Abstract
Gabriel and Tilda walked side by side in deep conversation. Suddenly they stopped together in the middle of the road and looked around, awestruck. The birds were singing the chorus of creation. The hawthorn trees greeted them in sweet harmony in a garden of paradise. And the golden sun spread its warm embracing red glow as a unifying symphony over the playing fields. A big show. It was like watching how the curtain in a huge theatre slowly raised upwards. It was a spectacular moment. Like a dream in colour, sound and brightness. “Hush!” Gabriel exclaimed at Tilda.
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Gabriel and Tilda walked side by side in deep conversation. Suddenly they stopped together in the middle of the road and looked around, awestruck. The birds were singing the chorus of creation. The hawthorn trees greeted them in sweet harmony in a garden of paradise. And the golden sun spread its warm embracing red glow as a unifying symphony over the playing fields. A big show. It was like watching how the curtain in a huge theatre slowly raised upwards. It was a spectacular moment. Like a dream in colour, sound and brightness. “Hush!” Gabriel exclaimed at Tilda.
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Angels’ Play
Heaven above Stonegate. Shared-Office Cloud.
FormalPara Time:Real-time GMT, Monday, 1 October 2018, 17:53
FormalPara Players:The two angels as before.
FormalPara Setting:Both angels are still sitting at the virtual reality (VR) simulation table discussing their next steps.
FormalPara GA(coughing modestly to break the spell while knocking on the Script):
Hey, now, “the veil of dusk will begin to cover the earth,” you know. End of show.
What is the plan for bringing them from Stonegate to the meeting venue as quickly as possible? It is no good letting them hang around down there forever. What was to be seen, they have seen. What we can add are some nice pointers for hinting to them that this was a special experience. Any ideas?
FormalPara TA(giggles and hits a few keys on its tablet to programme a red cabrio sports car, which triumphantly display it on the simulation table in front of GA’s puzzled face):
How about this? Red Corvette with the chauffeur driving them to the next pub, then two ice-cold draught beers, then their project partners driving by to fetch them by car with some Indian vegan food and red wine… (seeing the shocked face of its colleague)
Indian food, you understand? Bede Griffiths will like that as well. The meal should be vegan for my girl. No more hardship. Let us give them a rest.
FormalPara GA(warningly shaking its head):
This red sports-car business is much too obvious! You must be joking. You have no discretion, no taste, no feeling for tact. I only say, “Objective One.” Any blackmail, miracle or brute force is strictly out of the question for angels like us. It is a red-line TRINI-T directive not to be crossed. If you start to spoil them this way, they will become lazy. They need to engage! You know that. Humans need to get engaged, not delegate everything to fate or to machines.
FormalPara TA(pleadingly admiring the simulated red Corvette):
Only tonight, OK? Gabriel is used to being spoiled. He will not be suspicious about it. Promise. It will even encourage him. And think about dinner.
The Red Corvette
Arriving at the village of Stonegate with the last arrays of the sinking sun, where dusk and darkness would soon take over, quickly revealed that there would be no hope for a shop, a pub, a phone booth, a taxi or anything else helpful in Gabriel and Tilda’s situation. This was just a little hamlet in the middle of nowhere. Not a single soul in the street, no lights behind the curtained windows of the few houses. After aimlessly wandering around for help, Gabriel and Tilda found a middle-aged man in a backyard fetching something from his garden shed whom they could at least ask for the way to Ticehurst.
The man started laughing. “I regret to inform you that we are still about two miles away from Ticehurst, with no public transport and no taxi service if not preordered one day ahead.” Despite the recent sunset experience and its glorious inspiration, they felt quite exhausted by then and must have looked very unhappy with the outlook, too unhappy to continue their solitary walk—Tilda tiredly bending under her heavy rucksack.
The man looked at them compassionately and took initiative. “Can I offer you a lift in my car?” “This is very kind of you, sir” Gabriel gratefully answered. The man smiled. “I have just a coupé and can only take one of you at a time if that’s OK.” Gabriel anxiously looked at his companion for consent, which she silently granted by nodding at him. What the man then fetched from his garage, however, was simply breathtaking: a red Corvette, a cool sports car, which nobody would have ever associated with him and which was obviously his personal pride and joy.
“What’s going on?” Gabriel murmured. “This is totally out of place. It seems indicate that something very special is happening here.” It also made the man a little suspicious in Gabriel’s eyes. He gallantly told Tilda that he, as her boss, would take the first turn to try the red Corvette, to see whether this transfer would be safe for a woman. The man pointed to his house behind and advised Tilda, “Just knock at the door and ask my lady for some hospitality while waiting.” Tilda was usually a little shy with these things. However, as she told Gabriel later, that lady, not his wife as she immediately explained to Tilda, was surprised but not unhappy to find an unknown visitor at her doorstep, taking her away from her telly routine.
The two of them had a nice chat about this and that in the surprisingly modern middle-class sitting room. “Amazing that a group of international development managers visits our modest part of the county,” the hostess said. “I have never heard of the place you are supposed to go to at Ticehurst.” That, indeed, was not such a good message, but maybe she and her boyfriend just lived too remote to know much about what’s around them.
Anyway, the ride in the top-opened car through the twilit Sussex countryside was brilliant with its—rolling fields of gold. Gabriel talked with his driver about football. “I am a big fan of Icke Häßler,” the man at the wheel confessed. He knew everything that was to be known about the German football league. Soon, they arrived at Ticehurst, which was not much bigger than Stonegate. The man dropped Gabriel off in the village centre, where he patiently waited for Tilda Toelz on a public bench. The red sports-car driver brought his companion half an hour later through the quickly approaching night. After receiving Gabriel’s and Tilda’s profound thanks, the kind driver left for good. Gabriel and Tilda decided to go to the village pub for a drink and maybe something to eat, as well as to ask the landlord about their final destination. It was pretty dark by then.
Scanning the menu of the cosy old English pub was a disappointment to Tilda, though: Nothing vegan, only meat-heavy pub food, plus fish and chips. They each ordered a well-deserved beer at the bar and brought it outside to one of the few tables facing the high street. There was not really anything to look at but an Indian takeaway across the street, the only place with a little life. They were happy to see it, though, because it ensured that they would both get something to eat tonight. Otherwise, the village held a handful of shops that were already closed, maybe one or two solitary strollers and a passing car every now and again. However, Gabriel and Tilda were very comfortable with their beers. A small group of people quietly talked at the next table, the only guests of the pub except them.
They were not even into the very first sips of their beer when Dorothy drove by in her car, already on the lookout for them. The evening turned splendid. Tilda and Gabriel got two rooms side by side in the souterrain of the house, both with large windows because the building was constructed on hilly grounds where each level had a window to the outside. In the darkness, they could see that tomorrow they would have a great view on a small lake and the Sussex countryside. Gabriel smiled when he realised that he was supposed to share the bathroom with his new colleague, though at least they had washing basins in their own rooms. Seeing Tilda Toelz’s little toothbrush in the bathroom was quite pathetic, and Gabriel decided to leave his own shaving gear next to it.
