VALLEY OF THE ORPHAN ANGELS

It is his great ambition to write a story, and there to express, in an articulate form, his experience of being in the world. Each morning, as he begins, he senses a secret correspondence among things, and feels the possibility of grasping the form of the whole. But every revelation is followed, inevitably, by second thoughts and doubts, and his initial insights soon are overwhelmed by the questions they provoke. Eventually his tale is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions, ultimately becoming a labyrinth, a mirror reflecting chaos.

He looks upon his scattered pages with their false starts and inconclusive endings, and in despair he considers tearing it all up and abandoning his task. But as he reads over what he has written he finds, on almost every page, something that he cannot part with, a sign, perhaps, that he has stumbled on some truth. So he decides to keep only those parts that please him, and to discard the rest. These lines he gathers, without regard for their sequence (for he has relinquished the quest for order), with the result that what remains is an enigma, a puzzle with most of the pieces missing.

Imperfect, incomplete, and paradoxical, it reminds him of himself, and of the world.

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Buddy Carnelian stood before a leafless tree, thinking about redemption. It was February, though not very cold, and his feet were sunk in six inches of melting snow while, behind him, stretching back to the house, his tracks had left an undulating line.

He had not expected, with his walk just begun, to find himself accosted by an apparition of mindless majesty, its fractal filigree exposed in full splendor. Nor had he expected to feel, before that still presence, a flush of shame as the failures and compromises of a lifetime came crowding unsolicited to his consciousness. Nor to sense, in the desolation of his heart, the possibility of being saved.

The music had stopped - that endless medley of songs and melodies that coursed, willy-nilly, through his inner ear and upon which his desultory thoughts seemed to float like debris. And as that interior silence mirrored the quiet of his snowy surroundings, peace descended slowly upon his heart.

He did not question this as one might question the propositions of a philosopher or the exhortations of an evangelist. He did not ask himself how it was this solitary tree, poised on a farmland slope with its parts in perfect balance while avoiding the banality of symmetry, could stand as a sign of renewal; nor did he pause to wonder whether what stirred within him was authentic and meaningful, or just a momentary delusion brought on by the change of scenery and break in routine. For Buddy Carnelian such inquiries were pointless, for he was like a man who had lived for a long time in a land of mists and shadows and who found himself, beyond hope, suddenly delivered into a sunlit realm.

His past lay about him in pieces, and in the stillness it seemed he could walk about as through a ruined city, examining his deeds; the invisible thread of motivation was severed: lacking that, his thoughts no longer vied with one another and his actions no longer clamored for justification.

As he stood there, contemplating the tree, a phrase came into his head: winter trees and symphonies. He liked how that sounded: like the end of a line in a poem. He would carry that phrase, along with the image of the tree, along with him for many months afterward, as one might carry an ancient scroll which, one suspects, contains some precious secret, but in a language which we have lost the ability to translate.

Out of the silence Angelica came; the wooden porch of the big old house creaked as she strode - graceful even in her boots - down to the steps, thence into the soft snow, rousing him from his trance with her unaffected loveliness. She is the most beautiful cleaning lady I have ever known, thought Buddy Carnelian, and immediately he felt ashamed, knowing she had lost a daughter, less than two years old, to an unusual condition though, in the performance of her chores, she never made mention, nor showed any sign of grief. She walked upon a carpet of blue shadows, wending her way to the road where she would wait, among the silent birds of winter, for the bus that would take her to her next job, or perhaps back home.

She passed very close to Buddy Carnelian, and as she did so she smiled - a generous gesture, he thought, considering her misfortune. He returned the smile, then followed her with his eyes. She left a trail of footprints behind her; a solitary white cloud meandered across the afternoon.

Then, about fifteen yards past him, she did something remarkable. Angelica turned - first her head, then her entire body, so that she was walking slowly backwards, and smiled again, in a lingering, confidential way, as if communicating some hidden meaning - a meaning intended solely for him. He did not dare to smile back, but simply stood still, looking into her eyes, as his chest began to throb.

She passed close by the tree he had been admiring, and it was then and there, in the juxtaposition of suffering and beauty, that Buddy Carnelian was struck with the idea of dignifying her inarticulate plight in the imperishable form of literature.

