WorldLit #5: A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

             In the realism story <The Lady with the Dog>, the part I thought the most realistic was that the transition was made by not an enormous milestone event but a trivial event that can occur any time in our lives. Gurov went indignant by a vain joke “The sturgeon was a bit too strong!” and made the grand decision of travelling to where Anna lives. Surely our real lives are not composed of dramatic events; rather a continuum of mundane routines eventually makes up a change.

             In the magical realism story <A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings>, the transitions are apparently not at all realistic. Suddenly an angel appears in the courtyard, brings enormous wealth to Pelayo’s family, and flies away again abruptly. However, those changes are described in such a mediocre tone that they seem to be some of our gradual and mundane routines. For example, the first encounter of Pelayo and Elisenda and the angel is described as follows:

“They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar.”

Pelayo and Elisenda’s feeling is no more intense than what they might feel when they find an abandoned dog and decide to nurture it in a chicken coop. They will not be familiar with the angel if the angel is a landmark event in their lives. Moreover, his “miracles” are trivial “consolations”, such as making a blind man grow three new teeth, which are far from grandiose events. Even when the angel flies away, he starts with a clumsy failure, while Elisenda is “cutting some bunches of onions”, an everyday routine. Generally, the angel, possibly a source of significant supernatural transitions of this story, is actually a decrepit man with wings full of parasites, and merely a part of a monotonous routine. This brings the magic elements of the angel into the pool of realism.

This story is also realistic in that it describes the selfish human nature. The relationship between the humans and the angel is absolutely based on needs. After the angel cures their child’s fever, the humans feel magnanimous, and consider releasing the angel on a raft with provisions. However, after they discover that he is a potential source of enormous profits, they confine him in a chicken coop and let him be tortured by the equally selfish crowd. As he no longer becomes a fortune, Elisenda shouts “that it was awful living in that hell full of angels.” Their calculating relationship perhaps reflects the connections prevalent in our contemporary society which lack warmth and altruism.  

The spider woman is another notable theme that conveys how myopic humans are. The spider woman’s provocative story, supported by awful visual evidence, conveys a direct moral to the crowd. The crowd suddenly feels no need to meet the angel, whose miracles do not provide a direct cure, and therefore disintegrates. Even if their motivation to meeting the angel was a religious conviction (regarding that Catholic has been dominant in Latin American society), such belief is abstract and therefore easily overwhelmed by sensual experiences. People tend to take the short and clear paths of which the endpoints are immediately seen in their eyes, rather than the long and obscure ones, which potentially have bigger rewards. Moreover, fear, represented by the spider, more easily prompts people to act right away than hope, symbolized by the angel. In these ways the spider woman portrays our shortsighted nature, a realistic trait of humans.

Personally, I thought that the depiction of Elisenda at the last part was also very realistic. When the angel flies into the air, her feeling is closer to regret than to freedom from a nuisance, as she fastens her gaze on the “imaginary dot”. The ending perfectly portrays how humans recognize a value of an existence only at its absence, just as we realize that we have to serve our parents with devotion only after they pass away. Whether the angel was a source of profit or a source of discomfort, Elisenda gets to miss him when he is no longer there.

<A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings> is a work that successfully blends the magical elements into a realistic tone and theme, as the story depicts magic as a banality, and deals with realistic human nature, such as selfishness and myopia. I really loved the way how magical realism makes sense. During my research I found that this genre is greatly affected by Latin American folklores. I am looking forward to read other magical realism works and perhaps the folklores that underlies as the basis of this genre.



Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Old_Man_with_Enormous_Wings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Garc%C3%ADa_M%C3%A1rquez

Commissioned Essay: Airstream Juggling

“What are you drawing on my window?” The taxi driver asked, breaking the silence.

Awaken from my entangled thoughts, I replied, “Oh, a floating ball, sir.”

“What for?”

“It’s my physics research problem. A ball can float on a slanted airstream.”

             I was thinking about one of the forces that capture the ball inside the airstream. On the wet taxi window, I drew a circle and some curves and arrows.  

“Wow, it’s amazing.”

“Yup, it’s like magic. A juggling magic.”

I was surprised by myself saying this. Truly the floating ball was similar with juggling. You juggle three balls with two hands. The airstream juggles one ball with no hand. As juggling is a continuous cycle of the balls, the floating ball exhibits a cycle of oscillating motion.

I soon became lost in memories, in a Christmas day 5 years ago. I received professional juggling balls for Christmas gift. Excited, I juggled all day so hard. I stared at the juggling lecture videos and scrutinized how the video guy showed a stable command of various skills. I tried to mimic him, dropped the balls, and tried and dropped, again and again. Whenever I was stuck I took a video of myself to see why I had kept failing. At the end of the day I could juggle under my leg, behind my back, and with my hands flipped. Still, there were so many skills left to do with three balls.  

Whoosh, 4 years after, Christmas day again, in a physics research camp. I was given a research problem for a physics debate competition. Thrilled, I conducted rigorous experiments all day. I stared at the phenomenon videos I had taken, searching for the conditions of stable levitation. Various forces acted upon the ball, and various factors influenced the motion. I put the ball on the airstream, dropped, and put and dropped, again and again. Whenever I found myself in a theoretical dilemma I asked myself fundamentally why the phenomenon happens. At the end of the camp I could explain some part of the phenomenon, but still there were so many veiled effects.

Whoosh, to the juggling days, in the National Park, and in a service center. I performed juggling with my team. I juggled two balls and an apple, which I bit in each cycle. Then my teammate stole them away, maintaining the cycle of juggling. I pretended to be angry, and took them back again and ran away, juggling and biting the apple voraciously. To perfect a single performance I had eaten hundreds of apples and had thrown the balls thousand times. Each cycle of balls, a fruit of devoted practice, delighted the crowd in the National Park and the grannies in the service center.

Whoosh, now I was in the final round of the physics debate competition. I made a presentation about my research of the floating ball. With elaborate equations and vivid imagery descriptions, I explained the forces that make the ball oscillate inside the airstream. Only for this presentation I had been awake and struggling till dawn for an entire month. Each explanation of the oscillation, a product of dedicated investigation, elated other student physicists and professors.  

Zoom, back in the taxi. I wondered how come I had been driven back to juggling after 4 years. Then I realized, I had been juggling with life all the time. Life has itself been an incessant cycle. A cycle that requires numerous trials and lessons to unmask some of its extremely various elements, but still the whole never reveals itself. A pure, fundamental inquiry about ‘why’ usually eases the process of knowing its mystery. Most importantly, life rewards only those who are the most passionate.

I looked up the window. The ball and the airstream glittered as the water droplets reflected the sunlight. My juggling cycle had not ended. In fact, it will never end.

646 words