Gabriel

If only they were all like the Annunciation. A receptive soul thrilling to obedience with modest eyes downcast and affirmation even in the hesitation. Sandro got that one right: all graceful curves and expressive language in every line. He’d been more than a little surprised at both her submission and her understanding. Of course it’s a bit easier when the cloak he wears is impossible beauty and austere elegance. All eyes, he terrifies and too much disguised they barely hear and rarely see. Today it is a garrulous old woman with a faint scent of urea wrapped about her like her salt-stained robe.

Clarity is so difficult for mortals. Nerve endings cause much of the clouding – and no wonder! The continual stimulus of smell and taste and sight and touch and sound would overwhelm even the highest of the spirit-bodied. Add to that the bruising sense of accelerating entropy piling on the aging and no wonder the poor creatures lose their fragile longing for the revealed and wrap themselves in an affirming narrative.

And, of course, there’s revelation and then there’s revelation. This is one of the latter sorts. Finding out that you’re an especially chosen one is certainly fearsome, but also gratifying and ennobling. What most of humanity needs is a little bit of unpleasant self-knowledge, not unexpected high and noble destiny. But both kinds of announcement are part of Gabriel’s job and this is one that has its pleasures. There will be no elegance in it, and Gabriel will definitely not be recognized. His audience of one will not be going on to perform a service to all mankind but will, at least momentarily, see himself and then Gabriel will savor the flinch. The crushed head here will not be a basilisk or the midgard serpent or a dragon but merely the conceit of one aging sailor.

Gabriel knows how hard it is for humans to see themselves. But sometimes he wonders how some can be quite so oblivious. He has witnessed that struggle many times. A young maiden uncertain of her bread-making skills could barely understand herself as an image-bearer much less as the redress of Eve. David was still a bit stunned that despite his murderous adultery, neglect of parenting, and other idiocies he still was, well, David. Likewise, the Captain firmly refused to see or be seen, hiding behind a misty cloud of salt spray from the albino cachalot’s tail and Ado recast her own degenerating salt as noble longing for bread and table.

This one is especially fuddled. He thinks himself the hero. Not just a hero, but the hero. Conqueror of the ages. All his life seems to him one great journey from greatness to greatness. Huge labors bravely undertaken and daring adventures boldly accomplished. Absurdly, he reimagined losing a sandal, the rape of a widow, his friend killing some giants, mistakenly fighting his own allies, and marrying a girl of unusual talents to somehow add up to a heroic journey. When his wife protected him from fire, taught him the secret weakness of the warriors, brewed the potion, and tricked the usurper to his death, and when his lyre-player drowned the wicked enchanted song, and when the witch-nymph purified his ship from evil, he thought it all to his credit and commissioned a poem to sing of his glory. Worse yet, this self-delusion so confused his sense of where the good in his life came from that he contracted a second marriage in defiance of his vows. When his first wife murdered the second as well as both of their sons, he thought himself tragically betrayed and not getting his just due.

Here he lies now, in the shade of his great ship, old and lonely and obsessed. Gabriel approaches as a beggar ready to speak in clear and ringing Greek, voice a musical contrast with the stained old robe this woman-shape wears: “It wasn’t you Jason. Don’t be surprised if this rotten fabrication collapses and you plummet to the eighth circle. If once you open those bleared lids inward you would have seen it. The story is all there”