A Language Made of Light

Daniel Goulden

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives.

- Genesis 6:1-2 

The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.

-Ezekiel 1:16 

I didn’t care much when an angel landed on the hill outside of our village. It was the early days of the world back then, when things were new and fragile like morning dew, and miracles were so common they were practically mundane. But when Tabitha burst through our door and announced that an angel had arrived, taking deep breaths of air between each word, my husband perked up. I was surprised at his response. Like all marriages in the village, the priest had arranged ours, joining us in the complex tapestry of familial relationships he weaved together to promote social cohesion. 

My husband was a hard man, as hard as the rocks he called calluses on his palms. He woke up with the sunrise and fell asleep not long after it set. He cared little for things that were not the plow or the dirt. He prayed daily and sacrificed his finest livestock each sabbath. 

I do not believe that one person is born more intelligent than another. But I believe that a person is born with limitless curiosity and it is a mission in life to cultivate that desire to bring the world into one’s own mind. My husband had driven that out of himself. My curiosity was limitless; I spent my days in the woods and fields foraging, learning about the medicinal and toxic qualities of every plant and fungi I could find, examining the infinite web of nature. My husband saw this and hated it. 

I was surprised that Tabitha’s announcement of an angel piqued his interest and wondered if I was being too dismissive. But I told myself that my husband’s curiosity showed just how mundane this miracle would be. He went off with Tabitha to see the creature. I went back to my weaving. 

When my husband returned that evening he didn’t speak to me. This was common enough, but instead of going straight to sleep, which was his usual habit after the sun set, he squatted down on the dirt floor and began to draw shapes in the dirt with a stick. He drew bent squares, circles wrapped in other circles. 

“A child draws better shapes than you,” I said. 

“This is what I saw,” he answered. 

I called out across the fields to Tabitha, who came running. She surveyed the scene — my husband on the floor covered in more dirt than usual — and laughed. 

“That is a bent and broken angel,” she said to him. 

He scowled in response. 

“Can you explain this to me?” I asked Tabitha, gesturing towards my husband as though he were a strangely behaving child.

He’s trying to draw the angel we saw,” Tabitha answered. 

“The angel looked like a bunch of scribbles?” 

Tabitha laughed. 

“Give your husband some credit,” she said, looking down at him crouched on the floor. “He is trying to draw the impossible.” 

I felt a pang of guilt. Did I not constantly damn my husband for his lack of curiosity? Here he was trying to understand the world — in an albeit limited sense — and I mocked him. I even considered apologizing, but I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. 

“Describe the angel,” I told Tabitha.

“It looked like everything but also nothing,” she responded, “like a wheel spinning around in another wheel, like a gleaming crystal, like a man with four faces and wings. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

“Did you speak to it?” 

“No, it just floated there, or maybe it was standing, or possibly swimming.” 

“There is no water by the hill.” 

“It was swimming in the air, like the air itself was a lake and we live at the bottom of it.” 

Tabitha recounted how the air around the angel shimmered, how its appearance kept changing, and how words themselves failed to capture it. The entire time, my husband stayed on the floor, drawing his shapes. It was well into the evening when Tabitha left. My curiosity now piqued, I tried to ask my husband about his experience, but he would not respond. When I went to sleep, he was still drawing. 

The next day as I foraged, I decided to go by the hill where the angel had appeared. I told myself that I was only looking for thyme, but I had become curious. 

It was a bright day, and the newly formed sky arched blue across the vault of the heavens. Everything seemed to pulse with quivering life, even the small sprigs of thyme that burst out of the ground beneath my feet. Miracles were everywhere, lights that fell from the sky, new creatures that burrowed out from the ground, nervous flowers that bloomed with the day and hid away at night. I did not know what to expect or if this thing was even an angel. It could have been a rent in a fabric of this new world, a mistake that would be sorted out in due time. 

But I was wrong. 

What was at first an empty patch of air at the top of the hill was suddenly filled by something human language could not describe. The priest had told stories of these beings, but they were so inaccurate they might as well have been lies. Before me was a wheel spinning inside another wheel, spinning inside of yet another wheel: infinite wheels, all spinning within each other. But somehow this thing was also a gleaming gemstone, a sun made of every color. And then the light bent into itself to form shapes that not only had I never seen before, but that I could not even fully conceive of, that could not exist. I understood that my world was small and flat and terribly imperfect. What was before me was something that lived in a world far beyond our own, in a place divine. 

