Which fact to pull forth as your initiating example? I do love examples, don’t you? Heavenly light has the yellow-white clarity of Fairy Tale, of pure Continuous Example. May I ask someone to volunteer the name of a well-known historical figure? Good, “Elizabeth the First.” I should warn you that, here at the beginning, it’s all going to sound like we’re all constantly showing off, umkay? —But, what real-life Elizabethanism presently seems most striking? well …
On the day Elizabeth decided if she should execute Mary Queen of Scots, she prayed for some omen. Queen Bess—carrot-topped and balding, pockmarked, beaky, brilliant—did, of course, feel a certain poisonous jealousy toward all usurping Papist cousins, especially prettier younger female ones.
At luncheon, Elizabeth bit into a ripe raspberry. What she did not swallow, popped forth, speckling her white neck ruff, four spots of glistening crimson. This became the Proof she sought. Cousin Mary’s beheading was ordered, loud, at once. (The farmer who grew the luscious berries that inspired assassination was one Ezekiel Booth, the latent great-great-greatgrandfather of a bad actor who’d shoot Lincoln.) After Elizabeth’s own death, molecules retained from the portentous berry departed her remains, entered a nearby elder bush whose wood became marquetry in the captain’s quarters of a fourmaster that in 1771 sailed to America, where the great ship was finally scrapped in 1804, its better interior surfaces purchased by a clock maker whose elaborate gonging mantel timepiece rode a Conestoga wagon West where, honored as an heirloom in Sacramento, it burned during a housefire, the splinters rendered into mulch taken up by the very strawberries then served to Bette Davis, on camera, as she played Elizabeth I with such psychic skill.
I could go on. It being Paradise, you can … Rest assured, You will.
The promised show is coming. Nine thousand new colors. You will be essential in God’s promised show.
Eating here and sleeping here and the nuisance of elimination are optional. But many of our ranks still choose to exercise these functions in memory (and therefore deed). Old habits die hard. Habits seem, in fact, less willing to stop living than does any single human life!
Sneezes have lately proved popular. Sneezing is a hobby as arbitrary as taking snuff. But sneeze these silly angels do, remembering.
I find such fads endearing. They’re unpredictable as our former species itself, and just as lavishly perverse. Certain rituals of the bathroom recall our lower starter-life as little else here can. “Voiding” is catching on in certain circles—you see them seated, knee to knee, salamander-smooth backsides exposed. Quaint, loggy, primitive, hopeless, soporific, yet engaging as human life itself.
Sex? You think we’re superior to that on high? With all this time on our hands? Rethink, my new beauties. You’ll find no virgins in Paradise—at least not for long. (0, sure, they’re a few holdouts. Emily Dickinson, Winslow Homer, Joseph Cornell, and Vincent van Gogh, actually. And I mean everybody’s after them.)
But, on this plane, there is, as the hit song tried saying, “a whole lot of fuckin’ going on.” You need only consider trying the act with someone, need only find a pooled majority vote, and instantly—indeed almost involuntarily—you two are at it. Oftentimes midair. Others, materialized nearby, get to watch. All in the family. No need for your partner to even announce his/her name or former occupation or death date—you know that already. (You know everything, my dear ones. And instead of being phone-book boring, Omniscience—one now realizes—is such a turn-on.)
Before, you had to sneak off somewhere fugitive to “do it.” But, here, anytime-anywhere, you ARE it.
And, hey, no need for messy debilitating anticlimactic contraception. Deadly diseases? No sweat. You are midair, you are your featherbed, and you are at it, in it, you’re guiltless (unless, of course, guilt alone still gets your overmortal mojo going).
Joined to your latest beloved, you utterly inwardly know each other’s deepest trigger spots—all your encoded pre-lingual animal oinks are placed before you like piano keyboards. “Higher,” “There,” “Unnnnh,” “Wetter,” “Less Teethies,” etc.
Imagine the sensation of “simultaneous orgasm” stretched out to ejaculatory increments across pearly eternity entire. The screaming can be funny.
Mainly, genital-mentally, we communicate.
Arriving, you just saw the gigantic Crystal Gate. You read its simple yet profound inscription.
