Tuesday 23 August 2011

The Alternative (or Real) Sleeping Beauty.

Do you know what we haven’t had for a long time? (A week is a long time in the blogosphere.) We haven’t had a woman post. Remember when JJ’s blog consisted of little other than woman posts, most of them a bit agonised? Right then, here’s a nice one for a change.

If you’re not a man, imagine you are. If you don’t believe in reincarnation, imagine you do. OK? You’re a man who believes in reincarnation. OK.

So, you encounter a woman and feel an immediate connection with her. More than that, the conviction soon takes root that you go back a long way – back into past lives, that is. A sense of separation from a dearly beloved takes hold and drives you crazy with longing. You can’t bear to be separated from her, but you know that circumstances are such that any reunion in this life simply isn’t possible. For a while you try to deny this unpalatable fact; you try to get close, but all that leads you into is pain on several levels, pain so bad that you get constant sleeping and waking nightmares, and descend to a pretty dark place. It goes on for months, and eventually you have to let her go for both your sakes.

More pain and longing follow, but then a certain clarity begins to assert itself and is accompanied by acceptance. You begin to feel relaxed; you begin to see the rightness and inevitability of it all. You stop feeling agonised; the longing ceases and you can breathe again. You know that she lies soft, snug and sleeping in your heart, and that one day you will find her again and wake her up. You’re content with that.

Doesn’t that remind you of a certain fairytale?

And it didn’t hurt a bit, did it? So no groans!

2 comments:

Zz... said...

that sounds like a good synopsis for a potentially good abstract surreal kind of mexican novella....magical realism is that the term?

JJ said...

I suppose the average westerner would call it magical realism, but most people brought up in a Vedic culture wouldn't.

It's already been done, of course. I have an anthology of Walter de la Mare short stories all based on reincarnation (I lent it to an American woman once, who dismissed it as 'weird') and one of Khalil Gibran's earliest stories takes basically the scenario I described.