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Angels of the Projective Mind
Angels of the projective mind repossessed in their lion and eagle faces, by consciousness grown taller in import, can still find themselves hypostasized anew as Plato’s bright Intelligencies, not yet comprehended, as Pythagoras’ singing stars, not yet acknowledged. These we have not yet exhausted on the heads of pins, nor sentimentalized atop pink-ribbon cotton-candy clouds. Oh no. To these we have
not yet risen. And they still haunt us: Lewis’ eldils, Herbert’s Calibans of the confusing tongue, Clark’s black monolith that wakens savages— these, we sense, desire down toward us men who know now that our paraded physics can never abrogate the universe of fact nor raise us there in starships for converse. But angels have bespoken
us across those staved lanes of light; and the angel of our sun transcribed their music for our sensual ear, chording the season-shift of moon and sun, of flowering spirit and the seed dropped in hope, to a slow crescendo of the affirmative heart that hears, and learns, and bursts too to song. We are an angel too. Sometimes, somewhere out near the moon, I sit and suddenly see this divided, four-cornered earth turn spherical—turn, emitting its one note into that vast, distance-attenuated symphony of dance and sound of lights, and rise into our miracle of oneness— among ourselves, among the humming spheres, |