In later depictions, they would make angels seem like men with wings or little fat winged babies with infant-sized bows and arrows. But why would a creature divine take such a mundane form? No, the true form of angel is far beyond the limits of human comprehension. 

“Who are you?” I asked into the jumbled mess of colored light. 

And I heard a voice that was both a man’s and a woman’s. It was a child’s voice. It was every voice that had ever spoken and every voice that would speak. It was a voice that carried the wail of a hawk circling above lonely mountains. It was the voice of an ocean crashing against a steep cliff wall, sending rocks tumbling into its swirling waters. I had never been to, seen, or could have even conceived of an ocean, but somehow I heard it. It was the voice of a wildfire, rushing, crackling, burning. And the voice spoke in a language made of every language, languages I didn’t know but could somehow comprehend. 

“I am a child of God.” 

The being asked me my name and I answered. I felt a warmth as it processed this information, as though it took pleasure in hearing me speak. 

“Do you have a name?” I asked.

“I have no name and every name.” 

“But what do I call you?” 

“Whatever you like.”  

“Why are you here?”

“To see. To touch. To be in creation.”     

At the bottom of the hill I could see villagers looking upward at the angel before me. They began to scramble up to see it.  

“Just tell me your name,” I said. 

“You may call me Ezra.” 

Ezra did not speak anymore that day, but they just hung there, a thing of geometric beauty floating on the hill. Tabitha, who was the first one up the hill and intensely religious, tried to touch them, but found that her hand simply passed through the construction of light. Then she took off her shoes, fell on her knees, and tapped her forehead to the ground. From her lips came whispered prayers. Others followed, taking off their shoes and dropping down into a prone position. Though I had barely spoken to Ezra, they had never mentioned a need for worship, so I sat on the grass and stared at the amalgam of divine geometry before me. I didn’t fault Tabitha for her prayers. If anything deserved worship, it was Ezra. 

It was around noon when our village’s priest came trudging up the hill. He was old and arthritic, his fine linen robes trailing in the mud as he ascended with labored breaths. My husband treated the old priest like he was some kind of god. He regularly brought our finest livestock for sacrifice and he listened to the man’s every word with obedient attention. But I found our priest an ignorant and petty tyrant, a man who made up rituals and systems of belief to increase his own minor power and then left them at the wayside as soon as they no longer benefited him. He claimed to have some kind of divine insight, but I saw nothing that differentiated him from every other imperfect man. I was lonely in my analysis. The village revered him.

“Oh great angel, hear me!” the priest shouted as he made his way through the prone villagers scattered atop the hill. “Tell us what you require from us.” 

A sound came from Ezra, wind chimes gently clattering in the breeze, bells ringing atop a steeple, a shepherd whistling to his flock to come home, the notes echoing off the valley and traveling ever upward to the snow-peaked mountains in the distance. Or perhaps it’s better to say: Ezra laughed and it was the most delightful thing I had ever heard. 

I did not mean to laugh at our old priest, but Ezra’s laughter was so wonderful that I could not help but join in. Soon my giggle was a full-throated chortle, then hysterical, seismic laughter. I could not stop myself. I could barely breathe. I had never laughed like that before. Tabitha joined in and then everyone on the hill did too, nearly half of our village laughing at the priest. 

He grew strawberry-colored and screamed at us for silence, but how could one silence a group of people laughing harder than they had ever laughed before? After stomping and fuming, trying to regain control, he stormed off down the hill, stumbling over himself, further muddying his fine linen robe.

The day turned into a picnic as Tabitha and the rest got up from prayer and joined me in the simple appreciation of Ezra’s beauty. Some brought bread and goat cheese and we enjoyed the sunny day in each other’s company and Ezra’s. But chores had to be done, seeds had to be planted, goats had to be milked, and one by one the villagers departed until it was only me, Tabitha, and Ezra before us. 

“We should get back to our husbands,” Tabitha said to me. “It grows late.” 

