Angelographia

This angel lives and works in a large graveyard near my house. I've taken hundreds of photos of her since last summer, when my Angel revealed Herself to me in fulness. (I promise I will get around to some kind of operational definition of what that means ...eventually.)

Before last summer, I didn't think much of, or about, angels. People who did bugged the crap out of me. I loved Wings of Desire, don't get me wrong, and for years have collected masses of religious kitsch, which I enjoy totally without irony: all manner of Marys, including a prized, glitter-covered dashboard model from a local Mexican grocery; psychedelic Hindu devotional art, more garish and multifaceted than any 1960s album cover; saint candles, including a black one bearing the image of a robed skeleton holding a skull and the legend "La Santísima Muerte"; a framed, sequin-adorned image of the Santería pantheon, plucked from a curbside trash pile.

You get the idea.

But--Holy Mother of Jesus! Angels?? They always seemed like fluffy flunkies, hovering over catastrophes (and not helping much) or delivering some inane message from "God." If the bible is to be believed, angels are even going to gather round and get off on the tortures of the damned (those who take the mark of the beast, anyway).

And then there's this Laura character I hang out with. When I asked her once, in astonishment and fear, what she was, she answered, "I am pure, unconditional love." You might guess, if you've read other posts below, that I was far from satisfied with this answer. Ever patient, she's given me more elaborate answers, including a visual one last night in which Kali was a polished stone sphere, I was a subatomic particle therein, and L. was all possible trajectories of that particle as its quantum wave function unfolded.

Some of you are now wanting to stop reading WiHW once and for all and find a nice political blog, and I don't blame you. If I sound like some unthinkable offspring of Terence McKenna and Jean Teasdale--mea damn culpa.