What he did first on arrival was use the Jacuzzi on the terrace after this long and eventful day. Of course, he had to do it in his underwear in lieu of his swimwear, which was probably still hanging around at the Berlin airport. Albert joined him. First, Gabriel thought he would have preferred to be alone under the dark night sky full of blinking stars, but Albert told him great stories. “I have just returned from a meeting in Oregon,” he said. “I was invited because I once belonged to the inner circle of Osho.” Amazing. Gabriel would never have guessed this, though the English colleague sometimes wore Indian clothes. They talked pleasantly about Osho in the hot Jacuzzi and had a great time.
Over the course of that conversation, Albert called Gabriel various times a “favourite child of the universe”—whatever that was supposed to mean in guru language. After a good and nourishing Indian dinner with the others, Gabriel dressed in a white Lufthansa XXL T-shirt from in the kit of lost luggage, which he used as pyjamas, and went to bed highly satisfied with his day.
Next door, Tilda contemplated her day in her bed while talking to her boyfriend Ken on her mobile. “Honestly,” she said, “I don’t know whether this can work out. What a laugh. I have to put a stop to the illusions that Mr David seemed to have about me. Probably, he considers me as his new companion, maybe even as a friend or something.” She shuddered. Her true feelings might give her boss some unpleasant surprises; he had no idea. He had ruminated about the fact that they now shared a great nature experience. From her side, there had never been any sharing between them. “Tell him that your talk about nature had just been information exchange,” Ken advised sternly and gave her his usual two cents about communication philosophy. “People regularly update each other with what they think is their life. Only if two are prepared to dig deeper, not resigning themselves to scratching the surface, can deep friendship emerge after a kind of ‘archaeology of the individual.’ I say ‘can’ because it might be possible to come across artefacts while digging which are displeasing.”
Tilda shuddered. Yes, like in her case. Her new boss had not even caught a glimpse of her mental-archaeological excavation site. None of her own precious artefacts had been excavated by Mr David; it had been just ‘updating’ what he had heard from her. Friendship between her and him was impossible. “You’re right,” Tilda said to Ken. “Take his stance on vegan eating, for instance. And he eats animals.” Tilda shook her head. She could not imagine why somebody educated such as Gabriel David could take the important issue of conscientious food choice so light-heartedly. It was fundamental to her identity, her health, her values and morals, to the environment and to the wellbeing of her fellow creatures.
Her boyfriend Ken was working as an executive manager at the Berlin central animal shelter. Ken knew everything because he had to nurse the poor creatures that were thrown away by the worst bio-trash that this planet had ever produced: humankind. “I could never be together with a person who eats animals. In fact, I cannot even really like such a person,” she said as she got excited. “Eating animals is worse than experimenting on them. And I could never trust a person who supports animal experiments, regardless of what type of animals are involved—except human beings.” Ken agreed. “Yes, do people think animals do not feel pain as they do? And if they agree that animals feel it, what is their excuse to administer this pain to creatures slaughtered for them?”
Tilda nodded against the phone. “What we forget about animals, we begin to forget about ourselves” was a sentence that had stayed on her mind. She had been very impressed when reading a book written by Jonathan Safran Foer—Eating Animals, in 2011—who wrote this sentence. For him, the decision to eat meat was a decision to agree to animal suffering in factory farms. Meat consumption was pure cruelty. The same applied to the products of industrial farming, such as eggs and milk, and to those of industrial fishing. Having read that book, Tilda became a vegetarian.
And then becoming vegan was only the next logical consequence of this reasoning. And she felt in good company with this choice: Annihilation actor Natalie Portman claimed that reading the Foer book changed her from a twenty-year vegetarian into a vegan activist; she made a documentary movie from Foer’s book in June 2018 that Tilda greatly admired. “Some people realise that meat eating is unethical, and they are rightfully ashamed of themselves. However, they are too weak and inconsequential to adapt their food choice behaviour.” Ken showed why he was her boyfriend. “These people are slaves to their desires and to other people’s marketing tactics,” he said. “The meat industry makes you believe that they are processing happy animals, keeping consumers in the dark of what is really happening on factory farms.” Tilda frowned into her bed sheets: Meat eaters like Mr David were bad people, full stop. Whether their moral choice was conscious or unconscious did not matter: Consequences were always real. Tilda was convinced that people were used to being cruel to animals anyway. Even if they would call them their “pets” and their “friends.” People like Mr David. There were some who ate animals and some who did not. This was the division that mattered.
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Angels’ Play
Location:
Heaven above Ticehurst. Shared-Office Cloud.
Time:
Real-time GMT, Tuesday, 2 October 2018, 10:04.
Players:
The two angels as before.
Setting:
Both angels are at work in their cockpit seats. Business as usual. There, Tilda and Gabriel are working again on their project publications.
TA
(caressingly playing with the telepathy board in its lap):
Shall we start the flow and synchronise them to get them more effective so that they can make the deadline?
GA
(cautiously):
Yes, but not like last time—nice and slow, please. You always connect people too quickly. Their sparrow brains cannot take it.
TA slowly moves the slider of the telepathy board to the power position, and both angels smilingly observe the effects on their charges.
Telepathy Works
The Allen curve was a mathematical equation developed by Professor Tom Allen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It said that geographical proximity was conducive to cooperation. At Ticehurst, Tilda and Gabriel started to use telepathic collaboration via the Allen curve. This interesting telepathy connection between them was very handy and effective for their cooperation at work but also quite spooky. So far, they had not discussed it openly. But they were using it all the time and sometimes played around with it. For example, they could call on each other to look up from their computer screens or make the other turn round when they wanted to pass something over in the kitchen while cooking. It worked best when they locked eyes. Then it could get so strong that Gabriel sometimes had to block his glance with his arm. But it even worked when they were far apart. Fascinating.
For Tilda, it was a matter of course that this was working, even if the scientific mainstream was totally set against it. She loved the book by Rupert Sheldrake about dogs that instinctively knew who was approaching the house door, wagging their tails when it was their owner. In fact, she owned that book. Sheldrake was one of her favourite science authors: She had watched numerous YouTube videos featuring him ever since she read the dog book. Sheldrake was a biologist talking about morphic fields structuring human perceptions of what was called reality. For her, the “scientific mainstream fascists,” as she called them, tried to suppress findings such as Sheldrake’s that did not fit into their world view. He thought that the brain could do many things, such as telepathy, that were still under-researched. This had nothing to do with anything supernatural. It was just that people did not yet know everything that could be known. Sheldrake considered telepathy as an empirical fact. However, Tilda admitted to herself that some people were more receptive to telepathy than others. It was very easy for her to reach out to Gabriel. Probably, their brains shared some neural architectures, creating an isomorphic field.
This had already started in her job interview with him. He had come across as a reasonable boss who was about double her age and height – quite good-looking if she went for the classical gentleman type. He looked a little bit like this Robert Redford guy, who was so fashionable in the old days. Gabriel had interesting deep-blue eyes and could hold her gaze for a long time. She had been quite fascinated by his habit of looking unblinkingly and permanently into the eyes of the person he was talking to. They had stared at each other during the job interview because she'd also had this habit since she was a little kid. She stared others down until they had to lower their eyes, or she connected to them. It was their choice. For Tilda, the telepathy connection to Gabriel was established between them from the very first minute, and it happened naturally. Gabriel would have never thought that this telepathy stuff worked, but it did. It was like mechanics: They could switch it on and go to that place in tele-space where they connected their brains for exponential use. It was easy to accept when seeing it work so successfully. Of course, it was spooky but also quite comforting and straightforward. Why not, if it worked? The problem, of course, was that it was highly seductive and addictive: Normal communication with other people became really shallow and cumbersome when this was possible.