I nodded, but I did not answer. I had spent the whole day staring at Ezra and now I felt that I had seen them enough to discern their form. As I stared, the bending light broke down and out of the pieces I saw a figure with four faces and four wings, perfectly straight legs and hooves where feet should have been, but then the figure returned to the light and out of the light I saw a square, then a six-sided box, then something else that I recognized was a six-sided box, but elevated to higher dimension, a shape too divine for comprehension. Ezra was not a being who stretched out infinitely. They were bound in a physical form, but that form existed on a plane of reality beyond my own. Still I understood it enough to wrap my mind around it. 

When my attention broke, it was evening and Tabitha had left me. 

“Return to me tomorrow,” said Ezra before fading into the evening air. 

I rushed home and found my husband by the fire, spooning stew into his gullet. He must have made it himself. It looked pale and watery.

“The priest tells me you were the first on the hill today,” he said to me as a greeting. “I had to make my own dinner. It was humiliating.”

I ignored him and squatted down on our dirt floor. My husband’s crude drawings of Ezra were still there from the day before. I now understood them. He was trying to draw something that was beyond the limits of human perception and the confines of our reality. His bent cubes and strange spirals were pathetic attempts to capture the divine. But I had newfound appreciation for his attempt, so I knelt down on the floor next to him to complete his work.

“Hey!” he shouted. “I wasn’t finished.” 

“I am helping you finish,” I replied.

I turned my husband’s shapes from the second to the third dimension, then I tried to portray dimensions beyond that, but drawings could not capture Ezra because they were limited by the realities of existence. Instead, I needed ideas to represent Ezra. Letting my curiosity guide me, I took up his stick and began writing numbers that represented higher dimensions beyond our own—the fourth, the fifth, and beyond. Through my scribbling I invented a new form of thought, a way to unite form and number, a discipline that would come to be known as geometry.

My husband groaned and complained while I worked, but I ignored him. He did not understand what I was trying to achieve and I was too focused to explain. Eventually he gave up on me and went to sleep. 

The next morning I ascended the hill to find Ezra. I got down on my hands and knees and in the dirt I drew out the equations that captured him. Once again, I heard their delightful laughter. 

“Congratulations,” they said. “You understand.”

“Why are you here?” I asked. 

“Because this creation is beautiful and the creatures that walk upon it are fascinating.” 

“And what is your world like?” I asked. “The one up there.” 

“Your comprehension is too small for me to describe it.” 

“But why do you want to leave it to come down here?” 

“A creature can love many things.” 

Over the next several weeks, I, along with half the village, would ascend the hill each day to spend time with Ezra. It was mostly the women. The men, including my husband, had lost interest either out of fear of such divine beings they could not fully comprehend, or a simple need to involve themselves with the dirt and the dirt alone. But the split was not exact. Some men stayed on the hill, while some women stayed in the village. Some, inspired by Ezra, began to think beyond the term man and women, stepping into a wild frontier of identity.

We’d tell Ezra about our lives, what we did each day, our beliefs, our prayers, our children, our first loves. Ezra would listen, fluttering in the air, wheels spinning within wheels, a creature with four faces, a fire burning but never hot. 

And then one day, when Ezra descended down to us, several jewels made of pure light followed them. They were beryl, amethyst, emerald, sapphire, ruby, diamond – other creatures made of the same divine geometry as Ezra. 

Tabitha screamed and reached out her arms. The air filled with the noise of bells, that wondrous sound of divine laughter. I had thought Ezra to be the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, but to see them with their divine siblings in all of their glory was beyond anything I could have ever hoped to experience.

Every villager had an angel. They pestered us with questions. They asked us what strawberries tasted like, what colors made us feel, who we loved, who we hated. They were like young children newly aware of the world and filled with bottomless curiosity. 

And so the summer of the angels began. Each day we’d pair up with angels and spend as much time as we could with them. We started venturing beyond the hill, taking them on excursions to the nearby river, to the forests, to the plain where we herded the sheep and goats. But we did not take them to the village. Our community was starting to split in two: those who loved the angels and those who feared them. 

