The Wave Theory of Angels

by Alison Macleod

  ‘Not by His sacrifice on the Cross; not by the grace of God at our moment of death?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you not believe, as your Arab did, that Jesus Christ was in fact Christos-Angelos, a ‘‘deified’’ or ‘‘angelicized’’ man and not Our Lord incarnate?’

  ‘With respect, Avicenna was not Arabian, but Persian. He was born in the province of Bukhara. Arabic was his second language.’

  ‘Answer the question. Is it true you believe Christ to have been a deified, or an angelicized, man?’

  ‘It is true.’

  ‘Might we each then become a Son of God? Might you, Giles of Beauvais, become the Son of God?’

  It was too dangerous, even for the impetuous likes of Giles of Beauvais. He started to panic. The bishop could hear him losing control of his argument. ‘The question is specious. You yourselves have read Avicenna. In fact, you must avow he was all you read until – ’ He would regret his haste.

  ‘Until . . .’

  ‘Until you realized the implications.’

  ‘Which you will now delineate on our behalf.’

  Despair made him reckless. ‘You realized it is within the reach of mortal man to contact the divine, himself, within, on the plain of the alam al-mithal, the Imaginal World.’

  ‘Please, Giles. Speak plainly. Do.’

  The sarcasm aroused the young man. His tone grew peevish. He was – the bishop smiled – an angry child after all. ‘I tell you only what you know already. Avicenna was your trusted authority until you suddenly understood the dangerous import of his philosophy: that Christians need no longer passively await the grace of salvation; that the Church might no longer be sole mediator between man and God; that the apparently base elements of this world of matter would no longer merit our contempt, but rather our attention; that its details are, potentially, the language, the very syllables, of divine revelation; that revelation is forever unfolding, uncontainable by Church or scripture; that God is not above His Creation but indivisible from it; that each of us, whether we know it or not, renews Creation moment by moment; that each of us therefore might yet discover our innate divinity – might yet say ‘‘I am God’’ even as we humbly know we are no more, and perhaps no less, than a mote of dust in the unstoppable light.’

  Amazingly, the tribunal had laughed. The bishop could hardly credit it. The records indicated that the assembly had to be reminded of the solemnity of the proceedings.

  Paris. This was Paris, the bishop recalled. Gathered here was the intellectual elite of Christendom. Who among them would dare register more than urbane amusement? Who among them had the moral rectitude?

  Yet there had to have been a certain confusion. The authorities would have been thrown from the grooves of habit and precedent. And this failure of readiness must have been Giles of Beauvais’s single stroke of luck.

  In the bishop’s experience, heretics who had admitted much less, who had been far less coherent in their testimonies, had been sentenced to torture, to unspeakable privation. Hadn’t Pope Innocent’s bull provided unambiguous guidance? Giles of Beauvais, however, was sentenced only to lock-up within the university walls. Furthermore, when he escaped three months later, he was neither pursued nor excommunicated. The bishop suspected Aquinas had, privately, been impressed. He himself found the man’s pride repugnant.

  Which did nothing to diminish the threat of secularity in his own diocese. The faithful grew increasingly distracted. There was little choice but to co-opt the heretic’s singular talent in the employ of scripture. There was no choice but to bargain for his services; to flatter his monstrous pride; to puff on the fire of his vanity. There was no choice, quite simply, because l’Ymagier gave him no choice. He had made the bishop ask. No other imaginator in the service of the Church was his equal. And the bishop’s cathedral could have no rival.

  The bishop was tall, strongly built. He came from peasant stock in Picardy. As a boy, the yoke on his back had been as easy as a thought in the mind of another. He had tough hands, an effortless stamina, also an agility in the material world rarely seen in clerics. He understood the value of land, and the power of a Church that could afford to use land merely in the display of vaulted space.

  As for faith, it was an abstraction he could appreciate in others but would fail to know in himself, a failure he would guard even from his confessor. He understood loyalty. It would serve. He understood Church law and hierarchy as a necessary expression of that loyalty. And because of his secret failure of faith, his concern for its tenets, not surprisingly, would grow and grow. At the age of only thirty, William of Grez – the son of a peasant farmer famed for his cabbages (the active ingredient in a local hangover remedy) – became bishop of Beauvais.

