The Bluestocking 2022-23

the mosaic above me, angels sound their trumpets as the seventh seal is opened; plague spills forth into the world, a tide of blackened flesh and lost teeth, god’s judgment made palpable. The cathedral nibbles at the corners of my mind. Sculptures and stitchings of sheep watch me with wet human eyes. Amongst the chaos, they crowd timidly behind their shepherd, who I think might be Jesus. They look up at him desperately. Is this god? ᕯ When I think of God, I think of angels. Not of the rosy-cheeked, haloed sort, but of the ophanim and the seraph; the kind with a thousand, bulging eyes that rotate on wheels of galgallin, with griffin’s heads protruding from bushels of feathery wings. The kind that command you to be not afraid, because, otherwise, you would be. Eldritch horrors that exist beyond our comprehension, that thrive amongst animal terror, that thwart our desperate attempts to explain the unexplainable. I cram the body of Christ in my mouth, and it tastes like blood and bile and ash. God is fear made divine. As I stood there, in that cathedral, I felt it: I felt the suffering of millions. The desper ation that lurked in every carving, every brushstroke, every tile of that mosaic above me. The buzzing of locusts filled my ears. I hear, in the distance, animals screaming, the pounding of His hammer on their flesh. The noise sounds too human. Is it an animal that cries, or a person? What’s the difference? The cathedral ate well that day. It leeched that hind-brain, caveman terror from me, parasitic. It reduced me to an animal—to a lowly lamb, so desperate for a shepherd. It reduced me to cathedral food. ᕯ We are cathedrals; bodies are cathedrals. Hulking structures stuffed with the ornate craftsmanship of a million organisms, our mere existence an act of worship to the forces of our creation. With eyes instead of stained glass windows and flying buttresses for ribs. We stumble against each other, arrogant, ignorant arcs of flesh like peeling paint, like silhouetted walls set ablaze from within, a thousand candles flickering with a thousand prayers sent up to heaven, so inhuman that I hesitate to even call us such things, and I think, for a moment, that I understand how artists were able to conceive of the ophanim and seraphim, because I think that might be us. ᕯ I stand in front of a mirror. An animal peers inside, and an angel stares back. The ani mal fears the angel because it does not understand; it bows and grovels and promises in its wordless language that it will build a cathedral in the angel’s honor. The angel watches with its countless, bulging eyes, and eats and eats and eats. I stand between them, both cathedral and cathedral food, and I weep.

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