Fortunate Fall: An Angel Plunges into Finitude Just for Love

What’s your favorite movie? I’ve had the same answer for almost 40 years: Wings of Desire, shot in Berlin before the wall fell.

Damiel (Bruno Ganz), an angel, perches on buildings that tower over the city. With other eternal beings who see the world only in black and white, he listens to the stream of human thought driven by the spectrum of emotions (hopes, fears, dreams, sadness, joy, pain, anxiety). Without interfering, except for leaning in to express empathy, they document earthly existence from the beginning of time.

But doubt arises about this detached existence: “Instead of forever hovering above, I’d like to feel a weight . . . to tie me to Earth. . . . it would be rather nice coming home after a long day to feed the cat . . . to have a fever and blackened fingers from the newspaper, to be excited not only by the mind but, at last, by a meal. . . . As you’re walking, to feel your bones moving along. . . .”

Falling in love with a trapeze artist, Damiel plunges to earth, surrendering immortality. He tastes what it means to be human amid the colors, sounds, smells, and textures of city life. Rubbing his hands in the cold, savoring a cup of coffee and a cigarette–these are his first pleasures.

The wall splitting Berlin into Cold War east and west reinforces human isolation. Other characters wander through the film: post-punk rocker Nick Cave, Peter Falk, in a surprise cameo as himself, and famed German actor Curt Bois playing Homer, an aging storyteller.

He laments, “With time, those who listened to me became my readers. They no longer sit in a circle, bur rather sit apart. And one doesn’t know anything about the other. I’m an old man with a broken voice, but the tale still rises from the depths, and the mouth, slightly opened, repeats it as clearly, as powerfully.”

I’ll leave it there in case you want to check out the film.

Every time I watch Wings of Desire, there’s a new takeaway. But here’s something that’s stuck with me over the years: if angels do hang around, I like to think they’ll comfort anybody, whatever their sins, good works, pocketbook, looks, belief systems, origins, or heritage.

Why? I figure angels have the privilege of perspective. So do space travelers who see our planet through fresh eyes (called the overview effect).

As Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo 14 astronaut, said, “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

The mass of humans don’t have the scientific and technical know-how to be an astronaut (or the cash to take a passenger ride). Still, we can look at dreamy photos of that orb hanging in the immensity of space. Without boundaries, it offers the hope of recognizing our connectedness and the caution to care for this fragile speck in the universe.

Poet Waldo Williams left us with yet another view:

What is it to be human?

What is staying alive? To possess

A great hall inside of a cell.

What is it to know?  The same root

Underneath the branches. . . .

What is it to sing? To receive breath

From the genius of creation.

What’s work but humming a song

From wood and wheat. . . .

What is the world to the all powerful?

A circle spinning.

And to the children of the earth?

A cradle rocking.

A veteran of Time Inc. and Dotdash Meredith, Catherine Hamrick is the author of The Tears of Things: Poems (Madville Publishing). Her poetry has appeared in Appalachian Places, Appalachian Review, The Blue Mountain Review, The Citron Review, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, storySouth, and elsewhere.

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