Right in Two

Read the last three lines in order and they make one argument. The creatures were given the hand, and they made a club to use on their own kin. They are so far astray that their surviving at all is a mystery. And the thing the angels find repugnant is not the club. It is the waste.

That last line is where the song stops being about war. It names what the creature had: the power to look up toward heaven, and the knowledge that its time is short. Each is a gift on its own. Together they are the whole human situation. On the song’s own terms, the angels have the first without the second: they look at heaven all the time, and their time does not run out. The animals have neither. Only this creature can look up and know it is going to die, and the angels’ disgust is that it has both and spends them on the ground it is fighting over.

The traditions say the same thing about the same two gifts, and they say it with the same urgency. The Buddha asks his monks to picture a blind turtle that surfaces once in a hundred years in a vast ocean, and a single yoke drifting on the waves. The chance of the turtle putting its head through the yoke, he says, is better than the chance of being born human, and a human birth is the only one from which waking up is possible. The psalmist asks to be taught to number his days, so as to get a heart of wisdom. Marcus Aurelius reminds himself again and again that he is about to die, and that this is the reason to live rightly now, not a reason to despair. Pascal calls the human a reed, the weakest thing in nature, and a thinking one: the universe can crush it, but it knows it is dying, and the universe knows nothing. In every one of these, knowing the time is short is not a burden. It is the door. The song’s angels watch the creature standing in the doorway and fighting over the floor.

The scene itself is older than the song. In the rabbinic commentary on Genesis, Rabbi Simon says that when God set out to make the first human, the ministering angels split into factions. Love argued for creating him, because he would do acts of love. Truth argued against, because he would be full of lies. Righteousness argued for him; Peace argued against, because he would be all quarrel. God made him anyway. The Qur’an keeps a version of the same moment: told that a steward is to be placed on the earth, the angels ask whether God will put there one who will spread corruption and shed blood. The answer they receive is only that God knows what they do not. Tool’s angels ask the same question after the fact, having watched the answer play out. Nobody tells them anything.

The dividing is the traditions’ oldest name for the sickness. Zhuangzi tells it with monkeys too. A keeper tells his monkeys they will get three nuts in the morning and four at night, and they are furious. He offers four in the morning and three at night, and they are delighted. Nothing changed but where the line was drawn. The sage, Zhuangzi says, harmonises the “this” and the “that” and rests in the balance of Heaven, walking two roads at once. On this Map, the cut in two is the Veil seen from outside. The one is still whole. The dividing is done by the one who looks.

And the garden matters as much as the club. The song’s creatures are not short of anything. The scarcity they fight over is produced by the dividing, not the cause of it. That is the teaching of the lilies of the field, and of the kingdom the Gospel of Thomas says is spread upon the earth unseen. Enough was never the problem.

For the Body Politic this is the whole of Layer I in a single scene. Ma’at and isfet, the Kali Yuga (kali is Sanskrit for strife, and for the losing throw at dice), Amos at the city gate: civilisations recording, one after another, how the order is lost. Layer I says the traditions watched this from outside any particular political moment. The song finds the only seat that is truly outside: the bench of heaven. And it ends on the question the layer cannot answer: when will it end? The Body Politic’s next layer begins there.

The song is angry, and it offers no cure. Neither does this teaching. It is a diagnosis made from far enough away that no side of the cut can claim it, and a reminder of what the cut is costing: a short life spent looking down.