By heavenly standards, the Gate is new. I suppose its design must have a few proponents. The thing does glisten becomingly. But, while icy in its perfect form, though all but planetary in its scale—for me, The New Gate is no better than, say, the St. Louis Arch. A leetle boring.
For Reasons all Her/His Own, God has lately set a Mr. Steuben loose “improving” our monuments. Back when I arrived, the great Bernini was still in charge. —And, as clean and World’s Fairish as these immense crystal paperweight thingums do look, you can’t imagine … before.
The choice of Mr. Steuben—and the recalled ruins of our former lives—both make clear the obvious: God’s Got Everything but Taste.
Insecurities persist. From here, my dears, all our earthly struggles look puppet-dumb if labor-intensive. From way up here, it all appears Claymation.
Some of you are wondering if you “deserve” such epic rewards. If you’re “up” to Heaven. You never thought of yourself as particularly GOOD, right? Actually, you often weren’t. It’s the contrast to those other slugs that makes you seem a total saint.
The others said, “Who’ll know?” “What difference will it make in fifty years?” “As long as you’ve already taken off your knickers, tramp, maybe just this once.” Meanwhile you were down there, muddling through, sweating out your quarterly estimateds, still playing by the rules, sweet fool.
Alive, I myself did most everything wrong. I even did wrong wrong. I can’t say more. I had a sort of life, I guess. I overtrusted. Let us all enjoy eternal After. As for my life, Before—I don’t want to go into it.
–Soon you will see the promised Show. How can I place Heaven’s Spectacle of Light in proper perspective? Earthlings go on and on about the Aurora Borealis. You know what the Aurora Borealis is? Leakage.
Imbue—Yellow: IV
Though nine and a half percent of you died illiterate, the largest single occupation among your group is/was teachers. Any teacher who would submit to that low a salary, to the inner-city parking situation, and who then—en route to a graffitied classroom—also daily agreed to being frisked by early-morning metal detectors, well, you caught our eye.
Among you, find a fifty-year-old daughter from Brest, France. She lived with her talented pianist mother, was her mother’s best friend. She eventually killed her mother because that cheerful woman, in such pain from spinal cancer, begged begged begged her to. The obliging daughter, using Mom’s own favorite pillow, succeeded, died in prison for her kindness. There, back there, step out, you two-reunited. Look, yes, there you both are again. Embrace. Hello. Forever.
I see among you a breeder of Labradors despite her severe allergy to dog hair, a shoe manufacturer, a young man who gave away his fortune saving the historic homes of North Carolina, several Kiwanians, and the destitute Monte Carlo aristocrats who are married (very unusual, both halves of a couple turning up together here … and not just because of the time factor). Over there, a mortician accused of having Heimlich sexual sessions with his female dead. He kept feeling that certain bodies contained angels. We’ve put him back there in a cluster of the talent he intuited. Among you, a young painter who gave away his only tube of his period’s most costly blue, hand-delivered it via subways taken from Harlem at three a.m. Welcome. All of you have managed to transcend to this exalted rank, the most exclusive “key club” in the cosmos.
But do know, please, Homesickness is inevitable. It’s lonely, waking alone at so far a new camp—lonely even waking to dewy celestial consciousness. Lonesome also is the wing-itching, aforementioned. But, not to fret on finding yourselves weaned from overtly resembl
ing your former fleshly self. Some remnants blessedly persist. We’ll touch upon those shortly. I believe you’ll be not unpleased …
Bye the bye, nothing is required here. Certain of our denizens opted for a good nap upon arriving in 1491 and have chosen never to end that supernal siesta. So be it. Little is demanded, and maybe it’s just me, but that far row on the end? Looks a teensy bit ragged, almost unattractive, thank you, there, I’m feeling better and you’re kind.
You appear if not exactly alike, then as similar as any given pair of shoes coming off the conveyor belt at the Thom McAn wing-tip factory outside Sag Harbor, New York, formerly managed, and most humanely, I must say, by the 19th from the left in Sub-Row 3. Yes, excellent. The maternity leave you implemented, madam, did not go unnoticed and still helps many. Welcome.