  This much he knew: he would not have indulged the young Giles of Beauvais in the manner of Aquinas. This he also knew: had he been a one-time Arabist and heretic, he would have answered the prelate when approached by the chapter; he would not have drawn a bishop’s attention. He would not have made a bishop wait.

  Now the daughter of l’Ymagier, it would seem, was dead. Healthy one day. Cold as clay the next. There were rumours in Beauvais. The bishop was not unaware, nor could he repress a wan smile.

  It was Father Joseph who’d found it difficult to contain his emotions.

  Summoned before His Grace, the old man was peremptorily informed that he, Father Joseph, would offer up a requiem mass for his deceased parishioner Christina at the new cathedral of St Pierre. Her ‘bier right’ was to be invoked. She was to be given all rites; the Offices of the Dead were to be performed in full. All trade in the town was to be suspended for the day. The family, especially the father, were under no circumstances to feel alone in their grief. Did Father Joseph understand? Under no circumstances. Regarding the mass itself, the diocese, he was told, would spare no expense.

  Bewildered, Father Joseph faltered to his knees and kissed the bishop’s gold-stitched hem.

  9

  Even as matter is frozen light, so is time past a memory of a future awaiting release.

  Look again at the bishop’s rising cathedral in 1284. Here, space, typically the absence of anything, becomes a dizzying force in itself, a vast longing, a rogue wave of light caught between those great expanses of translucent surface. Even then, between the cathedral’s striving ribs and vaults, in its vertiginous invocation of light, lay the phantom architecture of Fermilab, a sixteen-storey ‘Research Lab on the Energy Frontier’, conceived by a man who was both physicist and sculptor; an American inspired by a visit to the cathedral at Beauvais.

  Here at Fermilab, in a hinterland that lies far beyond the secular faith of Chicago’s soaring skyline, physicists chase, among other things, the elusive ‘God particle’, or, more humbly perhaps, the principle that will mediate the mysterious indeterminacy of the microscopic realm with the bricks and mortar of the macroscopic world; a principle that will reconcile the ephemera of quanta, leptons and quarks with the mass of big bangs, beetroot and the bodies of great-uncles.

  Thirty feet beneath the prairie, beams of protons and anti-protons are fired around a vast particle accelerator, a ring four miles in circumference. Every year, thousands of students come, pilgrims, to observe for themselves the winking reality of the world’s underface; to follow in faith the movement of particles, insubstantial as the trajectories of angels.

  Giant magnets force the two beams to collide. The magnets must be kept cold, −267 degrees Celsius. Cold beyond imagining. In one second a proton can speed around that ring 50,000 times. In ten seconds it will have travelled two million miles. In the debris of the collisions, particles are born that have not been known to the universe since the time of the Big Bang. Some of these particles will exist for less than a billionth of a billionth of a second. Yet finally, fleetingly, they are observed: dancing filaments of light on a phosphor screen, more transient than a dream.

  Imagine. You stand on the threshold of the Energy Frontier. In the distance you see it. Twin concr
ete towers, like praying hands, spanned by a two-hundred-foot wall of glass and a vast atrium. (Twin towers, in crumbling chalk, spanned by a mighty rose of a window.) Walk in. Across the broad, light-filled foyer (through the transept). You see two young girls watching an elevator door open and close, open and close. A fault. No one is pushing the buttons. They giggle nervously to each other.

  It’s a late Sunday afternoon, and the place is dead. You step inside the elevator, and the girls squeeze in beside you as you push the button for the fourteenth floor – in reality, the thirteenth. Odd that even a world-class research lab pays its respect to superstition.

  You stare at the ceiling, uncomfortable in the company of children who observe you so openly. The ceiling is simulated stained glass. Plastic, but vaguely funereal none the less. You watch the numbers overhead come to life, one by one. Rise up.

  They tell you their father works here. He’s promised them a treat because it’s a Sunday and they’re getting bored. He hasn’t forgotten. You too approach his lab. You hesitate at the door, then walk in.

  For though you might not know it yet, you are the privileged Observer. You enter at will.