These days, Gabriel pondered a lot about Tilda and his relationship with her. It was of course very different from the usual relationship that he had with his team members, though he had always been on good terms with them. Tilda amazed him with her intellectual capacity. She was a really smart person. When he was explaining something logically complex to Dorothy without any hope that anybody else would have even the slightest idea what they were talking about, suddenly Tilda would step into the discussion and not only show her complete understanding of the issue at hand but also provide some interesting comments that were helpful for our considerations and the progress of ongoing work. He was surprised because he was usually alone in these areas, and suddenly, somebody else with that capacity was around. He looked at her with new eyes.
Of course, he thought her to be a strange little creature: very small and thin, quite muscular for a woman. Probably doing a lot of sports. Otherwise, he found that she looked like everybody else in her age group, trying to appear “radical” or “not mainstream.” Starting with her half-shaven hairdo. He found seeing the skin of a woman’s head quite unfavourable. Both her ears were heavily pierced. He took a closer look while she stood near him in the kitchen. He had to smile. It was quite sweet because every single piercing was in the form of a heart, each in different style and colour. This mediated a bit the martial aspect of being so heavily pierced, in her case.
In telepathy, not only strictly work-related stuff was transmitted, by the way. Feelings such as gratitude, anger, anxiety or sorrow could easily be distinguished from one another. He learnt much about Tilda that way. What he learnt was that thinking and talking were two different things with her. He discovered that Tilda tried to hide many things from him. She had secrets she did not want him to see. He felt a certain darkness in her: It was a kind of pettiness, parochialism and insularity, full of gloom and sombreness. Gabriel shook his head: He realised that this sounded rather obscure if not also unfriendly. Maybe one could just say Tilda was composed, a little shy, withdrawn and serious. However, to him, she sometimes came across as cagey, secretive and guarded.
Gabriel wondered whether it was just him realising that something very strange was going on. What he got through the “telepathy channels” was that Tilda was suspicious, cautious and reserved about all this. And he completely understood. To be honest, it was not so very different with himself. What was this about? Your usual love story would not work like this. It would be too much ado about nothing. Furthermore, he did not go for kids, and she was that to him: She wasn’t even thirty, goodness gracious! Last but not least, he reminded himself, she was small, dark haired and wiry – not his favourite type of woman. But she had nice eyes and a sweet laugh. On Tuesday, another colleague arrived to join the little group of eight for the writing retreat: Now they were six women and two men. Gabriel had met the new arrival, Simone, at a couple of former project meetings and always found her a good-looking blond, though a little too full of herself. She confirmed that impression this time too. Tuesday night, they all went out to the Ticehurst village pub for dinner, where Simone wanted to show off as a vampire. “I like my steak really raw,” she told the waiter. “Meat is best when the blood still drips red out of it.” Gabriel was sitting opposite of vegan Tilda, who looked so disgusted that he had to laugh out loud.
However, the most interesting story that was told in that pub after dinner came from Tilda: She told the group about the end of her semi-professional sports career, which took place in 2012. She was heavily injured in a fight at a kickboxing tournament, where she broke her left ankle. The injury never completely healed, so she could not return to her sports. “This is why I see you limping sometimes!” Gabriel exclaimed, the words escaping his lips before he could prevent it. In fact, he had been too much of a gentleman to remark on her gait so far. He had also wondered about why her face had contorted with pain sometimes. When she talked about the accident, he could see how difficult this was for her. He looked her up on the Internet later, when they were back at the cottage, and found out that she had been pretty good at her sports. He found an outdated public fighter profile for her on the Internet for international league tournaments that ended the day of her last fight. It proved that she had been one of Germany’s best female kickboxers in her time.
In the daytime, Simone sat around talking a lot of nonsense and trying to keep the others from work. Gabriel found her quite annoying. However, it became even worse the evening before the group’s departure. While everybody was sitting at the dinner table chatting after dinner, Gabriel was bored and went to the terrace Jacuzzi, hoping for Tilda to join him: They had such a nice time working together, jogging in the mornings, cooking dinner for everybody after having volunteered for that out of fun, and chatting in the evenings. Lying lazily in the Jacuzzi, he could see the people at the dinner table through the terrace windows. However, who came after him, having heard that the Jacuzzi had been switched on, while he was sitting in the hot bubbles was Simone. “It will only take me a minute to undress and join you,” she whispered with a promising smile. Gabriel could not get out of the Jacuzzi quickly enough once she had left to undress in her room. Good thing he had left his bedroom window open. So he ran around the house in the dark night and scrambled in through the window with his drippling wet boxer shorts to avoid Simone on the stairs.
He went to bed early because Tilda and he had decided to do some London sightseeing before catching their return flight to Berlin. They had agreed to start at 6:00 am, using the early-morning village bus to the next, bigger town with railway transportation.
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Angels’ Play
Location:
Heaven above Ticehurst bus stop. Shared-Office Cloud.
Time:
Real-time GMT, Friday, 5 October 2018, 05:57.
Players:
The two angels as before.
Setting:
Both angels are in their cockpit seats as before.
GA
(wildly turning sliders on the telepathy board, which answers only with weak beeps):
Why is it not working? She is totally pissed off with him without any reason.
TA
(laughs at its colleague):
She thinks he did it with Simone in the pool. Don’t you think this is an appropriate reason to freak out?
GA
(indignantly):
But he did not, as you very well know. And Tilda should know as well if the gear were working properly, as it is supposed to do (shaking its telepathy board). Unreliable integration technology. I hate that. Look at her sullen face. That is totally stupid. Can we not do anything?
TA
(shrugging its shoulders):
No, Objective One applies. And this objective forbids any unnecessary meddling from our side. You know what TRINI-T Board says about “stepping down from the cross” and the like. Our charges need to find their own way. (sarcastically) How about talking to each other? Empathy? Communication helps.
Both angels silently watch the bus coming, the two people entering and taking seats in separate rows and then looking out of their windows. The same happens inside the train to London. Both charges stare out of the window into the misty early morning, where it now even starts raining.
TA
(annoyed):
Please contact somebody in charge of the weather. Otherwise, the London trip will be a wet experience, and they do not have good raincoats with them. Plus, we will need the sun for the cows.
GA
(talking to the saints section, asking for support from St. Peter, then turning to its colleague watching the charges):
Gabriel no longer wants to go sightseeing around London with Tilda, as you can see. Now he is pissed off as well. A whole working day lost for an unworthy girl like her to look at a city he has seen a thousand times before. (listening to the cackle in its earphones) OK, weather should improve by now.
TA
(eagerly reading the Script for guidance):
We should start our descent soon and should manipulate the train timetables to get them over to Horsham.
BG is eager for them to see the place where he went to school and where his own sunset experience took place. This will give them something to think about, and it is good for an exegesis on playing-field vision.
GA:
OK, let’s go (sighing). Otherwise, your girl will never talk about cows, the mood she is in right now.
Both angels step down from the cloud and elegantly slide downwards to earth on two rays of sunshine. During the last 300 metres, they apparate as two beautiful cows softly landing on the green grass of the Sussex meadows in the middle of an only mildly surprised cow herd.
