born, of alliance and
hatred, of fine words and carnage: because when.
Hobbes writes that man is a wolf for man, he authorizes
us, by that token, to savage our fellow men, who
become classified as animals and bestial!"
"Thus Spinoza and Hobbes are saying the same
thing."
"But in Pascal the two phrases become immediately
contrary, because they express two identical but oppo-
site perspectives. Lack, the animal, equals excess, the
Angel-both of which are measured by the beam of a
set of scales which is wavering."
"Inasmuch as we waver, we never have choice. We
switch endlessly between admiration and censure. In
the language of approval or contempt we stamp our fel-
low men as either angels or animals.
"Herein lie the origins of the sacred: to sacrifice
means to kill, put to death, by hatred and violence, and
also to render sacred, sacralize, honor and adore.
Slaughter and deify. There you have the outcome of this
law of perpetual reversal, there you have the mecha-
nism for fabricating gods."
"Gold medal, president, Nobel prize winner, front
page news... or the humble ranks of the invisible. And,
as usual, we make ourselves of the same metal as the
others."
"How long will it be before we realize that we are all
just men? If that's all you are, what a great thing it is no
longer having to kill yourself.... But can I love you,
when this machine for fabricating gods comes to a halt?"
"Who will help me then?"
"You remember this morning, when we were talking
about translators, intermediaries and announcers, and
쓰

ANGELS AND BEASTS
The four metamorphoses of the
Words of the Gospel hover around
Christ in his glory: the eagle
(aquila) - St John; the bull
(vitulo)-St luke; the young man
(omost matthew, and tinalh
the lion (leo)-St Mark. And each
ter tom wire the coner ound
the oval of a kind of eye: synoptic?
Whether men or beasts, all four
extend their wings lixe angeis.
Christ in Glory, San Isidoro
the vibration, the switching between appearing and
disappearing...? We also discussed doubles, apropos
of guardian angels...
"We have just identified the global terms of the law
of reversal: it is that this reversal operates at the very
roots of religion."
"But we also see it functioning in nature, and in
society!"
"Why should it not? Are you scared of general
rules? Have we just discovered why it was that, in talk-
ing of angels, we had a wonderful paradigm for talking
about men and things?"
"Certain schemas stay with us."
The good tidings close the age of sacrifice and block the
machine for manufacturing gods. As Jacques put it,
Hermes dies.
Then, having become divine and verbal, flesh
remains never-endingly flesh. It shines, serenely, and
illuminates the night of the spirit, being at once both
subject and object. The scales are at rest; a horizontality
of the beam of the balance; justice.
No difference separates gods from men.
changels
from animals, profane love from sacre
ly from
soul, beauty from the beast, prayer fri
*s from
high mystique. We are at last men for:
nd of
the reign of angels sounds with the bis!
Tessiah,
who makes flesh divine and incar
ence
encompasses everything, in its urine. ing
Neither angel nor beast: just sir.
She quotes:
And before the throne there was a St videos t
nto
crystal: and in the midst of the thror
throne, were four beasts full of eyes hear and 2taa
And the first beast was like a line wind thor sure f host
like a calf, and the third beast sands step as a sor
fourth beast was like a flying eagic.
And the four beasts had at
him: and they were full of eyest
Silent for a moment, Pantop
"You see these creatures
mals-the lion, the calf and IN.
they are borne on six wins
seraphim of tradition. An. in
man's face. They combine all nature
Ireneus of Lyons brillianti;
lists, and from that day on, this is
shown them. It adds the
beings. Inasmuch as it is afr
angelic, flesh is the language of the divin:
They look at each other, as swing themestes, neid
for the first time, flashing with light behind invest
clothes....

Susseely tilting to the vertical
remocrats ole or muste
place the angels of Newtown on a
pinnacle, ereven thousand meters
up in the sir, esting a mest during FALSE GODS
thousand kilometers. As they settle
down to oldest soun
uncomfortably, they may fall into a
discussion of human rights, and
may even be traveling for
humanitarian reasons. Meanwhile,
down below, the vast majority of
their peers inhabit a world of
destitution where they are barely
able to scratch together even the
Polytheism is what explains this
distortion between our ideas and
sctuai reality, between gods and
T'd like you to show me your unjust machine for
nanufacturing gods, Pia-working, life-size, in front of
ne, now....'
"Pantope, just take a close look at these two
queues— assuming they don't make you too ashamed
to look. Compare the one on the right-tourists from
Berlin, Boston and London, setting off for some island
in the sun-with the other one on the left - emigrants
from Africa and Asia, traveling in search of work."
The poor and the rich...."
"No. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat are actu-
ally very similar, and always have been. This was as
true of serfs and aristocracy in medieval times as it was
of slaves and freemen in classical times."

AFTERNOON
A correction to the tos Angeles
chapter, the angels who soar in the
upper reaches, and who drink
complex pharmaceutical potions
designed to keep death at bay, are
today transformed into false gods,
addicted to the Olympic banquet,
in other words to an orgy of drugs
sno obesky, snoons mytrolesy
provides a neat description of our
current lifestyles.
A freso by Giulio Romano
(1492-1546), The Meal of the
Olympian Gods, 1525-35. Palazzo
del Te, Mantua, Italy. The Latin
subtitle of this work is hardly
apposite. Neither the ancient gods
nor today's rich people do physical
work, so neither their leisure nor
their perpetual meals actually go
lowe cherison
"Do you really think so?"
"How far back in history would we have to search
to find an inequality as shameful as the one that sepa-
rates these two queues? They are beyond mutual com-
parability— not only in the fact that one side is wearing
clothes from the best tailor, while the other wears old
clothes in tatters; not only by their respective states of
health, weight and bodily condition: on the one hand,
faces that are suntanned, on the other faces that are dis-
figured by visible diseases; not only in their respective
ages and life expectancies, their culture, technology, sci-
ence, physical well-being and clearsightedness; not
only by the fact that one half leads solitary, bachelor
lives and the other half lives in tribal communities.."
"It's a class difference. The bourgeoisie and the pro-
letariat!"
"No, I tell you...! No, simply by reason of one sin-
gle factor which has been constant throughout history,
and which makes us close neighbors with apes and
other social animals: hierarchy, which has remained
unvarying throughout all ages and cultures, in forms
that have been more or less hypocritical, with aristoc-
racy remaining the sole form of government..."
"It's a political difference: serfs and nobles, slaves
and free men!"
"No..! Basically it's a question of heaven and hell."
"Your Dantean world order again!"
"According to statistics issued by reliable sources,
Oldtown that great metropolis which is proliferating,
chaotic, corrupt, dirty, sick, ragged, skeletal, anemic,
and full of starving, corpselike babies-still regularly
contributes to the upward mobility of Newtown, a very
large amount of money, labor power, raw materials and
human flesh. All this is supplied to regions which are
190

FALSE GODS
rich, overfed, science-based, sterile and empty (trou-
bled by neither microbes nor children), ethical and tech-
nological, assured of (and protected by) creature com-
forts, heating, cheap food, pharmaceuticals, medical
care, the atomic bomb, morality and democracy, and
absorbed with the threat of the unions, a rose-tinted
press, and every kind of drug.
"In
return-employing highly sophisticated
mechanisms such as its army, its big business, its
finance and its science-Newtown maintains the
implacable course which decides what individual or
what group will tomorrow join those who will dine on
board an aircraft at thirty thousand feet, and who will
take pills in order to help them to sleep, or not to have
children. These are the beings who will be preserved
for an old age confined to bed in some old people's
homes. And what country or individual-me, per-
haps, before to long, or maybe us will be consigned
to join the vast numbers of those who have been sen-
tenced to death by need and want, condemned by
industry and finance, by technology and science-the
inhabitants of that hell or Oldtown whose death
throes permit the occasional one or two to make it up
into a heaven that is lonely and aseptic, where over-fat
people take pills to help them slim, and to speak at
length in important debates.
"Now tell me, how are we to explain this appalling
inequality, which is becoming increasingly acute as the
years go by?"
"By history and social classes, by politics and eco-
nomics, by hierarchy..."
"By religion!"
"No!"
"Newtown, for all its social advances, seems to
have forgotten that you get nothing for free, and that its
progress is paid for by corresponding backwardnesses
elsewhere. Now, in order to get the measure of these
backwardnesses and regressions at the world-wide
level, monotheism proposes a (moral) viewpoint and
gives a (strange) result, both of which are clear and
overpowering.
"And here it is: Newtown lives in a regime that is
polytheistic."
"For you to be right, Pia, you would have to be able to
demonstrate that there exist two worlds: a world of
gods, and a separate world of mortals."
"Can't you see them here in front of you? Or does
shame prevent you from seeing?"
But who on earth are these gods, today?
"In the old days, the immortals only bothered about
men—who were anyway condemned to an early
death-in order to hand down cruel orders or to lecture
them on morality. Armed with Zeus's atomic thunder-
bolts, they sat round their tables, laughing and drinking
pharmaceutical liquors of immortality, and entertained
themselves with complex love affairs, in mountain
hideaways, defended by the power of fire and sepa-
rated from mortals who, for their part, were deemed to
live a life of implacable necessity.... Do you recognize
these Olympian figures?
"It's remarkable-the old pagan myths describe to
perfection our own desultory state and our absence of
history: as we were describing this morning, the end of
adventures and the loss of time."
"We have our science and technical progress ahead
of us, on the credit side, and ancient myths, behind us,
on the debit side— is it the case that they converge in

some kind of balance, to enable us to understand our
present state?"
"Do we always understand what we do? Why is it
that we feel obliged to sit, every evening, half-mori-
bund and slumped in front of our televisions? Why is it
that we cheerfully accept the fact that thousands of
women and children are killed annually on our roads,
or that millions of inhabitants of Oldtown die of
poverty every year....? Do we perceive the obscure fac-
tor that links these habits?"
"How can one be a westerner?"
"By a return to paganism. Here you have us, mind-
lessly worshipping, in silence, every evening after sup-
per, a wooden object which holds pride of place in our
homes. We revere it in the same way that our ancestors
worshipped their hearth gods. We pray at its feet for
several hours a day, and its body emits flashes of light,
eliciting dread and pity in the same way as a statue of
some antique god. We could compare our attitude,
prostrate before this domestic object, to the daily rites of
the ancients who every day went down on their knees
to pray to their household gods. That would give us a
better understanding of the life of enslavement that we
live, and of the identity of these unheeding gods of
whom we have become the humble, silent, unconscious
servants...
"And who are these gods? They are us ourselves,
dominated, in our narcissistic representations, by the
champions of a mythology which ties politics and
wealth to sport and spectacle. On our roads we yield to
the cruel divinities of economics and finance, and to
weekly human sacrifices, particularly
numerous
among the young, and particularly common on week-
ends and holidays; inhuman rites descended from the
Evening prayers, kneeling before
the statue of a Cyclops, a divinity
whose single, square eye, shining
with images of war, hypnotizes,
command, dior tils on
with indignation, terror and pity.
Once the the tien wurs that th
lived in our houses;
nowadays it is we who live

FALSE
G O D S.
ancient festivals, in which our ancestors regularly killed
their children in order to satisfy obligations which they
imposed on themselves and which we no longer under-
stand.
"So there you have some of our mechanisms for
manufacturing gods."
"How can one be a god?"
"In the Middle Ages, when Christians were in the
majority, they would castigate those who refused to
accept the revealed truths as pagans. We can turn the
word on its head: since they are now in a minority,
Christian believers have become the non-believers of
today's world, because they believe neither in the gods
of politics and the spectacle, nor in the reigning gods of
money and economics, technology and science, nor in
this power and glory to which we ruthlessly sacrifice
more than a hundred human lives every week. People
often say that if God exists, He is not here.
"There you have the most lucid criticism of our
times!
"Do you believe in the gods whose bodies appears
every day in the papers or on TV?"
"How can one be an unbeliever?"
"Read the day's news in theological terms. Some
years ago, during the Gulf War, I was going round ask-
ing people who were getting high on that media-hyped
conflict the name of the country on which we were tip-
ping our millions of tons of bombs. It was Eden, or Par-
adise, situated, just as the Book of Genesis describes it,
between the Euphrates and the Tigris. We were destroy-
ing our origins, without realizing it.
"Who was the angel with the sword of fire? What
was he doing?
"Religion pushes us, at bottom, in the same way
that slow-moving tectonic plates shift countries and
continents. Its laws stay with us."
However, Pantope goes on the offensive:
"If you can't show me immortals among us, then
the differences remain the same as they were in his-
tory."
"No, it never lived this separation between mortals
and gods. Ever since it found that it had no more fron-
tiers left to conquer, Newtown has proposed to its
members a project of prolonging their lives, by post-
poning their deaths for as long as possible. It promises
immortality: that's what they're all working towards
now.
"In private estates, insulated from barking dogs
and the shouts of children, a few rich old people, whose
life expectancy is steadily being increased by medical
science, vegetate, and shake and get ali confused. It's a
fair bet that they're suffering from Parkinson's disease,
which means that they will have to be supported in
their senility, or from Alzheimer's sickness, which will
turn them into human vegetables. All this thanks to a
medical profession whose efforts are dedicated to keep-
ing useless derelicts alive, at huge expense.... Is it
really right to pour money into this project and to leave
millions of young people and poor people to die of
hunger and starvation all over the world?"
"Three cheers for old people's homes!"
"Having devoured space, Newtown
has now
launched off into time. In an imbecilic vacuum of aims
and values, it has given us two new slogans: 'Death to
death!'-there you have a return to the eternal time of
the immortals; and Death to everyone else!' —in other
words, to the Mortals, who in this case are people from
the Third and Fourth Worlds, who are defined precisely
193

FALSEGODS
The angeis of Newtown hare
become gods. They eat well and
sufficiently, they lie a life of
deanliness, luxury and security,
Comedy the the raerous
power of nuclear wespons, and
sure of living to a ripe old age...
Iney feel tree to expert mortdis
from the earthly paradise and to
abandon them, naked, and
Sonoose town and
hunger. A paradigm of
nosm sno eve expened from
Paradise: the Mirror of Human
Salvation, fifteenth-century
Flemish miniature. Musée Condé,
Chantilly, France.
by the fact of a death which awaits them sooner rather
than later. Ecce homo."
"Do I gather that you're not in favor of fundamen-
talism?"
"When we question things, we tend to accuse oth-
ers more often than ourselves, since we believe that our
lives are modeled on science, reason and law, all things
of which we are justly proud; except that our democra-
cies actually far outstrip the worst aristocracies in his-
tory, when it comes to inhumanity and violence.
"Just for a once, let's reverse the point of view: what
is it that we do in order to produce this scale of things?
"In order to obtain an outside opinion on the ways
we behave, why don't we conjure up, right here at Paris
airport, the cultivated travelers who, in an earlier cen-
tury, came from Iran, and who wrote their Persian Let-
ters, a humorous, generous and charming book which
educated earlier generations in the virtues of toler-
ance…"
"How can one be an Iranian?"
"... or maybe a double-bodied cherub like the ones
we described earlier, an interchanger, a stranger
endowed with several cultures: only machines that are
just can get the exact measure of unjust inequity.
"Perhaps this stranger would ask us the following
question: are you today becoming the fundamentalists
of polytheism? Is classical antiquity returning to pos-
sess you like a ghost of the past? Is your history feeding
into this mythology-which you love so much that you
are forever teaching it to your children as a supreme
model of life-like a river feeds into the sea?
"There you have the point of view of the non-
believer, I mean of the believer: he is appalled by our
regression into paganism."
"So we've become more fundamentalist than the
fundamentalists whom we disparage!"
"Pantope, did you know that in the old days there were
seventy nations, and a guardian angel for each of
them?"
"So did Angels take the place of individual gods of
nations? People also say that angels are the residue of
polytheism within modern monotheism."
"Yes. And nowadays, since our machine for manu-
facturing gods is still at work in our message-bearing
systems, we first produce angels, and then, when they
fall, we make gods. We reverse the process.
"In the Newtown and Los Angeles, it's true to say

that we live and work like angels, as we said this morn-
ing, but our machines have turned them-in other
words, us into the false, cruel and indifferent gods of
ancient paganism."
"So progress is regressing!"
"Do you believe in the fall of angels now?"
They look across at the queues again.
"Yes... gods and men... immortals and mor-
tals... Were the differences between us ever so great?"
Pia consolidates her case:
"One of the puzzles of human thought ever since
philosophy began has been the problem of how you
define man. None of the definitions proposed thus far
has been sufficiently precise or adequate, and the topic
"Then the high priest rent his
blasphemy; what further need
have we of witnesses? behold, now
ye have heard his blasphemy.
What think ye? They answered
and said, He is guity of death."
(Matthew 26:65-6)
"Pilate therefore went forth
again, and saith unto them
behol, l bring him torch to you,
that ye may know that I find
no tault in him.
"Then came jesus forth.
wearing the crown of thorns, and
the purple robe. And Pilate saith
unto them. Ecce homo, Bchold
the man!' (John 19: 4-5)
Glotto (1265-1337). Christ
before Calaphas, 1303-9, Freso,
Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy,