Your new face has been rendered only about as much like your old one (which it contains) as a brand-new pair of shoes in your proper size can be called personal and deeply yours. Your face has become wonderful-looking if generic. True, here at first, it appears a tad blank. There are but two ways that you can—with precision—be visually identified post-Transformation.
Say you died; as you so recently did, actually. Now you’re waking, half alarmed (I know, my dears, believe me, I have been there), waking to this mystic scumbly light. You snap to, alert. First you hear my perhaps annoying babble, sounding like the nurse’s prodding chat that roused you from the outer edges of an anesthetic or—in thirty cases present-that did not.
You’ve re-become yourself but, in addition—wriggling beneath an overlay unsought—you’re also, confusingly, an angel. Disconcerting to find all telltale traces of your fond mortal coil gone. Even within your Ziploc envelope of powder-white light, you feel nude … deprived of a single youlike souvenir. You’re shivering, that cold.
You were just getting almost used to the earthly you. You’d set up the bank draft program that freed you from writing those depressing monthly utility checks. You’d started acknowledging certain thorny traits that, in resembling your same-sex parent, you always feared most— qualities you’d begun to joke about and even crankily accept, love almost. —Then, whammo, that missed left turn, a new lump under your ear, and here you are, one semi-translucent flame of soul, grafted with wings, no less.
Well, be calmed. You fear that, in gaining Paradise, you’ve sacrificed your own true earned identity. You miss your friends. My dears, all is not lost.
The earthen stamp has been preserved. Certain features wholly yours. Back there, I see a few of you start noticing. Excellent. Go ahead.
There are echelons of virtue here as there are echelons of filth and lust and greed below. I will now tell you how the highest forms of the Once-Earth get recognized. Say you are standing here, winged, similar, if merely “designed.” All our torsos are single-sex units—chests, sizable for pecs, if small for breasts. Your silver ectoplasmic wings are tucked behind.
What has stayed constant from that depressed old world to this inspirited new one? What, on you Job-patient postmen so schnauzer-gnawed, on you unpredictably bighearted Monte Carlo gamblers, on the twin brother Kiwanians who broke records selling Christmas trees for Cerebral Palsy in subzero weather only to catch pneumonia as your one thanks? What? That’s yours? Looks exactly as before? Yes, I see more of you back there catching the drift. Good, explore, feel.
The single portrait-fixtures still serving as Autobiography for all we otherwise-samish angels?
Yes, your original genitals have stayed intact. Those, and your beginning hands.
The dear baubles—be they cleft or sceptered—plus your clever mitts—are still themselves, no? And in their every cuticle particular. Open and close your hands. Look between your legs. “Hello,” right? Now, don’t you feel a heap less alone?
Go ahead, check yours out. Flex those digits. Your hands are more fully yours than was your face. Our nail-biters will find those nails yet gnawed. Your wedding rings? They vaporized in transit, dear ones. But the grooves still dent and dignify. Laden with typing skills, able to tie fly-fishing lures in the dark, still so attuned to others’ genital pleasures—your particular hands were more instinctually clever than your head’s best try. Manual labor matters mucho to our Lord. Your hands contain your own most automatic kindness: your soul. Maybe touch your very own underparts for starters? I know I never tire of doing so. Oh, the memories!
Your surviving portions are made of slightly finer stuff than that first rude stab at getting them right. Here they’re more satiny, slightly sleeker, euphemized. Plus there’s a wee bonus: So much sudden time, such distance as you just blurred through in getting here, mercifully served your lower body as a depilatory. That helps, design-wise. It was patchy, pubic hair, admit it. Even ours.
—So this, my dears, is how we separate our two classes of the Angelic. You are all now Angels Republican Second-Rank (that’s honorary, just “for showing up”). But, way far higher stand the Angels Imperial-First-Class.
Though I do belong to that crowd, I was not consulted in the matter of celestial “haves and have nots.” Paradise should not feature such elitist structure, I’m sorry.
You, future Angels Imperial-First-Class, will be immediately subsumed as God’s minions, His/Her Teacher’s Pets, Her/His Handpicked Gofers, the confidantes to Utter Knowingness, Complete Enfolding Compassion. And, in my experience, I swear, the best Company, like, ever. You cannot imagine the level of God’s Smartness and Steadying Quantum Joy. God, however tasteless, is the Original Sense of Humor. Total Recall for All Jokes. And, you alone, of your opaque crowd, “got” it.