Telepathy with Cows
Thinking that he would enjoy a day out with Tilda for London sightseeing. How could he have been so stupid? Gabriel was furious with himself. Already, when they left Ticehurst early this morning, Tilda had looked at him as if he had tortured a little puppy. The journey to London had been awful—both on the bus and on the train: two strangers travelling through foggy and rainy England heartily disliking each other.
Shortly before reaching London Waterloo (Waterloo station), the weather improved a little when the sun looked through the clouds again. As travel information had revealed, Waterloo had no luggage storage, because of terrorist warnings, so Gabriel and Tilda jumped aboard the next train to Farnham, which was already ready and waiting for departure, leaving their luggage with Dorothy, who lived close to the train station. This would at least give them free hands for sightseeing, and they could use the Heathrow airport shuttlebus from Woking later. However, when sitting on the already moving train, Gabriel read from the information screen that it would be taking a tremendously long detour owing to construction sites on the route—travelling through all the countryside of West Sussex before actually going into Surrey again, taking more than double the time that the quick hourly train would have needed for the short distance from Waterloo to Farnham. They were travelling back to where they had just come from! What was wrong with this day?
Adding to this misfortune, the train even came to a complete standstill in a little town called Horsham because something was wrong with the engine. Gabriel could not believe it. Tilda was quite desperate, pressing her little face against the fogged train window. They both stared at the station nameplate “Horsham” on the platform for what they felt were ages without speaking a word. When they finally arrived at Dorothy’s place out of breath, Dorothy told them that they would have to hurry back to the station for the quick train returning them to Waterloo if they wanted to stick to their sightseeing plans. At least the sun was back now in full force, and their mood was a little better, with conversations starting again. Back in London, Gabriel and Tilda wanted first to have a look at Buckingham Palace but missed the entry gate and had to go around the whole place to find it. It was a long distance, but while walking and thus having time for extensive conversation, the reason for Tilda’s bad temper was revealed: “At Ticehurst, there were some nice people. We had a good time. Especially you with Simone.” Gabriel could not believe his ears. “When did I have a good time with Simone?” “Yesterday night, when you amused yourselves in the Jacuzzi.” “Blimey! Obviously, I am not known for my good taste. How can you think that I would be interested in such a shallow person?” Tilda scowled. “I saw her going after you.”
After having clarified this bit of worried half-knowledge, her temper immediately subsided and her mood improved. They chatted away about this and that. For example, they talked about different habits of crossing a street, which vary among cultures of course but also among people. Tilda compared Gabriel to her boyfriend. “Ken would never cross a red light as pedestrian.” Gabriel, on the contrary, would go whenever traffic allowed. Tilda confessed, “I quarrel a lot with Ken about his law-abiding behaviour.” Gabriel did not get a very favourable impression of this boyfriend from her revelations.
“He is not such a nutter as he comes across,” Tilda protested. “Quite the opposite: He is the nicest person I know. He is a family person who likes to stay at home—especially, he does not like air travel, due to the global CO2 footprint. Of course, he’s vegan. Ken and me both live outside the mainstream. Ken dislikes all injustice and exploitation. For example, he supports Anonymous for the Voiceless, an animal rights organisation. At university, we always sat together in the lecture theatre critically appraising everything we were ‘taught’ by our ridiculous professors. Ken joined me in making fun of these so-called experts who were very often pathetically helpless in the intellectual domain. It was good to distance ourselves from the mainstream standard knowledge we were presented with and to join forces to earn our degrees as a purpose for an end. Kennie, who can be quite manipulative when he chooses to, was good at liaising with the professors, massaging their egos and preparing them for goodwill, while I was working on sound reasoning and explanatory powers backstage.” Gabriel raised his eyebrows. He was not convinced that he liked “Kennie” any better now.
Later, Tilda bought Asian seafood for Gabriel, and they had a nice street dinner while watching some kids laugh about a puppet player’s skeleton string puppet, which danced to some music. Gabriel said to Tilda “With music, you can let even the most horrible and frightening thing look harmless and funny.” Unfortunately, they enjoyed the rest of the time so much that they missed the quick train to Farnham. The next quick one was cancelled, and what were they supposed to do as the only solution? Yes, take the snail train again with the endless detour owing to track construction sites to see their luggage again. At that time, first doubts arose in Gabriel about whether they would make their return flight home to Berlin.
These doubts were affirmed when the train stopped again for a long wait owing to construction in the middle of the sunny Sussex hills. Tilda, who had decided to trust Gabriel again, happily chatted away, pointing to things to see from the train windows. While discovering some cows lying lazily in the sun under the Sussex trees in high green grass, she even told Gabriel private things about a walk with her boyfriend: “We have ‘talked’ to some cows, with Ken mooing to them, me using silent telepathy.” She was totally convinced that the cow-to-Tilda telepathy had worked, and Gabriel could only second this view given what they were doing at work all the time without talking about it. Building integral relationships was probably possible across different species.
Though agreeing that telepathy worked, they did not refer to their own telepathy connection but stuck to the cow topic, dreamily meditating about the sleeping cows in the sunshine outside of the train window. However, discussing telepathy with cows proved to be a brilliant trigger to start talking about stuff that really mattered.
Tilda told Gabriel about Rupert Sheldrake. “He is a biologist working on the topic of telepathy. He is a scientist to be taken quite seriously. However, the mainstream scientific community rejects his theories as esoteric.” They talked a lot about the sense and nonsense of glorifying the mechanistic world view of modern science and technology and of discarding everything not immediately complying with the current scientific consensus. Gabriel got interested, and Tilda promised, “I will send you some links to Sheldrake’s YouTube videos.” Then, the train slowly moved away from the cows in the sun—only to get stuck shortly afterwards, completely irrationally, at Horsham again. They endlessly stood there, again staring at the town’s name on the station sign but this time with even more desperation because the chance to get their flights on time diminished by the minute. When they finally reached Dorothy’s place again to fetch their luggage, Dorothy announced that they would never make it in time to Heathrow. She would have provided a lift with her car but was scheduled for an important meeting in London city. So Gabriel and Tilda ran to the station to get the train to Woking, where the airport shuttle would leave. What else could they do but try their luck?
At least, Gabriel was able buy a small bottle of water before jumping aboard the waiting train. They had not drunk anything since the lunch at London and were dried out. It was such a challenge, as everything on this trip. Tilda and Gabriel shared the bottled water amiably, but with the foreboding of the last supper. They bought airport shuttlebus tickets right on arrival at Woking station and joined the crowd of waiting people. Unfortunately, there was an issue with the bus company, and the next bus was cancelled, with about forty people angrily waiting. The bus after was supposed to come in an hour. “Catastrophe!” Gabriel mouthed to Tilda.
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Angels’ Play
Location:
Heaven above Woking train station. Shared-Office Cloud.
Time:
Real-time GMT, Friday, 5 October 2018, 16:51
Players:
The two angels as before. Bede Griffiths (BG).
Setting:
Both angels are in their cockpit seats as before. Bede Griffiths has not yet arrived but should be there any minute. The angels have called for him as an emergency contact.
TA
(curiously whispering):
Say again: Why is the guy a member of the saint section? An English monk who went to India to live with the Hindus? He has not even been beatified by Rome! Why is he a saint?
GA
(patiently explaining):
Because he is the great lover.