FALSE GODS
has generated a lot of heat: man can't agree about man.
Perhaps he has difficulty in accepting him as he is. He
either admires other people as angels, or hates them, as
beasts."
"However we don't need ringing declarations, for-
mal or abstract, for us to be able to recognize him: we
see somebody step forward-sick, perhaps, suffering.
maybe disfigured, either by birth or by some accident—
towards the doctor, the nurse, the passer-by in the
street, and by the fact of his pain he has the quality of
being a man. Recognized as such, marked out as such,
because that death sentence that awaits all of us is likely
to be brought forward in his case to an earlier hour.
"Who is this man? I don't know, but here he is.
Here's the condemned prisoner, about to die at dawn.
Here, behind him, not even sentenced by our laws, is
the man whose death will be advanced by nature's
secret decrees or by the hazards of life's misfortunes.
He's sick, and he's going to die. Ecce homo.
"We've never needed grand philosophy to enable
us to recognize, in the man who's been sentenced to
death by the power of men (Roman or otherwise), man
himself. We need no philosophy, either, to recognize the
man who has been sentenced by a power which is
beyond us, and which we study every day in order to
keep it at our measure. Ecce homo.
"But there's more. Behind the man who is suffering
only from a curable illness, or from a sterility that can
be cured in the splendid confines of Newtown, we see
the myriad peoples of low-life Oldtown, suffering from
malnutrition, afflicted with every kind of disease,
caught up in a demographic whirlwind, abandoned by
us and condemned to death en bloc, while we strive to
build egotistical moralities and refined ethical concepts.
The death sentence has been brought forward for them,
to now. Ecce homo.
"In this crowd, right here before us, we see man
himself-humanity-which, in our language, also
means compassion.
"No justice without mercy."
"What about those of us who are less hardy, who are
stuffed full of drugs, with our protecting science end-
lessly putting off the day of our death-we who are
becoming gods? Can we still lay claim to the name of
men?
"No mercy without justice; but no justice without
equality of access."
쁘

A viny of the Third and founth
Worlds that have been produced
by the new gods. Thanatocracy or
the rule of death has beer
permanently oretent throughou?
history, but now it has come to
coninatetworo coner
conur tenderer
destruction... contirm men on a
datly biss in their satus as
mortals. Now that we need only
contemple der been notar
works, what need do we have of
imagining a hell?
Bruechel the Elder (c. 1525-69,
The Thraman of tath.
Museoc noto mara.on

By a juridical logic, we choose to
depict as devils those who cause us
suffering and who enjoy such a
power that they would win a trial
anainst us from the very moment
that we publicly brought a plea
against them.
Keserve not Turn
identifying the character on the left.
But has aryone ever really been
scarco oi this sirng ceast, as pool
horned devil with eyes in his bottom
this victim of our cruel weakness?
However we have no difficulty in
exploding H-bomb.
So who was it who unleashed this
global conflagration? Science,
technology, national interests, the
military, people's subservience...?
Whose face is hiding behind this
light? is it worth the effort of trying
to find out?
Detail from the Brixen altarpiese,
Michael Pacher (1483), Neustift,
Austria. Alte Pinakothek, Munich,
Germany.
Atomix bomb exploding, Bikini,
Pantope asks Pia, uneasily:
"Do you know how to tell the difference between
good and bad angels?"
"Between the light of seraphim and the fires of hell?
Have you ever felt pain from a fire which burns without
giving light; have you ever been able to see something
thanks to the kind of fames which illuminate but do
not burn?"
"Couldn't you just speak clearly, without images?"
*Is it possible to produce clarity without sources of
fire?"
"Come on, be bold, talk about the devil!"
"Forbearing saintliness rarely comes about sponta-

AFTERNOON
neously, unlike grace and beauty, which are given at
birth; in fact many have only acquired it by wrenching
themselves heroically free of times and existences that
were crushed beneath those foul and burdensome
envies on which small minds live- the thirst for recog-
nition, power and glory.
"How are we to rid ourselves of these scourges?
"That's what I wonder. What can we do with that
jealous resentment that afflicts a body like a great
hump, an obese paunch, and which spreads its poison
to make wrinkles, blotches, spots, and cancers? Jeal-
ousies manifest themselves in ugly illnesses.
"How are we to lay aside hatred - the hatred which
is invisible, transparent, incarnate, always justified, suf-
ficiently similar to be mistaken for courage and com-
mitment, and the poisoned draught of the spoken word
and of ideas? On to what pyre are we to throw this
transparent enemy of creative work, this obstacle to cre-
ativity, this opposite of creative goodness?"
"Your angels pass invisibly. But the devil is very
visible. Every day. Fantastically present. Which of us
doesn't feel rancour, unceasingly, within himself,
directed against himself, or against the world outside of
himself?"
"A superhuman hatred flames high among those
whose written word illuminates and heats, by virtue of
having found the furnace in which to reduce it to cin-
ders: so sanctity lights its flash, then maintains it, of this
inexhaustible combustible; all vilenesses are consumed
there."
"I wish that our violences really did burn all this
detritus. But how, in turn, are we to bum away vio-
lence, the worst of human evils? In our criminal wars,
the blood spills and runs like flaming alcohol; it flows
and spreads to the horizon..... Unspeakable conflagra-
tions, into which we hurl a thousand people before also
perishing there ourselves.
"Do we necessarily have to pass via the medium of
violence in order to purge ourselves of it, as if, in flesh
and blood, as our works catch fire, we are transforming
ourselves into incandescent columns, burning white
and immobile, breathing, expiring, inspiring, souls at
last become pure, blazing across our flaming pages, by
the fact of having thrown into this bad fire the little that
we possessed, our clothes, our shoes, plus the entirety
of our poor bodies?
"The problem is, Pia, in the midst of all these bon-
fires how are we to distinguish the language of fire, that
of the Holy Ghost, and differentiate it from the devil's
fires and the flames of hell?
"What are we to do with this encumbering hatred,
God creates the world; hell burns
men. The reference here may be
to the divine work of creation and
to destruction being incapable
of creation
From Satan's mouth flares
the flaming resentment of
the impotent.
In order to produce, we have
to find a way out of this
flaming torch.
Paul and Herman de Limbourg,
Tres Riches Houres du Duc de Berry
(1113-16), Hell Muste Conde,
Chantilly, France.

AFTERNOON
given that it has so comprehensively taken possession
of our flesh? Throwing it into the furnace destroys it,
without a doubt, but it also fulfils it, gives it its logical
development. Where are we to put hatred in our works
of creativity, the flesh of our flesh? You spoke of frozen
Rthies.o.
"As a lighted pyre or beacon, saintliness can be seen
from afar, like a signal at sea, in the fog. On the other
hand, cold resentment plunders anything it encounters,
without one being able to see it, because it is concealed
in transparency and by its lucidity, of which the light-
bearer-there you have Lucifer-seduces the intellect
without justice or mercy. Invisible and implacable, it
extends and spreads, ravages the horizon with its white
laser, and dominates the world.
"Are you saying that hatreds that burn in them-
selves and of themselves are like beacons marking dan-
gerous places, in the same way that lighthouses warn
us not to get too close to the rocks?"
"Also they prevent themselves from invading
space by consuming themselves in the duration of their
time. They implode. The pages flame, a body becomes a
column and burns, consumption fills in a black hole at
the place where the root of tares destroys itself. And
there you have a chance to end up in sanctity, or to
begin a work of creation.
"Icy hatreds, on the other hand, shoot forth spurt-
ing flames which explode at a distance and carry war
throughout the universe. The central core of the fires of
this hell which encompasses everything— the earth, the
heavens, history and our miserable lives— is frozen. Icy
blue, pale, transparent, barely perceptible, there you
have Satan, the eternal uninvolved prince, washing his
hands of the blood of the innocents.
It takes a lot of time, knonledge
sole god in three persons, in other
words three religious methods for
comes one Volches, the ton
legions of angels range themselves
in battle formation in the name of
this god. if you want peace,
one comes to understand that
wars, armies, strategies, militias
juridical framings of violence, do
in fact protect againat violence
Welchee corne othel when th
unleashed without laws. Jupiter:
law; Quirinus: production; and
Maes. armies. There you have one
slogan be translated on to the
Ridolfo Guariento (2-1378),
The Heavenly Host. Musco Civico,
Padua, Italy.
"When envies are burned to ash, they give power to
the creative machine. By dint of creating, God becomes
good, so infinitely good that he could treat himself to a
long Sunday; by dint of goodness, he creates, endlessly,
until the Sunday of his holidays; undoubtedly he drew
the positive energy for his acts by hurling jealousy into
the fire of hell; on the other hand, the devil sits at the
center of evil, with a cold head and frozen feet, and con-
centrating a hatred so frozen that it remains impotent
and is able to exercise its destructive power only at a
distance, by means of the flame-throwers of envy. The
world from which God has been absent since his great
labor falls under the universal empire of impotence and
its destructiveness."
"God constructs, evil destroys."
"One imagines, the other criticizes. All works of
construction, which are rare, necessitate legions of
workers or operators-this is where the good angels
30%

come in; whereas, as powers of this world, the wicked
give a powerful helping hand to Satan, the proper name
of the all-powerful public prosecutor, in destroying."
"All this is rather over my head, but I'm trying to
understand. In my humble and human experience, !
know that it is not possible to speak honestly of inven-
tion in the sciences, or of artistic creation, without this
everyday morality based in violence, within us and all
around us."
"How to suffer the pains of hatred, without the con-
joined figures of the devil, who is an everyday reality;
and the angels, who are rare?"
"Pantope, come on a trip with me. We're going to
take a look at some angelic statues and horrible
demons. Come and stand on the square in front of
Rheims cathedral. Forget that you have read books
about it and heard lecturers saying how wonderful it is.
"It is horrible. Horrifying in the original literal sense
that it makes your hair stand on end: punk hair; a
squatting monster, poised, crouched on its flying but-
tresses, a low, triple, wrinkled face, with one huge eye,
a face capped by a helmet. An insect, some giant batra-
chian come out of the ancient forests of some immemo-

THE DEVIL'S WRATH
From this page to the next.
compare two opposing solutions to
questions of violence: the piercing.
pointed, jagged, sharp, sacred
suffering of Gothic art, flaring up
vertically...
Exterior of the west face, Notre
Dame cathedral, Rheims, France.
rial past. A misshapen griffin, it makes your flesh creep
because a cumulative horror springs from its stone nee-
dles, its crests, peaks, points, arrows, teeth, barbs, all
ready to tear, bite, pierce, hole, slash.... Is this beauty?
"In my opinion it's full of hatred and to do with
expulsion-an obsession to exclude, a paranoiac
defence of its surroundings; exuding, suffering indefi-
nitely the hideous patience of hatred and of the
sacred-you recall our massacre earlier on? The epic
dance of its flames is frozen in a sacrificial horror. The
Gothic style thus expresses the sacred-the consecra-
tion of Rheims.
"Is this a way for Christianity to love its neighbor?"
"Can we say that the Romanesque style, on the
other hand, expresses sanctity? Smooth, bare, under-
stated, rarely grandiose, it is inward-turning, built with
rounded shapes which are endlessly welcoming."
"Yes: the saintly says yes where the sacred repeats
an endless no. It accepts and includes, whereas its
opposite rejects. The saintly loves, the other hates. In
the Gothic style the interior has a serene sanctity which
is the obverse of the sacred which has been expelled to
the outside."
"Closer to our own times, at the end of the last century
the French Gothic school of writers emerged from within
a period of sanctity to announce the return of the sacred.
This sacred was the force that devastated the twentieth
century in total wars, which themselves were preceded
by an art which returned determinedly to the primitive.
"This cultural regression appeared as the advance
guard of the deathly violence of war. Before the last
war, for example, sculptors began creating monstrous
gods awakened from archaic times, and it was hardly
surprising that the demon twins of these divinities were
to return shortly after, alive and terrifying, in the shape
of war."
"The classical age scorned the Gothic, Pia. It tamed
the pointed barbs, it mastered that mad hatred which
was later dropped by Romanticism. Speaking of the old
texts of polytheism, the classical age called them fables,
to be able to laugh at them, make fun of them and keep
them at a safe distance; whereas Romanticism accorded
them the status of myths, in order to oppress our destiny
with them and oblige us to submit to their necessity. In
our childhood we learned to believe them as if they

AFTERNOON
were religious texts, believing them far more than did
the Ancients. We became pagans again, in other words
tied to the hatred which spills over into the human sac-
rifices whose violence is so often portrayed in our art."
"Then we plunged once again into the savage, the
primitive, the barbarous-I'm speaking of us, of that
which culture, in us and among us, soothes and calms
when it works directly, that is to say with sanctity;
whereas the sacred, to put it briefly, was wandering in
the streets, out in the road, through space; a roaming
monstrosity; a lightning return to the archaic of which
the beginning must date from the storms and assaults
of Romanticism, and which had as its result the atomic
flash over Hiroshima."
"Was it that we were actively seeking our own
decline, in the way that, with such awareness, genius
and application, we sought to return to our originating
myths?"
"As we are well aware, what you find lurking at the
origins is always hatred."
"Violence, murder, wars, atrocities.. death, always
death.... The diabolical sacred is fulfilled in this
monotonous repetition, whose only task is that of
maintaining itself: and from this derives the absence
of creativity."
"We assume this violence unceasingly; do we con-
sume it?"
"Fire! Resentment flames up; hatred burns, red and
black, and its flames flare up and dance, reaching up
from the bottom of the abyss towards that inaccessible
saintliness. Our works of art and our acts catch fire
because they consume the sacred much as an engine
consumes its fuel. The bonfire roars, the machine turns
.. . And the horizontal, saintly,
calm, tranquil, protecting
contemplative gece of
the Romanesque style.
A view of the Romanesque
crypt. Church of Saint-Eutrope,
Saintes, France.
over, crazily, but doesn't go anywhere, since it's dedi-
cated to the perpetual motion of hatred, which recog-
nizes itself in its own repetition."
"Let's go back and stand in front of the cathedral! The
indestructible destruction of a fire which is self-beget-
ting freezes the flames into barbs of stone: the spikiness
of the Gothic style appears.
"Now, it's my belief that our creative energies exist
in a pairing arrangement which carries us from saintli-
ness to the sacred, but which can equally well carry us
from the sacred towards saintliness. While we aspire to

the latter, we fall unceasingly into the former; once
again, here we have the law of reversal!
"Sometimes, all of a sudden, a great tongue of blind-
ing fire comes leaping out, directing its flames at love-
that love which is hidden, discreet, retiring, peaceful, sim-
ple, silent, well-meaning, isolated, a child in the straw.
"The light of the hearth attempts to shed light on it
but makes it impossible for one to perceive him, in his
dark retreat, as if the fire was creating shadow.
"Can't it be put out, so that one can see it?"
"But how would one be able to recognize him with-
out light?"
"It is difficult to go forth in saintliness!
"Hell on Earth displays never-endingly the fasci-
nating spectacle of hatred: there you have the essence of
the lack of creativity and the illusion of creativity.
"You can always recognize hollow works of creativ-
ity by the subtle scent of human detestation that is
given off when you read them.
"But, once again, what are we to do with these aver-
sions that are as tiresome as weeds that keep on grow-
ing up again unless you burn them?"
"Consign them to the fire of hell, to the fire of all
devils-to the sacred fire, precisely the hearth of an

AFTERNOON
immobile, perpetual motion. History that is repetitive
and monotonal, static, statue-like, reduced to the eter-
nal return of the same. Banal, vile, deadly, tragedy
returning unceasingly, ever-changing but always the
same. The whole world going through the same
motions and mimes the same thoughts. The return to
the primitive implies the immobility of the eternal
return.
"A history that is new, young, joyous, improbable,
childlike and miraculous grows hard and stiff in the
frozen fires of the Gothic.
"You will recognize the realm of hatred by the fact
that creativity there sinks to pusillanimity, envy and
plagiarism; always the unending critical duplication of
what has already been done.
"When artistic creativity again bursts out anew,
that is the sign that a great goodness has its rare
chance."
"So is it the sign that all we need in order to pro-
duce are saints?"
Modern art has this fortunate
aspect, namely that it is hard to
make out shapes and figures, so
that here nobody can distinguish
the demons from the ancels. This i
just how things are in everyday
wonderful illustration of reality
The Rebel Angels Struck Down,
1889, Musée royal des Beaux-Arts,
Antwerp, Belgium.

