Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Immortified

I’ve wondered for a long time how to talk to you about this. How to explain myself, if such a thing is necessary or possible. Should I even bother? Would you understand? Will you be able to see things from my point of view? Could you find it in your heart to forgive me?

Ironically, perhaps, if you believe in God, the Holy Spirit, then you might be more likely to understand me and therefore to forgive.

My desire is not so much that you understand what I have done. It’s more important that you understand who or what I am. Therein lies the path to forgiveness. It depends on understanding me, my nature, not what I do.

Perhaps, you have already reached the point where you don’t want to understand or listen to me? Anyway, I will begin my explanation now.

I have had to live with myself for 91 years. During almost every day that I can remember, I have asked myself the same questions: who am I? What am I? Perhaps you have asked yourself the same things?

Every day, I have looked at my body, I have scrutinized my mind, and I have thought that this is not the real me. I am something different.

The best way to explain this is to say, in the simplest way possible, that I am my soul. I am not my body, I am not my mind, I am my soul. I am separate from them.

Before this body and this mind, I resided in other bodies and minds. I have no way of telling how many or for how long. These things are not revealed to our souls. However, I feel confident that there have been many. Speaking to my friends and comparing pasts, I have resolved that I, my soul, am at least 5,394 years old. Sometimes I wonder why I am not older.

I’ve transitioned 15 times that I know of. It fascinates me whether the body or the mind will succumb first, but usually the time between deaths is not long. It doesn't really matter. The important thing is to be close to another carrier, so that I can embark on the next stage of my journey.

With all due modesty, I’ve inhabited some pretty special humans, some merely from the point of view of their minds, some from the point of view of their bodies.

Still, it’s difficult for a soul to relate to a mind or a body.

Bodies, in particular, seem to be driven by DNA. They want to fuck all the time. When they’re not fucking, they’re thinking about fucking. Well, in that case, their minds are thinking about fucking. At least, that’s a pretty fair description of the males I’ve inhabited. The females aren’t as bad, but, to be honest, they’re not that much better. Certainly they’re not as virtuous as they would have you believe.

I’m 90, almost 91 now, in body years. Ironically, Delgadina is only fourteen. I say ironically, because in soul years, she is older than me, not by much, she’s 5,678 years old. She’s had almost four extra earth experiences than I have. Nineteen versus fifteen mightn’t sound like much, but you’d be surprised.

The strange thing is that our soul age counts for nothing on earth. No matter how religious somebody might be, they still judge us by our body age, not the age of our mind or our soul.

Even though Delgadina is technically an adult at age fourteen, people still think of her as a child. Little do they know, her mind is superior to mine. Just because she speaks less than I do, doesn’t mean that she is dumber. In our most recent life before this one, she topped our college in her last year. Sometimes, for her own benefit, I wish she would speak out more in this life, so people appreciated her mind, not just her body. Perhaps, that will come with time. I'm already teaching her to read, write and paint.

We almost didn’t meet in this life. In the last, we had actually been married, but only in our seventies. She had enjoyed a long marriage. I had remained faithful, well, as best I could after 622 lovers. So many of them had been whores, but they were still women, all of them. Delgadina was determined to find out what it had been like to be one of my whores. She knew me well enough, after four earth relationships, to know that the best way to get my undivided attention was to manifest herself as a fourteen year old girl.

I didn’t recognise her at first. She was promised to me. Well, her virginity was. Several times, we went through a ritual whereby I was supposed to deflower her. Each time, I slept next to her, and did nothing but caress her or kiss each centimeter of her body. It was as if my 90 year old body wasn’t up to the task, whatever the capacity of my mind, let alone my soul. I even began to question myself, which was a first for me.

People judge me as if I have done something wrong. Sometimes I wonder if they imagine that I have done only what they would like to have done, or in Delgadina’s position, might have wanted me to do to them.

I wonder whether these people know what it means to be a soul. To be condemned to live forever (although is it really such a condemnation?). To wander from body to body in search of another soul. To, at last, find a soul to whom you can relate, let alone, in my case, one who coincidentally I have loved before.

These are things that mean something to you in eternity. True love. Not whether one of you is 90 or 14. These are just numbers. Notches. Hands that move in a circular fashion around the watch face of time. They mean nothing to someone, to two lovers, like us, whose soul lives have already lasted almost six millennia and show no signs of giving up.

When I think of Delgadina, I don’t think of her legs, her breasts, her lips, even her mind, these things that somehow I have touched or kissed. Instead, I think of her soul. Meanwhile, she smiles when she thinks of how much more experience of life she has had than me. If only I could die now and start another life ahead of her. But, vain man that I am, I have resolved that, in this life at least, I want to see out a century. It comforts me that, when I lie awake in bed, sometimes I can derive some pleasure from observing her naked, legs apart, breasts spread across her chest, dreaming of me, her 90 year old stallion.



Playboy Seeks Sex Toy

The more I read Marquez' post-Nobel Prize works, the more I'm convinced that his modus operandi is to invent characters and situations that will outrage many, if not most, readers.

Here, a sexually-active nonagenarian is offered a fledgling 14 year old virgin whore to celebrate his birthday.

Whether or not he deflowers the girl, whether or not he might only have watched the girl sleeping, he would be condemned by the reader. Society objects not just to the act, but to both the desire and the intention.

The problem is that Marquez employs beautiful language in his enterprise.

In fact, I've always suspected that, as I suspect of Nabokov, he writes a straightforward tale of love and sex, then, only then, twists or perverts it, by adding an element of the forbidden, the taboo, the immoral, the illegal.

Without the perversion, it would be a work of beauty. What happens when he tweaks the ages of the participants? Would a story of love and sex involving a 40 year old male and a 30 year old female be acceptable? Well, what happens when the age of the male is dialled up to 90 and the girl down to 14?

Something in our minds registers, this should not be happening, something is wrong.

Marquez might not explicitly ask, why is it wrong. He might not be expressly challenging morality. It exists, whether we like it or not.

However, I think he is asking us whether, as a work of art, it is any less beautiful because it is transgressive.

Part of what he is doing is questioning the aesthetic nature of transgression.

The novel is inspired by Kawabata's "House of the Sleeping Beauties", which I hadn't read when I read this novel.

In the epigraph from that book, old Eguchi is warned by the madam not to do anything in bad taste. The specific caveat is not to "put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl".

Different things are forbidden at different times and in different cultures.

The act of writing the novel doesn't mean that Marquez advocates child abuse in real life. He just wants to ask these questions and explore these issues within the realm of art.

Again, like Nabokov, he wants to treat art and literature as a playground. He wants to explore not just desire and intention, but the imagination as well.

By doing so, he asks of the reader that we suspend moral judgment and engage pure aesthetic judgment. Not all of us will want to, not all of us will be able to.

In this way, he doesn't just confront us with his subject matter, he confronts us with our own temperaments. He utilises the response of the reader as part of his creative enterprise.

His works are all the greater, because they involve and implicate us.



VERSE:

Angels Surround the Bed of Delgadina

Let us share a bed.
You can sleep if you need to.
I'm content to watch.


Breathless

I kissed your body.
I inhaled your wild fragrance.
It made me breathless.


Dear Girl

I'll write words for you.
"We are alone in the world."
I'll teach you to read.


The Abominable No-Man

It does more damage
For authors to write in chains
Than to write freely.



SOUNDTRACK:

Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Title Sequence)



Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Breathless"