Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

It looked as if Raphael had done it before . There was no grief there. Michael, God’s general, the foremost among the archangels, immortal — shouldn’t his death induce a little more than these simple hand gestures? That single glance?

Raphael had looked at him the way a mother looks at a sleeping child. She goes out, and then she comes back the next morning.

But its brow was cold, Antinous wrote. And there was no pulse.

What did he know about an angel’s body temperature?

What did he know about an angel’s heart rhythms?

He knew nothing about them, he realized, as he sat there writing. He’d always regarded his writing as a sort of friend, a friend who would always listen to him, and this time was no exception, for the very last thing Antinous Bellori wrote in his notebooks, was, triflingly enough, that unfortunately he’d have to stop there, he had to check up on something, and it couldn’t wait.

NO SEARCH was ever made for Antinous Bellori for the simple reason that no one noticed he was missing. In the town people were used to him disappearing, sometimes for several years at a time. He was a loner, he didn’t talk to anyone, and it was several weeks before they discovered he wasn’t at home, which in turn didn’t cause any reaction whatever.

If Guido Bergotti was right, and it was Antinous Bellori’s corpse that the landowner Donati had found later that year, it means that either he went out there right after his last diary entry, or that someone else carried him there. What actually happened during the last few hours of his life, no one can say. Nor what became of his manuscripts until their sudden reappearance in London in 1859.

But we do know what happened to the angels. Only a few months after Bellori vanished without trace, angels began to reveal themselves to human beings again. But these angels, which can be seen in great numbers in paintings from the seventeenth century, bore little resemblance to the angels depicted in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. These angels appeared in the guise of chubby toddlers. The fact that they gradually became known as cherubs is merely another example of the extent of historical irony. Such child-angels have no basis in either the Old or the New Testaments, they were unknown to people of olden times and only began to manifest themselves in the medieval period, but then only in very small numbers. So, what happened at the start of the seventeenth century is therefore remarkable in more ways than one. Were these small, chubby angels a different breed? And if so, why did they suddenly pop up in such huge numbers? And why just then? Was it coincidental that this happened at the same time as angelic revelations in their previously known form ceased all together?

The possibility of its being accidental is small, because where would the old angels have gone to in that case? The way back was closed to them, they were imprisoned here, and this makes only one explanation, as incomprehensible as it is awful, possible. Were these the divine pure? Were these the most lovely of all beings? Were these the heavenly host? Were these the feared angels?

They must have been. Exactly what happened is obviously difficult to say with any certainty, but the little that is known points in the same direction. When Bellori saw the angels at the start of 1606, their situation was untenable. They’d become deeper and deeper rooted in earthly things, they’d lost their divineness, almost nothing of their old dignity remained. If their condition had been discovered by mankind, and others besides Bellori had glimpsed their hunger, lust, and savagery, they would surely have been hunted, caught, and burned at the stake like any common witch or heretic. So they’d retreated, when the worst of their lust had taken them, and held their orgies away from human beings, and this went on for a considerable time; for a long time they were able to sustain man’s ancient image of them, but finally their new terrestrial state had such a firm grip on them, even down to their souls, that they could control its manifestations by willpower no longer. At that, the angels had moved out into the wildernesses, where they tried to conceal themselves as best they could. It isn’t certain that Bellori’s discovery was instrumental, even though it was much more dangerous for them than if an ordinary person had chanced to see them, because Bellori actually knew they were fallen, and that God was dead. Presumably they would have done what they did anyway. They had no choice. There was only one way out, and they must have agreed to follow it. Although they were stuck here, and the way back to heaven was barred to them, there was still one way forward. The angels could still change their outward appearance. But in contrast to previous times, any change must have been fatal, in the sense that there was now no way back. If they changed, they could no longer return to what they’d been. The process was irreversible. But change they must, if they were to survive the new age. Why they chose the exact form that they did, and transformed themselves into human, babylike beings, isn’t difficult to understand. Their fear was that their barbarity and appetite and terrible rage would show themselves, and so it was innocence they sought, and as man was created in their image, they selected man at his most innocent as their new model.

The consequences were enormous. In order to attain this innocence, they had to relinquish everything about themselves that was capable of inspiring awe and admiration, and even though their own self-respect would disappear with it, they were all willing to make the sacrifice. For in the spring of 1606 they swarmed into the world of human beings. Hoards of cherubim spread out across the whole of the southern and western parts of Europe. Small, chubby, naked boy children with white wings gradually appeared wherever there were concentrations of people. For a long time they must have noticed the position children occupied, what tenderness and joy enveloped them, how spoiled and voluptuous they were, what hope people invested in them. And for the first few years it seemed to have been a happy choice. The cherubim also aroused joy and tenderness wherever they showed themselves. They could do pretty well as they liked, for people viewed them as the sign of God’s unqualified love for mankind. In the paintings of this period they can be seen filling entire meadows with their games and songs and reveling. Their hunger was just as rapacious, but no longer seemed threatening to human beings, on the contrary, it was often depicted as comic. Rubens, for example, shows how the mismatch between the angels’ divine status and their sensual behavior tends, again and again, toward the farcical. The tubby little infantile figures fight each other until the feathers fly, they lie lounging in the grass with bunches of grapes in their hands and gorge while the juice runs down their chins, they stare at one another with desire or hate in their looks, candid as only children or animals can be. At some point a new attitude to angels, that regarded them as inferior human beings because they lacked human seriousness and dignity, must have displaced their divine status entirely. For what did their divine status actually consist of? Where precisely was it? In the past, the glorious past. And because seventeenth-century man began to regard himself and his own notions as truer and more important than those of the previous age, the angels’ past lost ever more of its force, in an almost wildly escalating process: toward the end of the century there were no longer any theologians or philosophers who could be bothered to write dissertations about them, and even though they were occasionally still depicted by the well-known painters of the time, their status diminished even there, until at last they became mere motifs for artists who were mediocre or downright poor, and finally their soft presence became seen as a sign of poor taste. The angels were no longer the most beautiful beings imaginable, but had, in an astonishingly short time, become nearly the opposite: the most vulgar. The Italian count and libertine Scarlatti relates in one of his letters how the servants on an estate where he was a guest were sent out during dinner to chase away three cherubs who had sought shelter under the roof beams of the ballroom. With brooms and torches and loud shouts they were chased from room to room, until at last they gave up and flew out into the dark rainy October night. They’d been there for several weeks, Scarlatti was informed. On the first night they’d got into the larder, which the next morning had been full of half-eaten cuts of meat, ruined dishes, broken platters, and feathers. When the door to that had been bolted, and the windows kept closed, they were several times observed at the animal troughs. This must have made them desperate, because not long after they made several attempts to get into the main building in broad daylight. When that didn’t work, they went down to the village, where, Scarlatti was told, they’d remained until the evening he saw them himself. Alone among the guests he found the interlude interesting and followed the servants as they chased them out. They constantly made small squeaks, he wrote, not unlike the cackling noises of magpies, but what he found really noteworthy was in their eyes. It was as if they had two souls , he wrote. When they looked at each other, which they did unceasingly, their expressions were sometimes frightened, sometime angry, sometimes despairing. When they looked at their surroundings, it was as if all emotion left the eyes. Something strangely neutral descended on them. When they stared down at the servants below them, their eyes were quite empty. Not apathetic, not cold, not unaffected, just empty.