Uttering angels

Two things happened today. I finished Steven Hall’s book Maxwell’s Demon. 

My friends shared a link with me forReachy mini, your AI companion.

I didn’t like the latter half of the book but some of the ideas within caused my brain to fire in weird and interesting ways. One of which made me want to pitch the droid into the sea.

Maxwell’s Demon gets into some heavy bible theory. I’m not religious, but I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of angels. 

If God is the engineer, angels are the energy that makes everything happen. Between the command on high and the world as we see it is the machinery of creation. Angels are messengers, which sounds kind of menial (postmen, secretaries) until you remember that everything right down to cellular function and right up to planetary movements can be defined as information moving. If angels are messages in motion, then they are the business end of matter.

Maxwell’s Demon argues that angels are letters. God formed the first alphabet and the angels at the same time because they were the same thing. In speaking words that formed all of creation, God spoke both creation and the angels. There are some lovely lines of reasoning drawing from word usage in holy texts that suggest the very words we use are made up of angels.

And I sort of loved this when I read it. Not because I believe in angels but because I believe that writing, and creativity more generally is a powerful magic. A magic that we come by scientifically due to our enormous, silly brains that allow us to reason and reflect on ourselves and the world around us.

I’ve written before about how the very best of what we are is our ability to look around us and reflect on what we see. When we create a drawing or a sentence in response to all this, we are reaching out with one finger to touch not the reaching finger of God as in Michelangelo’s ceiling but the world in all its wonder. 

Our attempts to interpret matter, however inept, is a profound gift. Our utterances give the world back to itself. 

“I am,” says everything.

“I see you,” we say.

In the moment of our noticing, we see the world stretch out to us. 

In the moment of speaking, we reach back. And in the reaching, angels.

How awful then to imagine outsourcing that.