{"id":23,"date":"2026-05-22T20:30:21","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T20:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=23"},"modified":"2026-05-22T20:30:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T20:30:21","slug":"on-astonishment-and-angels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=23","title":{"rendered":"On astonishment and angels"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

On 28 September 1915, my hero, the Swiss-Scottish author Blaise Cendrars, had his right arm blown off during the Second Battle of Champagne while serving as a corporal in the French Foreign Legion. Friends claim that his arm was only partly severed by German machine-gun fire and that he finished it off himself with a trench knife. He wrote about his experiences in the war in the books I Bled<\/em> and I Killed<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Read more Why Iran is right to be paranoid<\/a><\/p>\n

In his 1945 memoir, The Astonished Man<\/em>, Cendrars recalled the death of one of his fellow soldiers. Hit by a sudden round of artillery fire, the man rose into the air and disappeared before him. That was when Cendrars became \u201cThe Astonished Man\u201d.<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/p>\n

My latest novel, Boyhood<\/em>, is my seventh and I have become accustomed, but never reconciled, to the magical process of writing and the encounter, time after time, with the writer beyond the writer. For a long time, I misunderstood William Blake\u2019s assertion that he wrote prophetic books. I thought that he meant books that predicted the future. What he really meant was books that are spoken out of the air. Charles Baudelaire, too, spoke about this \u201cother\u201d that we encounter in the process of writing, this presence that seems to be co-creating alongside us. Philip K. Dick, Arthur Rimbaud, William Butler Yeats, all of them referenced the speaking of something beyond the self in the act of writing. What I have come to realize is that, through the writing of it, this other takes its place in our lives as much as it operates in our fictions.<\/p>\n

Boyhood<\/em> revolves around a group of remote viewers who work for the secret service in Northern Ireland, monitoring paramilitary activity. When a young boy is murdered, they realize their true calling as angels, and as the guardians of boyhood. Midway through writing it, I traveled to New Zealand\u00a0 and on the plane I got talking to an air hostess from Georgia \u2014 Georgia in the Caucasus, Black Sea Georgia \u2014 who told me her name was Tamar. She asked me if I would buy her some chocolates for the way back. I said that I would. I immediately forgot all about it, until I was on the flight back home and I spotted her once again. She was cradling a little baby boy in her arms, walking it round the cabin, kissing it and talking to it. She came over to me and said, seeing as you are a writer, I have something to recite to you. \u201cProse poetry,\u201d she called it. Then she recited, off by heart, in Georgian, some lines from a book I had never heard of, The Knight in the Panther\u2019s Skin<\/em>, by Shota Rustavelli. It was beautiful and incomprehensible. Then she gave me her phone number. She wrote it down on a piece of paper alongside the name of the book and the author. \u201cCall me,\u201d she said. \u201cCall me once you have read The Knight in the Panther\u2019s Skin<\/em>.\u201d But I knew that I would never call her. I knew that whatever happened after that had to work its way out in the book, because I had come face-to-face with one of the angels of Boyhood<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I got home and searched out a copy of The Knight in the Panther\u2019s Skin<\/em>. It turns out that it centers around a quasi-angelic figure named Tamar: Queen Tamar. Tamar had given me a book in which she figured as an angel. I sat down and wrote Tamar into the ongoing narrative, an air hostess that one of the characters meets on a flight to and from New Zealand to attend a book festival there. I had no idea what her role might be, and as she interacted with the characters I had to hold fast to my faith, as she threatened to derail it completely, by seducing one of the book\u2019s other characters and generally behaving in the most fantastic and unlikely of ways. And then she revealed herself as the guardian angel of an unloved character who had gotten himself into serious trouble:<\/p>\n

