Welcome To The Watch

I was sitting around earlier reading a book by Bernard J. Bamberger called Fallen Angels: The Soldiers of Satan's Realm - an interesting survey of the texts about Lucifer and the fallen angels from which we derive much folkore. I'd even recommend this to someone who isn't privy to this crucial part of the Christian cosmological vision - for a literature or theology class, or for the heck of it - in addition to Ezekiel 28 ( I mention it mostly because it was the first biblical passage with which I was taught the fall of Lucifer ). Otherwise I notice that the folklore tends to be taken for granted - many assume one particular take on the story.

But the point of this post was a similar matter of risk, namely posting a short piece of writing I did earlier yesterday. Although it may seem that it is predominated by things I've read lately, I will object to that assumption. In fact, I've been familiar with texts like the Book of Enoch and other apocryphal tales for quite some time - their narratives about 'evil' I find to be great inspirations for theological as well as tickling my wild imagination. For a brief summary of the Watchers / Nephilim go here. The idea for the story came together as a result of this week of class, rather. We were reading Brome Abraham and Isaac and the Middle English refers to the Angel in the play as "God's sound" - like some disembodied voice speaking only to Abraham. When a classmate brought it up, I thought it was fantastic way of thinking of angels as messengers, something I'd imagine would be an amazingly dramatic thing by itself, to imagine "God's sound" speaking to mortal ears. The metaphor of God's messengers, Angels as "sounds" seemed to have so much narrative potential as an "idea" or "device" for a text. I was also thinking about the opening scene of Hamlet with the watch and guards - imagining how eerie any voice, not to mention a wandering ghost would be dramatically. For the last part, where the character wakes up in a dream-like landscape I was picturing the hellish crags at the Green Chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

It has no name nor continuation beyond what you see, so far. So behold:

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“Nephilim!” she shrieked, before crumpling to the ground.

The shrill wail caught the attention of a frightened, hobbling passer-by. He looked up from the city pavement with a stab of his head, wide-eyed, towards the fallen woman. A cringe shook his face, locking his eyes closed as the wail pierced his ears and skull. Hands shot up in defence to cover his drumming ears. The noise continued to infest the air like a swarm of flies, their rank odour of filth boring into his skull. He flailed his arms around, trying to swat the buzzing away from his ears in vain, for seconds later the swarm laid eggs of babbling voices in his head. Then all sound ceased, a mind in limbo, until a few seconds later the whisper of a ghost-like wind blew in his ears. Hob opened his eyes and beheld a thick mist hovering atop a mountainous crag and patches of grass gleaming with an emerald shine, almost a dream vision.

“Welcome to the Watch,” a rasp in the mist greeted him.

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This is my second attempt, recently, at writing a short story about the ideas that interest me. The idea to be the thrust of the story was the sub-narrative of the Nephilim or giants born out of the union of lustful Angels and human women - an interesting example in the Bible, in the words of Bamberg, that one could interpret as a fear of "miscegenation". But I wanted to play the idea out with any "angel" being a sort of supernatural "sound" instead of a physical being. If I do expand it, I'd almost like to do what Bulgakov did in Master and Margarita - that is, insert an old biblical figure in to the modern landscape and see how the modern world would react.