Then, suddenly, Angelica turned her back to him again and resumed her trek. The snow-covered path wandered down and away: in less than a minute she was gone...

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In order to get to the Penumbral Valley of the Orphan Angels, you blast off in a rocket ship and travel, in any direction, for a very long time. Leaving the stratosphere, you can set the controls on automatic, and sit back to read a book, or let your mind wander among the stars. You’ll know you’re near when the categories of objective and subjective space, usually considered separate and distinct, begin to merge. Then look out your window: instead of the myriad stars twinkling in the cold and dark, you’ll find that your ship is afloat in a soft, pink haze like cotton candy: this is the Penumbral Valley, the half-lit place between the living and the dead, between what is and what is not.

Now the reason you need that ship, the reason you need to travel for so long, is not simply that the Penumbral Valley lies so distant from Earth (though that is true enough). You need to travel for a long while for an equally important, or maybe even more important, purpose: to find the necessary room in your mind. Which is what I meant by the term subjective space, the complement to objective space, those two categories which, for you, at this point in your travel, will have blurred, and both of which, in my experience, are needed to locate that valley.

By way of explication, let me ask you to consider: if you were a teacher, what is the first thing you’d do after dismissing a class and before the next group enters the room? You’d erase from the blackboard all the work of the lesson just completed. Similarly, what do you suppose Shiva does, preliminary to creating the world? He dances the former world to dissolution, making room thereby for a new creation. (And don’t try to tell me he needn’t have bothered, that there’s lots more space outside the universe for another one: the universe is, by definition, everything, so until you get rid of it - dancing it to dissolution, for example - anything you add is not a new one but part of the existing one, multi-verses notwithstanding.)

Now these are examples of objective space - the space on the newly erased blackboard, and the empty space of a slumbering, nascent cosmos. Necessary, but insufficient. For, in those precious moments before a new group of bright and eager students enters (along with some maundering companions, and a few irredeemable nitwits), you close your eyes and enter into the secret chambers of thought, finding therein the blueprint for another lesson, forming the language through which to communicate it (just as the eternal Creator/Destroyer pauses, I imagine, to ponder, out of all possible worlds, a particular one, such as the world we now are pleased to inhabit). And these latter examples - of you planning and of Shiva pondering - demonstrate the importance of subjective space. All of which is to say that the Penumbral Valley is to be discoveerd far out in space, and deep within the mind.

It’s in this valley that you’ll find the Orphan Angels - the abandoned, rosy cherubs of outworn creeds, along with broken angel-statues, with pieces of harps and trumpets, all adrift in the endless pink mist. You’ll find there as well the multitude of the unborn dead of the ages, the bright, blue fetuses, the stillborn, and those who died in infancy.

And shepherding these little ones, leading this numberless army of forsaken innocents, is a Lady, a Mauve Madonna, stately and tall. She guides her flock with tenderness and with strength, among the gauzy clouds, leading them now down, now up, along a path that, in all eternity, will never bring them out into the Land of the Living. She knows this - knows well the hopelessness of the situation - but cannot bring herself to abandon them, and so, over time, her wandering has assumed the manner of a funeral procession, the ritualized pattern of a sad, slow dance.

She is, in a sense, an orphan herself, a Virgin without a Savior, what’s left of a goddess when then heavens collapse. No more than her infant charges can she leave that lugubrious land, that valley poised between the dead and the living.

Limbo. The holy men of ancient times so named it, or named a place that was as close to this valley as their imaginations could muster, or their dogmas would allow. A safe but barren home, a land of eternal twilit clouds that keep from the view of its inhabitants the beatific vision, the face of God.

In speaking of whom I refer not so much to Shiva who, when you boil it down, is more of a cosmic principle than a personal deity (something he’d probably admit himself), but of the Judeo-Christian God - God the Father - in this case a kind of absentee Father, whose abnegation of responsibility creates the need for, or at least the possibility of, adoption. Indeed, the single thought, unspoken but constant, that sustains these orphans through the aeons, is that perhaps one day, without warning, there will be an incursion, that a shaft of light will rend the shadows, opening a rift through which escape will be possible. (And let’s not be overly hard on the Judeo-Christian God here, considering that, since he’s been so heartily debunked by our modern sensibilities, he can hardly be expected to act with his former authority and verve.)