To make the split worse, the women who spent time with the angels spent less on foraging, planting, and herding, tending to our womanly and wifely domestic duties. We still produced enough for ourselves and neighbors, but instead of giving the choicest cuts of meat and our finest crops to the priest for sacrifice, we held on to them instead. Our huts went unswept and untidied. New clothes were not spun. The men began to grumble about disobedience. The few women who did not spend time on the hill loudly proclaimed their superior domesticity. The old priest fumed to see his sacrificial fire grow more pathetic each service. He reserved particular anger for the minority of the men who joined us in communing with the angels, accusing them of abandoning their masculine duties as heads of their households. Those of us who had moved beyond the concept of man and women, he mocked as affronts to God. 

“Tell me about God,” I said to Ezra one day. 

They laughed and I heard a mother singing to her newborn. 

“What do you want to know?” 

“What is he like?” 

“He?” 

“God is not a he?”

“God is beyond the words he or she. God is God.” 

“So what is God like?” 

“I cannot describe God very well.” 

It was strange to hear Ezra talk this way. They had such confidence in their knowledge of everything. They never admitted to any sort of fault because they had none. 

“Is it because I won’t be able to understand?” 

“God is to me what I am to you. God is beyond my abilities of understanding. I look at God and I see things I cannot describe, things that break the very fabric of what I understand to be reality.”

“Does our priest understand God?” 

Again Ezra laughed, but there was a mocking to it, like a dog owner laughing at her animal for tripping over itself. 

“Your priest’s understanding of God is like the scribbles your husband made on your floor. He has but the vaguest comprehension of something far beyond his understanding. Into his ignorance he pours useless ritual.” 

I laughed and in my laughter I could hear the traces of Ezra’s. 

It was towards the end of summer, dry and sweltering, when the priest trekked up the hill, his fine linen robes turning red with dust. His face had rapidly wrinkled and was unshaven, thin wisps of what should have been a beard trickling down his chin. 

“Demons!” he shouted, in a voice louder than what I expected his frail body to produce. “You consort with demons!” 

I laughed, a loud chortle that came from the belly. But aside from a few others, most of the women were silent. Tabitha, who despite her rebellion still fervently believed in the priest’s religion, looked like she had just seen a ghost. Unease was on the faces of those of us on the hill. It was one thing to ignore the priest, but another to consort with a demon.

“God has told me that these beings are no angels,” said the priest. “They are devils, sent from nefarious places to distract us from our holy obligations to sacrifice and obedience.” 

This was a pathetic attempt by the priest to wrest back control over the village, to get our choicest cuts of meat back for his pointless sacrifices, to yoke the women to the authority of their husbands and fathers. Ezra moved forward with gentleness. 

“My friend, you are mistaken,” they said in a voice of a mother soothing an infant. 

“I am not your friend,” said the priest, banging his staff into the dry earth. “Begone, foul creature.” 

I waited for the laughter from the crowd, but all I heard was an anxious silence. Superstition and fear were powerful things. They hijacked the mind. They turned neighbor against neighbor. They could even turn one against the divine. 

Tabitha was the first to come to the priest. I hoped that she would yell at him, that she would tell him about the beauty of Ezra and the rest of the angels, but she fell to her knees. 

“I am sorry,” she cried. “I have forsaken God.” 

And with that the floodgates opened. Villager after villager rushed to the priest and got down on their knees, prostrate worshipers circling him. He beamed like a child who had just thrust a handful of honey into his mouth. 

I rushed to Ezra. 

“Tell them it isn’t true!” I said. 

“I was afraid of this,” they said. “We have involved ourselves too much.” 

“No! You brought life to this poor little village.” 

“I am sorry.” 

And then, as my fellow villagers uttered frantic prayers to the priest and what he claimed was God, dust and dirt coating their clothes and faces, Ezra and the other angels began to ascend, brilliant beings made of jeweled light climbing ever higher back up to the heavens. I was forsaken and abandoned. 

I became pregnant when the other women did. It was only the women who had spent time with the angels on the hill. Somehow we all got pregnant at the same time. Some of the women were unmarried. The village shunned us, me most of all. We were relegated to stand in the back during sacrifices. We were forced to walk behind their husbands. We received glares and whispers of disapproval when we walked through the village. This was all done under the direct orders of the priest, happy to restore order and obedience. 