Sested upon their thrones.
powers dominate. But if one
stigmatizes them in words or
pictures orie con swirty overturh
their meaning. Those who are
able to diffuse these visible
images sit upon irvisible thrones,
oho.wmerenein
transparent power, they
dominate the former holders of
certain viuble nowers whd
thereby become their victims.
Should we be constantly reversing
tn encino casioa e POWERS, THRONES
those who condemn, in the
cretiy of thit power, m muh AND DOMINIONS
due for a fall as those whom they
accuse? In short what difference
is there between constehning
powrates dre cone minire
those who condemn?
"Angels are unstable," says Pia.
"Can they fall, from on high?" Pantope asks, laugh-
Georg schone (18,0-1949).
Industriebauern, 1920, oil and
collage on wood. Von der Heydt
wucunemwodere det matr
Paul and Herman de Limbeurg,
lt tw
Berry (1413-16), The Fall of the
Rebellious Angels,
Wakse Conce, Chanblly
France.
ingly.
"I believe so— in fact I know so. You see, more than
us, they waver between good and evil, because they are
in a position truly to distinguish good from evil."
"The frailty of the intelligent."
"Have you ever had to endure dealing with evil
people?"
"I don't know about evil people.... But like most
of us I've often had to deal with people who are egotis-
tical, cruel, ruthless and thoroughly unpleasant."
"Herein lies their drama: at the moment when they

Glory is a product of violerce. it
only one half: a headless crowd,
down below, of waving hands
raised in acc amstion of trie
divinity's lieutenants, a small but
ferocious sect bearing the weight
serpents, above which, right at the
top, shines the unique light of
lustre and renown.
inhuman beasts, divinity would fall
prey to the hands that are seeking
lowest depths of decadence are
close neighbors of the peak
of glory. There you have
the social machine for fabricating
(false) gods or fallen
angels.
trite Lana (1890-1976).
first see the light of day, they receive seven price-
less gifts: intelligence, adaptability, creativity, speed,
strength, enduring memory and light.... Genius,
seated upon them. In addition they would require a fine
degree of detachment in order not to succumb to the
temptation of looking down upon those less gifted than
themselves, or of pouncing to seize power, which from
that moment lies within their grasp."
"So the good angels are those who do not succumb
to the temptation of injustice!"
"But in the opposite case, the bad angels-those
who occupy space and history-fall. We meet them
everywhere,
and we speak unceasingly of them,
because we suffer from them: exterminating angels!
"Among the powerful of this world, it is hard to
identify the inevitable fall of these powerful beings. For
obvious reasons. How can we see them as fallen, when
they appear to climb from one triumph to another?"
"Impossible! You may as well stand on your head
and declare that all victors are vanquished and that all
214

high mountain peaks have become profound valleys!"
"And why not? Couldn't we reverse the law of
gravity and say that a fatal attraction hurls them up to
the heights?"
"So should we feel pity for the powerful?"
"Behind their self-importance they are stamped by
a frailty that drives them on to still further cruelties."
"I've noticed that," says Pantope. "They're evil
because they're intelligent, and intelligent because
they're evil, and both these things because they're
weak.
"They are unjust, and have never tasted the wine of
strength which foregoes comparisons."
"Tradition refers to them as Powers, Thrones and
Dominions: all those who sit at the tops of ladders."
"Are we to recognize the world's rulers in these
descriptions, and conclude that the world is thus ruled
by angels of evil?"
"By the fact of their fall."
"The angelic condition of the highly gifted is harder
to live than that of ordinary men."
"Certainly. Who can hold out against the instability
produced by true intelligence? And how many people
have such an excess of goodness that they are able to
refuse power, position and dominance?"
"Almost nobody."
"And that is the origin of the tumbling fall of in-
iquity: its fall takes place in the power and glory of
extermination.
"Has our thinking really been so corrupted that,
over thousands of years, we have come to believe that
angels fall as a result of their love for pretty girls,
whereas war and murder are held up as heroic and
strong? Film and television show endless scenes of
guns and killings. Plenty of killing, not much love.
"God's true justice requires me to state my belief
that angels only fall on account of power and glory, and
thus because of killing; on the other hand, when they
sup on love they remain angelic.
"Only humility—a word which, appropriately,
derives from humus, earth-makes them fly above it.
These are the beings whom tradition labels sera-
phim... Burning, suspended in the ether..."
"For us to imitate these perfect seraphic upliftings,"
Pantope resumes, dreamily, "inevitably also involves
descents and eventual falls, as delayed or retarded as
may be...."
"Mortal and weighty!"
"Have you ever ventured on to the slender crest of
a surfing wave? Have you ever plucked up courage and
ventured into the curling tunnel of a fearsome roaring
breaker, poised in fragile equilibrium on a surfboard?
Have you ever known the calm ecstasy of flying a hang-
glider four hundred meters above green valleys, in the
mountains, surrounded by clouds, ice and the white
villages below you? And, even higher, have you ever
experienced a descent by parachute seemingly both
instantaneous and never-ending-towards the woods
and valleys of a countryside laid out below you, in the
dense, muffled silence of transparent air that suddenly
takes over from the noise of the aircraft's engines? Or
have you known the hissing of the wing of a glider slic-
ing the air as it flies in the vast silence of space? Or,
down at ground level, the motionlessness which is as
eternal as it is instantaneous, at the apex of a jump offa
trampoline? Have you enjoyed the quivering litheness,
almost alive, of a windsurfing board as it catches the

Skimming along the surf, or in
the tunnel of a breaking wave,
the frail, insubstantial surfboard
follows force lines which permit a
man to stand upright in a state of
unstable equilibrium, price to the
final inevitable fall. In a similar
way, life glides among the many
and precarious, it follows invisible
time-lines, at odds with
eventual fail into thermic disorder.
Large or small, every work of art
consists in being able to grasp a
good edge of surf and follow it
through. The light, delicate accord
the surfing wave enables the surf
artist to race along and delay the
final obligatory wipe-out. In each
of these cases, the achievement,
the living joy of doing it, holds off
the moment of final collapse.

rhythm between the smail breaking crests of waves and
the gusting of a fresh breeze?"
"Such pleasures have no rival-and are outside of
the injustice brought about by comparison. Bless
ings upon the woman who reared you!"
"Engaging in non-confrontational sports gives us a
fleeting glimpse of the eye studded wings of seraphim in
their cosfase: ves, it is only the body that enables the soul
to be understood... Physical courage draus one into an
innocence whose evistence intelligence, memory and so-
ence, which are so often evil, do not eten suspert."
"Are we to conceive the mass, the crowd, the total-
ity of men in the image of this choppy sea, of this fresh
brewze, of these eddies and fluxes?"

We would unhesitatingly couns
the following among the band of
angels: pole-vaulters, high-
jumpers, goalkeepers diving to
Catone wiln wreertel eesrechis
para-gliders, ice-skaters dancing on
ice, gymnasts on their apparatus
rugey krom-naves ooing s oiving
pass... All those who assume the
form of a flying body. When you
fiy a hanc-alider, vour
understanding of how masses of
air behave enables you to move up
on rising <olumns, while your
weightfulness enables you to
colaroueikor wiet to
thermic reasons, ascent can easily
become as perilous as a fall.
A hang-glider in flight. Val
d'Aosta, laly.
"Is this what vou are saying to politicians and ora-
tors?"
"Via the medium of words, I dance the thought-
without-language which flesh experiences with inten-
sity in its inner darkness, suddenly illuminated,
uplifted and warmed by a melancholic desire..."
"... When a true insight sees the light of day, or
when a phrase sounds and floats, broad, musical, intel-
ligent and calm, they resemble somehow those slow
descents following on the ascents which soar on the
counter-currents of fragile turbulences."
"Tell me about your falling, Pantope," Pia asks,
breathlessly.
"Am I falling? Yes: when I am on board a land vehi-
de or an aircraft and the floor quivers and shakes. Yes:
when a huge wave suddenly sweeps up and pushes my
boat over on to its beam ends, with its deck rising to the
vertical. Yes: when a gust of wind catches me by surprise
and almost knocks me flying. Yes: when an earthquake
above seven on the Richter scale makes the earth move.
Yes: when a piece of terrain has been pushed up skyward
more than four thousand meters to form a narrow moun-
tain crest on which I am too scared to stand upright.
"Sailing in ships, the open sea, wind, earthquakes,
towering peaks, all these are moments of the command-
ment: 'Rise up and walk. Moments from before birth."
"Do it again, Pantope.!"
"Am I falling? Yes: when I see a woman's face and
body. Yes: when a new idea takes form in my mind. Yes:
in the presence of the Annunciation as painted by Fra
Angelico. Yes: when the final hour comes close enough
for one to be able to touch it.."
"... when the grace of eternal glory shines forth,
housed clumsily in my fragile, moving, trembling body
of stretched skin and transfixed bones, which wavers
unceasingly in the wind."
"The idol worshippers of olden times believed that
the gods lived at the tops of mountains. Since you
spend your time up there, you can testify to having
found no gods there, even around the crosses which
sometimes dot their peaks."

AND
" I would slip awav and ther
procure a boat, in which I would
row out to the middle of the lake
Mire the wenwalm. there
would stretch out in the bottom of
the boat, gazing at the sky and
Mowing mysell to ant stowy on
the water, sometimes for several
hours at a time, sunk into a
reveries, which, while they had no
particular abiding object, were
nons more to myxor
than the sweetest things I had ever
experienced in what people choose
to call the olessures of life.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les
Reveries du promeneur soitaire
Cinquième promenade Reveries of
the Soltary Waiker. Fifth Walk
Collected works, (Peace, Paris
Evariste Vital Lumina's
(1822-90), Les tnerves de
Jumieges. Musce des beaux-ans,
Roven, france

AFTERNOON
"You also find the ruins of temples and statues there,
but only when major obstacles don't stand in the way of
access to them: idols only look after the foothills."
"Since all divinity is absent from that rarefied
space, as from all other spaces, given that we have
experienced this huge loss of enchantment, why do you
go up there?" Pia asks. "What is there to discover up
there? Angels?"
Pantope attempts an answer:
"Jean-Jacques Rousseau once told the story of how
he had lain down in the bottom of a boat and allowed
himself to drift with the current and dream. This was on
the Bielersee in Switzerland. With his body at water-
level, in a passive state of semi-sleep, he says that he felt
truly alive."
"Can we say that, from the point of view of
excelling, life is asleep when it abandons itself to low
places? My profession is quite the contrary: we recog-
nize sicknesses when people take to their bed. How can
we assimilate life to a clinic?"
"When you find yourself in a wooden coffin like
that, carried off by an irreversible river, with no possi-
bility of control of your circumstance, would you agree
that what you are experiencing is a little bit of death?"
"I suppose so. Now, if you don't have the opportu-
nity, at some point in your life, of enjoying relaxation—
the dreaming, dozy warmth of a body that is com-
pletely relaxed and turned in on itself, allowing itself to
be carried away by the mortal river of passive time-
then can you feel yourself truly alive?"
"Yes, look: when you are standing upright, high on
some mountain, you are alive; when you are on a dizzy-
ingly slender mountain ridge, at the top of two sheer
walls falling away invisibly beneath you, struggling
against your weightiness and against losing your bal-
ance, you are alive; when you are in that state of alert.
ness which produces a minute and unbearable atten-
tion to detail, burned by the sun, frozen to the marrow,
buffeted by gusts of wind, soaked in a sweat whose
cold fervor gives a foretaste of the experience of death,
and you are exhausted after having exerted yourself
beyond the limits of the possible, then you are alive."
"Bawling, chilled, torn from my first breath—that's
how I came out of my mother's belly."
"Yes. Arriving at a mountain top is in many ways
like a birth."
"Emerging from a window, from a threshold or
from a mountain peak, the living being trembles like a
spurting, incandescent flame, yes, as a beginning. Flar-
ing upwards, but not lying flat!"
"Imagine mountain ridges during a storm-they're
like flaring gas lamps! They burn! And when I am up
there, standing upright, shivering on that roof of the
world, I become like a vertical flaming torch."
"Thanks to you, in future when I look at some jaggy
mountainous horizon, I will imagine that I see fiery
seraphim there, in serried ranks, guarding the moun-
tains, all quivering, like the statues of archangels that
decorate old cathedrals. They make them flame with
life. And that is how our guardian angel, standing close
by us, holds high the torch...."
"Have you ever seen young people climbing up
from the valley on Midsummer's Day, up on to the sur-
rounding mountain peaks, and setting them aglow
with lighted bonfires? At that moment the whole
mountain becomes angelic!
"What a mistake it is always to depict angels in the
image of men; in fact they come closer to the beauty of
222

To understand people's
predilection for setting up statues
and crosses at the tops of
mountains, it is enough to have
tert the costatic pleasure of tinay
Attened me nicon too aner
a long dimb.
Your entire body is reborn: it
cultime war. the the
being trembles like a spurting
flame, incandescent, beginning:
monumer towar
that fire. The photograph shows
March 3, 1984, close to the village
of Kilaues on the island of Kaual,
north west of Hawat. On that day
the crimson fountain reacheda
height of over three hundred
the world! This fine popular custom consolidates a
vision that is sensual, corporeal and ordinary—in other
words, divine.
"The world is continually bursting into flames,
bursting into life."
"You go for life and risk on mountain tops;
Rousseau goes for a sleepy life down at water-level....
Life and fire in the universe."
"Maybe most particularly in places of transition
and passage, where messages increase in number and
intensity: on a tidal foreshore, where waters licks the
earth and winds caress it; in deep submarine crevasses,
where fiery lava mixes with the salt water of the sea and

The possibility of falling is what
gives meaning to every scent of
uplifting; the miraculous beauty of
the world reveals itself at the end
certain, is what renders life-in its
improbability- ecstatic. The peaks
of mountains are sometimes very
narrowne make i hard to hone
upright for long.
solidifies; in high places and upper regions of sun and
cold, where the Earth thrusts delicate peaks up into the
realm of light airy turbulences."
"Places of passage, and spaces of interchange: a
passing-place of angels?"
Astonished, he falls silent for a moment.
"Up there, more than in any other space or at any
other time, you feel yourself being born, being alive."
Now, if God exists, he is life, wind and fire.... The
essence of life, the creator, the beginning, the apex, the
summit, the excellence and the love of life."
Pia cuts in:
"So God lives on the tops of mountains, with you?"
Pantope hesitates for a long while. Then, with tears
in his eyes, he says, at dictating speed, as if spelling out
his last will and testament:
"Cemeteries are too ugly. I don't want to be buried.
I prefer to be cremated, in one last flame, after these my
few years of incandescence. I ask that my ashes be cast
to the winds, in one final fall. People may pray, if they
are believers; they may meditate, if they wish; they may
also read inspirational texts. But at the end I wish to be

