Primeval and Other Times

THE TIME OF MISIA’S ANGEL

The angel saw Misia’s birth in an entirely different way from Kucmerka the midwife. An angel generally sees everything in a different way. Angels perceive the world not through the physical forms which it keeps producing and then destroying, but through the meaning and soul of those forms.

The angel assigned to Misia by God saw an aching, caved-in body, rippling into being like a strip of cloth – it was Genowefa’s body as she gave birth to Misia. And the angel saw Misia as a fresh, bright, empty space, in which a bewildered, half conscious soul was just about to appear. When the child opened her eyes, the guardian angel thanked the Almighty. Then the angel’s gaze and the human’s gaze met for the first time, and the angel shuddered as only a bodiless angel can.

The angel received Misia into this world behind the midwife’s back: it cleared a space for her to live in, showed her to the other angels and to the Almighty, and its incorporeal lips whispered: “Look, look, this is my sweet little soul.” It was filled with unusual, angelic tenderness, loving sympathy – that is the only feeling angels harbour. For the Creator has not given them instincts, emotions or needs. If they did have them, they would not be spiritual creatures. The only instinct angels have is the instinct for sympathy. The only feeling angels have is infinite sympathy, heavy as the firmament.

Now the angel could see Kucmerka washing the child in warm water and drying her with a soft flannel. Then it gazed into Genowefa’s eyes, reddened with effort.

The angel observed events like flowing water. It wasn’t interested in them as such, they didn’t intrigue it, because it knew where they were flowing from and to, it knew their start and finish. It could see the current of events that were like and unlike each other, close to each other in time and distant, resulting one from another or completely independent of each other. But that meant nothing to it either.

For an angel, events are something like a dream, or a film with no beginning or end. Angels are unable to get involved in them, they don’t need them for anything. A human being learns from the world, learns from events, learns knowledge about the world and about himself, is reflected in events, defines his own limits and potential, and names things for himself. An angel doesn’t have to source anything from the outside, but has knowledge through itself, it contains everything there is to know about the world and about itself within itself – that is how God has made it.

An angel doesn’t have an intellect like the human one, it doesn’t draw conclusions or make judgements. It doesn’t think logically. To some people an angel would seem stupid. But from the start an angel carries within it the fruit of the tree of knowledge, pure wisdom that can only be enriched by simple intuition. It is a mind devoid of reasoning, and so devoid of mistakes and the fear they produce, an intellect without the prejudices that come from erroneous perception. But like all other things created by God, angels are volatile. That explains why Misia’s angel was so often not there when she needed it.

When it wasn’t there, Misia’s angel would turn its gaze away from the terrestrial world and look at the other angels and other worlds, higher and lower, assigned to each thing on Earth, each animal and plant. It could see the vast ladder of existences, the extraordinary structure and the Eight Worlds contained within it, and it could see the Creator embroiled in creation. But anyone who thought Misia’s angel was gazing at the countenance of the Lord would be wrong. The angel could see more than a man, but not everything.

Mentally returning to other worlds, the angel had difficulty focusing attention on Misia’s world, which, like the world of other people and animals, was dark and full of suffering, like a murky pond overgrown with duckweed.