The pregnant women accepted their punishment, but I didn’t. I refused to come to the sacrifices. I spent little time with other villagers. I wandered outside the village, looking out for places where the light bent in ways that it shouldn’t. But I saw no trace of Ezra or their kind. 

My husband ignored all of it. He spoke of the things he would teach our child. How it would join him in the field if it was a boy or join me in my weaving it was a girl. He never spoke of the angels. He sent our finest meats and the pick of the crop to sacrifices. He prayed. 

When my son was born, he was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. I know that’s what every new mother says, but for my son it was actually true. He was astoundingly beautiful. He never cried and he looked at everything with a bottomless curiosity. The light bent funny when I stared at him too long. 

The other babies born around that time were also stunningly beautiful. They did not cry and the light hit them strangely. But like my husband, the village ignored this. Their fathers raised them as though they were the most ordinary of children. We never spoke of the angels. The priest hated them. He considered them the fallen product of fallen women. He made them subject to all of the humiliations of their mothers. But the children never seemed to mind. They accepted the priest’s punishment with a sort of jovial ignorance that removed all of the power he held over them. They laughed, they played, they raced through the fields, existing on a plane beyond the pettiness of the priest. 

I named my son Eli and watched him grow. He was intelligent and lithe. He loved running through the woods and through fields. He was an excellent forager and learned all of my medicinal potions. But he refused to work in the field as my husband insisted and instead kept his own flock of sheep that he led on adventures through the foothills. By the time he was ten, he could lift a fully grown sheep over his head and run faster than any man in the village. I loved Eli more than I had loved anything else in the world. 

Each of those children born at that time were extraordinary. They were strong, quick-witted, and kind. They put their parents to shame. But they also all shunned the old priest and his rituals. The only time they became unruly was when they were dragged to sacrifices. They would scream and hiss and fight. The old priest hated them all. 

Tabitha had a daughter Amira. She was tall and beautiful with auburn hair that reminded me of rubies. Unlike Eli, she loved farming, spending her days bent over in the fields, the dirt sullying her wonderful hair. She was a gifted botanist and bred heartier and more bountiful crops, unaffected by drought and disease.

In the years since the angels left, Tabitha had become the most devoted follower of the priest and his rituals. Despite her punishments, she was the first one to attend the sacrifices and the last to leave. She even managed to drag Amira to them, a remarkable feat, though her daughter sulked off to the side.  

One day when I was out in the fields, I found Amira with Eli tending to his flock.

“Amira,” I said, “the sacrifice will begin soon.” 

“You do not attend,” she said. “Why should I?” 

Though I sympathized, Tabitha was my friend and I wanted to help her wrangle her daughter.

“Your mother wants you to. Isn’t that reason enough?” 

Tabitha sulked in response. 

“Mother, can’t she stay with me?” asked Eli. 

“That’s not up to me.”

And in the distance, someone called out Amira’s name. I saw Tabitha, her skirts hiked, rushing across the fields towards us.  

“The sacrifice is about to begin,” Tabitha said to her daughter. She was breathing heavily. 

“I’m not going,” said Amira. I was surprised to hear such precociousness from such a well behaved child. 

“Yes you are.” 

“The priest is an evil man. He lies.” 

“The priest is our connection to the divine.” 

Eli, who always hated arguments, took a step towards Amira and placed his hand on her arm, but she threw it off. Eli, so innocent, seemed shocked at such anger. Tabitha grabbed Amira’s arm, but through instinct, Amira pushed her mother square in the chest. 

Tabitha went flying, as though a burly soldier had thrown her. She fell onto the ground far away from where she had stood, her body bent like a rag doll. I rushed over and found my friend bloodied and bruised, her arms and legs bent in ways that arms and legs did not bend. Amira was next to me, horror on her face. She was still a child. 

“Mother!” she wailed, but Tabitha did not respond. Far off in the distance, I thought I saw a jewel, shimmering on the horizon. 

We carried Tabitha back into town. She breathed, but shallow and labored. I did not know if she would survive the night. She was too heavy for me to carry, but Amira and Eli, though just children, were able to lift her with ease. They carried her gently, but I nevertheless worried that the bouncing of the trip would damage her even more. 