The miracle of something that
has been intelligently and
its beauty, and soars abore the
flat horizontal, ugly and
preoctable kingdom ruled by
Powers, Thrones and Dominions
Statue of the archangel Michael
at the top of the church spire at
Mont-Salint-Michel, Manche,
France.
consigned to fire and air and scattered through the uni-
verse. Thank you.
"I would like my friend the mountain guide, who
can be found unfailingly in the main bar of Abriès,
Hautes-Alpes, to carry the urn containing my ashes in
his faded backpack. For this service he is to be paid
three times the normal rate for the ascent, plus any
beers which he may care to drink on his departure and
his return-to my health, or to another's, it matters not.
I would like him to take a partner with him on this
climb-the woman who was always there to accom-
pany us and make up our climbing party. The afore-
mentioned pot of dust, so fine and imponderable, will
be carried on the back of the first and in front of the
third, and so will take the place that I always had
between them, surrounded and protected by them. For
once my two guardian angels won't be bothered by my
heavy weight. Thank you.
"1 ask that they then climb to the Pelvoux refuge in
the Massif des crins, where they will spend the first
night. My heirs are to provide them with food and lodg-
ing there, without, however, accompanying them. The
21S

The mountaineer defies the
danger of falling and at the same
time plays with it, since it is a real
possibility at atty given moment. In
the same way, works of human
creativity, such as music and
poetry, maintain a distance from
venturing perilously close to it; on
dee went tall then into tutt
also keeps its distance from mortal
equilibrium, until the point of the
tinal tall. the death from which the
rare uplifts in life draw their
improbable meaning. Some
mountains, such as the one
pictured here, became climbable at
the price of the lives of the first
people wins reached their summits
rocks raised high on the tombs of
their victims. The mountain-climber
The north face and the Hornli
ridge of Mont Cervin (4,478 me-
ters) photographed in winter,
at down; the snow and ke burn
with the light
following day, before daybreak, I ask that they make
their way to the Coolidge gully and climb it during the
minutes preceding the dawn.
"When they arrive at the midpoint, they are to
belay their ropes. Then they are to throw my remains to
the wind, to the snow and ice and rock, as if I were
falling or flying, finally becoming angelic. I would ask
them to say Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine, in remem-
brance of those selfsame words that came to my lips on
the thrice-blessed day when I first experienced the
sweet divine benediction of the mountain, in the first
mauve light of dawn, at the moment when the ice is
tinged with pink, when my second (and true) youth
began, very late, in this truly primordial mountain
landscape. Thank you.
"As to whether they will then come back down, or
will proceed to the summit via the Pelissier glacier and
the Ailefroide traverse, this will depend on the weather,
on their mood at the time, and on any obligations which
they may have elsewhere. In any event, I hope they will
enjoy the tranquillity and silence of the place to the full,
just as I loved the Earth which was given to me, and as
I also loved the man and the woman who had given it
to me. Thank you."

A orradoxical set of verler, the
ewuen ton tohtrous
this book, places the whole
configuration all together on one
sor ton thetoote.nothhe
protagonists' right), all collected,
dlassified, weighed, neatly sorted
into angels and demons, heaven
and hell, the saved up above and
the damned down below, a static
sno unmoving universe, all duly
rewarded and punished, ordered
for all infinity.... And on the
other page, bodies mingied in love.
But, alas, this balance again creates
a separation, and thus contradicts
fselr. troctent now sre we to get
to the point of doing without this
dalanice? How to forget
juegtment grren that law remains
necessary. In singing our vitality.
Heaven and Hell, fifteenth
Cnitya doloe veoel
Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna,
Italy.
Auguste Rodin (1850-1917).
The Kiss, 1898, marble. Musée
Rodin, Paris, France.
MERCY
"Do you believe in t'
"You mean 'when a!":
jokes.
"When I imagine
wrath, and the huge croreis eauane
think that on one side
arated and divided, and on dad
"1 beg your parde:.
"It's easy. Look-ca üic
both together; good and erit th.
the true and the false; the inp wod ta
and madness; and, avove ail, *n:g.:
all the (rare) winners and ait the lown
other side, intermixes, living and stenr, fot cer
239

blended things. On one side separations, on the other
composites.
"I like your idea of a separation of separations-
sounds like a contradiction in terms to me!" says Pan-
tope, laughing.
"Fusion is what gives lovers their home, and the
party which divides gives exclusives their razor! A
judgement which judges only the judges, and leaves
aside the undecided, marks the end of a course, like an
outer limiting point; one could call that 'the last!"
"Your musical pause is as paradoxical as the Big
Bang which gives the lie to the laws of physics!"
"When one loves intermixings of things, a court of
law becomes nothing more than a meeting-place of all
philosophies... of philosophies that are other!"
"On the other side?"
"I hesitate to say it, since love does not exclude!"
She found herself uncomfortably caught in her own
trap.
"Pia, do you know what the word 'absolute' means?"
"Perfect, completed, omnipotent, independent,
unreserved, without contradiction," she replies, in one
breath.
"Literally speaking, 'absolute' means non-soluble:
that which cannot be dissolved."
"Not in water, vinegar, or any of the acids?"
"An irreducible diamond!"
"If we no longer have courts of law, and thus things
are 'absolute', all we are left with is absolution."
"And that's where mercy comes in! But there still
remains exclusion."
"Love excludes exclusion."
"A contradiction in terms, just like your Last Judge-
ment!"
Pia:
"Your logic is destroying my morality."
Pantope, proudly:
"Since morality is relative and subjective, how can
it stand up to reason? Consider objective science: dri-
ven by the stimulus of competition, it reaches heights of
excellence and gives of its best. There's nothing to beat
it."
Pia replies, wearily:
"So I suppose that's where our duty lies: promote
excellence at every available opportunity. Live by fol-
lowing the best government. Put our children on the
path of the most refined studies under the best teachers.
Ensure value for money. Build a career plan as fast as
possible. Earn the highest wages. Go for promotion.
Marry the most beautiful woman. Wear the best
clothes. Write the book that's going to win the prize.
Score the most goals. Fortius, altius, citius and to hell

Philosophy has always added o
supplementary action to the Last
time of history on to eternity. the
Theodio renteres the perspective
of this picture, and Leibniz, its
author, there sets about a trial of
God himself, accusing him, In his
turn, for the problem of evil. Kant
later, was to set up a court of
reason. And the age of suspicion-
our dool, was numerte
intentions behind the best of
sentiments.... When will we ever
courte the cho on that
debt which philosophy makes us
pay? At orce, as we wish.
Giovanni di Pacio (1399-1482),
The Last Judgement. Pinacoteca
Nazionale, Slena, Italy.
with losers... That's the direction that we're taking in
everything we do, whether private or public, and there
you have the primordial separation.
"And while we're at it, why don't we also practise
eugenics so as to create the strongest and most beautiful
sons and daughters, and thereby, in the end, produce
the best of all possible worlds? What hell is presup-
posed and produced by the promotion of this par-
adise?"
"Who doesn't dream of it?"
"For example: do we live in a democracy?"
"Yes. And proud of it."
"No. We've never lived in a democracy. As a subtle
form of advertising, political philosophy poses the
question: what is the best form of government? And i
inswers secretly: the government of the best
The question is, have we ever actually emergeo
from feudalism, the rule of the so-called best, who
according to the circumstances of time and need, might
be the strong and powerful, the well-born, the rich or
the intelligent, the cultured or the learned, or university
graduates controlling knowledge, law and the media?
"In Newtown, those who have the right to be
fined equal are the rich and affluent, the wealthy, th
so are in good health, clean and well-bred. In o!
words, the strong. Compare them with the discarded
peoples of the Third and Fourth Worlds, a vast starving
쁘

Here we see the Latin motto of
the Olympic Games: Citius, Altius,
Stronger'-translated into Russian
on the other side of the stadium,
at the opening of the inosow
Games in 1S80.
The stakes of nationalities for
domination of the world, financial
pressures, drugs, the obligation for
the wretched of the earth to
excape at any price from the
grinding misery of their
exotences... cemper the
enthusiasm which these media-
overkill world gatherings inspire,
justly, towards the authentic
Choles eroduce ties
champions, and the human
examples which they give. It
of the stadium come from the
poorest groups and the least
favored: justice, revenge, or a

MERCY
Handscene, sturdy, confident, a
naive imbecile: Tarzan, standing
head and shoulders abore his
companion Jane. One of the most
popular and stupid heroes of our
times, Tarzan always wins,
conquers, triumphs, carries the day.
and is the embodiment of glory
and the supremary of strength. To
the ideals of Social Carwinism he
brings the additional element of
machismo. With their modest
loincloths and their very proper air,
how many hours would they
actually survive in a real jungle?
Maureen O'Sullivan and Johany
Weissmuller in The Triunph of
Tarzan (1943),
mass which is hugely in the majority on our planet. Has
our history ever known a more ferocious aristocracy?"
"Are you denying progress?"
"Newtown works unceasingly to improve the life
of its best citizens. That's what it calls progress. How-
ever these advances are at the expense of Oldtown, and
at the expense of the rest of humanity. There's nothing
for free; everything has to be paid for."
"At least we have to submit ourselves to the laws of
evolution."
"Do we really know what is meant by this strange
and aristocratic comparative of the strongest, the best
adapted, or the ones who proliferate? A person who is
a mass of muscles may lose a wrestling match, for lack
of skill and technique; another person, for all his intelli-
gence, may be incapable of reproducing himself! An
excellent quality may turn out to be detrimental in
terms of the complex totality of a person's personality.
Thus the strongest become suddenly fragile; this phe-
nomenon is observable among champions and the
highly gifted.
"Earlier generations used to fantasize about this
kind of thing-from Nietzsche to Chekhov, from
Tarzan to the Nazis. Since that period, Social Darwin-
ism has been running rampant, sometimes overtly and
sometimes covertly, and more current in our usages
than we believe not to mention more hypocritically,
since we also claim to live in a democracy!"
"No way out of a law like that."
"And Pantope, what if plants and animals are con-
demned to the consequences of Darwinian law, in other
words to a struggle to the death from which they are
nowadays dying by entire species? What if we only
become men on the express condition of freeing our-
selves from that law?
"Unlike all your thinkers, writers, historians, politi-
cians and film stars, I, for my part, believe that man is
born of weakness, of frailty, of a gentle ironical attitude
to victory; I believe that the glory achieved by people
who dominate others transforms them into brute ani-
mals; I believe that Thrones crumble and Powers fall.
"From where do we originate? From Tarzan or from
the Pietà? From the man who wins because he's the
strongest, and is able to reproduce himself and adapt

AFTERNOON
better than others, or from the woman who watches
over her dead child, holding him on her knees and
weeping for him? She has lost: will she now have no
descendants? But just look and count them now!
"All civilizations which, like ours, are obsessed
with victory come what may, are headed inexorably for
their own annihilation. Like a species about to become
extinct."
"All the big empires died of that."
"But how can a woman without a child have
descendants?"
"I've already told you: by adoption. We choose our
fathers, our mothers, our sisters... who in turn choose
their sons, their daughters and their brothers. An
incredible juridical and theological novelty, which
destroys the destiny-laden and tragic hazards of
genealogy and of physical begetting (as well as criminal
and incestual relationships within the family, and the
rudimentary structures of kinship, clan, ethnic group
and culture) by giving every person freedom in the
choice of his parents, his children and his relations.
Anybody-outside of my family, my ethnic group and
my culture, outside of any blood relationship or histor-
ical relationship can become my mother, my sister or
my daughter. From there love comes. The love
expressed in adoption thus cancels out Darwinism-
both biological and social-and the vengeful wars
which history has cause to remember, and all the theo-
ries which fed your youth."
"But what about the big empires?"
"Why did the big animals-the mammoths and
dinosaurs-disappear? Why is it that today the noble
species- eagles, elephants and whales-are all threat-
They have lost Now dead, the
Word becomes dumb; the Word
returns to the flesh; the flesh
reuterolen stethe moth
herself, grief-stricken and
unmoving, returns to the mass of
marble, to matter, to the maternal
matrix from which we all derive, a
oral motorcee involuton o
which the inverse shows our
genealogy, evolutive and
deployed: all children of the Earth,
one me ner or ones
of our fragile languages.
al children a. weakness
Pieta, 1458. St Peter's Basilika,
Vatican City.
2A5

The word misericarella comes from
waken terestor could
and miser--woeful. It evoices the
state of the archangels. The face of
this archangel doorkeeper reveals
precisely that sense of heartfelt pity.
poor characters, so deferential,
obsequious, and stamped by a life
servility. They present themselves
naked, as if they had come out of
Rogier van der Weyden
(c. 1400-64), detail from the
The Just Entering Paradise,
c. 1443-6. Hôtel-Dieu, Beaune,
France.

MERCY
ened with extinction? Why did whole empires col-
lapse-Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome? Why did
whole eras come to an end... all exhausted by their
claim to a monopoly on excellence, power and glory ...
all killed by what we call Darwin's laws?
"The only ones to be saved from death, whether
animal or collective, are the ones able to free themselves
from this law: their name is 'human'. If we look at
human beings more closely, we find the animal. When
we scan the range of arrogant conquerors and the myr-
iad hordes of the conquered, when we look at the hier-
archies and gradings of Nobel prize winners, tennis
players, best-selling authors and superstar singers, it's
easy to identify the elements of vegetable nature or
primitive animality that remain in us,
"In other words, we are men inasmuch and in so far
as we are not the best, or because we manage to pursue
another aim rather than that of being the best. Classifi-
cation and competition concern us a little. That's why
eugenics, for example, is inhuman: if you set yourself a
project of designing the best of men, you'll end up cre-
ating a sick monkey or a weedy lettuce.
"A miracle! Suddenly there appears among us a
poor person, a simple person, and we follow him,
because we love him: that's why, secretly, we are neither
gods perched on high nor lowly beasts, in other words,
conscious subjects. "If intelligence refines, the exacer-
bated search for the highest summit leads us to resemble
those animals who continually fight each other to see
who is the strongest. Human means kind, in the sense of
goodness, never in the sense of exemplary success; of
the first in the class or in the farmyard."
"Idle dreams.... What would we ever achieve
were it not for the spur of competition?"
"Works of creativity! Any work that is dedicated
exclusively to the pursuit of excellence demands a great
amount of humility in relation to its raw material, as
also towards experts and others: it is only in this way
that the author achieves the incomparable, the inim-
itable, free from mimicry. Never in any other way."
"However, exclusion returns with the rigorous
requirements of science, of logic, of all well-conducted
reasoning: ali require the rule of the excluded third.
How, without such a principle, are people to be stopped
from saying, claiming, undertaking anything at all?
Which accounts for your confusion just now, when you
wanted to exclude exclusion."
"Certainly. But over the course of time we have sep-
arated the corporeal and social rigor exercised over
men from that which we manipulate over forms. The
one gets rid of the other!"
"I doubt it."
"Maybe keep the requirement of exclusivity in rela-
tion to works of creativity; but let your relationships
with men be governed by mercy!"
"What do you do about justice?"
"There can be no justice-which is exclusive, with-
out mercy—which is inclusive."
"It's impossible to think those contradictions
together!'
"On the contrary, it is entirely possible. Take science
for example. Rigorous, faithful to reality, up until now
beneficial to society, founded on the search for non-con-
tradictory truth, and thus on the excluded third.. But
now, like everything around us, it finds itself drawn
into ferocious competition, always intent on getting
there first, bent on victory and condemned to glory, a
second form of the exclusion of others.
200

