1. Because they are made in the shape of God, which is the shape of man and because they are man’s brethren.
2. Because they measure the distance that inheres within man himself, as do the beasts.
3. Because the body of the word and the body of the stone are not the same thing, or because they are.
4. Because an angel is said to perish from taking human food, when a man dies of choking we say that he has received a holy death, heralding his joyful passage into realms higher and more glorious.
5. The saliva of an angel is said to improve the quality of matter and raise it to a state of greater perfection, much as the saliva of man is said to degrade it, and it is reported that a mealy apple thus inserted into the mouth of an angel and stored there for a time shall emerge fresh and devoid of flaws when it is drawn back out.
6. Because the thing and the thought are not one, or because they are.
The angels mill about in the fields, picking things up from off the ground and sticking them in their mouths. The cattle regard them in passivity, and wonder. An angel discovers a small pebble and places it within the cavity. He extracts it, and behold: a pebble of the same size, shape, and specification — but now composed of solid gold. An angel regards a small flower, and plucks it from the ground. He places it in his mouth and, lo: what he removes from his mouth is no flower, but a single word. He holds the word up before the eyes of the other angels and they rejoice, marveling in the miracle of flesh made abstract. They pass the word from angel to angel, holy hand to holy hand, turning it over in their palms and observing it from every angle. The sun weighs on them from overhead, weighs like light upon them all, as they tilt their faces up toward the source, mouths open, joyful, and light touches the backs of their mouths, the unbroken backs of their throats.
WORKS CITED
Durandus of Saint-Pourçain, Durandi a Sancto Porciano in Petri Lombardi Sententias Theologicas Commentarium, book 4. Venice, 1579; reprint, Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1964.
Iribarren, Isabel, and Martin Lenz. Angels in Medieval Philosophical Inquiry: Their Function and Significance. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
Rabbit Starvation
On the first day comes the new shipment of cotton balls, bundled in blocks and factory-wrapped, masses of plastic-trapped white that hit the floor with half as much sound as expected. On that day, we begin again: plunging long knives through the blocks, cutting straight lines along the top and sides. Cotton balls sputter from slits we stanch with our hands while we cut them free. The next day we sort. At the cotton ball factory they strive to make them all the same, but variation creeps into the shapes, some barely larger, some barely lacking. Their near-uniformity makes the differences more startling. We search the mounds for ugly ones, the ones whose variance disgusts us.
This cotton ball is fine. So is the next. The next after that suffers from a deformity, a small tuft of fluff strung out like a tail. I set it aside for mending. The next is all right, and the next.
But the cotton ball after that has something wrong with it, more wrong than we’ve ever seen. On a white table in this spotless room sits a puff of white with a bright red blotch, an urgent liquid color soaking the center of a dry nothing. We gather around, afraid to touch the spot with our gloves, afraid of the color lingering on our suits.
Cotton ball after cotton ball, all stained, arriving on the conveyor belt and falling off into a basket with the clean ones. Color everywhere. We look toward the cotton heap growing redder. We look toward the reddening heap knowing that one of us will need to go into it and discover what is leaking.
The rabbits are white, and when I stack them they stay put, looking back at me from a creamy vagueness dotted with eyes. Rabbits are edible. They have bony bodies beneath the fleeciest fur, like whisked clouds or something even lighter. Dozens on dozens shuffle across the floor in short bursts, hopping weakly then growing tired, making the sound of teeth sinking into marshmallow. Press an ear to a rabbit mouth and hear a soft chuffing, a machinery made of cotton.
I tried everything else before I tried rabbit, and that is to my credit, I think. I’ve tried to eat the walls (white plaster), the floor (white plaster), and the patches of Astroturf against which their tender shapes contrast so nicely. I tried to eat dust and dew, my own fingernails and hair. As little as there is, there is enough. There is enough, and also too little, a deficit that hangs here like an overhead light. It shows the inadequacy of myself to this room, of this room to myself, of the rabbits to each other as protection or company. Even the Astroturf seems to long for something more, though what it gets is more rabbits. The sky stretches empty overhead, and I devote time to wishing something into it, a cloud or a series of them, something to watch change and improve — or rather, just change.
This room has the look of a snapshot. It slides away day by day, though not for the rabbits, who seem to multiply mathematically rather than biologically, increasing their numbers even without nourishment. This is one of the things that leads me to say aloud, though of course there is no one to listen: Hunger is, in and of itself, an eye pointed continually at what is lacking and how badly.
What to feed this baby? I thought to myself. This produced no results, so I said it aloud. The baby rolled around vaguely, grabbing at its own nose, swaddled in a fair number of dishrags. It burbled in an incompetent way. I thought to myself: I am better than it, both at grabbing and articulating sounds. Then I wondered again about what to feed the baby.
The baby had been assigned to me by the government, or by a similarly well-organized group with a voice that sounded very much like that of the government. They called to tell me to come to the bus station to pick it up, and that I would have to bring my own container. They also said: clothes, bring clothes, it is not guaranteed that your baby will come clothed. My parents were disappointed in the extreme: I was only twenty years of age. “Twenty years old with a baby,” my father said, grudgingly crocheting a yellow beanie on the couch. “And with so much left unlived.”
Look at its teeth, I thought to myself. You can tell what anything eats if you look at its teeth. An archaeologist can look at a single tooth, even a fragment of a tooth, and find signs as to whether the tooth’s owner was an agriculturalist or a hunter-gatherer. Small cavities, or caries, on the surface of the tooth indicate that carbohydrates and sugars have dissolved on its surface. Similarly, chewing on tough seeds and husks leaves wear and tear on the crowns. I looked into the baby’s mouth. I was not sure it had teeth.
The baby threw up a small amount of orangish substance, which I took to mean it was full, or at least not empty, at which point I decided the question of feeding the baby could wait until I had watched a couple hours of television.
Skin and slaughter the rabbits, clean the rabbits with tools made of rabbit. Stow bits in larger bits of rabbit and try to tie the package up. Tidy up and sweep matter toward the other corner. Lie supine. Lie prostrate. Pick at the Astroturf with a fingernail. Is it held there with glue? Stack the rabbits. Number the rabbits. Place a fingertip on the nose and stroke from forehead over spine to the tip of its adorable puff. Regret and regroup. Enumerate the possibilities. Write messages to the sky. The most pliant and stationary of the rabbits, the rabbits most suited to lying still as if on a page, the sort of rabbits that seem somehow to understand that lying still may be a form of self-defense, the only form. Messages spelled out in white on the white surface are nearly illegible, but spelling them out offers a one-dimensional sort of relief, like speaking to yourself in a loud and confident voice.