%title NaNoWarmUp 2
%date 2008-10-26 01:24:39
:diary:livejournal:fossils:

Fiction, of course.

<details text="Every Angel is Terrible (or - An Exercise in Pathos)"><summary>Every Angel is Terrible (or - An Exercise in Pathos)</summary>
"Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich," wrote Rainer Maria Rilke.  Every angel is terrible.

I read that sentence countless years ago as part of some modern sculpture exhibit while I was studying abroad.  I don't even remember what the sculpture was about, but I remember the title of the piece, and soon adopted it as my own.  It became my email signature, and appeared in various fora and journals that I kept here and there online.  I don't think I ever figured out what it really meant for several years.

Once I'd made tenure and discovered that the library was useful for something other than the wireless internet and a place to send my students in order to torture them with real research, I found a copy of the Duino Elegies, the source of the line, secreted between two large volumes.  The slim pocket-sized volume was checked out by me for more than a year, renewed month after month as I slogged through the dense and wanderful poetry, German on the left-hand pages and English on the right side.

When I had used the phrase, I had used it ironically.  I was raised by two almost militantly atheist parents, both engineers, and I'd be lying if I said that none of their skepticism had rubbed off on me.  To me, the phrase meant that every angel was terrible because they signified a crutch.  Something to blame when things went wrong, something to thank for chance.  Context means the world, though, and my take on the single phrase had turned it on its head.

"Who," Rilke begins, "though I screamed, would hear me amongst the ranks of the angels?"  The depths of despair one plumbs after the death of a family member always seems personal, unique, and applicable only to the one suffering, at least from their point of view.  People can always sympathize and try to talk you back up into the comparative heights of day-to-day life, but it always seems as though they couldn't possibly understand.  Who, after all, could possibly hear and understand amongst the cries of the world?

I lost Peter after thirty years of knowing each other, seventeen years of living together, ten years of living as a married couple.  At the beginning, I had spent nights and days wondering what was so different about this relationship from the others.  It began with the same level of awkwardness of those other relationships I had had that sprung from friendships into something more.  The awkwardness had given way to the standard elation, and the elation settinged into the comfortable familiarity punctuated by arguments I'd been through before and those small surprises we gave each other over the years.  

He was someone to whom I was able to give myself in my entirety, though.  Totally honest, even in his little lies - even though his words might say something, his voice and his body told nothing but the truth.  I gave him myself to him and he did the same to me.  We could live together without destroying each other.  When the marriage acts were passed, we were among the first couples down at the courthouse to apply for a marriage certificate, not because we were elated, but because we had felt as though we had been married for the past seven years anyway.

Despite our standard arguments and a few problems with money necessitating our move from the house we were living in to a condo, most of our problems came from outside our happy family of three (one must never forget the cat).  Peter quit his job teaching history at the local highschool a year after the marriage when a few parents complained to the school's administration about the fact that he was teaching about the marriage acts in his class when he would talk about current events, mentioning his sexuality as a statement of fact.  Administration had suggested that perhaps the subject was still too sore for some people to be talking about it to their kids, and Peter had suggested that that if he didn't teach his students the other side of the issue, they would only get that sore side taught to them by parents.  He finished out the semester and spent most of that time searching for new work.  On the day of finals for that class, the students threw him a party, and Peter invited me along.

Being more distanced from angry parents in college, I experienced little enough in the way of discrimination from my students and their families, though it helped that I taught in the music department and sexuality rarely came up.  Instead, discrimination came from my fellow professors and even some of the administration.  Despite colleges supposedly being a hotbed for it, all the supposed liberalism was only apparent when the problem was abstracted and far from home.  When I brought Peter to what amounted to the department's Christmas party soon after his last day at the high school and introduced him as my husband, quite of the few who had argued so eloquently for gay marriage subsequently treated me different and one or two were down-right chilly to me after the fact, as though I might somehow give them the gay.  It was even implied by the department head that I shouldn't mention this to students, and though he said that it was for my own good lest I face litigious parents, I get the feeling he thought I might recruit.

