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And yet, as time went on and into the second week, members of us became bored. Their senses became dulled by the experience of the unbelievable and impossible. It started with the physicists and philosophers, who joined the priesthood on the ground, who had been determined to avoid the sin of flight from the start, figuring the will of god to manifest itself in corporeal wings, not imaginary ones. The wise-men nodded their heads and stroked their beards, agreeing that these thought-tassels worn shamelessly around the shoulders were a foul temptation. Thus the men of religion found new unity on earth while their congregations flew as one in the sky. The physicists and philosophers, closer to the priesthood than they would have liked to hear, rejected the material manifestation of an immaterial wish. New age baloney! cried the physicists, hating the downfall of their faith. The philosophers were mortally jealous that they had lost the exclusive ability to soar, within the four walls of their heads yes, but soar unbound nonetheless. Next the financiers, bankers, stockmarket-men, gangsters and entrepreneurs. There was no niche in the perfect sky, no profit, no suckers or roll-overs. The ground is for us, they decided. On the ground we can escape these shackles of equality, we can excel, dominate and subjugate. The world needs ditchdiggers, they say, and thus it must need people who demand ditches be dug in the first place, around and under their fabulous palaces. Soon followed in their own wave high society, fashionistas, magazine editors, Anna Wintour (a category all by herself), scenesters, models, designers and tastemakers. Flying? Everyone (anyone) can do that. Others gave up their wings, those who would always need a place among others.
But who to sew the dresses? To thread the needles? Who to take the loans? Who to fill the pews and pay the taxes and read the books and go round and round and on the mill? Not us in the sky, no, we wheeled and screamed and hollered our joy! We were expected to relinquish our pretty sky-silks and come to the ground, pulled down by stern glances and a palpable wave of condescension. As we ignored the call to give up our gift and get on with our lives, our ‘real’ lives, our two worlds pulled apart. New fashions appeared on the ground, caps with brims and visors blocking the joyous melee of colour above from view, we were unmentioned, unmentionable. Those below did not leave their warrens and their cities extended underground, fabulous burrows of activity and squalor extending miles into the crust. Our intransigence to part with what they could not have, what they were now too bitter to take back, was intolerable. Underground for years they missed what we did to the earth, how we decked the even the tallest buildings in haunting skyscapes of golden colours, each piece of ironwork interwoven with a glisteningly soft filigree of imagination made manifest.
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In time, those below have forgotten, they call us the angels, bad luck by night and good by day, beings of light and splendour, mystical creatures somehow left over from an age of legend. They occasionally venture up and outside, not ever to live, but simply to see. For the world does not look like a home any more, it is too beautiful, too heartrendingly plumed with our endless thought. The polar lights are a flickering bulb against our glory. The earth-people take their young up to see us, to prove we are not like manticores or dragons or mermaids, that we are real. The children see our magnificence, but do not know that their ancestors gave up our effortless flight. They have new wonders to see each time they leave their anthills; we work slowly and painstakingly, for we have forever; we shall never die.