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rhyming dialogue between the angel Gabriel and the LadyLord, God, on the miracles discovered by science.
SWEET SINGER OF SONGS or YOU AINT SEEN ANYTHING YET
Angel Gabriel, Song of the Lord, hovered through heaven's limbo, hacked off and bored.
'Gabriel, Gabriel, look,' said his LadyLord, 'hey, see what I'm doing, see what I'm making.'
So he yawned out of heaven's invisible window.
Flash! Wallop! Bang!
'Thunderbolts in hell!' His harp twang-twanged reverbs in time with Abaddon's quaking, and the shaking of the seraphic knees of Gabriel. 'Don't do that, God.'
'Pretty good, eh?' said the LadyLord, modestly. 'I'll rewind and replay. Now, see this full stop?'
'Period.'
'OK, period.. My singularity. I open its prison and set it free.'
Explosion! Where a blink seems eternity, for, as scientists reckon, in merely ten to the minus forty three seconds, virtual particles - dancing, myriad, in thunder, stupendous heat, matter and antimatter - leap together to cancel each other out, but matter wins by a tiny amount. Each instant the universe is growing from the size of an orange to a galaxy, doubling and cooling, undergoing profound changes as infant gravity freezes out to invent space-time. The foaming universe, curved and hot, flattens until the quarks combine, an indissoluble knot. The eternal laws are now formalised, physical, chemical, protons and neutrons, electrons clasped electromagnetically - rules elemental which stand till the universe shrivels and dies.
And a second of time has passed.
'Not bad,' yelled Gabriel over the riot, grabbing a diet pepsi - angel equivalent - from a passing string theory, while circling the Excellent rating out of five. 'Pyrotechnics - fair.'
'Hang on in, the show isn't over yet.'
Gabriel thrust a foot from his easychair into the universe. 'Yuk. It's treacly.'
Slow as a dream, the pirouette of particles claim their mutual friends. Some clutch tight and others weakly, hydrogen, helium, bonds without end. Then in a moment the viscous mass thins into foams and bubbles and cavities and matter is clumped by the power of gravity - superclusters and protogalaxies.
A full million years have passed.
'My first miracle.'
'Neat,' replied Gabriel.
'But, Sweet Song, you ain't seen anything yet.'
Gabriel ordered a pizza while he waited, lent back in his chair, smoked a cigarette. The smoke rings rose. He waited. And waited. 'Get on with it, mate.'
'Zoom in. Full zoom. To that tiny light, surrounded by drifting rocks and faint footballs of frozen gas. Go right on in to the third rock out.'
'A mere pinhead. A hundred and nine times less in diameter than its sun. How many angels could dance on that?'
'Is greatness measured by size? Now come, my Melody, let us walk thereabout.'
There were boiling seas, thick with slime, a cochineal, emerald, tawny mat that lapped shores fringed by multicoloured boulders, where the slithering lavas curled and smouldered. Into those seas Gabriel tipped his wing. And something nipped it.
'Ow! Drat! There's some horrid thing.'
'That's life.'
'Well I don't like "life" one little bit. It hurts, man. It cuts like a knife.'
'Forgive its blindness. Sing life from the seas! My Descant, my Joy, clothe the naked land!'
Gabriel yelled, still discontented. He bawled his orders and fisted his hands, and the sea puked ochre and green fermented spew right over his knees. 'It won't listen so that's that.' He walked away, turning his back.
So when LadyLord called, no one heard God's summoning of the living word. Nothing except rock-groping weeds, and the softness of moss where bacteria dance. Sandy flies pumped blood in their folded wings and fluttered and pranced, and fish from those crowded oceans freed, belly-shuffled the beaches on four hard fins. Then ferns their shepherd-hook leaves uncurled and dinosaurs galloped the wild terrain, and feathers grew birds with wings of flame. Flowers and insects together whirled while still the call of creation came. When Gabriel turned and looked again, he saw living world.
'That's my second miracle.'
Different,' said Gabriel.