In his absence, then, an incursion, in the form of a foster-parent, or, even better, a pair of kindhearted people - a couple with no biological relation, no moral obligation, to these little ones, motivated purely by selflessness and compassion.

Which brings us to you - you who, by choosing to pick up and begin a story entitled Valley of the Orphan Angels, have implicitly acknowledged the existence of a soft spot in your heart for the neglected, the unwanted, for losers everywhere.

And before you go off feeling too pleased with yourself let’s admit that, mingled with your authentically loving sentiments is a good measure of guilt you’d like to assuage - guilt about your ease and comfort, your money, the dirty work you need to do each day, your vanity - let’s face it: you’re the perfect hypocrite, with a ready explanation for a host of actions that have become the story of your life. A story, fortunately for you, that you've had the temerity to glimpse in its true colors. Hence your interest in the mending of this life of yours, hence this desire to rise to true goodness, before it’s too late, perhaps even through the unlikely strategy of adopting an orphan angel.

So you confer with your spouse, and the two of you, carried away with emotion, decide to rescue one child, to take, from this land of silent hopelessness, an orphan angel, and to bring her back with you on your ship and make her part of your home.

The Lady of the place assembles all the children for your perusal, and you are reminded, all of a sudden, of the time you tried to buy a puppy from one of those dog shelters. Thousands of faces stare back at you, expectant, or mistrustful, or devoid of any expression. You feel embarrassed and ridiculous: selecting a step-child is not like shopping for sneakers. You find yourself wondering: Will she be healthy? Is she intelligent? Good looking? But is that why you came here - to win a prize?

The Mauve Madonna is coming toward you, her face exactly as it appears on those Byzantine icons, with the drooping head, the long, thin nose, the oval eyes heavy with sadness. What will you say to her? What will you, with your canteloupe-colored sneakers, say to the Woman of this place?

You panic - you leap into that tin can of a space ship and fly off at high speed, as the little faces fade into the distance,while you console one another with the promise that you’ll return once you’ve talked it over.

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In the middle of the night young Shiva awoke, and found a plan for the world spread out before his mind in perfect clarity. This surprised and delighted him in equal measure, after what seemed like years of fruitless struggle. He wished to create something noble and grand, complex and captivating. Though it would be his first major work, he wanted it to be a masterpiece: this required that it have, in some sense, a coherent form, though not an obvious or easily recognizable one, rather, a form so vast and comprised of so many parts as to appear, up close, to be chaos, while actually possessing an elegance and unity only perceptible from a transcendent vantage. So that the people might struggle from the darkness to the light, he thought.

But though the form of the world would be complex, his plan for creating it was pure simplicity. Instead of attempting to compose the world as one would a piece of music, instead of creating a series of consecutive events, proceeding logically through time from one to the next, he would fashion a collection of simultaneous occurrences having nothing to do with one another but for the coincidence of their synchronicity. Each of these occurrences would then proceed, without any further assistance, on its own path, and eventually collide with one another, resulting in a world where things seemed somehow both inevitable and free.

Shiva rose in the cool night breeze on his mountain. As he stood there, in the moonlight, relieving himself, he descried a small, black mark on his foot; when it moved, he understood it was a fly. He wanted to swat it away, or at least shake his foot, but thought it wiser to wait until he had completed his business. But by then it was too late: he felt the sting of the insect’s bite, and cursed into the silence. The fly buzzed about, then settled on a shrub. After a few half-hearted slaps in the dark Shiva gave up.

Settling down again on his mat, he recalled his plan. He lay very still, savoring a feeling of sudden purposefulness, and began to form the pieces of a vast puzzle in his mind. As he was about to sink back to sleep he realized that, with his rising, urinating on the mountainside, and encountering the fly, the story of the world had begun.

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On the long ride through empty space, inevitably, from time to time you awaken - to check on the progress of your journey, to have a corn muffin, to pee. Then you find yourself with time on your hands and limited options.

