Angel In Goggles: Earthly Scriptures

These scriptures are earthbound. Gravel, gravity, grandson. Their only concession to the otherworldly is a winged figure who sports practical eye-gear. Even your author is less prophet than monk, bespectacled and time-tonsured. And he is more entertainer than seer.What follows is an earthly testimonial by an author (b. 1942) who recognizes nothing transcendent or immanent. Gaia, he believes, is a material girl. She’s all we have and all we get. Mystery, yes; magic, no. Wonder, yes; worship, no. (Adore has a knob.) Spirited, yes, not spiritual—a word equally pleasant and vague.Angel has a secular-humanist edge but not a polemical intention. It has no interest in changing anyone’s mind. The author, however, does have a rather astringent intellectual bent (or spiritual scoliosis), so, as he likes to quip, he can apply the standards of reason to the behavior of others.These pages draw largely upon his three-score-and ten, as well as upon his begetters. From his father, Dudley (b. 1914), he inherited a measure of joie de vivre laced with impish deadpan. Betty, his mother (b. 1918), was much appreciated for her droll repartee, but she would often note the untimely, the untoward, the unfair: “It’s a crime!” The author, too, refuses to keep on the sunny side of life despite a song that’s inadequately woeful. He does treasure the bright side, in part because it can be so rare and fragile.He also has a high regard for magnanimity, Aristotle’s “crowning virtue” of being great of mind and heart. “They’re good people,” my mother once declared, taking a thoughtful puff from her cigarette; “But they’re not big people.”As with the Christian bible, the canon of Angel admits an assortment of types and lengths. But this variety promises recurrent themes, objects, phenomena, and characters.One early chapter takes an inventory of the Window—an artifact that illustrates the world’s extreme degree of sensory, concrete variegation. “The moon it’s not.”A half-dozen intermittent chapters compose a raffish travelogue. Besides reporting details about places, people, and adventures, it traces an over-up-down-and-around course that attests to the world’s shape as a globe.This sequence complements another, a record of life on Randall and Marjory’s “Estate.” These chapters tend to cherish the place’s topography, terrain, flora, fauna, weather, seasons, and heavens. Both series offer contrary ways of experiencing the earth: locomotion vs. location, wander vs. Walden.Angel also gives a full weather report with its story about the young author who gets caught between fresh snow and ethical gray. Other chapters explore the conflict between public and private property. One of them analyzes the book Rapunzel, by Paul O. Zelinsky. This chapter also celebrates Art as valuable to earthlings.Angel has a keen interest in the relationship between humans and other species. An entire chapter investigates the dog—often a sacred cow with a collar.How do humans and other vertebrates monitor their balance and bodily positions, especially against gravity? A chapter admires proprioception, usually neglected as not one of the Five Senses.And what about the relationship of this earthly speck to the supernal? Angel concludes with a nigh-hallucinatory Revelation.