APTERNOON
"The obsessive quest for truth pursues progress,
while its competitional precondition implies regres-
sion. Rushing ahead like this exposes research to mis-
takes en route, to be sure, but more particularly to fun-
damental options and orientations which may prove
fatal in the long term.
"Is it not possible to separate the two motors, the
two terms and the two aspirations? Search for truth
without downgrading the other? What's so impossible
about that as an ideal?
"We can never be too cautious on paths that are as
complex as this. We can never be too aware of our
fragility."
"What does weakness protect us from?"
"God himself is infinitely weak; we live in his
image. Mercy protects us from the pestilence of compe-
tition: all culture comes from there."
"I understand nothing of your mercy or misericor-
dia. In Latin, the last half of the word comes from the
heart and not from the brain: are you wanting to manu-
facture stupid people?"
"With its pursuit of victory and glory, the rational-
ity of science and economics necessarily leaves out the
emotions of the heart. Obsessed with accounting and
exactitude, piloted by one-time top-of-the-class pupils,
Newtown, as an organically rational entity, is singu-
larly lacking in love, as were the European and classical
ages of aristocratic reason. In their time, the Greek
philosophers whom our schools would have us admire
were only superb and ruthless quibbling brutes.
"We have fallen into the habit of optimizing our
actions, results and thoughts. We place pathos and
emotion on the debit side of our accounting systems.
Thus we labor to eliminate what we call the irrational,
with a view to eradicating it. The leading lights of our
societies have turned to stone, they eschew emotion,
and this pitiless best of all possible worlds is headed for
the mortuary and its own funeral.
"To say that men without love are good is like say-
ing that rocks and death are gentle."
"1 admit that the cost-benefit approach can some-
times be seriously misleading, in that it doesn't take
account of the complexity of things and people in the
real world: a given element that is prejudged as bad
may, in the event, contribute positively to the combined
community of its neighbors, and vice versa."
"The decision to avoid emotion falsifies that
approach even more."
"We've not been taught to mix reason and pathos."
"No, certainly. But the essence of humanity passes
through pathos quite as much as through reason, and
we owe the biggest bifurcations in history more to pas-
sion than to understanding.
"Ecce homo: the only definition of man that I have
cited because it is beyond discussion cries out in pity in
the face of the poor tortured victim. Where understand-
ing fails, the heart succeeds!
"In fact, can we even hope to survive without emo-
tions? Our bodies do not warn us of assaults on their
integrity merely via the channel of intellect, but also
through language-less pain, which is too swiftly
defined as pathological. Thus pain and suffering are
often capable of saving life.
"Consider this emotion, which creates history's
upheavals, which teaches us our status, which protects
from death... these beatings of the heart, this back-
ground noise that is as old as humanity..... Any philos-
210

MERCY
ophy which is not prepared to accept it as a precursor of
reason is surely entirely deficient, a powerless para-
lytic."
"I didn't realize that we were here to do philosophy?"
"In the make-up of the word philo-sophy, love
comes before knowledge and science."
"Do you know that from the body of St Michael a
million heads sprang forth, and that each head bore a
million eyes, from each of which flowed seventy thou-
sand tears?
"Is he weeping before thinking, albeit that he is
pure spirit?
"No. The soldier archangel, protector of Israel, hel-
meted, armored and merciful, weeps eternally over the
fact that war or other organized forms of violence have
only thus far come to an end, albeit temporarily, of an
eternally renascent violence which is brutal, savage,
bestial, deadly, of men, of angels, and of all beings. His
tears concentrate the ancient and fundamental sadness
of contemplative love. The emotion of tears brings to a
peak the lucidity of eyes."
"What's going to happen in this future world, with
no army and no religion, which no longer has produc-
ers?"
"Freedom, or the law of the jungle? We need to
decide."
"Can we go back to judgement, to the lawcourt where
we started. Love is blind, and neither follows nor issues
criteria or standards of judgement!"
"A criterion of love? Love shuns comparison and
hierarchy. It mocks them. When it speaks their lan-
guage, beware! It is no longer love.
"No," he says. "The reason that I love you is not
because I think you're the best, the most beautiful, the
richest, perched at the top of some stupid ladder; I love
you for your singularity."
She says, wistfully:
"Humanity was born, suddenly, from the fact that
some Adam innocently believed that there existed
some Eve among others, who was single and unique,
with and for him, and also from the fact that she
acquired a reciprocal belief. At that point a marvelous
garden sprang up between them, in them, and around
them, full of fruit and flowers and visited often by God.
They were only forced to leave that garden on the day
that they succumbed to the temptation of comparison.
"Because the devil, a fallen angel and a bearer of
light, encouraged them, treacherously, to eat the apple.
He said: 'You will be like God'. In other words, the most
powerful, the strongest, the most intelligent, the best
etc. History then arose from this scale of degrees, a tum-
bling river of tears and blood, rushing towards claimed
excellence by the light of the flaming sword brandished
by the exterminating angel. On the contrary if you so
wish it your good will can bring forth Paradise at any
time, anywhere. A dream for a dream, Pantope.
"In the hour after my death, between which and
this moment there will not flow twenty dense seconds,
because we have lost time, when the angel of consola-
tion will accompany me and, after having rung, he will
have planted me at the door, not at all of the first Par-
adise, but of the last and definitive Paradise, that's how
I dream of the Judgement.
"At the entrance to heaven, as we know, St Peter
stands in judgement, asking each and every person

what good they have done in life, and apportioning
penalties for sin. However—although he hardly ever
receives a mention-there is also another archangel,
gentle and smiling, sitting opposite, at the door of satis-
faction. This is Michael with the Small Foot, an unas-
suming little archangel. He is there to ask whether your
life has been happy.... Have you earned enough
money? My life has been poor, but sufficient. You
haven't suffered too much pain? I've had eleven opera-
tions, I've had twenty years of virtual madness, but I
have no complaints about my health, thank you. Have
you had enough glory? After a lifetime of obscurity
came a little fame, which I found rather an embarrass-
ment. Would you have wanted more bread or wine? No,
I was hungry as a youth, and also later in life, but I've
had my share of good wines. Have you traveled suffi-
ciently in other countries? Yes, I've seen the beauty of
the world. Have you acquired enough knowledge? I've
often been blind and deaf, and frequently stupid, but on
balance I have enjoyed the happiness of understanding.
Would you say that you have had enough ideas? Yes,
sometimes a new wind has blown on my face..... So
you are fulfilled, satisfied. You may pass..... No, no, 1|
am still hungry, and always will be. Mendicant, suppli-
cant, thirsty, I have not yet begun to live. Insatiable as if
Ihad never tasted anything.... Have you given enough
love? I haven't had enough love, I've hardly begun to
love; even though my whole life was devoted to it, I
have barely even begun to be loved. Allow me to live for
just a while longer—ten hours, four minutes, twenty
seconds.... Thave, again and again, to make love, now,
in new ways, inexhaustibly, the only unfulfillable
urgency between the hour of my death and the drawing
up, today, of this little will."
The fint triangle puts together,
snake (which is visibly female) in
the scene of the Temptation. The
oed0tosodmerson
xrtbbod, dortiayoaoe tar
in robes of blue, who delivers
ene tinal trianex woroe wertt
red archangel, to expel the couple
Wino hew thworone soree
The game was thus played in
threes, and three times over. Is it
afty wonder that it turned out
bedly?
Paul and Herman de Limbourg.
Tres Rahes hewes ou bux de berry
Neeow cantraroes
Muste Condé, Chantilly, France.
343

MERCY
"When lovers melt into each other, are they giving
themselves absolution?"
"How is one to use our language with less exacti-
tude, since the absolute can never be dissolved? You
may as well try to exclude exclusion!
"But don't ever call them dissolute!"
Pia begins dancing and singing:
"Tomorrow, love will come to those who have
never loved. Tomorrow, those who have loved will
experience love reborn. Tomorrow, those who have suf-
fered from love will suffer always from him or from her.
Tomorrow, those who thought they had died from love
will die once again from another love, or from the same.
Do you believe that tomorrow love will be extin-
guished?"
In the previous picture the red
archangel performed an act of
exclusion expelling Adam and Eve
from the island of Paradise, vis the
Gothic porch passing across the
encirding rivers. In this picture we
witness an act of inclusion into the
celestial Paradise: the just woman
is welcomed into the garden by a
red angel; she enters the dance of
angels, amid the chromatic scale of
colored flowers.
The Dance of Angels, or The Just
in Datacher, detail from the ta
Judgement, c. 1431. Museo San
Marco, Florence, Italy.
245

NOCTURNE

With their eyes directed towards
one point, the gazes of these
Tom var dus trote, cures
and colors, join together in one
primal nakedness to suggest a
bouquet, of which their heads
form the flowers; perhaps they are
considering their genealogical tree,
the single source of their tresge,
the primitive nodal point of their
Traternis.••
Has humanity intermingled in the
course of its history in the same
way as the multiple interflowings
of the tributaries feeding this lake?
Small rhulets flowing into Lake
Natron (so called because of its
sodium deposits) on the Tanzania-
Kenya border, on the East African
Rift.
LIGHTING-UP TIME
The airport is still crowded.
"As I watch all these people passing through the airport
- Japanese, Australians, Argentinians, Chinese, Rus-
sians, Moroccans, and so on.... I see them as a display
of our basic fraternity, spread out before me."
*The origins of humanity's fraternity lie in Africa,
thousands of years ago!"
"In our sick bay, no one person suffers pain or groans
in any way differently to anybody else. Pain is as univer-
sal as violence and death; it makes us equal. The same
bitterness resides in the salt of sweat, tears and blood."
"Did you know that we had tiny elements hidden
at the heart of our genetic make-up, called mitochon-

dria, which show that originally we all came from the
same stock?"
Pia nods. She closes her eyes and recites:
"Adam and Eve were probably black, and were cer-
tainly African. They had two children, Cain and Abel,
and so on and so on, down to our times, when the pop-
ulation runs into billions and spans the entire world."
"I can draw a map of the voyages, spread over
thousands of years, of entire populations on different
continents; I can chart the genealogical tree of the
human species and its languages. Imagine its develop-
ment painted on a panel: by now its outer branchings
will be way out at each end of the panel. There are now
huge distances separating the most far-flung descen-
dants of the first African family, some of whom have
now become geographically very distant from each
other: the Australian bushman and Aborigine, the New
Zealand Maori, and the Finn from Helsinki. The differ.
ence is enormous!
"We could see if we can measure on the wall where
this tree— as vertical as any ladder-would reach."
Pia takes Pantope by the left arm that he had disen-
gaged from his right to express the magnitude of these
distances, and draws him into a waiting room. It is
empty at this time of night. From the ceiling hangs a
Calder-style mobile. Delicate, agile, changeable and
sensitive to the slightest breath of air. From the ends of

LIGHTING -UP
TIME
The patriarch Nosh sits beneath
his family tree. The ark which
he built in order to escape the
waters of the Flood farca, chest, in
Latin, as in the Ark of the
Covenant) is said to have contained
every existing species, like a
200 or a botanical garden.
While all living creation was
aflost on the flood waters, did he
and establish their genealogy?
since this story is archaic in sil
possible senses, are we to road
it as the beginnings of our
natural sciences?
A Calmet, Genesfogical
Tree of the Descendants of Noah.
Disconnaire historique
de la Bibfe, 1730.
each of its horizontal arms hang model aircraft repre-
senting all the airlines in the world, painted in the
colors of their respective liveries: Australian, Japanese,
Canadian and Chinese, American, African, Indonesian,
European..... All languages, all nations...
"More flying angels!" Pantope chuckles.
"You can imagine the hook in the ceiling as being our
earliest ancestors. From there hangs a thread, to which is
attached a horizontal bar, which has at each end the two
children born to this one single couple. At the ends of
this one we have Cain and Abel. From those points hang
other threads, which are attached to other horizontal
bars, from which hang other offspring, and so on.."
"And by so saying, you've just constructed a
machine in the same image as the family tree that we
just mapped out on the wall."
"However it's no longer on the flat surface of a
wall, but in the space of this room."
"What difference does that make?"
"A great deal of difference, Pantope. Would you
mind opening the door?"
Almost imperceptibly, a draught enters the room. The
effect of this is to set the horizontal bars moving on their
hanging threads, like horses on a carousel, moving in
ten or twenty small and irregular rotations,
Then, as if in a ballet, aircraft models that were ini-
tially close to each other move to a distance, while those
which were distant now find themselves neighbors.
The Africans fly towards the Japanese, the Swiss
towards the Chileans, while the English end up a long
way away from Ireland.
"Sublime, isn't it! Those huge separations which
just now had you stretching your arms as far as they
would go to measure them, suddenly become no dis-
tance at all, whereas people who just now were neigh-
bors suddenly become distant."
"Twins become separated, and enemy cultures
intermarry: mixed-race children will be born!"
"When we depict our family tree spread across a
flat page, there we all are, distanced, differentiated and
deceived by the way the pattern is laid out; when we
portray it in space, it gives us a possibility of meeting.
"Behind the differences of our respective lan-
guages, do we all speak one single language?"
"Here, and since early this morning when the storm
was raging, where would you say angels are to be

NO C TURNE
This travel agent displays an
windom-identical models, the
only difference being in their
reproduction of the state of
today's skies, and of the stable city
of angels. At ground level, airports
are all different, in distarce.
languages ano interest, out once
the aircraft take off, they all fly
according to the same physical
laws, the same mechanics
driving forces, and the same
juridical regulations. A fist
picture cannot express the sarne
realite that can deare
in space.
found, Pantope? In the aircraft, or on the invisible
wings of breaths of air?
"In us, as men and women, or outside of us, in
nature or in machines?"
"In the rounds which they generate, I would say in
the queues in our airport, where, instead of staying at
home, separated from each other by thousands of
miles, Asians mix with Spaniards, and Hindus with
Tierrafuegans."
"Ah! Now I understand why you have just been
singing an amorous round."
"You see it in motion."
"So here we are, all cousins and brothers! Instead of
one single scale or ladder, we have circles, innumerable
intersecting circles! No more hierarchy, but neighbors!
No more contempt, but equity! No more injustice, just
visits!

"The little aircraft approach each other head-on, but
they never crash into each other."
"I never realized that there were such things as
philosophical machines..
.. which create equality and are ideal for pre-
venting us from fabricating gods!"
"Now let's have one more effort," she adds, laughing.
"Instead of simply putting human beings in the
place of these aircraft, how would it be if we were to
add every species in nature? Then, in this same twirling
round of marionettes, woman would come close to but-
tercup, seaguli to sea, and rock to snake.... And that is
just how the world is, in its deepest and most concrete
reality."
"But twins eventually have to separate and travel
off on their own! The son has to leave his mother; the
wolf has to leave its lair."
"Pantope, pay attention, I'm about to start again!