One of these is music. And since you’re in no hurry, you recognize in this circumstance an opportunity to listen at last, with proper patience and sympathy, to some of those Maximalist masterpieces from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reputedly important works whose imposing dimensions always discouraged you back when you were busy: the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, the Gurre-Lieder of Arnold Schoenberg.

So you sit there, at the main console, or better, at the viewing portal at the back of your ship, gazing out the window, while the violins sing and surge, the brasses blare and the oboes lament, and you find it all strangely lucid, as never before, in your earthly experiences.

You’ve decided to start with something relatively modest in length: the third symphony of Johannes Brahms. An interesting choice! Of all the Romantics he is the most "classical"; not only does his music preserve a sense of formal clarity, but typically it avoids the temptations of "program music" in which the sounds are connected to stories or images. This tradition of "absolute music" he proudly traces back to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, though recent scholarship has proposed there’s really no such thing: music never can be purely itself - it’s always the product of, and therefore bears intimations of, the time and place of its provenance.

But way out here in space those cultural associations - to dance, to song - fade away, and what’s left seems naught but abstract design, aesthetically pleasing and emotionally charged. Like a child grown up and moved away from home, this symphony has emancipated itself from its origins: you appreciate it in the same way you enjoy the sight of flowers.

Or trees, which brings us back to Buddy Carnelian, whose snowy epiphany was interrupted by the appearance of Angelica the cleaning woman.

What drew him to that leafless apparition was a feeling both for the rich multiplicity of its parts and the unity of its design, despite the absence of repetition or evident symmetry, thanks to which the independence and uniqueness of each detail did not diminish, but rather seemed to enhance the coherence of the whole. To our enchanted onlooker this suggested that, though the living presence before him had grown slowly, over many years and in response to changing stimuli mysteriously sensed, there was an inevitability to its present form, a sense in which it was preordained, and never could have assumed any other appearance than the one that presented itself to his gaze that afternoon.

Which perhaps is something like your experience of Brahms’ Third Symphony, with its variegated surface, the delightful foreground of surprises, and its majestic unfolding toward completeness, the combination of which renders it unpredictable and free, yet organic and natural.

But what struck our viewer, oblivious to his cold, wet feet, more than either the beauty of the tree or the symphony, was the correspondence he felt existed between the two. For at that moment, the tree appeared to him as a symbol of deep but indefinable import, and the emotions it aroused in him were akin to those elicited by music - powerful and precise, but devoid of specific content. The Symbolist poets of the late 19th century would have offered that both sight and sound were ephemeral signs in the material world of spiritual verities, and that, since both tree and symphony indicated that same unnameable essence, it was natural that they bear a special affinity.

But correspondence is not equivalence, and for Buddy Carnelian the principle pleasure in this meditation lay in feeling his mind flit between physical symbol and emotional meaning, between the tree before his eyes and the music in his ears.

Winter trees and symphonies, he thought, and as he struggled with these enigmas, it dawned on him that the complexities evident on the surface - the variegated details, the freedom from repetition - could be reconciled with the intimation, equally vivid, of overarching unity, if he understood the idea of symbol as incomplete - as suggesting in a partial way a design too grand to be grasped by the mind. And gradually a new phrase formed within him: Where the matrix of possibilities is infinite, symmetry is an asymptotic dream.

Does this solve the riddle of music’s meaning? he wondered. We intuit a form through a fragmentary representation of a pattern too large to be apprehended entirely. And this added to his perception of the tree, as it can add to our perception of the symphony, not only the pleasure of a degree of understanding, but the conviction that one needs to transcend one’s current condition, to grow out of one’s present state, in pursuit of an ideal.

Then, to his surprise, Buddy Carnelian found himself wondering, What would Angelica think of this? A ridiculous question, posed by a ridiculous man, he thought - a man with the name of a two-bit gangster and the agonized, introspective temperament of a poet. A writer with a secret loathing for his work, whose popularity was purchased at the price of artistic integrity, while in the privacy of his imagination he had built a vast, labyrinthine mansion of unrealized dreams. Now and then, in moments of felicity, he could feel, almost, the possibility of mastering his desultory insights, of expressing in a coherent manner what lay jumbled within his soul, of creating a true work of art.

