What Would You Do With an Angel?

 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings' written by Gabriel García Márquez tells the story of the reactions of a poor family and community to the finding of a bedraggled angel at the bottom of the garden. What would you do?

The people he met, including a family, clergy man, doctor, mob, pilgrims and a woman who believed in folklore, interacted with him in many ways, ranging from the ridiculous to the understandable and all consistent with the magic-realist genre.

Imagine if you found an angel...

Would you...

tell someone

stare at him with surprise

stare at him so long he become familiar

speak to him

assume he is an angel

hold him captive

club him to death

put him on a raft with food for 3 days

lock him in a chicken coop

make fun of him

find entertainment and throw food to him as if he is in a zoo or circus

make him mayor of the world

make him high ranking military to win wars

cross breed him with humans to make wise rulers of the universe

check to see if he speaks Latin

consider him an impostor because he does not speak Latin or show deference to clergy

conclude that he is not an angel if he is not perfect in actions and appearance

call him the devil because he does not live up to expectations of what an angel should be

describe wings as as little a prerequisite for being an angel as the difference between a bird & plane

check with higher orders in the church for advice

mob the place where the angel resides to see it

fence off the area of the miracle and charge entry

seek a miraculous healing from the angel

burn candles in his honour

make him eat mothballs – folklore angel-food

provide him with a feast offered up in penance

give him sustaining plain and easy to eat food

let the chickens groom his wings for parasites

allow people to take feathers to restore their ailing and failing bodies

throw stones at him to make him move and stand

burn him with a branding iron to rouse him

examine him for a belly button

check if he speaks Aramaic

wonder how many of him could fit on the head of a pin

discover if he was just a human mutation from Norway

lose interest in him when someone new comes along who you can empathise with or understand

move on to the next news-cycle because he is not meeting your imaginary needs

let his extra-ordinariness become so ordinary he is no longer considered a concern

examine his biology logically and see how he could be considered normal rather than humans

take him so much for granted eventually that he became like the house pet being shoed from here to there as a nuisance

cover him in a blanket and let him sleep in the shed like an old dog

get concerned by his demise because the disposal of angels bodies is out of your area of expertise

be relieved, as he finds health and energy again and recovers, relieved that this unexplainable entity is leaving your life, a question mark is gone.

miss the extraordinary when it is gone

Whether it is measuring him against certain criteria, judging him with a prejudiced eye or having expectations of him which are only within a limited area of experience and knowledge, an angel may not fare well in the real world. 

Our lives could benefit greatly from the angel but we, ourselves, might be the barriers to achieving those benefits with our very earthly and earthy views, prejudices and ignorance.

And even worse than that - we might miss out on the miraculousness of the extraordinary in our need to negotiate our surroundings and experiences into ones which are familiar.

 Spotting angels in the world isn't necessarily the hard bit – it's what to do with them next.

As Gabriel Garcia Marquez warns, if we are not careful we can, as the angel's captors did, look 'so long and so closely' at the miraculous that surprise can be over come and the extraordinary fades into the ordinariness and safety of the familiar.

Fraser (2014) from the Guardian considers that:

'magic-realism...employs the magical as a form of imaginative resistance to the harsh and totalising logic of imperial rationality. It seeks the freedom to think outside the box of established wisdom: that is, by rubbing away the line between the real and the fantastic, it frees the imagination from the constraints of how things are. It is revolutionary stuff.'

Viva la revolution !