When we returned to the village it was past dark, a crowd gathered to greet us and at its front was my husband, seething and fuming. He stomped over to me, oblivious to the broken Tabitha the children carried. 

“It is night. Where have you been?” he shouted, sending spittle everywhere. “You embarrass me. Leaving sacrifice to wander the fields. Taking our son with you. You are disobedient. I have every right to leave you with nothing!” 

Then his eyes fell on Tabitha and his lunatic raving ceased. 

“What happened?” he asked. 

I planned to concoct some story about how Tabitha fell and hurt herself, but it would hardly be believable. She was too mangled to pass off as a mere accident. But I didn’t even have a chance to speak before the village priest stepped forward. 

“Who did this?” he asked, his voice full of fury. 

Amira was nearly in tears. She was a sweet girl who had never learned to lie. It wouldn’t take much interrogating for her to admit to everything.  But Eli stepped forward.

“I did it,” he said, loud and steady. 

The priest didn’t even have to give an order. In an instant the crowd had grabbed Eli, pulling his arms behind his back and binding him, a mere child. I wailed and screamed. I ran to my husband and begged him to help our child, but he stood there in stony silence. 

They bound Eli and threw him in the priest’s home under guard. I was not allowed to speak with him. For my role in raising him, my husband kicked me out of our home. I spent the night tending to Tabitha, listening to her labored breathing, Amira sobbing in the corner. 

“I did this,” she whispered over and over. 

I tried to explain to her that none of this was her fault, that she had not known her own strength. But she did not react to me. 

The next day, Eli had escaped. He had torn apart his bonds and ran, after his jailers had fallen into an alcohol-induced stupor. They showed me how he had broken apart the ropes tying him with his brute strength, reducing them to frayed whispers of twine. There were no tracks or any trace of my son, no way to find where he had gone. For the priest, this was a less-than-ideal, but still acceptable outcome. My boy was gone. 

I returned home — my husband was out in the fields and could not bar my entrance — and I packed up what little I owned into a deerskin bag and left. I was leaving Tabitha and Amira, but my love for my son was more powerful than anything else. I knew that no one would follow me. 

As the sun rose, I saw the shimmer. I was walking past reeds not far from the village and I saw what looked like an amethyst cube floating above the plain. I stopped and stared and I thought I saw the object change into colors that I could not recognize, colors that lay beyond the bounds of human perception. 

“Ezra!” I shouted. 

And there they were, my erstwhile angel, taking the form of a million shards of light. 

“I saw everything,” they said. “I’m so sorry.” 

“Eli is your son and you just watched?” 

“I did not know that this could happen.” 

“He is just a child.”

“Eli is much more than just a child.” 

“Help me find him.” 

“I have interfered far too much in the affairs of humanity.” 

“You must take responsibility. Help me find him.” 

“I will only make things worse.” 

The light broke apart and fled across the sky. I considered calling after them, but it was no use. Still, as I wandered, I was aware of a shimmering following me. A few times, I called out, but there was no response. 

I wandered for days or maybe even weeks. I lost track of time. I foraged and snared rabbits and hunted game. Not once did I think about sacrifices. In a way, I was happy, liberated from my husband, the priest, the entire village. But I was lonely and desperate to see my son again. I knew I would never return home.

When I found him — we were far beyond where I had ever been, in the valley of a rocky canyon — he had grown many years in a short time. He was a teenager now or maybe even a young man, with hair that fell below his waist. He had gained muscle and was well fed, living in a shelter he built for himself next to a pond. He smiled when he saw me. 

“Mother,” he said gently. “I knew you would arrive.”

I rushed towards him and wrapped him in a powerful hug. As my arms gripped his torso, I could feel a warmth. When I pulled back, I saw a jeweled-colored light coming through his face. I understood that my son was not my son at all, but a creature that transcended the words son and daughter and child. Eli belonged to everything and no one. He was a creature made of divine light. 

“Who am I?” he asked.  

And around us was the shimmering, always there and always watching.

“Ezra!” I shouted. “Meet your child.” 

They materialized, a thousand eyes spinning around a single eye, a chariot wheel made of wheels, a diamond made of uncountable jewels. They came down to Eli and I could feel the recognition and love between them, a force that broke apart fear and cowardice. And they began to speak in a language made of light.