TA
(surprised): I beg your pardon? He is a monk!
GA
(confirming):
Exactly. A monk should really know what love is. Father Bede loves others to tears, like St. Romuald.
TA
(puzzled):
And who now is St. Romuald when he is home?
GA
(knowledgeably):
Another monk and saint. Same order as Bede Griffiths. It is said of him that he cried out of love all the time because he felt it so strongly.
TA
(slightly appalled and starting to prepare itself for a weird encounter):
Does Father Bede also cry out of love all the time?
GA
(mildly):
No idea. But there is a nice story from the Benedictine ashram where Father Bede lived in India. They regularly received guests for retreats following the hospitality rule of St. Benedict, and Father Bede was the guest master of the place. Sometimes weird guests arrived. Among them was a guy who was mentally deranged and sang opera arias day and night with a full voice. It was a terrible noise in the retreat place dedicated to perfect silence, and it did not cease. After a few days, everybody was fed up with the guy and wanted to get rid of him.
TA
(very supportive of that):
Sure, I would have killed him right away.
GA
(dismayed):
Tut, tut. The monks and the other guests asked Father Bede to tell the guy to leave. Instead, Father Bede started to cry and told them to love the singer and receive him as they would receive Christ himself. The guy was safe with him, like in the womb of his mother.
TA
(foolishly):
Like in the womb of whose mother?
GA
(explaining):
There are only few human places that are good metaphors for safe spaces. The womb of the mother is one, the loving heart of a friend is another. And Father Bede’s heart was an icon of a safe space for others. He loved others completely and wholeheartedly.
TA
(amazed):
Everybody the same way? Is that possible?
GA
(carefully):
Same approach to everybody, yes. But of course, Father Bede was a human being, with some people being closer to him than others. You could break his heart like that of any other person.
TA
(shaking its head in doubt):
Hmm, that concept of love sounds a bit risky for my taste.
GA
(warningly):
He is coming. Get up from your cloud!
Both angels reverently stand to attention for greeting a saint with a long white beard and amazing blue eyes, an Indian monk sannyasin outfit and a red tika on his forehead. It is Bede Griffiths who has just apparated. He is in emergency mode.
BG
(in a hurry without further introductions and with friendly authority):
Hello, dearies, nice to meet you. I will take over from here. When Gabriel and Tilda miss their flight, this trip will count as a “bad experience.” We do not want that.
TA
(embarrassed):
Father, pleased to meet you. We regret that we could not cope, ourselves, and had to call for you.
BG
(turning into his forty-year-old self of Alan Richard Griffiths exchanging his Indian monk outfit for an Englishman’s casual attire):
No problem. One of you with me. TA is the better driver. Can you maybe look a little more Indian, dear? Indians are excellent car drivers. Will give you more credibility.
BG and TA evaporate, leaving GA behind on the now solitary cloud. GA switches on some music, switches its dashboard to “default monitoring,” lies back in the softness of the white cloud and is soon fast asleep.
Taxi to Heathrow
While Gabriel and Tilda were standing in this huge crowd of waiting people, they felt solidarity and companionship because everybody was in the same horrible situation. Complete foreigners related what the delay would mean to them. For example, there was an elderly lady who was about to miss her daughter’s wedding, and there were many other sad stories.
But then a miracle occurred in the middle of all this gloom and frustration. A very good-looking man of about forty with blazingly water-blue eyes walked through the waiting crowd. Everybody made space while staring at him because he had a kind of friendly but demanding authority.
He directly approached Gabriel of all people, locking eyes as if they had met before. Probably homosexual, Gabriel thought. This impression strengthened when he addressed Gabriel with a voice of loving care: “Nice to meet you, my dear. Are you OK?” Strange question. Far from OK, just like everybody else desperately clutching their bus tickets. The man said, “Please leave it to me and trust me. You are going with me.” He was obviously soft on Gabriel, or else it was a mystery why he had singled him out from the big crowd of people. Tilda raised her eyebrows and grinned. She was slightly jealous while watching Gabriel ask the stranger, “What would it help us going with you? There is no other connection to Heathrow airport.” “Oh, yes, there is,” the man complacently replied, “by car.” “Cars will be too slow on the jammed motorway to reach our scheduled flight time,” Gabriel said but the man just shook this off. “Even if these station officers are not known for reimbursing once-sold bus tickets,” Gabriel tried to convince him, but the stranger only waved away all these considerations with an elegant hand. “Please accompany me to the bus ticket counter.”
Gabriel shrugged his shoulders at Tilda, let chance happen and complied. Inside the station then, he witnessed an amazing scene: The blue-eyed man had their money back from the ticket office in no time, doing it with his mere personality. People simply did what he wanted. Outside again, the man waved to a waiting car where a martialist-looking Indian with tattoos sat in the driver seat and begged Gabriel to fetch Tilda. They also asked the elderly lady with the marrying daughter whether she wanted to join them, but she refused: “Thank you, I will wait for the bus. You will never make it to the airport in time.” Probably, she thought them a bit phony—if not totally mad. They jumped into the car, where the three of them sat in the backseat, and the driver immediately took off.
The blue-eyed man bowed to Gabriel and Tilda and introduced himself: “My name is Richard. I am an Englishman from the North.” Politely, Gabriel answered: “We are coming from a workshop in Sussex and are employees of an international aid organisation.” “Delighted, delighted!” the saintly Richard replied, beaming. He was a bit strange, though. The conversation that he had with the Indian taxi driver was the strangest thing he did : Drives was the name that he called the driver, as if the man were a Latourian actant rather than a human being. “Latourian actant” was Gabriel’s description. Bruno Latour was a French sociologist who thought that not only human beings but all entities in our world should be perceived as acting and as important in understanding the complex network of relationships of everything and everybody with everything and everybody else. Drives was just a neutral way to address an entity as acting—be it a human, an angel or anything else. And Richard gave Drives strict directions about the proper way—even though he, an Englishman from the North, had no idea about traffic hereabouts. Drives, a professional taxi driver from the London area, obediently followed Richard’s directions without discussion.
And the result was stunning: They arrived at Heathrow airport just in time to drop their luggage off at the counter, running to the gate and jumping aboard their flight home. But before that, they thanked Richard, their patron saint, profusely. He was gone with the car—as was Drives— as quickly as he had appeared, probably to make his own flight at another terminal.
“Without this smart blue-eyed Englishman,” Gabriel commented, sitting on the plane next to Tilda with his beer in front of him, “we would never have made it. Everything worked out the best it could have in the end.” Tilda ridiculed Gabriel: “You have problems—an English saint is singularly sent to save you. That is what you believe. I do not know whether I should envy or despise you for this. Mr David, get a grip on the facts! All of this was pure coincidence. You are a naïve man.”
“I am not Dr. Pangloss!” Gabriel grinned. “And who is that when he is home?” Tilda grimaced. “He is a person in French philosophy coming close to your description of a naïve man. In Voltaire’s Candide Dr. Pangloss teaches his innocent pupil Candide unreasonable optimism against all empirical evidence of vice and misery in the world.” Tilda nodded. “The world is a dangerous place. There are no saints, angels or any god coming down, performing miracles, and saving you. Otherwise, why is there all this crap? Either God allows it, in which case he is not good; or, if he must let this happen and cannot help it, then he is not almighty. Pessimism and fear are the only reasonable responses to shit happening all the time. They are preventing you from tumbling into your doom immediately. In fact, fear is the only good thing to rely on. For all the rest, you must rely on your own devices. There is just you. Better be strong. If you are, you will get the upper hand on this world. If you do not take great care and precaution—which you can only do by following your fear—you will soon be the garbage of history. If you do not empower yourself to strong will and perseverance, the others will win and you will be the loser. Simple as that.”