How will some few of you become Angels Imperial-First-Class as, unexpectedly, yours truly did?
—Simple.
If, among the other wandering angels, those newly transformed and those already recodified/refined—if among the millions greeting you, there should chance past you any—any single soul who, upon doing a “high-five,” feels your original palm-to-palm portrait energy, one who—on glancing at your telltale lower regions Knows you and can name your name, then that—even amid this level of piled-on cumulus virtue—marks yours as a soul judged Ultimate Good.
It proves you did the maximum while still so painfully earthlocked.
Your discoverer-namer might be your predeceased spouse or lover. Perhaps an overadoring elder brother or sister. Some intimate friend. Maybe your gynecologist or even some diddling scoutmaster with a great memory for detail, up-close and personal. Maybe simply a regular customer whose hand you shook every week for sixty years.
But, if just one such perusing angel can, merely from the feel of your right palm’s heat, from the characteristic moundness, roundness, mole, depth or breadth, raggedness, rosiness, heft or tinyness, from any twist or suppleness of your mortal generative area—if just one angel (are they ready to come in? fine, hold them just a wing beat more, please) … should just one know your touch, should one among the millions of formerly dead about to file past you (quite a spectacle of breeze and beauty, the promised show), should one suddenly point down, should just one, with glee, call but a single of your names, say, “Verne!” … then you, my dearest new angel, will soon be known as an Angel Imperial-First-Class forever. You will automatically advance to the right hand of God the Mother Father Almighty.
Am I making any sense here? They about ready? Excellent.
At surge, they now come drifting. Here it all starts, my dears. Above you, note four million fetal planets become visible at once. Fish farm for the firmament. “Ann,” you say, your heads back, loveliest of sounds.
Heaven’s colors, this emotive and inventive, are renewed. Most hues will still lack names for you. Colors here are granted the volition and mischief accorded human souls. They play above—in cloud formation—their own form of tag, hopscotch, and chess.
That dramatic wine-dark hue over there is Magna. This one above us is mainly Timbre. And the other, lightest, farthest, God calls Imbue.
To shield you, dear beginners, uncoiling in your Ge
nesis, we’ve tamped back the Euphoria at first. We don’t want its jagged playful force to scare you.
Good, there … you’ll feel the Dynamos of Ecstasy come purring on, in lights. Settle over the sensation. It’s not unsexual, is it? Hmnnmm. —Yes, laugh, do.
Your own well-being thrums forward, like some upper-end harp string long ignored, newly plucked, and oh so glad to be found by Music’s uses.
–NOW, let The Great Celestial March and Fugue commence! Feel the scented airs increase? Note how colors this intense press their nap against your palms and crotch? The washes of green light (green especially) soothe those itchy upper wings. See the range of blues go pink go oh so yellow. Magna to Timbre clear off to Imbue! Feel light burning cool across your new-old body. Recognitions will soon occur.
First thing, check out your own variouses. Having done that, freely browse among each other’s, some of you will know the others despite years. Go hand to hand. A strong impression was made by you once chanting, “I’ll let you see mine, if you’ll let me …” You did see, didn’t you? Seeing others’ is God’s will.
Here, lines devolve. Mill, ogle, scout, waggle, point, chat, giggle, gab, prod, whatever. Freely, good, keep gazing, good, freely at your classmates’ last innocent ties to the old corrupted world, good. Touch. Should you come, good, upon anyone/anything you simply know, then by all means, Blurt! You were picked for your Enthusiasm plus your diehard talent at Belief. Don’t get shy on us now! Far nobler to lay claim to an overwide test group than knowing too few.
There will be no more talking for one-tenth of a nanosecond millennium. Simply drift among each other now. Steer and pirouette. Skate atop the attendant crust of light always blooming beneath each foot in time to perfectly support you. This is the smallest group of angels from that awful present age down there. You winged ones escaped your century’s major peril: self-pity’s flypaper.
Plays Well With Others Page 43