  *

  During his tribunal at Paris, Giles of Beauvais argued – passionately? ridiculously? – for the ‘desiring mind’ as a physical force within Creation.

  Wishful thinking? Overblown mysticism?

  Try this. For Giles of Beauvais’s ‘desiring mind’ or ‘acts of ardent imagining’ read quantum theory’s ‘Observer Effect’.

  The Observer Effect refers to the elusive subatomic interaction that somehow lifts reality out of virtuality, or ‘event’ from a smear of quantum probabilities. It is triggered, ostensibly, by the act of measurement – or, more simply put, by the act of observation.

  The Observer is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the measuring device: a microscope, let’s say, or a tracking chamber in a particle detector. Here quantum flux meets the solid world and is instantaneously flat-packed into reality.

  That’s the story – and also the least unsettling, philosophically, of our options.

  Yet why should the location of newborn reality be the microscope or the core of the tracking chamber? What is unique, in the material sense, about either of these locations or indeed any measuring device? We might just as easily point to, say, the computer processor where data is first uploaded or the computer screen, where particle showers are first glimpsed in delicate tracks of phosphorescence.

  For that matter, why the computer screen and not the Observer’s own retina, where light alchemizes into meaning at the back of the seeing eye? Could this not be where quantum flux gives way to the unquestionably real?

  Mystery yields only to greater mystery.

  Move on, from the eye of the Observer (yours, for instance)

  to the mind of the Observer (yours again), a reality as physical as any other. Think of the initiatory light of the concentrated mind; of a mind that cannot be separated, fundamentally, from the stuff of the world it beholds. For what is the quickfire of thought but a residue of an incalculable light that is fifteen billion years old? Can such a heat be left out of the equation?

  Listen. ‘There is mind in every electron.’ Listen. ‘The action of consciousness has the physical consequence of determining the subsequent states of a system in a manner that corresponds to the concept of will.’ And even: ‘If the observer is emotionally involved in the outcome of the experiment and particularly wants one result to come out rather than another, there may be a corresponding shift in the probability distribution.’

  It sounds like madness. Or magic.

  Back in the Sunday quiet of the lab, you’re watching something pulsing, alive, in an assistant’s hand. You squint. He takes it into his other hand as he adjusts a dial. A frog. An ordinary frog here in a place of boosters, injectors and superconducting magnets. Surprising, but not entirely unfamiliar. For within the frog that once danced in the trick hollow of l’Ymagier’s loaf of bread is the green memory of this, this other frog, alive now and, understandably, jumpy.

  The assistant places it gently in a metal cylinder and tells you, as he does so, that they’re using a magnetic field of sixteen tesla. ‘That’s a million times more powerful than the earth’s field.’ His boss turns around. No, your eyes do not deceive you. It is l’Ymagier – in cargo trousers and rolled-up shirtsleeves. He sees you for the first time: a seemingly casual observer with a pamphlet and map in one hand. A visitor on the self-guided tour for off-season visitors. He smiles an apology for his overexcited children. ‘Poor frog,’ he says. ‘They never tire of this one.’

  L’Ymagier adjusts the apparatus. His hands fly over a computer keyboard. His assistant commentates. ‘It’s simple really. We distort the electron orbits in the frog’s atoms. That generates a tiny electric current which generates a magnetic field in the opposite direction from the main magnet. The repulsive force pushes them apart, and the frog, as you can see, gets caught in the middle.’ And suddenly you do see: the confused frog is suspended in mid-air, six feet off the ground.

  The girls clap, and you find yourself wanting to do likewise. L’Ymagier shines, like a child himself.

  ‘Do me now,’ cries the elder girl. ‘Me now, Dad. I want to float, too.’

  ‘I’ve told you, Tina. You’re too big.’

  ‘But I want to!’ As if this changes everything.

  And, somewhere, perhaps it does.

  10

  In the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, laid out upon her bier, Christina is cold. Were you to lift her hand from her breast, you’d feel the dead weight of her waxen fingers. You’d see her nails are blue. It’s true, the chapel, one of eight which radiate off the choir, is chill with evening dew, for the cathedral of St Pierre is still without even temporary doors.