But he was intoxicated by success, drawn back to the tawdry realm of the cheap and the sensational. And so he had lived his life - beloved by fans and family, envied by his colleagues, though, as he now saw things, all that approbation had made of him nothing but a fool and a weakling, incapable, even when faced with the simple nobility of this woman in her inconsolable grief, of separating his higher from his baser instincts, so that even a legitimate impulse - to memorialize the tragic death of a child - became mingled, inevitably, with the desire to amuse his audience, to appear clever.

But what would Angelica think? And why did he care, and where did that question come from?

It was his habit to deflect vexing questions like those to the corners of his mind, deferring direct confrontation to some future reckoning. But let us recall that, for Buddy Carnelian, the encounter with the tree served not only to kindle his curiosity but to assault his conscience. It was as if the beauty laid bare before him, and, even more, the man he felt himself to be while immersed in its contemplation, cast scornful judgement on that other man whom he also was, he of the compromises and contradictions, the self-serving strategies and deceptions.

But while his appetites, his lust for success, occupied his animal nature, and while the chaste exercise of philosophizing and the dream of artistic perfection attracted his higher self, the beautiful woman managed to appeal to both. He wanted to possess her, but also to share with her his dreams. Suddenly he recalled the moment Angelica had passed close by the Tree of Winter, and a shiver went through his body as he felt again, but more strongly, the possibility of escaping from the morass of wasted years and harmful habits, the wild hope of redemption.

I am falling in love, he thought...

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His greatest deprivation was writing. More than the continual ache of hunger, more than the stiffness of his limbs, more even than the intermittent agonies inflicted by his torturers, the Prisoner suffered the frustration of one whose feelings remain trapped within him, churning and unfocused. In the dark, unmeasured cold, he felt that to inscribe in language his experience - even better, to forge in words an alternate reality, refuge from his fetid confinement, was his only hope in maintaining his sanity - yet pen and paper there were none.

And so he resolved to make of his memory a shining palace of marble, and in that unassailable sanctuary to form for himself a land of peace and beauty which, at first with difficulty, but over time with ease, he could enter and remain for long and salutory stretches.

Eventually a new world took shape in his imagination, with polished avenues and gleaming glades, and a populace that greeted him each day with warm and lively discourse. It was a kingdom of light, surrounded by darkness, sprung to life from the fertile soil of his brain, and sustained by the effort of his will.

But as every writer knows, the things we make have a way of taking on lives of their own. And so, at a certain point, he began to notice that unease, a tone of anxiety, had infiltrated those walls he had thought impenetrable. The people became cantankerous, and eventually violence broke out. An existential crisis gripped the land, and some whispered that all was but a dream, a fiction masking some dark truth.

The more time and effort the Prisoner devoted to his creation, the more desperate its circumstances grew, until it became difficult for him to distinguish between the world he had sought to escape and the refuge he had so lovingly fashioned. Everywhere there was war; day and night the sounds of pain and fury filled his ears. In the end, the marble palace was assaulted and he was dragged from his chambers and placed in a dark tower. With courage and with cunning he escaped on a moonless night, and fled across a charred and desolate land. Exhausted, he fell asleep along the side of a hill.

Awakening after what seemed like years, he found he had lost all memory of who he was, so it became impossible to say whether he now looked upon the world he had imagined or the world he had fled. Slowly he rose, and looked about him, across a quiet valley. The sun was just tinging the east, and all was still. As he urinated down the hillside, he smiled, and began to form in his mind a plan, intricate and vast.

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Strawberries. Angelica Cruz was thinking about strawberries. She was standing down the hill from the house and the yard, by the side of the road, waiting for the bus that would bring her to her home, her front door with its little wreath, her kitchen with its checkered tiles and the refrigerator that chilled the fruits she loved to eat after a dayˈs work.

She would take off her shoes at the front door, then go straight to the bathroom where sheˈd scour from her hands the scent of industrial cleanser, replacing it with the soothing aroma of lavender soap. Then, in her bedroom, sheˈd undress, pausing before the full-length mirror to inspect herself, as if making sure her labor had not diminished her dignity. Slipping into a nightgown, sheˈd return to the kitchen and select the ripest strawberries, and take them out to the sofa beneath the large living room window where, slowly, sheˈd enjoy her treat while the sun descended slowly across the snowy pines.