Gabriel was shocked. He had not heard her talking so wildly before. She was right of course: The empirical evidence for vice and misery in this world was overwhelming. How could he argue for the possibility of “everything turning out for the best”? It had proved to be true in their story with blue-eyed Richard, but would it hold against pessimist world views firmly grounded in cruel reality? Tilda shook her head: “How can you seriously argue for the possibility of the world turning out to be good when you actually see how bad everything is?” Gabriel did not give up; the rescue work of blue-eyed Richard was still too vivid in his mind. “This is not a purely academic question,” he said as he scolded Tilda. “In fact, the whole success of our work, for international social development, for a better life on this planet, depends on the answer to that question. Is a better world possible? We need to answer this question affirmatively, or our international aid projects will not make any sense!” “Dreamer,” Tilda said to Gabriel. It didn’t even sound unfriendly. “Think of all the other people probably still standing at the bus stop in Woking waiting for the airport shuttle. Think of that poor mother missing her daughter’s wedding. Why make us of all people happy and leave the rest in the dark? Think of the millions of much-more-miserable, painful fates and experiences of all people stricken with pain and misfortune. Where is your Richard over there?” The options for an integrated world society in future, for the participation of the many voiceless people, for equality, and for justice seemed to be nil, as far as Tilda was concerned.
She ended the conversation here and turned away from Gabriel to look out of the window for the rest of the flight. The whole trip seemed somehow surreal to her and left her a bit overwhelmed.
She had the feeling of having been thrown into a saccharine US TV soap opera full of candy, cake and popcorn, where Mary Poppins and Alice from Alice in Wonderland would be strolling around the corner anytime. Thus, she felt quite content and sobered when the plane finally approached rainy Berlin-Tegel. It was lovely to return to the everyday chatter of Ken, who fetched her from the airport, and to go home on the X9 shuttle bus.
Ken had been among the protesters against the festivities for the third October celebrating the German reunification where French street-art activist JR had shown a 25-metre-high photo collage. Sitting on the bus home, Ken eagerly told her that he had fought against politicians who had tried to capture the show for their personal bravado. Tilda was quite proud of Ken, who had dared to join the protest group protecting the collage. This was finally something real and hands-on after the terrifying mysteries that had happened in England. She smacked herself on the head: Why had she ever started rambling on about cows and telepathy?
Gabriel, however, felt completely different about their journey. He was happy and composed. The journey had been like a story in a novel, full of mystery, miracles and funny adventures. As soon as he reached home, he first took a bath and then took a curious look at the YouTube links that Tilda had sent on Rupert Sheldrake. He was not so convinced when he first watched the videos, though: too much strange talk about morphic fields and the like, for his taste. However, it at least got him interested enough to search for Sheldrake on Wikipedia. He had to find out more about the meaning of the journey. He had to read. His academic training asked for exegesis: Exegesis means an interpretation of a text—not an arbitrary, subjective interpretation but rather a careful excavation and examination of its meaning that is deeply rooted in knowledge and evidence. You could read any situation, any experience, indeed your whole life as text. Everything could turn into a text, becoming subject to exegesis. Maybe the Sussex story was an experience for exegesis.
Gabriel fetched a glass of red wine from the kitchen and settled down comfortably on the sofa in his sitting room, with his laptop next to the wine. Rupert Sheldrake. Here was his Wikipedia entry. And here was the comment on the morphic field book, including the reasons why telepathy works. Gabriel’s eyes widened. The paragraph mentioned the venue where Sheldrake wrote that book. In a Benedictine monastery. Finally, here was something that Gabriel was most familiar with: The Benedictines were a monastic congregation in which he had some friends. That afforded Sheldrake some credit in his eyes—enough at least to read on and give Sheldrake some credibility.
Gabriel learnt that Sheldrake had “an interest in Indian philosophy, Hinduism and transcendental meditation,” that he went to India to work as a plant physiologist at a research institute and that he then focused “on writing A New Science of Life, during which time he spent a year and a half in the Sacchidananda ashram of Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk active in interfaith dialogue with Hinduism. Published in 1981, the book outlines his concept of morphic resonance.” Gabriel curiously clicked on the hyperlink leading to Bede Griffiths. He had never heard that name before. The Wikipedia entry showed an old man with blazingly blue eyes, a long white beard and an Indian sign on his forehead.
The text revealed that Father Bede was an English Benedictine monk who died in 1993, who was raised in Sussex/UK, who converted to Catholicism and who emigrated to India to lead the abovementioned ecumenical Sacchidananda ashram. Raised in Sussex. “Interesting,” Gabriel thought. He read on: “His mother took the children and established residence in a smaller home which she maintained, though she had to find work to support herself and the children. At the age of twelve, Griffiths was sent to Christ's Hospital, a school for poor boys.” Gabriel shook his head. Went to school in a place called Christ’s Hospital. Strange name for a school. He clicked on the Wikipedia link for Christ’s Hospital.
“Christ's Hospital is a public school (English independent boarding school for pupils aged 11–18) with a Royal Charter located to the south of Horsham in West Sussex,” Wikipedia reported. Magically, Gabriel’s eyes were caught by a single word: Horsham. Horsham in Sussex. This was the small town that the slow train with the extra route had to take twice to Farnham yesterday, stopping on its way from Waterloo both times for an overly long time.
The First Google Maps Miracle
Now, Gabriel was curious like a detective. Why had the train taken the detour through Sussex anyway instead of going right from London into Surrey? He opened Google Maps and searched for the train route from Waterloo to Farnham. It was pretty clear: Horsham was way out of the direct train connection between these two places. In fact, Horsham was nearly as far away from Farnham as Waterloo itself, located in a completely different county. Why had the train ended up there twice? It seemed impossible that a train from London Waterloo to Farnham should go through Horsham of all places.
Amazingly, this was the town where Father Bede went to high school and where his spiritual foundations were planted, as Wikipedia reported. “Who has ears shall hear,” Gabriel murmured following a Bible quote that St. Benedict had loved so much. Next, he looked up the maps and timetables of UK train company webpages, looking for an explanation for the detours that they experienced during their train ride. While looking at the UK train services, he found information on the disruptions that had taken place over the past few days. Network Rail called it the Brighton Mainline Improvement Project. “The work will be carried out on several weekends between September 2018 & May 2019,” the webpage said. “Brighton and stations to the west will have trains to and from London, but these will be diverted via Littlehampton and Horsham.”