An intermixing and paradisakal
reconcilation of all species, animal
and floral, to the accompaniment
Henri Rousseau ('le Douanier)
(1044-1910), 7he Dream, 1910
Museum of Modern Art, New York,
USA. This picture was exhibited at
the artist's death. The picture was
accompanied by the following
con wrountine sober
to discowaae anvone thinking of
writing another for it:
In a beautiful dream
Yadwiga
hears the sound's of a pipe
plped ty a thoughefuf
charmer,
while the moon reflects
The wild snakes Nisten
to the instrument's sweet
airs.'
Instead of human beings, species and aircraft, I'll now
list the elements of which our bodies are formed: func-
tions, organs, tissues, cells, enzymes, molecules, and
others that I can't remember … which are separated by
our sciences but which I put back together into one sin-
gle tree of analysis and of decomposition."
"Now turn, little mill... And lo and behold, the
mix begins to appear, the same mixture which I
encounter concretely every morning-—the interlocking,
in one single location, of muscles, nerves and bones, tis-
sues, functions and organs, all needing to be cured and
cared for.
"Biology makes its distinctions and invents a sci-
ence which is precise, effective, general and dead; in
their intermingling the doctor treats the whole as living
individuals. I am tempted to give a name to this alloy—
both fused and discrete as it is, an unknown terrain for
experts and an everyday reality for practitioners: 1
would call it flesh. No knowledge without incarna-
tion."
284

G H TI N G•UP
The existence of a single law and
the diversity of multiplicity are not
necessonly in contradiccion. K may
happen that a putting together of
very different things may result
uthe tcieoronese
property. We now know how to
manufacture so-called composite
marcor ordento droduee
single chosen result which then
dominates the mosaic. They
produce wonderful abstract images
Wher swooe ororound
eiie vorrae lowon
Micrography of a thin section
otnemery mee an alioydentee
under strict conditions of heat and
cooling: when the material is
wistonco.chetntote
its original shape.
"Pia, or how theology makes a comeback via the
end of a stethoscope!" Pantope laughs.
"An intense clarity of light shines down from your
hanging lamp, Pia," he continues,
"without either
flame or tongue: a light-bearer, or Lucifer, but without
evil fire. Even without a lamp of any kind!"
"A light which is rational and reasoning at one and
the same time, a rare thing! Interminglings take place
without being in contradiction with order or classifica-
tion; universal reason, on the other hand, thrives on dis-
persion and distancing: it actively produces them and
observes them.
"No universe without this blending..."
"And vice-versa. The intense variety that is the
result of this intermixing, far from obscuring the law of
its distribution, enables us to see it.
"T'he empirical, the flesh, is the heini •i abstrac-
tion!"
languages,
"Thus our airport intermixes gmyys .' ponle and
distributing
them
little
machine...
"Not only an airport, Panten.)
does it too, and the universe as :.t';
do it more, and better. Wildly disordor
ived
they
ont enclessly
revealing a fine degree of orde.ins
They emerge from the network of corsdors, ai ; top at
a café. It is packed with people.
Pia says, thoughtfully, as sit- farats frcketato
her cup:
"If I were to add sugar to m
tuvel
too much to adulterate it, I would s t mmot rs 1
stirred the spoon and saw tiie 30
this is the way the little aia ia"
round and round.."
. waiting for the sus
... because the ange
on the hanging mobile,
dictably by the angels of the diao:
invisible substances in the aa:
like a hundred teaspoons.
"Or like the way this
twenty languages and ten nd gin
"This intermixing takes time
"Or rather, the procuci dces. Thire fae Maok
ings of human beings mrkus thir bistes
clearly explicated."
"Invisible, dazzling. everyone thhatas Maar war tard
28

NOCTURNE
battles are what make history: the likes of the Horatii
against the Curiatii.... And nobody ever notices Sabina
and Camilla, two victim women, loving their adver-
saries, and bearing their children by them: there you
have blending, time, evolution, advance and progress."
He looks at her, amazed. Was he becoming a femi-
nist?
"The male separates, the female blends," he says.
She looks at him, astonished.
"Either it is the machine that intermixes things, or it is
those things that make the mobile turn-as you prefer.
I now imagine the distanced branchings of the family
tree, with its burgeoning offshoots, being twisted and
shaken under the onset of gusting winds, as if in a
cyclone zone: at that point, branches and foliage that
were previously distant are brought together, caressing
each other or slapping against each other."
"It's my turn now, Pia. Let's classify branches of
knowledge: is it the case that the sociologist and the
astrophysicist, one of whom studies the sky, and the
other humanity down below, will come together one
day, despite their separation? What storms of under-
standing are going to have to blow for them to love
each other?"
"So what storms does reason need for it to re-find
the concrete world?"
As they return to the airport sick bay, they pass the
boards on which flight arrivals and departures are
announced.
"Pia, you have convinced me. Look at these
machines for blending all people and languages!"
"Not all of them, Pantope. Far from it."
On the departures board, the list
of desanations reads like a
aareteer of the world, and is ar
different from the reality of the
world as a genealogical tree is
boch dutterent from numan reality,
she removie tru
operations of this particular
message-bearing system, men and
women ton company secon
together, re-arrange themselves
and create new human mixes. Here
we see them at rest; in a short
while people who are now
standing next to each other will be
a thousand miles apart, and
strangers will converge into
neighboxliness. You could read in
all this the table of contents of this
book.
She gives some loose change to a beggar sitting on
the ground:
"It is the wretched of the earth who make the
humanity of the universe, Pantope, and they are more
numerous than travelers. They constitute, above all
else, an eternity of which history never spoke; in no
way do those who produce time blend with them."

Humanity was born, all of a
eden. drine omen when sort
Adam, in his innocence, beliered
that some Eve, among others,
exoxco, one and alone, with and
for him, and at the moment that
she care to believe similarly. At
that moment a garden of marvels
sprang up between them, in them,
and around them, full of flowers
and fruit. Seraphic, and visited
often by God. They were only
obliged to leave that garden on
the day when they succumbed to
the temptation of comparison.
Adam and Eve in Paradise,
miniature from the famane,
c. 1610. Topkapi Palace Library,
Istanbul, Turkey.
Paul and Herman de Umbourg
(d. 1416). Très Riches Heures du
Oue de Berry (1413-16), Four
winged Straphim: St John on
Patmos. Muste Conde, Chantity,
SERAPHIM
"Why do you travel so much?"
"In order not to be in the state of having arrived.
You won't find me at the place which I'm leaving, or at
the place to where I'm going. I'm absent from the world
for everyone."
"Is that running away?"
"I'm attracted by just wandering, disappearing,
being on my own somewhere. I leave, but when I arrive
somewhere I only stay there for long enough to leave
again."
"But you're here now!"
"Would you like me to leave?"
"You dare!"

NOCTURNE
"In that way I have come to understand my own
absence."
"To what end?"
"In order better to be able to see, hear, pay attention,
understand and find. The less I exist, the more I think."
"You fly, Pantope. Like aircraft. They are where
they are not, and they're not where they are. They're
not beings, but relations!"
"Why do you look after other people, Pia?"
"Each patient exists powerfully as a presence-all
the more so when they're worried and in pain. By the
same token, for our care to bring relief, they have to for-
get that I am there."
"But you are there!"
"My profession requires me to disappear, just as
you said this morning, when you were talking about
lecturers and messengers. It was a similar desire for
withdrawal that led me to choose this job. The more I
think, the less I am."
"You are not that which you are, and you are that
which you are not: you are a giver, Pia."
Silence.
Unspoken thoughts were going through his head:
*I've spent half a lifetime in airports, waiting rooms
and amusement arcades, at the edge of the sea and on
the edge of tears, always moving, always on the go,
attentive, absent, looking for the road to take, then tak-
ing it, and then leaving it. I'm lost. What do I wait for?
Arrival, transit, departure, flight.... Why do I lead this
distracted existence? Why spend a year in New York
rather than Barcelona, Pantin or Valparaiso? Why return
to Paris this moming, an exile even in my own country?
To do what? To see whom? Since wretchedness is the
same the world over, and space has the same taste wher-
ever you are ... people, my passing, my loss, my forget-
ting and my indifferences, my isolation in roaming and
in hope, Earth, my companion in solitude."
Pia says, gently, as if she had overheard his private
thoughts:
"You live in airports, places of passage and transit,
always mingling with crowds."
"You live in this same port, a place of multiple
neighborings, but where the same people rarely pass
twice: everybody is always someone other."
"Maybe we don't exist?"
A pause.
"Have you ever experienced the pleasure of going
very gently, silently, on tiptoe, like the wind —the art of
passing unnoticed, of quitting a place as if you'd never
been there, of leaving things exactly as they were, and
then, suddenly, becoming transparent, whiter than
white, empty and pure as the air of the universe, full of
light...?
"The wild passion of letting yourself be transported
by wind, by burning heat and by cold space...
"...the pleasure of being anonymous, of being
quiet for a long time, of existing in no place at all ...
where the dialogs of others continually slip in."
"...the pleasure of leaving, of being far away, of
being missing…."
"The subtle pleasures of erasing the presence of
your body, your words and your shadow, of counting
for nothing, of hiding yourself, of becoming so light
that you fly away.….
Standstill.

As tuck would hore it, Paradice
obseives into a primitive memory
and regret for a lass, or peciecte
itself as the hope of an eventual
human educations. Silence writes
on the ground the stave of a silent
musketeor
rewaro, decause the crossing of the
Sand ridges in the Simpson
desert, whether in a group or on
one's own, remains the best of all
east of Alice Springs.
Angels pass in silence, wordless flight, subjects dis-
appearing.
"Did you know that, without anyone realizing it,
the word cacher, to hide, has traces of the Latin cogitare,
to think?"
"So is it that the person who hides thinks, or does
the person who thinks hide something, or himself?"
"I don't particularly enjoy thinking about objects—
often mere empty things— with words, that fast become
frivolous. I prefer to live in a vacuum, to entrust myself
to time, to bed down in a shady place and listen to
silence. Words sometimes make so much noise that
they obliterate the idea that they're seeking to express,
whereas the hollow form in which I hide myself con-
tains the essence of thought. Lying, motionless, in the
dark room of some anonymous tourist hotel, sunk in
silence and in darkness, I begin to be in a state of no
longer existing, so that, when death finally arrives, in a
sense it will find nobody."
They neither of them see the other now. Who is speak-
ing?
"When I'm traveling I change languages and adapt
myself to places, like a moving pool of water or a pass-
ing breeze. Foreign languages slide off my skin like
water off a duck's back. You may think that I'm moving
from place to place, but what is in fact moving is a kind
of phantom or shade."
"What I absorb is the smell of the patient, which is
quite specific in an unwell body, and the deep-throated
sound of pain."
"I have only ever traveled in order to reconnect
with my nothingness; my body has resisted the learn-

NOCTURNE
ing of languages, in order to stay lost, bewildered, sus-
pended and in flight."
"I have only ever cured people in order to fuse
myself with the bodies of others."
A moment of emotion.
"Do you exist, my friend?"
"As little as you, I would say, Pantope."
At this point, without saying anything, they knew
that they were in love.
The conversation moves on to a new track:
"You have shown me a universe of networks, and
shown me how to see everywhere, and to hear at all
times, angels, Pia. Message bearers. It's thanks to their
work that this universe functions as wondrously as it
does."
"But do we really have anything to say to ourselves
through this universal message bearing...?"
"... which exalts only power and glory, violence
and unhappiness, and in the process constructs a thou-
sand unjust hierarchies."
"What is the point of all this intercommunication, if
all it does is to sing of all the ways in which we lack
love? Can we live without joy or supplication, without
pity or perfect love?"
"Do sicknesses all derive from the fact of hating
love?"
"The angels of old loved us enough for the roles
which demand compassion: guardians, protectors,
guides for travelers, messengers in our sleeping and
waking dreams, comforters of the dying, announcers of
the good tidings... The hard-nosed realities of science
and law, of giant investments in multimedia communi-
The depth of the waters and the
random outcrops of jagged rocks
make for unpredictable currents
ewine and dred onderous
for navigation in the Bay of
Along, one of the wonders
of the world. For a long time,
pirates-and. more recentiv.
refugees-have sought refuge
in its inextricable labyrinth.
Archangels or gnomes?
A junk in the Bay of Along, in
North Vietnam, on a calm sea, in a
cations, create relationships that are cynical. We no
longer love love. A hard-edged era, a dry century, a
time of stone."
"You have a love for mankind, gentle doctor."
"You love the world, wise voyager!"
"So now put yourself on board an aircraft, flying
above Labrador, under the pleated skirts of a mauve
aurora borealis.... While physics fills your head with
the facts about magnetic fields and charged particles,
legions of angels fall from the heavens, a delightful
shower on that same head of yours, in myriad cascades,
enough to make you weep with marveling emotion.
"The fact that you understand the geological origins
of the volcanic formations in the Bay of Along does not
prevent a quickening of your heart when you first wit-
ness the labyrinthine archipelago with its mortal meteors.
I imagine that they were all scattered there by gnomes.

As testimory to the deep inner
volcanoes present a magnificent
and menacing spectacle. With their
unpreo stole awarchings,
volcanoes may threaten the
existence of nearby towns; they
Moree mere he where
A sovereign source and global
menace? The major eruption
oPhotos here, mer
in June 1991, on the island of
lucon, north-west of Manila,
"By what partial understandings do the natural sci-
ences divest themselves of the enchantment of the
supernatural? If anything, knowledge of geography
adds to our ecstasy at the sight of the waters of the
Troise. They say that the spirit descends upon certain
people and makes prophets of them; but here the same
psalms rise up from the shores and the rocks. I even
hear this clamor better when it echoes in the unceasing
background sounds of wind and tide than in clattering
musical scores for cymbals.
"What speaks to us best? The sounds of things, or
the creative works of men?"
"Reason combined with emotion, begotten by the
universe."
"Combined with ...?"
"Does an understanding of oceanography stand in
the way of our fascination at the sight of a grey ice-floe,
and glaciers spawning their icebergs in the Arctic
Ocean? Does the science of tectonic plates confine the

NOCTURNE
enthusiasm which a strong earth tremor delivers to
your stomach, and the thrill to be had by climbing to
the crimson crater of Mount Etna, or the volcanoes of
Malaysia, with their plume of smoke rising straight up
into the calm sky, piercing the layer of equatorial cloud,
or of the dark cone of Stromboli, or the serene geometry
of Fuj-San? Have you ever experienced raging
cyclones on the high seas? Have you ever traveled
across the ocher and purple deserts of Australia, where
reality seems to simulate some abstract painting?
"Does science in any way add to the enchantment
of the world?"
"It reproduces it, it reveals, details and multiplies it.
As a geometrician and physicist, I have met angels in
their thousands, shrieking in a wicked wind as it lashes
the ocean-God, what a furore! Also, when I was a
child I was always scared of the angels-who must
surely have been fallen angels -whose perverseness
made our river swell with water and swamp my
father's boats, after months of heavy rain, and the melt-
ing snow coming down in March. We slept and worked
under the constant threat of the unleashing of these
malevolent demons, just as the peasants of the Philip-
pines cultivate their rice below the menacing peak of
Pinatubo, or Bangladeshi peasants farm under the risk
of being drowned beneath raging floodwaters."
"Human beings can also switch nature without
warning, from benefactors to villains, from angels to
devils."
"The wind is both life-bringing and ruthless; fire is
both warming and devastating; the same water that
baptizes us swallows people when they drown; the
same earth that feeds us takes our buried dead.
"Wind can turn from a pleasant presence that fills
The photographs of certain
oceans, ice-kapes and deserts
provided ay the refined techniques
of modern science make the
amateur wonder whether there is
cole reno termosween
enter penin and strate t
empirical representations of
nature, given that the world is so
teeming with strange and
beautiful views, in other places and
at other cecrees of magnitude
than those svallsole to ordinary
everyday perception. On to what
real world does this oval porthole
open?
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944),
Painting Al, Oval Composition
(Trees), 1913. Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam, Holland,
our sails, to a demon that blows down houses; fire
warms us and guards us, but may suddenly turn
satanic and burn us; water and earth may be protective,
assuaging thirst and hunger, or murderous, suffocating
us in agony. We should love this twin-natured existence
of the world, Pia."
"And we should love the twin-natured essence of
human beings, Pantope."
"So do we also have to love demons, villains and
horrible people?"
"Them especially: they are angels too, albeit fallen.
Beneath the dominant beast sleeps the beauty.
"Only the beauty of the world gives us reason to
believe in God, Pia."
"Only the finer works of mankind draw yours truly
down the same path."
He waits for a long moment, and then continues, slowly:

NOCTURNE
"Animals, trees and stones... Reckon now the pro-
gressive ages of the inhabitants and components of the
Earth. When awareness vanishes in the hearts of ani-
mals, and movement stops, time retraces its steps from
fauna to flora, from animals to plants, and from plants
to cold rocks.
"As people get older, some acquire no more than
the memory of their old age, spanning back no more
than a century; others add the memory of their read-
ings, which may take them back some thousands of
years; but those who know how to be quiet, and who
are able to stop and watch and study animals, trees and
stones, go back billions of years, to acquire the ultimate
truth, the truth which made animals lose their speech,
plants their movement, and rocks their life activity.
"Thus, since the origins of time, cliffs, mountains
and lakes have watched-unmoving, silent and inert—
the portion of earth where they came to a stop; then
trees stopped moving and took root there; and animals
fell silent, lost in ecstasy. All old, like me, and struck
motionless before the beauty of the world.
"Now, by dint of contemplation, silence and immo-
bility, these inhabitants of the world are what now com-
pose its beauty, the last truth.
"When my life finally comes to an end, when I
finally lay aside my pen for all time, setting aside burn-
ing desire, and speech, and standing upright, and all
sign of life, then and only then will I enter into the
beauty of this world, to augment it."
Pia:
"Did you know that the word 'author' means an
'augmenter'?"
We're on our way! Our first
direct and beautiful view of planet
Earth as a whole, as photographed
by astronauts, constituted an
authentic revolution in the spirit
and perception of human beings of
all languages and cultures. For the
first time we can imagine at least
the beginnings of a universal
solidarity, like that which unites
the dew of a ship
Planet Earth (Arabis, Africa and
the Antarctic) seen from space,
photographed by Apolio 17 during
its voyage to the Moon in
December 1972.

