four thousand years ago. In the elapsing of one minute, a star ten thousand light years away from earth explodes and it ceases to exist. Five thousand years after this explosion, we still see the light. You get the idea. Of course, there’s always Wikipedia to help with these things: “Imagine I dropped a letter in the snail mail then dropped dead. It’s like asking how long my letter could go on after I died. The answer is ‘until it is delivered.’ My death doesn’t stop the letter from coming.”
The metaphoric language of the dying is the language of the boatman. Of the five rivers dividing Hades, it is Acheron, the river of sorrow, across which Charon ferries the newly dead. It is the river Lethe they drink from to forget their past lives. The difference between
translation
and
metaphor
is slight—the former meaning “to bring or carry over”; the latter, derived from the Greek, “to transfer or carry across.” If death is an act of translation, metaphor, then, is the language of transition. You could say it is the falsework, the scaffolding of the whole dying process; it holds us up until the crossing is strong enough to get us to the other side.
In Athens, three-wheeled delivery trucks, used to transport merchandise around the city, careen through the streets with
Metaphor
written on their sides, causing pedestrians to jump out of the way and curse them with their own metaphors.
Aristotle believed the use of metaphor was a sign of genius. The dying as geniuses. On some level we know we will all be there one day. Climbing into the yellow cab idling at the front door.
From the Dictionary of Angels
Angelos
, from the Greek, means “messenger,” either human or divine. In rabbinical teachings there are at least a dozen angels of death—Adriel, Apollyon-Abaddon, Leviathan, Malach ha-Mavet, Metatron and Yehudiah, to name a few. With those monikers, there’s no mistaking them for Gentiles. In Christian tradition, the angel Gabriel is the angel of consolation. Michael, the angel of death, “leads souls into the eternal light” at the yielding up of the ghost of all good Christians. Michael is made up entirely of snow, Gabriel of fire. “And though they stand near one another they do not injure one another.” So says the Rabbi Akiva. I would have thought the angel of death was made of fire, but no, God has His own ideas about consolation. Fire, it seems, figures prominently in His plans; the seraphs are born of a stream of it blazing out from under His throne.
In Muslim theology, Azrael is the angel of death who is forever writing in a large book and forever erasing what he writes. What he writes is the birth of man, what he erases isthe name of the man at death. One wonders at the futility of this; one wonders if there are times he just wants to skip over a few names, put his feet up, call it a day.
Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor, nicknamed the Angel of Death for his diabolical experiments on twins in Auschwitz, was also known as the White Angel for the calculating, cold manner in which he chose who would live and who would die when the trains pulled into the camp each day. Angel Dust showed up on the streets of San Francisco in the 1960s—otherwise known as PCP, Peace Pill, crystal, hog, horse tranquilizer, embalming fluid and rocket fuel. People were known to take flying leaps out of windows, like angels, when high on the stuff.
What’s in a name? Joe Fortes arrived in Vancouver from Barbados in 1883. He worked as a shoeshine boy and porter in the city where, seventy years later, I was born. Joe pitched a tent on English Bay and took to patrolling the beach as a self-appointed lifeguard; legend has it that hundreds were saved on his watch. In 1901, the city appointed him its first official lifeguard. Joe’s full name was Seraphim “Joe” Fortes. Named by his mother after the highest order of angels, Joe, it seems, just had an instinct for the drowning.
When I was sixteen, on
The metaphoric language of the dying is the language of the boatman. Of the five rivers dividing Hades, it is Acheron, the river of sorrow, across which Charon ferries the newly dead. It is the river Lethe they drink from to forget their past lives. The difference between
translation
and
metaphor
is slight—the former meaning “to bring or carry over”; the latter, derived from the Greek, “to transfer or carry across.” If death is an act of translation, metaphor, then, is the language of transition. You could say it is the falsework, the scaffolding of the whole dying process; it holds us up until the crossing is strong enough to get us to the other side.
In Athens, three-wheeled delivery trucks, used to transport merchandise around the city, careen through the streets with
Metaphor
written on their sides, causing pedestrians to jump out of the way and curse them with their own metaphors.
Aristotle believed the use of metaphor was a sign of genius. The dying as geniuses. On some level we know we will all be there one day. Climbing into the yellow cab idling at the front door.
From the Dictionary of Angels
Angelos
, from the Greek, means “messenger,” either human or divine. In rabbinical teachings there are at least a dozen angels of death—Adriel, Apollyon-Abaddon, Leviathan, Malach ha-Mavet, Metatron and Yehudiah, to name a few. With those monikers, there’s no mistaking them for Gentiles. In Christian tradition, the angel Gabriel is the angel of consolation. Michael, the angel of death, “leads souls into the eternal light” at the yielding up of the ghost of all good Christians. Michael is made up entirely of snow, Gabriel of fire. “And though they stand near one another they do not injure one another.” So says the Rabbi Akiva. I would have thought the angel of death was made of fire, but no, God has His own ideas about consolation. Fire, it seems, figures prominently in His plans; the seraphs are born of a stream of it blazing out from under His throne.
In Muslim theology, Azrael is the angel of death who is forever writing in a large book and forever erasing what he writes. What he writes is the birth of man, what he erases isthe name of the man at death. One wonders at the futility of this; one wonders if there are times he just wants to skip over a few names, put his feet up, call it a day.
Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor, nicknamed the Angel of Death for his diabolical experiments on twins in Auschwitz, was also known as the White Angel for the calculating, cold manner in which he chose who would live and who would die when the trains pulled into the camp each day. Angel Dust showed up on the streets of San Francisco in the 1960s—otherwise known as PCP, Peace Pill, crystal, hog, horse tranquilizer, embalming fluid and rocket fuel. People were known to take flying leaps out of windows, like angels, when high on the stuff.
What’s in a name? Joe Fortes arrived in Vancouver from Barbados in 1883. He worked as a shoeshine boy and porter in the city where, seventy years later, I was born. Joe pitched a tent on English Bay and took to patrolling the beach as a self-appointed lifeguard; legend has it that hundreds were saved on his watch. In 1901, the city appointed him its first official lifeguard. Joe’s full name was Seraphim “Joe” Fortes. Named by his mother after the highest order of angels, Joe, it seems, just had an instinct for the drowning.
When I was sixteen, on
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