With Peter now working at the public library and making less money than previously, though, I stayed on the job.  I was tenured, and the money was helping us to live comfortably despite the move during the mortgage crisis.

We were given far too little time to deal with the issue before it came to a head.  Peter came home from the library looking decidedly harried, a rip in his shirt at the breast pocket.  He walked a co-worker home daily.  She lived on his way home, and didn't feel safe in the city, despite how safe everyone claimed that it was.  As if to prove some terrible point, a block after Peter had seen her to her door and walked on, he was jumped by two males he never saw clearly.  One grabbed the front of his shirt, ripping it in the process and held a knife against his belly while the other fished through his pockets, taking his wallet, music player, and key-chain.

That night, we filed a report with the police, the officer promising what help he could, but assuring us that, without any description, there was little we could do but get new keys made and cancel his credit cards.   The rest of the evening was spent with me doting on him and researching the bus-routes to get him to work the next day - I couldn't convince him to take a three-day weekend.  I made him promise to call me when he got to work, and right before he left.

When I got the second call, I ducked out of work early, bringing the papers I was grading home with me.  I expected Peter to get home before me, but he wasn't there.  I called the library; they said he had left already.  I waited another ten minutes before I struck out along the route I knew he took to get home.

While I don't remember much after that, I can tell what I know now.  Peter had been stabbed three times not two blocks from where he had been attacked only the night before.  The attackers had taped a sign with the word 'FAG' crudely written in marker to his back.  Clutched in his hand was his keychain, a wallet-sized picture of us encased in a simple plastic frame.

He lived for three more days in a coma with two surgeries in the process before he passed away.

This tore me apart, to state the obvious, but worse than that were the sympathies I gained.  Both our families visited, and the resulting media flurry crushed us.  Friends, acquaintances, and people we didn't even know confronted us to share their feelings on the matter.  Most tried to console us on the matter, though several called us sinners and one or two even tried to imply my guilt in the crime.

On the third night after Peter's death, when things got to be too much, I went for a walk.  I walked and walked.  I headed out West under some other authority's direction - it was as though I wasn't in control of my body anymore.  businesses thinned and stopped, and after a while, houses began to thin, too.  

Shivering in the March evening's chill, I came to the edge of town.  Staring up at the mountains that prevented further sprawl of the town, I lingered.  The sun set, the moon rose, stars faded into view, and still I stared at those mountains.  The first true thought that entered my mind was of how small I was, mentally trying to see how many of me stacked head to toe and packed in together it would take to equal one of those mountains, and how little all my problems would mean to that many people.

The sound of a car door shutting brought me out of my reverie, and I blinked at my surroundings.  I was standing at the side of the road with the barbed wire of the open-space fence clenched in my fists, a small two-door car parked about tenty feet away from me.  It was a small wonder I hadn't heard it before, nor even noticed the headlights.

Once the driver walking towards me resolved from a black cutout against his headlights to the features of one of my students, I relaxed my grip on the fence.  Without saying a word, he led me over to the passenger door of his car and made me sit in the seat.  He tore strips from a towel in his back seat to wrap my bleeding hands in and used one to wipe the tears and snot from my face before shutting the door and turning the car around.

When we reached the university, he finally spoke, asking me where I lived from there.  I told him the address and another five minutes of silence followed before he pulled up in front of the condos I lived in.

We both got out and he gave me a hug before I went inside.  It wasn't a guy hug, but it was far from any embrace I'd shared with Peter.  There was more support, more emotion, more understanding in that hug than in any of the many words spoken to me over the past week, and I had to try my hardest in order to make it back inside before bursting into tears once more, watching the blurred shape of his car pull slowly away from our house.

I owe that student of mine my all, because he, of all people, explained Rilke's first Duino Elegy to me.

<blockquote>
	Who, though I screamed, would hear me among the ranks of angels?

	And even supposing one of them took me suddenly to his breast,
	I would perish within his overpowering being.
	For the beautiful is right at the margin of terrifying, which we can only just endure.
	And we marvel at it so because it holds back in serene disdain and does not destroy us.
	Every angel is terrible.
</blockquote>

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