\u201cAndrew Lethal rushes down the stairs and crosses the road to the park where the birdwoman waits for him in the rose garden. It is Tamar. The birdwoman is Queen Tamar stood among the roses. Tamar, Andrew Lethal says, Tamar, what are you doing here? I thought you were a bird, I thought you were a tall bird, rising up from the flowers, when I first saw you, he says. I\u2019m your guardian angel, Queen Tamar says. Easy to mistake for a bird, she says. Flight and consciousness, she says. Flight and consciousness are the same thing, she says. Wow, Andrew Lethal says. Exactly, he says. They are as far as we can go, he says. In terms of ingress, he says. It\u2019s normally one or the other, Queen Tamar says. Except in the case of angels, she says. Which means that I am always with you. And Andrew Lethal starts to cry, stood there, in the rose garden, at the revelation of his guardian angel. Here, she says. I have something for you. She hands Andrew Lethal a file with the word \u2018Welt\u2019 on it. Everything is forgiven, she says. In the end. And she puts her wings around her little boy, stood there, shaking, in Tollcross Park, in the rose garden, in the east end of Glasgow, on this bright new morning.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

When I was young, my father would tell me that an angel touched me on the head when I was born. As soon as I was old enough, he told me that I had been adopted, that he and my mom had picked me out in a cot, in a foster home, and that when he had reached down towards me, I had reached up and wrapped my hand around his finger. That was when he knew I was the boy for him, he said.<\/p>\n

Read more Alasdair MacIntyre was right all along<\/a><\/p>\n

I have always thought of my adopted status as a gift. And my father as a fisher of men. It meant that I could do anything, be anyone. There was no example for me, no one that looked like me, nothing to inherit but the love of my parents. Years later, I read about a thing called a bastard wing, an odd evolutionary development in birds where they grew a smaller secondary wing that allowed them to fly even higher.<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every time that I look at Blaise Cendrars\u2019 old pock-marked and booze-riddled face on the cover of his Selected Writings<\/em>, published by New Directions in 1966 with a preface by his big fan Henry Miller, I want to use up my own body. Didn\u2019t Antonin Artaud say something about how it\u2019s the state of your body, in the end, that figures the final judgment? Has this body died from a surfeit of life, I asked myself, when I read the news of my Uncle Jim\u2019s death, my Uncle Jim whose terribly disfigured face used to send my brother and sister and I into fits of screaming terror when we would visit him in Holytown after begging our mom not to take us.<\/p>\n

\u201cWAR HERO DIES,\u201d the headline read. Jim Tosh was a rear-gunner in a plane that was shot down during the Battle of Britain and who was treated by a special unit led by Archibald McIndoe, from New Zealand, who pioneered radical new techniques for rebuilding badly burned faces, including eyelid reconstruction, and who insisted that his patients wore their service uniforms, and never convalescent pajamas, while receiving treatment. McIndoe called his patients, with their astonishing faces, \u201chis boys\u201d. Despite his disfigurement, and his partial reconstruction, my Uncle Jim\u2019s fianc\u00e9 married him, before he drank himself to his war hero\u2019s death. In my novel Monument Maker<\/em>, a man returns to his long-lost love after receiving a face transplant from an experimental surgeon and marries her all over again without ever revealing his true identity.<\/p>\n

Blaise Cendrars\u2019 youngest son, R\u00e9my Cendrars was killed in the Second World War while serving as an airman escorting military planes in Morocco. Cendrars wrote about the death of his son in a book entitled Sky<\/em>, most of which is taken up with the unearthing of stories about the ultimate idiot-saint of flight, Saint Joseph of Copertino, who theological history enthrones as the only saint to demonstrate the miracle of\u00a0flying backwards,\u00a0an event that Cendrars describes as \u201cunique in the annals of aviation\u201d. But not, as Cendrars himself demonstrates, in literature.<\/p>\n

As a writer, I have taught myself to fly backwards. All of my books have been written with the speed of angels, in astonishment and gratitude. Astonishment, at the way the world speaks when you think it into existence with writing, and gratitude, for the precious gift.<\/p>\n

Read more Can Andy Burnham save my town?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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