A trion of tuo diginct entes
smells, odors, breaths, fragrances,
scents and perfumes; a contact of

Alia
HOT 30
brilliant presences and two
Muscolo cotono
resistances; a symphony of two
here, distinguishes, blends and
fuses yellows, ochers, sorrets
temons, blond ambers, saffrons,
topazes, maizes, mustards,
caramels, champagnes, straws,
honeys, siennas, old roses, oranges
and golds... in a precious mosaic
(another name for music).
Gustave Klimt (1862-1918), The
Kis, 1907-8, Österreichische
Galeric, Vienna, Austria.

SERAPHIM
"So let us produce only works which make things
grow."
He continues:
"But seeing that everyone is shut away in towns,
who ever sees the world these days? Love it in its
entirety, Pia, warts and all; it was only recently that, for
the first time, we had the opportunity to view the Earth
in its global entirety."
"Love the entirety of humanity, Pantope, since
your newly unified world and its message-bearing sys-
tems obliges it to unite for the first time."
"So are men and things going to exchange mes-
sages between them, en bloc?"
"Like the two of us?"
"To say what?"
They remain silent for a long while, as if angels really
are passing, bearing calm news.
"I'm as timid as anyone, but I would like to end by
telling you about... my predilection.
"Yes, I have traveled enormously, so much do I love
the world; it can be a beautiful place. I've lived in a
hundred places and circumstances, during frequent
wars and rarer periods of peace. I have known hunger
and poverty. I don't remember never having had to
work...
"But, on balance, the rare and truly precious
moments of a brief life (the kind of moments which I
imagine anybody would be willing to buy back at the
price of what life remains to him) were passed in love-
in seraphic instants where the flesh states its divinity.
Always rebirthing and productive of time, love is an
angel-child; it is the only thing which does not become
worn out with duration, whether we live in it or it lives
in us; formerly, I thought in its youth, it died in me,
henceforth.
"There is no vitality except through love; no strong
and constructive adult except for love; no old age and
wisdom except in relation to love; no goodness or cre-
ativity, the only virtues that are worth anything, except
through it, with it and in it.
"The body is not brought into life, does not begin, is
not formed except from love; the backbone stands
upright only through love; one's humiliated bones only
gather themselves up with joy because of love; blood
only circulates, legs only run, arms only raise, muscles
only tense, nerves only react, and joints only bend in
relation to love; cells only multiply or associate accord-
ing to love's law; the heart only beats by love; the brain
only functions at a high pitch through love; hair only
gets dishevelled, falls out, or becomes white for the rea
sons and unhappinesses of love; the palate only tastes,
the tongue only moves and the throat only chokes in
the presence of love; sweat and tears only run when
your skin and eyes are full of love; cries only emerge
from the pit of the stomach from love; sobs, together
with despair and unrequited wanting, come only from
out of love; music only descends from the heavens
amidst love and supplication before love and grateful
rejoicing on one's knees after love; sex is nothing with-
out love; a vague life of shadow and cardboard passes
by, poorly, between and without acts of love, in the
hope of new ones, and in forgetful memory of past
ones; memory and amnesia begin only after love; imag-
ination only takes flight above or below love; sins are
only committed in relation to or against love; ecstasy is
only achieved during love; there is nothing in knowl-

NOCTURNE
edge which did not first spring from love, and pass
span of the four limbs of the woman standing before
through ecstasy; there is sadness only in excepting love;
him?
our times, our spaces, our thoughts, our feelings, our
In any event, once they had united, they got up.
actions are posed in relation to love alone; there is no
"I love the fact that you love the fact that I love
life except according to or following love; we are only
you," they say. "I discover my joy in the joy that you
close to others, and perhaps also to ourselves, through
discover in me."
the closest of contacts with love; and we will never
Do they decide to call each other Theodore and
know if, in dying, love ceases, or whether that is the
Dorothea, on the grounds that they knew that God had
point at which it truly begins..."
given one of them to the other, but they couldn't
"In amor-tality?" she asks, laughing.
remember which was which?
"No thought is worth anything without love; with-
Reborn, the two of them enter the triangle of the
out love we find nothing to say.
seraphim.
"As a foundation, it supports and upholds; as fire
and energy, it moves, emotes, changes and transforms;
as a messenger, it takes wing and delights.
"Love is the sum of all philosophy.
"I am as timid as anyone, and I want to finish by
saying, Pia, that I love you."
"Angels, archangels and cherubim," she says, "trans-
mit noises, music, song, verbal messages, texts without
body, words, phrases, conversations, codes, paper and
wind. When these messengers finally fall silent, the
Word becomes flesh.
"The true messages are human flesh itself. Meaning
is the body."
"Or the world."
"Love is fleshly."
Was she listening to him, or was she doing the talking?
He in turn, in listening to her, couldn't decide what was
happening. Was it that his thorax was being quartered,
his bones cracking, and wings sprouting from his
body? Or was it that wings were enlarging the white
"The Angel of the East dressed in
Earth is the habitual state of
purple, and the Angel of the
Angels in Heaven. Love is the light
of then woeld..
like two breaths of wind and
"merged: one was an Angel of love,
the other an Angel of
wisdom. these two Angels had
been united on Earth by bonds of
micromlp aho ne diway» bcen s
Oi, parate does
The mutual giving which is the
essence of good marriages on
This infinite reciprocity is the
essence of their life." Honoré de
Balzac, Strafita, La Comédie
Humaine, (Pliade, Paris),
wol. XI, pp.782-3.
A Double-winged Seraph,
Byzantine mosaic, twelfth to
thirteenth century. San Marco
Basilica, Venice, Italy.

MIDNIGHT

The French mathematician mile
calculable probability would be
the equivalent of throwing down
a handful of letters and coming up
words such as the ones on the
banner held by these angels:
goodwill."
The English thermodynamicist
James Jeans (1877-1946) used the
term 'miracle to refer to a physical
event whose cakulable probability
would be the equivalent of seeing
a container of water freeze when
It was placed in a superheated
the complexity of DNA, and the
even greater complexity of arry
organism, the probability of this
very singular little chap being
born-a mixed-rose child held in
two pairs of hands: one pair black
and the other white--is so low
that one might call this too a
"miracle'. Science enables us to see
the reality of miracles.
Wall painting from the chapel
in the counted urte
Bouroc. France
NOEL
There's a radio message from an aircraft in flight: it was
ill-advised of her to have boarded in her condition. A
pregnant woman passenger, en route from Israel, is suf
ering contractions in mid-air. The aircraft lands
Pia runs to the arrivals lounge.
She is astonished at the sight that greets her.
Since people are pushing round to look, the air
stewardesses have to get the mother-to-be away from

MIONIGHT
A group of astronomers and chemists has flown in
from Iraq for a scientific conference; they stand by and
burn incense... The woman's baby is delivered.
The shop's window display collapses….. furry toy ani-
mals all over the place... a donkey, and ox.... A man
is leaning over the woman..... The new-born child is
minute, naked, shining with a tiny light.
As Pia stands there, she thinks:
"As between the banal perception and the ecstasy,
between a setting like this and paradise, the hazards of
life and eternal happiness, this anonymous place and a
king's palace, between the dreariness of concrete and
the splendor of the story, the Messiah and the street
child.
"More errant than a tumbling dice, than a vapor, a
breath of wind, the smallest movement of some light
thing, a feather, an atom, a corpuscle, more impercepti-
ble than an intention, the difference always escapes us,
infinitesimal, equivalent to a breaking into tears.
"An experience so powerful and so conclusive that
one can call it ultimate, and think of dying, passing
immediately into another world ….. even here?
"To be born?" she wonders.
The young mother looks pale. She is bleeding. She says
that her belly feels heavy. Still smeared with afterbirth
the baby wails among the toy animals and the straw
dolls. The donkey seems to nuzzle up next to the ox. It
is night time, and cold.
Pia kneels down. The man whom she presumes to
be the father helps her, shakily, as she cuts the cord. She
imagines that he might be a carpenter. Like all good
manual workers, his heavy, skilful hands seem to be.
stamped with the silky grain of woods that resemble
joints of meat-pink, white, scented, according to the
way it's been cut and the knots that are in it: maternal
matter.
The shepherds offer cheeses.
Sheepskins and straw, mother and child, animals
blending with the crowd, people and things. In this
scene, what is pregnant is the flesh.
Music is playing over the airport tannoys. It overlays
the sounds of the crowd of onlookers. Pia busies herself
with the mother, who is uncomfortable in this cramped

Onty the mother, with her open
weenand tourneto
cakulate it, knows that the infant
Te, methorouterne
like a rare miracle, or Messiah. In
orde to undent and this win their
space, and with the child. Crouching low as she works,
she thinks wishful thoughts:
"I love the outdoor life. In the mountains, in the
country, at the seaside places where you can see for a
long way. Towns are so claustrophobic. With their
never-ending walls and streets they make it impossible
to see any distance. In the country there is an immensity
of space that soothes your eyes, calms their restlessness
at being confined by these prisons.
"Once I was walking on some hills from which you
could look out over the whole countryside. I heard a
woman calling from far off in the distance. It awoke in

The twilight of the angels.
anybody else. So what is the
were done yeti
of the painting refers? it is the
same conversation as that of our
monic, carlier. Savate but
together. It is at the same scale
as that of the Word. Here it is
again, ten. Crass ano srang:
produce music, and John the
Baptist as a child symbolizes the
cry in the desert. In the midst of
musicians, and in the face of that
trying voice, Jesus is the Word
she the westheteo
to say, the sum totality of the
Message. This genealogy having
been fulfilled, the angels return
to their normal places: in the
orchestra pit.
Vittore Caroacciol
(1460-1526), Sacra
Conversazione, Musée du Petit-
Palals, Avignon, France.

MIDNIGHT
me an ancient memory from way back, from the years
of my childhood in the countryside, when the voices of
our neighbors would hail us from the horizon. So the
space of our auditory horizons was also immense.
"But now that the sound-pollution of engines and
never-ending industrial muzak have invaded all avail-
able space, nobody any longer calls to people over such
long distances. Our voices find themselves shut out of
the world. These walls of sound intercept our messages
and corral us, even out of doors, into a field of hearing
that is tiny. Views are cut off, hearing is blocked, so
what am I doing here?
"We have chased all the angels out of our country-
side, where they will never again sing the hymn of the
heavens.
"What are they singing tonight? What are these angels?
They are messengers; guardians of wise people and of
people who are lost; advisers to kings good and bad, to
poor people and victims, to tyrannical empires and
egotistical villages; as a community they are responsi-
ble for the salvation of the Earth as a whole, by peoples,
nations and neighborhoods. And now here they are,
gathered together, in conference, arriving at the speed
of light from all places, from ali horizons, and from the
most remote past, because they have suddenly been
notified of the good tidings. They are happy, at last, to
be able to hand over their responsibilities to the Media-
tor, who is more efficiacious than they are because, for
all eternity, they fail in the undertaking of converting
the world, by groups and by individuals.
"Why is it that they fail?
"It's obvious," Pia thinks. "It's because of their
intelligence: quick as a flash, light as the wind, as fast-
moving and brilliant as light, dazzling like lightning
flying, abstract, graceful, gentle, full of wit and style, of
music, of spirit, of restless repartee, even of good-
ness... yes, of angelism.
"Unbearable.
"The reason why their messages do not come across
is because they lack body: they are intellectual."
"Singing the new Christmas hymn, they sing, con-
versely, the glory of the flesh. Wracked with humility,
once in a way, the angelic intellectuals of the cities fill
rural space with this strange annunciation that their
messages, now obsolete, volatile and empty, will, for
the time to come, give way to the heavy body which is,
in the here and now, it and it alone, the Word: flesh,
with its sweat and its meconium, its blood and its
saliva, the animality of ass and ox, wood and milk,
straw and dung, the presence of the three shepherds,
the mother's pain.
"The Word is no longer the cry in the desert, the
burning prophesy or the psalm, the music, the litany,
the motet, the rustling of crossed wings, the coded mes-
sage, transported, delivered, received and deciphered,
emphatic words and speeches, written law, sign, mean-
ing, the signified and the signifier, speech, language,
commentary and interpretation. all of which are
angelic... Rather it is the flesh. Yes, the real and actual
flesh, which has just been born from the other mother,
dense with divine life, divine intelligence and divine
presence.
"We are not talking of God as something distant,
living in the body and achieving lastingness through
blood; it is not that blood and the body symbolize him.
No: God is flesh and the flesh is God; one and the same.

"Angels will still be able to continue expressing
their language, writing and singing, transporting and
coding messages, distinguishing the symbol and the
devil, professing, like commentators, and commentat-
ing, like professors... but henceforth their role will be
subaltern, their age will have come to an end, and both
their role and their age will have been fulfilled, because
the message is here, in this place, in this living space, in
this stable with its animals, in this cradle surrounded
by quadrupeds, in this smelly immanence and real and
actual tangibility, at the crib.
"Today the City is a chattering, language-filled,
puritan, message-bearing, advertisement-laden thing.
It replaces reality with its representations in sound and
image; it no longer bears children; it destroys species
and keeps only pets as animals, having first neutered
them; it no longer examines life in its laboratories; it for-
sakes love and expatiates on sex, via the intermediary
of personal computers and psychiatrists; contemptuous
of muscle and heart, it follows the latest fads for exer-
cise and diets... the power, the capacity, the speed and
the shortcomings of angels haunt this City.
"Throughout the whole world, all the networks are
crying out about hunger, are screaming a thirst for incar-
nation, in a situation where the body is horribly lacking.
But at last, the Good News: the Messiah, the message, is
flesh, immanent, which saves itself, in and of itself."
She said these last few words out loud.
"To my knowledge," says one of the scientists, "this
flesh in itself teaches us nothing; in order to understand
or explain it we divide it into functions organs, cells and
molecules.."
"I know, but that is all a doctor has to go on-real,
all intermingled, all bones, nerves and blood, compact,
concrete, living, individual, pained with hate, joyous
with love, here seen in its nascent state...."
"A theologian's dreamings," he says.
"But also a practical everyday experience. When a
patient tells me that he has a pain, he points to a partic-
ular part of his body where different tissues, cells and
functions intermix. You never tell me anything about
that place."
"You're mixing up what we're trying to analyze.
You are confusing things!"
"In the laboratory you lose life: in my case life
requires of me that I comfort it and save it."
"You don't understand it, though."
"But how is one supposed to understand sick peo-
ple?"
"You explain nothing to them."
"But I bring them comfort. How can one manage
this without loving the flesh? These intermixings, com-
posites, mixtures, confluences... of carbon and nitro-
gen, of rare earths and metals, of organs and functions,
of sweat and milk, of gold, frankincense and myrrh, of
fires and signals, of forgetting and memory, of scientists
and shepherds, of Spanish-speakers and Arabs, of indi-
viduals in the crowd, of networks of communication
where wander those who are going to enrol on the cen-
sus registers and those who run congresses and confer-
ences, composite and varied multiplicities, these
encounters, including our own….. what way can we
find of naming them other than by calling them the
loves of humble, fleshly man..? Which was our point
of departure this morning, and the point which we
have regained, in its divinity, tonight."
By this point her logic has become too private for
the man. He interrupts her, impatiently.
3AS

208
The disappearance and leave-
taking of the anges. Viewed in
profile, the crocession of ancely
takes its leave, rapidly, each in turn
ween the Conten
then they fiy on, dive and
disappear. Who is left? The infant
father, sested and hall.aseeo: the
mother, recumbent; the sheep and
lambs lying down, the sheparos.
awestruck: the ox and the ass at
their manger: for some reason the
are all static. Nothing moves except
the angels. The flesh is there, and
the messengers are finishing their
workine day. They sach take a bon
as they exit, like actors at the end
ot a play. Please applaud
Gotto (1265-1357. Hatvity
Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy.