“There you have it,” Gabriel murmured. He clicked on a further link, this time from the Brighton and Hove Independent, where he found an online article by the newsroom titled “These are the weekends a major Sussex to London railway route will be closed.” Here, the detour through Horsham was announced exactly for the day that he travelled with Tilda. Handy that the train did not break down completely at Horsham, because at that point in time, they could not have yet deciphered why. That evening, Gabriel wrote a strange email to Tilda describing what he had found out:
“It ended with the words ‘world communication,’ so it obviously wants us to go to India for some reason: I have never been there before. It must be loud and confusing. Far too many people. Furthermore, I do not want to go into an ashram.” Gabriel scanned what he had written. “Blimey, the girl must think I am totally daft! Or that I am getting muddy in the brain due to old age. Maybe that’s even true. What am I doing here? ‘Remystification of the world’ following a word from famous German sociologist Max Weber? I need to get a grip and stop this.” However, he could not deny evidence. The lovely London day, which had only started to become lovely when Tilda discovered that he had not muddied their relationship with somebody else, had been a prerequisite of building enough trust between them that she could muster enough courage to talk to him about her telepathy experience with the cows at home in Germany.
The English cows on their train journey that triggered her confession would have gone unrecognised if the train hadn’t stopped for ages just in front of these animals, providing ample opportunity for long-term conversation. Talking about cows and telepathy had been prerequisites for Tilda to mention Rupert Sheldrake and then send these Wikipedia links and for Gabriel to find out that Sheldrake wrote his telepathy book in an ecumenical ashram in India named Shantivanam, hosted by Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths.
Gabriel would just have marvelled about this discovery of a Benedictine connection for a few minutes if he hadn’t stumbled across the town name of Horsham. Remembering that name from twice staring at it for endless periods when the train got stuck at the station of that town twice. These periods were enabled by a most unlikely incident caused by British Railways. On that very day, they had travelled to Southern England, where their two trains were detoured so much out of the usual way by rail construction sites that they travelled to Horsham, a desperate tiny town in the middle of nowhere, where this Bede Griffiths had obviously gone to school in a place called Christ’s Hospital.
“What else can I say but ‘Hello, Mr Griffiths! Nice to meet you’?” Gabriel was stunned.
Maybe it was just his feeble attempt to make himself interesting and attractive to Tilda by pointing at hidden secrets of the spiritual world that only he has access to. How embarrassing could he get? Very strange things happened. The whole journey was a strange experience and had made him really curious as well. Therefore, the last thing he did before closing Wikipedia for the night was scroll down to the reference list and literature recommendations for the Bede Griffiths entry. The monk was obviously a famous mystic, having written an enormous body of religious literature on spiritual life. Gabriel copied and pasted the first literature recommendation into Amazon and ordered Essential Writings, by Bede Griffiths. If Tilda hadn’t talked about telepathic cows, nothing would have ever happened.
Angels and Other Cows
A few days later, Gabriel and Tilda sat in B1’s company cafeteria and stared at the two pages lying before them on the table. Gabriel had copied them for Tilda immediately after Essential Writings arrived. The shock still was deep.
“I opened the book randomly when it came,” Gabriel reported tonelessly. “It fell open on page twenty-seven, where Essential Writings starts with Bede Griffiths’ autobiography, The Golden String.” He knocked on the page. “Please read it out to me.” Hesitantly, Tilda drew the page closer to herself and began to read the words of Bede Griffiths, audibly but under her breath so that the other guests at the cafeteria would not overhear. The opening passage from The Golden String was titled “Sunset in Sussex” and started with a poem by William Blake. Tilda read from page 27:
I give you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
BuiIt in Jerusalem’s wall.
“Nice poem,” scowled Tilda prickly, “if you go for poems.” She read on:
One day during my last term at school, I walked out alone in the evening and heard the birds singing in that full chorus of song which can only be heard at that time of the year at dawn or at sunset. I remember now the shock of surprise with which the sound broke on my ears. It seemed to me that I had never heard the birds singing before, and I wondered whether they sang like this all year round and I had never noticed it. As I walked on, I came upon some hawthorn trees in full bloom, and again I thought that I had never seen such a sight or experienced such sweetness before. If I had been brought suddenly among the trees of the Garden of Paradise and heard a choir of angels singing, I could not have been more surprised. I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then it sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.
These are the words with which I tried many years later to express what I had experienced that evening, but no words can do more than suggest what it meant to me. It came to me quite suddenly, as if it were out of the blue, and now that I look back on it, it seems to me that it was one of the decisive events of my life. Up to that time, I had lived the life of a normal schoolboy, quite content with the world as I found it. Now I was suddenly made aware of another world of beauty and mystery such as I had never imagined to exist, except in poetry.
It was as though I had begun to see and smell and hear for the first time. The world appeared to me as Wordsworth describes it with “the glory and freshness of a dream.” The sight of a wild rose growing on a hedge. The scent of lime tree blossoms, caught suddenly as I rode down a hill on a bicycle, came to me like visitations from another world. But it was not only that my senses were awakened. I experienced an overwhelming emotion in the presence of nature, especially at evening. It began to wear a kind of sacramental character for me. I approached it with a sense of almost religious awe, and in the hush which comes before sunset, I felt again the presence of an unfathomable mystery. The song of the birds, the shapes of the trees, the colors of the sunset, were so many signs of this presence, which seemed to be drawing me to itself.
Tilda looked up and met Gabriel’s excited gaze. “A very familiar visual impression, indeed. We have seen that sunset in Sussex,” she slowly said. “Yes, only without lark, and the red cabrio is not mentioned,” Gabriel eagerly agreed. “It must have been where he saw it or, at least, very close to the place where he saw it, right?” Tilda asked.
“Yes,” Gabriel confirmed, scanning the GPS app on his mobile, “forty miles between Christ’s Hospital and Stonegate, three hours on his bicycle.”
Tilda drew the other page closer. “The editorial remarks, called A Vision of Nature, by Thomas Matus, introducing the sunset scene are also interesting because they use the ideas we are using at work all the time—such as a network model of reality, the world as a complex web of interdependent relationships and so on. Exactly the concepts our work is based upon. And this is definitely not mainstream. Have you ever seen such a perfect fit to our professional approach? Furthermore, the Matus introduction talks about India. Shall I read the passage out, too?” Gabriel nodded. “Go on,” he said.
Tilda read from page 26:
As for scientific thought, Bede Griffiths distinguished between the traditional mechanistic paradigm, on which the edifice of industrial society is based, and the newer vision of reality, the “network” model propounded by such thinkers as David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake, and Fritjof Capra. The metaphor of the universe as a complex web of interdependent relationships enabled the scientist to think of the universe as a whole, with many hidden dimensions, and not just as an assemblage of parts, which could be examined separately and then exploited without concern for their place in the whole. … Finally, half a century after his playing-field vision, he once more saw the same light of the setting sun, heard the same bird songs and the same voice of the soft wind in the trees, and smelled the same fragrances, but now he was in India, at the ashram he had inherited from Monchanin and Le Saux, by the banks of the river Kaveri. He saw nature in its beauty and in its fragile contingency, and above all, he saw his own contingent being both within the cosmic body of the universe and within the Word, the ground of nature, in which he had existed from all eternity.
“From sunset in Sussex to an ashram at border of the river Kaveri: It seems to indicate that we have to go to India. What do you think?” Gabriel slowly concluded. Tilda held his gaze. “What I think is more stunning is that this passage provides the context for the sunset scene with reference to scientific concepts such as complexity and network models. This is your dedicated conceptual approach at work. You have used and developed these concepts throughout your whole life. All your publications are about them. From our own Sussex experience, only the cows do not make much sense. What do they have to do with a sunset in Sussex leading to India of all places? Whatever. I would love to go to India. If literature recommends, this is what we should do. And cows are holy in India. No idea why, though. Cows are not like angels, right?”