So she stood there at the roadside, lost in thought, waiting for her bus to come, and suddenly she remembered her dream. It had awakened her in the night with its vivid strangeness, and she had lain there for a long time afterward, unable to return to sleep. In a house that reminded her of her childhood home, she was searching for Serafina. The house was set along the side of a cliff upon uneven stilts, and seemed to wobble uneasily beneath a darkening sky. Within, the ceilings were tall, the corners dim. Angelica ran from one room to another, looking for her baby. In the dim light, faces floated past - anonymous infants with egg-white eyes, and relatives of bygone days with uncouth, decrepit smiles. Then all at once the man from the house on the hill was before her: he was smiling - and holding Serafina in his arms. Serafina! She rushed over to the kind man to take back her child; as she neared, she wondered that her daughterˈs skin was so dark. The old house shivered on the slope, the sky opened up in a black rain. A flash of lightning illuminated the baby - as limp as a doll. Angelica awoke, sobbing in her bed.

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Well you certainly took your time! That’s alright - the main thing is you’re here, and you’ve made a decision.

It is your wish to strike a deal with the Pink Lady in the Clouds. You will adopt all of the children, but one at a time. In return she arranges to grant you virtual immortality (which you will need considering the scope of your task). You agree to a strange condition she insists upon - that returning to earth you relinquish all memory of the transaction, and forget about the existence of the Valley, remembering only that you have taken in a child. And so it will be with subsequent adoptions, so that each of your countless lives will seem the only one, while as for the little ones, the memory of their origin will fade with the passage of time.

As you head home you feel vaguely hopeful. But despite your uncertainties you are pleased to feel that, finally, after so many wasted years, after so much equivocation, you have found a task you really can throw yourself into with enthusiasm, for deep inside you have always wanted to be a hero.

So once again you set the controls on automatic, and sit back with your hands folded in your lap, side by side with you partner, and gaze out at the starry deep. Every so often you glance behind you at the slumbering beauty in her little star-seat with its safety-straps and buckles, and you think the thoughts all new parents think - you imagine her growing up and going to school, learning to ride a bike and to play the violin. You think about the world she is about to enter, with its cliques and its bullies, its wars and disasters. It occurs to you then that, once upon a time, the most hardened criminal, the cruelest creep, was a lovely little babe like this one. And you realize that the only world good enough for your child is a world without war, and that such a world will never exist until we learn to love all God’s children like our own. And at this point you begin to see how the birth of a child is always an opportunity to save the world.

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He has set things in motion, and they have become entwined. As with Brahms’ third symphony, all seems, somehow, both preordained and free.

He knows not - and this pleases him - what will transpire next. Will art, will love, bring Buddy Carnelian to goodness? Will you, dear friend, remain steadfast, rescuing and raising, one after another, all the children adrift in that penumbral valley? Will Angelica’s dark dream be retold in the language of salvation?

His characters lurch forward toward the light, they stumble backward, they slip off the road and are lost. The story, like its author, seems drawn to an unreachable ideal that reveals itself in flashes, and then retreats to the far horizon.

And it dawns on him, after several hours, or maybe centuries, that this ideal is an illusion whose purpose it is to draw forth the world, and that to apprehend it would be to attain what people call nirvana, or non-existence, and in any case the end of that story the creation of which constitutes his greatest happiness, and that, achieving that goal, that divine state of plenitude, his only desire would be to plunge again into the world of forms.

And yet, as ever, he is dissatisfied. Those secret correspondences that he senses continue to elude him, and he despairs of ever grasping the form of the whole. Is it possible, he wonders, that language itself - language, the very stuff of the story-teller - is what impedes him, what limits his understanding? Has he been trying to reason out the irrational, and is there another kind of language better suited to express those instincts and intuitions that surge within his breast?

So he decides to end with a poem, whose meaning resides fundamentally in its sounds and images. Perhaps, even , it has ho meaning, but somehow it seems to him true:

Lady of the orphan angels

And the broken statues

Adrift in the pink penumbra

Mother of the bright blue, the breathless ones

Shepherdess in this forsaken valley

Could I but believe…

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