Death makes angels of us all
& gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven's
claws

-- Jim Morrison ¹

The German poet Rilke wrote about the hard to grasp parts of life, what he
termed the Too Big, especially how to live in a world marked by death. He
tried to bring such knowings to words in a way that created a widened space
that was about the oneness of life and death. What Rilke called the "work of
the heart" posits angels as about living without certain belief and truth. In
essence, Rilke's "assenting Angels" are about the paradox of affirming from
negation, about overcoming the lack of hope that comes when life is "teach-
ing its most desperate lessons." For Rilke, the test of living was an alchemy
that used pain and suffering in order to earn hope in a hard world. His are
terrible angels, annihilators of images we have built up "fondly and lazily,"
in our delusions of some higher order. Shatterers, great undeceivers, this is
"the angelic terror" where we have to learn to live without redemption, no
longer sheltered by the ruins of Christianity. Here the angels are about say-
ing yes to life in the face of disaster, sickness, murder, cruelty and senseless
death.

Sixty some years after Rilke's terrible angels is Benjamin Jones' papier
mache AIDS Angel. Names cover the angel's body in a roll-call of account-
ability for governmental neglect and ignorance. "Fuck George Bush" screams
across the angel's belly. Slash marks and names track the dead. Dollar and
cent signs on the angel's feet underscore the fiscal bottom line. Reminding

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