“Angels and cows are indeed the same thing!” Gabriel laughed. Enjoying Tilda’s bewilderment, he fetched another scanned page from his bag and placed it in front of her. He had marked a few words with a yellow highlighter for her better understanding: “See what I learnt from Bede Griffiths’ main book The Marriage of East and West, which I got today. It is about the role of cows in the Vedas, one of the main religious reference texts from India.” Tilda groaned but curiously started to read.
The Vedic understanding of the mystery of existence is revealed in the Vedic myth. This myth centres on the Sun as the source of light. But the Sun in the Vedas is not merely a physical body which gives light to the eyes. It is a cosmic power which gives light also to the mind.
The gods (devas) of the Vedas are the “cosmic powers” of St. Paul. … In the theology of St Thomas Aquinas, these are conceived as the angels through whose agency the order of the world is maintained. … The Sun therefore is a god in this sense, the source of intellectual no less than of sensible light. … In the Vedic myth, there is a constant conflict between the light and the darkness. The darkness is represented by Vritra, the primeval monster, who holds back the waters of life and hides the light of the Sun. He represents the primeval darkness of the unconscious, conceived as a rocky cavern in which the cows of the Sun are concealed. The cows themselves, strange as it may seem to us, are symbols of light. They are called the Cows of the Dawn and represent the rays of the Sun, so that the dawn can be described as the releasing of the cows from their pen. But these rays of light are not merely earthly light, they are the light of the mind, and the search of the rishis (enlightened people) in the Vedas is a search for illumination of mind.
“Moo,” Gabriel said to Tilda.
-
Angels’ Play
Location:
Heaven above Berlin. Shared-Office Cloud.
Time:
Real-time GMT, Monday, 8 October 2018, 22:21
Players:
The two angels as before.
Setting:
Both angels are sprawling in their cockpit seats. They are still working overtime.
TA
(yawning and stretching its cracking golden wings, which were today decorated with sharp knifes at the feather tips):
OK, I think we can call it a day and go home. They have now got to the basic literature and are on track. Anything else from your side, or should we have an afterwork drink now?
GA
(stemming its fists in its angelic hips):
According to the Script, we have all sorts of catastrophes coming up. We need to get prepared!
TA
(unconvinced, longing for its evening beer):
What is it?
GA
(reciting from the Script):
Your girl will interpret Gabriel’s spiritual insights in terms of realpolitik.
TA now definitely looks a little alarmed.
GA
(puzzling over the next catastrophe item):
Have you ever heard of the postmodern critique of cultural colonialism and identity politics?
Hearing these words, TA groaningly wobbles back to its workplace.
Dualities Fight Back
Tilda had done a terrible thing, in Gabriel’s eyes. She formally claimed overtime at the HR system of B1. Gabriel was furious. “This is a ‘don’t’ in our kind of job. Overtime is actually part of the job description!” he shouted. “We are not factory workers or petty Babbitts but working for the social good. We do not count hours.” Angrily, Tilda demanded, “I want to know what is wrong with you!” She stood her ground in his office, quarrelling with him about it; nobody could say that she shied away from conflict or could not communicate difficult topics. “I have just applied for a day off. This is an unimportant, formal thing, Mr David.”
He told her that he had never seen any formal overtime notice from any of his staff except the part-time admin people. “Otherwise, our work mission to help people cannot work out—at least if everybody is law abiding. All these nice achievements of modern labour-union regulations are not for us. They only keep you from your mission that you fulfil with your work. Some of us—including me—would even pay money to do their job. What a shame. Have you never heard about dedication to your professional vocation?”
“Sorry, but such an idiotic statement can only stem from a person born with a golden spoon in his mouth. It is an interesting specimen of human stupidity and misinterpretation,” Tilda heatedly answered. “For you, Mr David, it is all very well to relinquish your legal rights as employee and speak of dedication and vocation instead. You earn about five times what I earn, and you can take holidays whenever and as long as you want, in contrast to me.” “That is not true,” Gabriel protested. But Tilda was in full gear: “You are the last person in this world to give me this shit about morals. You are the last person who can speak about these things. You may say nothing about my work ethics. You are privileged. And with this, you have to relinquish any right to be in a position to tell me off like that!” Gabriel could not believe his ears.
“I am your boss, Mrs Toelz. Of course, I can assess your performance. And I see and understand your situation. Why have I ‘relinquished any right to talk to you just due to my so-called privileged position,’ as you say? I do not understand.” Tilda got fundamentalist now: “I could only accept to be told off by a person of my own kind: young, female, dependent, in precarious work conditions. From you, this is inacceptable and even unethical. Indeed, it is annexation of the worst kind. It is hubristic, colonialist and invasive.”
This seemed to go political. Gabriel’s suspicion was confirmed by Tilda’s next words: “If you want to talk about white people, be a white person, Mr David. Otherwise, your statement will be compromised by your outsider perspective. It will be invalid by source. If you want to talk to me about work ethics for people in precarious work situations, be in that position yourself. Otherwise, get lost!”
Identity politics. Gabriel was gobsmacked. He had read about cultural appropriation that white authors were accused of when trying to write about POC characters, or “crippling up,” writing as an able-bodied person about disabled people and somehow unjustly benefiting from it.
He looked at Tilda. “Mrs Toelz, please think about your viewpoint. If our access to the world is principally corrupted—be it by elites, dark powers or any other antagonists that stand between us and the world—how then can we say anything at all? That is bad philosophy.”
She went to his bookshelves, fetched a book and waved it at him. It was Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. “Here. This guy is of the same opinion I am, and he is famous. The baseline is, whoever is human will recognize the world under the condition of a human being. The fly will recognize the world with the cognitive and epistemic apparatus of a fly. Human beings will recognize the world with the apparatus that makes us human beings. Nobody shares exactly my constitution and apparatus, namely being Tilda. Therefore, the appearance of the world for me is totally different from yours. This means if we do not see the same thing, we cannot share knowledge, we cannot talk to each other.”
“This is called relativism,” Gabriel patiently explained, “but you totally misconstrue Kant.” He looked for a second book and gave it to Tilda. “Kant searched for the basic apparatus that all human beings share and that distinguish us—let’s say—from the apparatus of the flies. For Kant, this shared conditio humana is not only cognitive and epistemic; it also has a moral component, as shown in his Critique of Practical Reason. That we share this basic access to the world with all other people is the grounding for emancipatory equality concepts and social justice.”
Tilda looked stubborn. “Read that second book beside the first,” Gabriel said as she pointed to Tilda’s hands, “then you can see what you are doing when you maintain that only Black people can recognise anything about Black people, only disabled people can say anything about the disabled and so on. You do just the opposite of what you want. You rob us of exactly what you want to shelter – the conditio humana: the condition for our equality, our dignity as fellow humans.” Tilda felt that she could not argue anymore with two books of Kant in her hands, which made her the more furious: “Elites invade what normal people think and say. These elites are corrupt, and you are a representative of the elite, Mr David. You are doing wrong everywhere: in epistemology, life objectives and morals!” With this, she stormed out of his office.
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Ahrweiler, P. (2024). A Vision of Nature. In: Angels and Other Cows. Artificial Intelligence, Simulation and Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60401-0_1
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