The Angel’s Nose
I
Two stories about Michelangelo. In the first he’s chipping away at a lump of rock. A child asks him what he’s doing and he replies, “Releasing an angel.” In the second story a patron tells him that the nose on the statue isn’t quite right, so Michelangelo climbs up his ladder after scooping up a few chippings. He then holds the chisel in the air, not touching the sculture, tapping away with his hammer while scattering the chippings. The patron thinks the work is much improved.
II
I get the angel thing. I’m glad that Michelangelo was able to release his angels but I prefer to send my angels fleeing before I get to work. The great work that sits in my head doesn’t actually exist and probably never will. If the angel in the rock does anything to prevent you from getting straight to work with that chisel then it’s probably better to cast them aside. As for the patron and the imperfect nose, you have to remember that the nose is the patron’s version of the angel, or their belief that their interjection is enough to set the angel free. It’s been a while since I last had a patron. I hunt down and fix my own noses.
III
I also like the idea of chiselling air. Musicians do that all the time. They send out low frequency radiation to tickle our eardrums. In the case of live music it all falls away immediately. We hear it and recognise it or we don’t. We don’t even recognise the note itself as music, it’s more the change from one note to the next. The music is already gone forever at the point where we recognise it as music.
IV
Maybe Michelangelo was tapping out his own music with the hammer as he chiselled the air. Maybe he tapped out his own personal code for the word NASO. I don’t know if the patron was a cardinal or a member of a wealthy but murderous family or whether their notion of what a nose should be impacts the story to a significant degree. It all begs the question as to what an angel would possibly need a nose for.
V
Whatever I just said about the transience of music, it applies even more to smell. You may counter my assertion with some examples such as perfumers or even chefs making olfactory art but for something to work as art it has to make some room for ugliness, darkness and pain. If there was some great Michelangelo of smell, would his patrons patiently endure the sustained reek of week-old household waste in order to fully appreciate the final crescendo of the the first raindrops hitting dry, parched ground after a heatwave? Is it because smell is more real? I don’t recall ever dreaming of a smell.
VI
The angel perches at the top of the town’s rubbish dump. They take a long breath through their nostrils — all the half-eaten kebabs, disposable nappies, failed dinners, decomposing batteries, hastily replaced pet hamsters, sanitary towels, see-through sheets of soft plastic, maroon-stained sticking plasters, milk teeth and cat litter. They are meant to be tuning into the frequency of mumbled prayer but this dimension says so much more about the residents of the town. There is a melody, a poetry to it that the bipedal hominids will never understand. The only part of this world that is without pretence and where there is nothing to judge. Satisfied with this one inhalation, the truth of it, the angel lets the breath go and puffs out of existence. I have no more use for them.
