What is a warrior angel? A defender of the human spirit.
Over the years, I have encountered demons and angels. The demons always say the same thing: “You are a factory for the manufacture of excrement. You are a pylorus of endless hunger. I know you, you world of multiplying bacteria. Awe of maggots.”
The warrior angels are more simpatico, and I have collected here some of what they’ve told me when we occasionally crossed paths:
What is life’s meaning? Truth answers in sorrow—beauty with wonder.
Joy’s secret? Never go back in memory without a bigger heart.
Soul is what we have because we cannot have it.
Words are the loneliest thoughts in the human heart.
Words want to be real. So, they lie.
We can spend time, but we must earn eternity.
Ink is the darkness that illuminates.
With art, we feel the many lesser fates that have fragmented our lives join for an incandescent moment.
Truth cannot echo from afar. For this reason, there is beauty.
Beauty is how we see, not what we see.
Memory is creative forgetting.
All happiness is discovery.
How quickly and finally everything that we are becomes what we are not.
Art is the scaffold of desire.
Only violent beauty creates. All else is imitation.
Art is more original than the world.
Dreams are not a lack of reality, but rather all of it.
Beauty has a separate identity from all others of the same kind.
Destiny is earned. Fate is owed.
The soul wanders, vanishes, returns, a stranger, evasive, at one moment sure, the next unsure of its existence, while the body never doubts.
Art is not the rain that comes uncalled. Art requires will, a personal truth as resistant to the vagaries of the day as a star to the wind.
Hope is skeptical beauty.
Everything that unnerves reveals.
Truth fractures into wholes – justice – God – self. To the extent that it fails, it is true.
Story remembers to forget.
Soul is everything written in us that can only be read by the light of another.
Our lonely gift among all of Earth’s creatures is to accept the truth that we will never know the truth.
Beauty is something within and yet beyond this world and so never quite fits.
Writer and reader meet in the same nothing as the mirror of a lake, where sky and water each see one beautiful world moving through another.
Love is the roof of the soul, the floor of the spirit, the house of the heart.