'I've evolved life out of dust, no sweat, but you aint seen anything yet.'
'They're dull, man. They just wander round reproducing.'
'Music of God, can you sing nothing more?'
'From the day of their birth till they're dust again, they merely explore. Life's greedy - know what I mean? - encroaching on beautiful naked and stony earth. What can stupid creatures and strangling plants on a pinhead planet, show to me?'
'Walk with my Adams. Talk with my Eves.'
Humans danced. They conceived. They growled war chants and waved their spears round protecting fires where they snatched at meat. Some built, some planted, some milked sheep, made jewelled hangings for neck, nose, ears, wrote on clay of tally and curse, crowned their leaders with diadems, painted and traded, sang requiem, made instruments and read the laws of the physical universe.
'Them? They can't tell me anything.'
'Come closer, my Song. Hear the words that they sing.'
They sang of desire that heats the blood like volcanoes that burst earth's crust. Hopes for peace mingled with songs of wars, of evolved desires that threaten all good, and the grief that is urned with the loved one's dust.
'It's nonsense, man, their thoughts are a bore. They giggle and joke when things don't work. They're jerks. Or they argue and shout and it ends in slaughter, then they wash their faces with salty eye water. And why they do this, I cannot tell,' said Gabriel. He saw God as only an angel can, for God's face consumes the pride of a man, and God's eyes destroy the lust of the womb. 'You are washing your cheeks as well, LadyLord.' As he touched that water and licked his finger, the universe shook with a sonic boom as the angel fell, naked and fleshed, bewildered and flawed - the bright Song of God become a singer, the earthing, the birthing of Gabriel.
Eve sang, pirouetting in Eden's glades, of Adam her joy.
So Gabriel crooned to his lyre, 'Sweet Eve, more lovely than anything made, gods themselves are trapped by your beauty. Yours is the world garden. So anything that your heart resolves, every desire, grasp and take. This is all your duty, for this is how life evolves. Whatever the heart of a girl or boy craves, God permits and pardons. Nothing you covet will be denied, so if any oppose you, push them aside. Enjoy!'
So innocence died as she and Adam fought in the garden, and all their children, endlessly.
On the road to death's city, Jerusalem, Jesus said to his friends, 'You will desert me when I fall foul of power rabid men. Yet come and feast. As God is merciful, so am I, for love is the law that a man lives by, both greatest and least. This judgement day I shall be broken, I, life's mirror. So look, look deep beyond your own faces, your own conceits into the truth I have lived and spoken. Then you shall be mirrors, a vast array of human telescopes searching the stars, questioning, ciphering, perfecting. So the dust of the universe seeks the way to ask and to find love's formulas, itself on itself reflecting.'
Gabriel whispered, 'Christ! You should see a psychiatrist! You are neither God nor specially blessed. You can save yourself easily. Keep quiet, slip back into Galilee.'
'My fear hears you and my legs tremble. I have no desire to tread this path.'
'Spilt personality! You're depressed!'
'At Jerusalem my judges assemble; but beyond there's a call from another heart, saying "Love, come," and my heart replies, "I come, my love," though my mouth is numb, my lips quiver and my palms sweat.'
Said the LadyLord, 'Above the noise of its fear and its pain, the uiniverse dust hears my voice calling again and again. To scorn its own death is its own free choice- supreme miracle. Have you seen nothing yet, Gabriel?'
'Apes evolve into madmen, ending your foolish experiment, LadyLord! I'm not pretending when I say the whole business is radically flawed.'
The LadyLord took his hand and led to a marble white gateway to the dead, twin towers soaring over the plains and woods. Before it all humanity stood and Priests knelt before them offering grace. 'Poor creatures, lost and misled, God's too holy, too good to look on your sin.'
The LadyLord said, 'From the fumes of space I called them. Sweet Gabriel, how could I shun them, I who so love them?'
'Now I know I know nothing,' Gabriel said. 'Truth and lies mix like flour and water in bread. Candor is hidden.'