MIDNIGHT
"Here's the baby," he says.
Pia cradles it in her arms.
Pantope arrives and takes in the scene. Then he leads
the young mother to the airport medical center. She is
supported by the Basque shepherds, who are as strong as
bulls and as light as birds. They follow Pia, who leads the
way carrying the baby. They make a kind of procession,
and the Iraqi scientists open a way through the crowd.
The muzak plays endlessly.
"Glory be to this ordinary child," Pantope murmurs in
Pia's ear.
"What use is glory?" she asks.
"In their millions, and for all time, Newtown and
Oldtown have been dying of violence, and probably of
it alone: rivalries, wars, torture, oppression, killings,
dripping off every level of its vertical ladder. Read the
violence on all these faces, both the arrogant ones and
the oppressed, the gods of the West and the mortals of
the South."
He points to the two sections of the crowd before
them.
"That is regrettably true! But why do they go on
killing each other?"
"For the strength that glory gives, and for the vain-
glory that power offers."
"If only they were to sign a perpetual peace, we
could resolve the problem of evil...
"An unrealizable dream, a paradisaical Utopia!"
"So how are we to arrive at a truce between us? If
our wars devastate us for the sake of glory, we would
have to move to a point where glory was no longer
something to be desired."
"Impossible! The percentage of mentally sick peo-
ple who live only for glory has remained stable
throughout time. Could there even be coherent history
without the enticement of glory?"
"If we can't eradicate this scourge, couldn't we at
least set its price too high?"
"What would you propose?"
"When a father wants his children not to be able to
reach pots of jam or medicines, because his offspring
covet them and run the risk of a belly-ache, he puts
them on top of the highest available cupboard."
"But the kids are clever. They climb up on stools.
And at that point begins a game which the father
always loses. No matter how high he puts the forbid-
den object, the child who is willing to defy him can
reach it. Like all simple-minded parents, you've lost."
"Not at all. All one has to do is reverse the roles and
there one finds the winning strategy of the absolute
superlative: no matter how high the would-be burglar
hoists himself, glory will always be above him, will
always be out of reach. The object is situated at a level
which is so much in excelsis, so high in the heavens, that
nobody can reach it."
"All High, as they say of the Good Lord."
"To him alone be the power and the glory!"
"In light inaccessible. I see."
"Since none of us can ever attain them, there you
have peace restored. We no longer have any reason for
killing each other, because nobody can hope to reach
those heights."
"Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth to
men of goodwill. In other words: if our will becomes
sufficiently good for us to make an agreement between
us to accord glory only to a transcendent absent being,
then we will be able to live in peace.

"Yes."
"All the ladders, both the good but above all the
evil, which we have ascended and descended today are
infinite in this respect."
"All your complicated words are in fact saying
something very simple. Namely that no matter how
high a pretentious person attempts to reach, his feet still
stay on the ground, and his head will always be
beneath the level of God's glory."
"Whether complicated or simple, this brings our
day to an end. All hierarchy collapses."
"And at that point, the machine for fabricating gods
(the machine which also produces violence and war)
comes to a standstill.
"This unique solution to the problem of evil thus leads
"In the end of the sabbath, as it
began to dawn toward the first
day of the week, came Mary
Magdalene and the other Mary to
see the sepulchre.
"And, behold, there was a great
earthquake. Tor the anger of the
Lord descended from heaven, and
came and rolled back the stone
Com the score no wilted t
not to a demonstration of the existence of God, but to the
His countenance was like
fact that it is necessary for him to exist, and to the refuta- lightning, and his raiment white as
tion of polytheism, which is what dominates us today.
snow:
"Without a God who is one and unique, and with-
out his exclusive glory-these being the sole founda-
"And for fear of him the
keepers did shake, and became as
tions of peace— the war of all against everyone will con-
tinue to rage."
'And the Angel answered and
said unto the women, fear not ye:
They now arrive at the medical center, where Gabriel's
body rests.
"A passion and a nativity, together in one single
day," he muses.
"Ah!" she replies, dazzled, "let us rejoice in the re-
surrection."
Meanwhile, the shepherds with their rugby-player
shoulders are less intimidated, and being in rowdy
mood they begin singing Basque mountain songs at
the tops of their voices.
which was crucified,
"He is not here: for he is
risen..
(Matthew 28:1-6)
The Angel Appears to the Holy
Jumièges, c. 1050. Ms. 274.
Bibliothèque municipale, Rouen,
France.

LEGEND
The reader:
"Why should we be interested in angels nowadays?"
The author:
"Because our universe is organized around message-
bearing systems, and because, as message-bearers, they are
more numerous, complex and sophisticated than Hermes,
who was was only one person, and a cheat and a thief to boot.
"Each angel is a bearer of one or more relationships;
today they exist in myriad forms, and every day we invent
billions of new ones. However we lack a philosophy of such
relationships.
"Instead of weaving networks of things or of beings, let
us therefore map some of the interlacings of paths. The angels
are unceasingly drawing up the maps of our new universe."
"Before getting on to things quite so erudite, I wonder
whether you could provide me with a key, in order to make it
easier for me to read your book."
"Since an angel is himself a skeleton key, he offers some-
thing even better: a whole bunch of keys!"
"A bunch of keys?"
"As messenger, he is able to pass through space, time and
walls; he keeps watch; he passes through closed doors. Noth-
ing stands in his way. Follow him."
"What are the stages through which he passes?"
"The dialog headed Morning describes them and their
functioning: a new labor-process, of message-bearing, a
recent outcome of a hard-borne history; from this derives the
organization of the City, which is new, vertical and global,

LEGEND
and maybe angelic or arrogant; a production of messages
according to a less rigid scale of degrees; an activity on the
part of messengers, who appear and disappear; the existence
of guardians, who provide assistance to the producers of
messages; and finally prepositions, which are active ele-
ments of messages, which are message-bearing entities in
themselves, and which are pre-posed agents and subsequently
nodes in the network of message-bearing systems."
"But doesn't this functioning process pose questions of
ethics in, for example, the injustice of that City and the code
of conduct by which these messengers operate?"
"After the anguished excursus on life and death heard at
Midday, the time of the Angelus, the Afternoon deals with
the following: we live in a world that is tending towards
angelism in its fluxes and its messages; there are interchang-
ers or cherubim in that world, which make the message-
bearing system universal, and which should, in that process,
be generating equalization, a balancing-out, a mixing which
is both homogeneous and strongly differentiated, and thus
social equity. So how does it happen that, quite the contrary,
it is heading to more bestial evil, to more false gods and to
more devilish wrath, to the constitution of more crushing
degrees of power and dominion, to an injustice that is even
more vicious than all its predecessors?
"There, if you like, is how the problem of evil presents
itself today."
"Why?"
"Because our all-powerful science and our new, effica-
cious and rehable technologies mean that we ourselves are
responsible for our destiny."
"Does that mean that we too are angels?"
"We communicate among ourselves at the speed of light;
we travel at the speed of sound; and we transform others and
the world by our words!"
"And what about evil?"
"The fall of angels-our fall—-places it right at center-
stage.
"It reveals some bizarre reversals. From 'for' to' against'.
Like the fluxes and the elements. The reversals include
appearances and disappearances, the necessity but the cruelty
of our guardians, the transformation of beauty into beast, of
victims into torturers, of upright citizens into abominable
gods... from which derive the extraordinary problems in
judging: you might as well try to cut a coin in half in an
attempt to separate the components of its alloy!"
"But in the final analysis, do you really not judge
things?"
"Satan, which is a Hebreto name, translates into English
as public attorney or public prosecutor. It way happen that
the activity of message-bearing drifts off into acls of accusa-
tion."
"I agree, and, as a bystander, I see this pao. suppening
every day."
"So therefore it would be better to open doors. Iy weans
of Mercy, rather than concluding cases n...'
undge-
ment and sending people to prison."
"How does your key open these doors
"The angel makes it possible, simmitmeast, noth to
understand, by means of refined tech phs ter tand wing
of things, of men and of tools, and to expos arosabry, sire
thing. That is why we have a day.
acts, divided at midday."
"So what's your solution, if you dor? say
"This is given in the sections heric wis have ta Mat
night, in the absent light of Lisming up Yins, t n
Satanic light-bearer, a mobile which haras, dra's cod arter
mixes. It reveals true Justice, which m is es moosity 24
2M

LEGEND
Mercy, as a passage-way to the ecstatic love of seraphim,
melted and fused, and, above all, to equality, at the lowest of
low points, around the new-born child, at Christmas, among
the simple and the wretched of this world, thom our book, at
Dawn, chose to call archangels.
"This equality or equity, these circles, turn, at random,
on themselves, according to how the draught blows. They
bring together the ner-born child, who is announced before
Midday by the little Angélique, and Gabriel, who died at the
medical center. They resolve the iniquity and injustice of the
scales and degrees— vertical and arrogant— of power and of
glory.
"When the word becomes flesh, the angel, a messenger of
pure language, restores all glory to All-High, and retires;
being invisible, he has a vocation for detachment."
"Would you say that this universal key has enabled you to
write an open book?™
"Are you familiar with the small watertight lockers in
submarines and caissons, which enable you to pass from
water into air, or from one level to the next?"
"Airlocks?"
"So, imagine a skeleton key for all imaginable airlocks,
and there you have angelic universality!"
"Before you begin showing off, I want to see the shape of
the key!"
"Have you ever felt, in your hair, on your skin, before
your eyes and in your ears, an insight like a pool of light, a
globe with millions of facets, a high, roaring waterfall on a
river, the myriad gusts of a squalling wind?"
The reader is at a loss.
"There, you've lost me again! Are you talking about an
apparition?"
"Both of apparitions and dis-apparitions, all together."
"Of light?"
"Yes, but also of wind, of all the fluxes of nature!"
"Of a person?"
"Yes, since it sometimes happens that he bears a name:
Raphael, Gabriel and Michael."
"Only sometimes?"
"Yes, because most often this person is multiplied into
innumerable entities. When individuated, this person speaks;
as a choir it plays music and sings; as a crowd, it buzzes."
"This person thus fluctuates between the collective and
the individual."
"Masses of angels, a swarming, multitudes, an army, a
troop, a procession, a parade... a barely ordered chaos, from
within which individualities may sometimes emerge. Angels
80 up and down an immense ladder, or scale of degrees, or
river along which is constructed, and then incarnated, the
Word-ranging between noise, music, annunciation and
dialog, and extending through to the flesh."
"Spirits?"
"Yes."
"Ideas?"
"Yes, again: ideas are idols, and they bear their name.
Now, it is said that angels embody traces of the false gods, and
that if they fall they become objects of pain worship. ideas,
therefore, beginnings of spirits."
"Breaths of wind, then?"
"Yes, always. A big wind deployed in billions of particles,
ever-finer, fluxes which are scattered and everywhere inter-
connected, volatile transports linking the universe by means
of their rivers."
"Are they physical or spiritual in nature?"
"Both. Fluxes in movement in the ocean, the atmosphere
and the climate; as armies of starry constellations, spirits and
messages, global and immaterial, they once again unite these

LEGEND
two realms, which, thanks to them, are inseparable and which
to read our present era like an open book: our sciences, both
formerly were stupidly separated."
abstract and practical, our hardware and software technolo-
"Intelligent?
gies-all our activities, both concrete and volatile.
"Certainly: as much so as human beings. Objects, the
"By the reverse token, these shed on these old angelic
world and sophisticated machinery are also intelligent."
forms a light that is new and, curiously, close to us. One
"Corporeal?"
might say that these are two mirrors which, when put face to
"They may be; but they all meet together on Christmas
face, multiply clarity, in white and in colors.
night to celebrate the incarnation of the new mediator."
"So why don't you go back to that simple insight of a
"These ancient mediators thus provide a perfect image for
globe or pool of light. Start with that."
our telegraph operators, postmen, translators, representatives,
"It brings together a very intricate tangle of meanings."
commentators.... the armies of our new labor processes."
"This interlacing is a fine airlock or interchanger! Do
"Absolutely."
you believe that you can find a better zany of grasping the
"But also fiber optics, and the intelligent machines that
meaning of words of philosophy, distinguished or detailed by
we have built to connect networks between them: switchers
a vocabulary whose nets are holed letting everything pass
and routers?"
through?"
"Of course, and more besides: cherubim with several
"That being the case, might these metaphors relieve you,
bodies, whether physical, living, human, artificial or in the
for example, of a treatise on cognitive science or philosophy of
realm of ideas..interchangers, interchangers, airlocks or keys... there we
language?"
have some fine new concepts to enable us better to produce
"What a relief!"
and understand."
"Of an ethics?"
"So your angels are individual and multiple; messengers
"Have you seen angels fall?"
that both appear and disappear; visible and invisible; con-
"Of a sociology of work?"
structive of messages and message-bearing systems; spirit
"And above all, of public holidays."
and body; spiritual and physical; of two sexes and of none;
"Of a physics of the Earth and of a climatology?"
natural and manufactured; collective and social; both orderly
"As workers or operators, angels construct the human,
and disorderly; producers of noise, music and language;
technological and physical universe."
intermediaries and interchangers; intelligence that can be
"Of a cosmology?"
found in the world's objects and artefacts... You must
"In nascent state."
admit that your angels are elusive. What's more, sometimes
"Of theology?"
they can be very evil!"
"Trust to God!"
"Their form is generally fairly adaptable. That form is the
"So what does it not say?"
skeleton key which enables them to open the blackest boxes,
"Who cares for categories such as these! Their only pur-
and this wealth of different forms extends to embrace all the
pose is to shroud themselves in a terrifying vocabulary in
different aspects that you have just listed and thus enables us
order to protect privilege and corporate interests. Since, as

LEGEND
people say, today we are seeing the dissolution of philosophy,
we find ourselves once again living the times of original
beginnings. Here glitters a vast and interconnected pool, here
flows a torrent of shimmering brilliance, seized at the
moment of its commencement."
"How are these things to be expressed, explained or
painted?"
"I have tried my best."
"In a fable or a philosophical dialog? A romantic novel or
a statement of opinion? A piece of theater, with its three uni-
ties? A film screenplay..?"
"All those are precisely how I'd have liked you to read
this book. Anyway, have you ever tried are welding?"
"Eh….?"
"It produces a sudden bright flash of light, which leaves
on two pieces of metal a scar, the color of which goes from blue
to cherry red, and it rather resembles the aforementioned
insight and pool of light."
"What are you attempting to unify or join, with this hot
fusion?"
"Several things, in fact: stience and the wretched of the
earth, nature and cultures, roason and religions...."
"But the Enlightenment taught us to separate these."
"...and the local differences between them.….."
"But this century of ours has taught us to study their
singularities, independently."
"...and finally, the one and the multiple!"
"But, yesterday again, the latter banned the former!"
"There you have it: knowledge unceasingly changes its
form, flesh, content and light!"
"Are we heading towards a new universe?"
"Yes, on the wings of angels, who are its workers."
"Will we come back down?"
"That remains to be seen!"
"You're dreaming again... Anyway, now I understand
why you described messengers of all kinds as angels; and our
leaders both great and small as Powers, Thrones and Domin-
ions; and interchangers, whether techological, living or ver-
bal, as multi-bodied cherubim; and lovers as supreme
seraphim. But in this classification of the tradition, whose
sum comprises the general message-bearing system, I don't
understand why, right at the start, you showed us a named
archangel appearing, and then dying, and why he had to be a
wretched doson-and-out."
"Because the word arche also means beginning", and
therefore because destitute poverty and exclusion stand at the
source almast as precursors of the future world that is
coming into being, in the same way that deathly violence has
been the foundation of human history,"
"One question, before you leave. What happens to Pantope
and Pia?"
"She becomes a doctor of the world. She travels, and
knows no frontiers. Pantope, on the other hand, has recently
been appointed to a post at the airport, where he waits to zuel-
come her on her return.
"I overheard them saying to each other:
'Pia, whom or what will you be looking for, when you
travel?'
"Pantope, whom or what will you be waiting for, at the
airport?'
"And I heard them answer, almost together:
"We have found something which, even if it disappears,
toe will never lose!"