Wednesday, April 29, 2009

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

I made this connection a while ago when we were talking about The Symposium and it was the weirdest thing. I was sitting there listening to Dr. Sexson talk about Anamnesis and how we used to have wings and we used to know everything and we were divine in intelligence and a really bright light jumped in my head. A while ago I read "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and I loved it, I wrote like three papers on it, all having different interpretations of what the old man with enormous wings could represent, an angel, foreign lands, other planets, but I hadn't heard of Anamnesis. When Dr. Sexson started talking about this concept of life, my heart started beating so fast and my brain was racing with ideas. I started jotting down notes in my notebook left and right. I was so excited. It was kind of silly but I was stoked.
The story is about this old man with enormous wings that washes ashore in this little village and a couple finds him. The people don't know what he is or where he came from but they put him in a cage and start to make money off of him. People from all around the world come to see this old man with enormous wings. Eventually he starts to get sick, and because he cannot speak to any of the people in the town he gets sicker and sicker. Finally the people who found him let him out of the cage and let him walk around their house with them and they feed him and treat him better and he starts to return to health. One day he flies away into the distance and the people are left wondering what he was and their questions are never answered.
Now that I have heard the concept of Anemnesis, I am pretty sure that this very old man with enormous wings was a man that somehow got lost before he was born, and ended up in our world before he forgot everything. Knowing that we are ignorant after birth the old man does not speak a single word and attempts to let the people try to figure out what he is. In the end he flies away to be born again. EPIC. The story is on the link below.

http://salvoblue.homestead.com/wings.html

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