'God is not mocked,' said the Priests, 'be warned - endless death awaits those who treat him with scorn. Leave the road that's forbidden. Repent and obey, then we'll open these gates that lead to God's way.'
Some trembled, some wept, some snarled in hate, 'We demand that you open heaven gates.'
Then the Poets sang from the portico, 'Will you charge through these gates, wild human mob? First stand and deliberate lest beyond lie the lands devoid of God. We have ventured. We know. For Innocence dreams that the human frame is clothed in pity and peace and mercy, but Experience makes a different claim of cruelty, terror, dark secrecy.'
'Open to us,' the multitude cried. 'We will not be denied the right to explore stars and black holes and life's evolution; to encounter the heights of hell and heaven; search the universe heart - the human soul.'
So the gates swung open.
Gates emblazoned Pro Patria, Work Makes Free, with the Dead in their endless lists, and beyond them a bone white cemetery vaster than hope, and the sun a dull coin in November mist, while spiralling clouds of mushroom shape offered their false security, the clouds that life cannot escape. Then out of those skies the missiles hurled and their pilots to paradise kamikazed as they tumbled the towers of the idle rich world in a frenzy of hate.
'Shall we bury ourselves in a lead lined hole? Flee to new worlds beyond the stars? Run, run as fast as we can, we cannot outrun the science of man. And how will your mother's arms console when she's dying of anthrax and rape?'
The Priests replied, 'All humans are blamed. None have heeded the god-given laws. All, all are guilty of sin, so God punishes with diseases and wars, death of species and global warming.'
But the Scientists shouted, 'Shame! on priests and poets for misinforming. We are the human mirror winnowing truth out of error. All life's tightly bound in a loveless frame from its origin, from the very first moment universe laws were founded in infant space. Those laws reveal the true Mind of God, indifferent to grief and pain. And it's fairytale that humans caused a fall from some early state of grace for life is a self assertive race, riding roughshod over the weak. It's push and shove, greed and fear, rape and ferocity. Religions, philosophy, humanism chatter of love, but there's no such thing as free altruism; affection is based on bargaining, reciprocity. The brain maps the mind, soul is fantasy, and the evils of death are mere illusion for decay's the foundation of evolution recycling waste with efficiency. So call God, beseech him as much as you like - he will not hear. He sleeps or he's dead, he's gone on a hike; he's down in the pub sampling the beer.'
'Cry! Cry! What shall I cry? All that is living is born to die. Look here, look here! For look you must - all that is good is reduced to dust. Where are your dances? Your words of hope? Futile is life that the sun awoke. Evolving animals, plants or brains - nothing remains.'
The LadyLord said to lost Gabriel, 'Hear how all life groans to me through the voice of grieving humanity. How shall I comfort, make all things well? Can even I make such miracle?'
Gabriel hid his face in his wings. 'In vain is their questioning. LadyLord, you did wrong to summon life that can ask such things of the pointless cosmos where it belongs. Since you claim to be just, you deserve punishment for earth's pain, you alone, for ever. Yet what will be gained by increasing the woe of this universe? So return all life to the witless dust. I will sing no more,' said the Song of Songs.
The LadyLord begged, 'Sing one more verse. For even an angel can explore the hidden dream. And though my laws cannot be broken, nor I intervene to alleviate sorrow in time or space, yet there are still deeper laws of grace only learnt through grief for hatred and wars.Sing: Look! look here! For look you may with courage at all your dying dreams, at the horror that eats your prayers away - here too stands love all unforeseen. I am this death that has no end, the arms that welcome when all your friends betray to your cruelest enemy. I am that love who stands distressed at all street corners every day asking each passerby to stay and look with me at the world's oppressed. I ask, "How shall these sorrows be redeemed? Let us work together with sympathy." Sing! out of that first explosion danced dust that has heard my call and dreamed of justice and peace, of love and mercy. Love has evolved from the laws of chance. Greatest of miracles! Bitter the birth, but even yet my loving dust shall make all things well. Sing this to their comfort, sweet Gabriel.'
But Gabriel wept.
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