‘Who are these archangels you’re always on about?” The question was asked by an earnest suburban reviewer the other day. Is this some strange category of human being, she wondered, that the mortgage-burdened classes might have missed?
Well, as a doughty missionary on the shifting frontiers of new culture, I am happy to cry my revelation to the nations. The postmodern archangels’ presence in our midst may prompt the thoughtful to recast received notions of gender, sexuality and — even — of work, play and pleasure.
In traditional Judeo-Christian cosmology, of course, the archangels are the highest spiritual beings beneath the Godhead, and each is charged with specific tasks in the endless battle of good and evil. (The archangel Satan, notoriously, dared to rebel against God.)
Mixing awe with irony, I espy in South Africa a comparable realm of similarly potent beings. They are young men of widely varying race, class and station, aged somewhere between 18 and 23 or 24, possessed of one abiding instinct: each knows he is delightful, immortal and incomparable.
The modern or, more precisely, postmodern archangel, has a curiously evanescent beauty, somewhere between an elongated El Greco saint, an endlessly leggy supermodel and a sulky Persian kitten. Among the most interesting of them are from places like Hanover Park, Bokaap, Guguletu or Ottery. Androgynous in mien (archangels never sport facial hair, except perhaps oddly comic sideburns), they merely are: beyond sex, race or shoe size.
And where they are, in an Age of Parties, is where it’s happening. As one blue-haired minx so memorably told me: “I am the pardy.” (Archangels never bite off their consonants neurotically and say “party” — that’s terribly 20th century.)
Like their heavenly counterparts, today’s archangels exist beyond time, but are always ahead of the age. Their clothes have a curiously diaphanous quality, are made of some fabric not heretofore known to man, and are always the height of fashion — even as they look as if they’ve been slept in, which they often have. (I forgot — archangels never sleep. The only 20th-century maxim they admire is, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”)
Although they always appear about to expire from undernourishment (archangels are never anything more than wafer-thin), they have astonishingly robust constitutions, and can guzzle amounts of alcohol, space-cake and other dangerous elixirs that would hospitalise your average herd of buffalo. Beyond normal categories of health and unhealth: that’s the clue. We’re not dealing with earthbound creatures here.
What are archangels’ politics, philosophies, careers? In a word, they don’t have any, especially not careers (although they sometimes masquerade as waiters and talk about becoming models). They simply, or complexly, exist in a charmed present that recalls the ecstatic heavenly intimations of saints and other holy folk. They are, indeed, post-work, as they are post-ideology: and their presence with us is a smartly postmodern response, in the age of Bush the Younger, Jürgen Harksen and Bill Gates, to the quaint, doddery notion that integrity and honest toil begets wealth, fame or good opinion.
One of the chief curiosities of postmodern archangels is their advanced approach to sex and gender. Existing, like their spiritualised namesakes, in a post-sex-and-gender realm, they regard “the, you know, girl-boy thing” (as a two-tone blonde I know puts it) as quaintly passé.
Archangels are drawn to powerful, self-delighting men and bright bird-of-paradise women but, really, sex is a touch too, like, tiring and offers fewer opportunities for crowd-pleasing gymnastics than dancing. (Archangels love dancing and require not much more surface than the head of a pin to do so.)
What becomes of archangels? Quite simply, they grow up, and around the age of 24 or 25 discover that they aren’t immortal, need an income (as opposed to other people’s), and must prepare for prosaic, self-supporting adult life. In a phrase, they become the rest of us. They find a cause, a career, a trust fund, or, possibly, become housewives in Hout Bay.
The moment of doubt is the moment at which superhuman self-belief vanishes: once you no longer just know you’re immortal, impregnable and charming — around the time of your first wrinkle — you cease so to be. There’s an iron law of the universe in there somewhere.
Meanwhile, the archangels delight, mystify and enchant more earthbound folk with their joie de vivre, their marvellously ancient youth, their splendid cheek — and their deeply premature knowledge of our time.
Contact with archangels may be dangerous — and exhilarating. After all, someone has to introduce the suburbs to the 21st century. Why not those who’ve been here long before it happened?
Guy Willoughby is a playwright and author of Archangels (Brevitas New Fiction)