  Given the bishop’s interest in the girl, the priests have chased out the pilgrims who routinely bed down for the night on the stone flags in the choir – the nave has yet to be built. Tonight, some will sleep in open graves under the summer sky. Others will steal into vineyards and crush grapes in their sleep.

  As recently as Thursday, Christina herself walked through the cathedral. She scanned the heights for the speck of her father, reckless in the scaffolding, a zealot with a chisel. She found, as usual, not only pilgrims, but also children playing ball, a couple courting, townsmen exercising their dogs, a falconer training bird to glove, gossiping women, and an array of miscellaneous merchant stalls that rivalled the daily market. She loved the careless hubbub of it all. She loved the sight of her father swinging madly from a harness on high.

  He was putting the final touches on the choir’s central keystone: a cluster of nine angelic heads. Three groups of three running around the edge of the stone. A design commissioned by the bishop himself.

  The hair shone in a glory of gold leaf. Each mouth was open in praise. No, l’Ymagier had been told, there could be, would be, no tenth. (‘In the very centre,’ he’d proposed. ‘To make the best possible use of the space.’) A tenth angel would ruin not only the harmony of the bishop’s composition, but also l’Ymagier’s own chances of future employment on the Île-de-France. Was that abundantly clear?

  Far below, Christina called as she did at the end of every day. L’Ymagier’s supper was ready.

  As she walked back up the centre aisle, the approaching solitude of Sunday evening and the profound loneliness of the chapel would have been unimaginable in the afternoon din of saddle makers, soap boilers, glaziers, glovers, tongue scrapers, tooth pullers, ear pickers, cheese sellers, wool combers, crystal gazers, relic traders, moneychangers, diviners casting entrails and barber-surgeons bleeding clients according to their charts. ‘Disaster,’ they might have said to her had she stopped to listen. Dis-aster. Literally, trouble in the stars.

  How might a girl of twenty unfix the action of the stars? By moving beyond her sphere.

  This is the wisdom, for soothsayers are as suspicious of change as the rest of us. They know ver
y well that it comes at a cost.

  I remember rain. Heavy, though it hardly lasted. And me marking the tree with the hive. The drip of branches. Water running down the bridge of my nose. Something just ahead. A muddy shoulder, a flash of white arm behind a dead trunk, a pair of suspicious eyes.

  It is true. I had a young girl’s weakness for abandoned things. Was I not reared on my father’s solitary grief? Did I not already understand the frost and fire of a spirit blasted by loss? Outcast, outlaw, wood demon, wandering player. That first day, I didn’t know what you were.

  Rain, yes. Wood anemones underfoot. Something ahead, then nothing. You, like some trick of the light, and Marguerite, a lifetime before, calling, calling. I didn’t turn back. I outran her easily. Past the quarry, up the hill, through the vineyards and into the wood. Then a flash of heat through the core of me. And suddenly the hive, as if I’d been led.

  L’Ymagier tested the effigy in his arms. Quite light. Surprisingly light. Athalie would have no trouble.

  Hers was the door with the small painting over the lintel: an unblinking eye in the middle of a flaming heart. The old sign – the rebel sign – of ecstatic contemplation. In the town she was thought a gypsy, a necromancer. She allowed it. Relied on it even.

  On the Saturday she’d found her old friend on her doorstep. ‘I know, Giles. I heard. I am so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ he said. His voice was strange. From within, her grown son, Ahmed, watched through a wall of white muslin as l’Ymagier pressed Athalie’s hand in his. ‘Don’t be.’

  She felt the back of her neck go cold, but she said, ‘Come in, Giles. You are welcome. Ahmed, it’s Monsieur l’Ymagier.’

  Inside, everywhere, the necessary evidence of her trade. Jars of mumia, a youth potion made from the boiled fat of the dead – noblemen, mostly, who’d wanted to escape the bite of the worm. In a mortar on the table, pulverized diadochos, a powder to evoke forms of the deceased when sprinkled into water. On shelves overhead, diverse phials – venena sterilitatis, abortion drinks – and rows of sinciput candles made from the worms of the grave, candles to cast unholy visions.