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| This is not an angel - Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911 |
Yes, of course they exist.
How else could we speak of them, and know what we mean? There may be a certain amount of disagreement
about classification, morphology, number of wings, if any, sex and sexual
orientation, if any. What, sether
Sanctimonia? No, not blasphemous at all. Well, you may be a Christian. It is not forbidden unto us. But if so, why don’t you read the Bible? In the beginning, as I recall, Jehova was not
the only being in heaven, of course he wasn’t.
If there had only been one god, he wouldn’t have said “I the Lord they God
am a jealous god.” He was
distinguishing himself from the other gods, who were quite happy with the
polytheistic setup. And the Sons
of Heaven, you will recall, yes, in the Bible, the Torah, the Pentateuch, yes
sether, we are talking about the same book, in the Bible the Sons of Heaven
came down and had congress with mortal women.
Yes, sexual congress. And
offspring were the result. Giants, as I
recall. So in that particular case, male
angels clearly had all the necessary bits.
Okay, let’s leave it at that. What I’m getting at is, there may be
considerable diversity among angels, but angels exist. Irreducible difference again. We know the difference, in an illustration or
a story, between a fairy and an angel, there is seldom any ground for
confusion. Yes, sether Albert, and
between an aeroplane and an angel. Between
a human being and an angel? More
difficult.
In early times angels did often hang about the place, outside the tent,
loitering on the path, in order to communicate with Homo sapiens; Abraham, Moses and the like. Jaweh himself did the same, and all in
human form. But there didn’t seem to be
any confusion. If somebody met an angel
upon the road, they knew it was an angel.
Jaweh likewise.
The question is not whether angels exist, but whether they
existed in the real world, the world before Homo
Sapiens, or will exist in the world as it will be when we are extinct. And the answer is that angels do not exist in
the real world. Well, okay sether Polly
Agnostica, they might. But only in the sense that there might be an invisible and weightless
pink elephant balanced like a ballerina on the weathercock atop the spire of St
Paul’s there — Holy Mary mother of God, is there a need to turn round and
look? I said it was invisible. There might be, but how would we know? It is massless (otherwise the weathercock
would collapse). Everything has mass,
even light travelling at whatever speed it does. E=mc2, remember. You cannot go round altering the laws of
physics just for the sake of an invisible elephant. So, in order for you to assert that there may
be such an elephant there atop the church spire, you have, a priori, to define that elephant as not existing in any sense that
an elephant does exist.
It is only in this sense that angels existed in the real
world.
However, in our world, angels do exist in their
millions. They exist in pictures,
carvings, spoken words, in hymns, books, stories, in encyclopaedias and dictionaries, on
the internet and above all, in the brains of Homo sapiens. In their
millions. To suggest otherwise would be
an absurdity.
Their existence is distributed, between all the physical
states I have mentioned, out in the world (the world that exists outside our
bodies, between us, not the real world); carvings, books and so on. And they exist, angels, in the neural
substrate of millions of human beings, as a locus of irreducible meaning, the place where a demon exists, where
it can be summoned into the workspace, in alliances with other demons, or there
to divide into further demons, one for cherub and one for seraph, as it might be;
or named angels, Gabriel or Jezriel, or your own very special guardian angel,
this too will be a demon with its own special place, its locus of irreducible
meaning, in the neural substrate. Yes,
sether Albert, the fucking brain it is.
But I use brain to denote the whole caboodle, in action, electrical,
chemical, millions of signals flying every which way every second. Whereas the neural substrate is more like the
Tube map. It is a fiction, insofar as
demons are nothing if not dynamic, and to try to tie them to a single location
in the wiring of the brain is unlikely to be possible. And what is the workspace? Tomorrow, tomorrow, always tomorrow. We have so much to cover, and life is short. Spring is here, and with it the Arctic
wind. The world heats, hot tempests
seethe northwards and topple the pillar of freezing air that should tower above
the Pole, so that it collapses and spills southward in a mighty wind that
funnels round the ringroad as if it were a racetrack, freezing off whatever
appendages are appropriate to our angelic sexual form. Bollocks it is sether, but one assumes that
angels can also be women. The obverse is
clearly so.
Okay, patronising guff. I apologise.
Cold breeds hunger, and while bread alone is inadequate, so are
words. Before you go—it is this. Angels exist in the metaverse, and only in
the metaverse. And the metaverse is a
space, a real space, that extends from the world out there into the brain, the
active brain, the ideoverse of each human being, and is made up of every demon,
and of the locus of every demon in the world.
That is, the demon angel is a locus in thousands, millions of neural substrates; in each ideoverse. But it travels between each
ideoverse as words, spoken or written, or pictures, sculptures, holograms,
televison signals, angels have many forms out in the world. If you add each and every possible demon, and
all demons are possible, the down quark and your aunty’s birthday, the man (or
hare) in the moon, the mug from which you sip your warming tea, then that
infinite number of demons, and all the existences in which they travel between
the ideoverses in and about each brain, words and carvings and all, if you sum the lot
to an infinite total, then that is a freeze-frame of the still expanding metaverse. That is Evoculture. Dizzying, I know. Luckily, all but the most minuscule fraction
of it is safely stored away in the neural substrate, and in the considerably
larger fraction of the universe which neither you nor I are perceiving at this
moment. It's also stored away in the ideoverses of your partner, your parent, your
child and every living human being. Yes,
there's a lot of it.
Tomorrow, the workspace.
But now, hot sweet tea to warm our ideoverses and frozen hands.
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