Feet-grabbing angels
Leave a commentSeptember 28, 2012 by Marcus Speh (Birkenkrahe)
I am sick of my routines. One of the routines I’m sick of is that I get routinely sick of my routines. Tomorrow I’m going to go into work. Several people are going to look at me and I wonder whoever it is they see: I’ve got a preference, I’d like them to see a writer, but if one of the writers I know would ask me if I saw him as a writer, I wouldn’t know what to say except that I might nod in order to please him, or to avoid hurting him. So, who are they going to see when they look at me? Does it matter? Can I change what they see? I’ve always thought that everyone has the power to make other people see. See you as who you really are. But I’m not so sure right now. Not sure at all. This power over others is a rather crude proxy, like comparing your pair of eyes to a pair of spectacles. You don’t see with spectacles per se. In fact, you see less with spectacles. You might be better off not having any. I’m thinking of my 98-year-old aunt, who’s almost completely blind, but really, now she only sees what she wants to see. When someone asks, do you know who I am? She thinks, do I want to see this person? And then, with the perfect innocence of the ancients, she makes her decision. But the other one will never know what goes on behind her eyes: they are silvery and flat like the dried out bed of a desert lake. When I look at my aunt, who usually decides to recognize me, I think that angels grab your feet when you die, so that you don’t just fly off in all directions at once.
Edward S. Curtis, Old Blood (Wikimedia)
See also: One Week On The Happy Isles, A-Minor Magazine.
