Poem

Gautama Christ

Pablo Neruda

The names of God and especially that of His representative

Who is called Jesus Christ according to holy books

Or someone’s mouth

These names have been used, worn out and left

On the shores of rivers of of human lives

Like the empty shell of a mollask.

However, when we touch these sacred but exhausted

Names, these wounded scattered petals

Which have come out of the oceans of fear and love

Something still remains, a sip of water,

A rainbow footprint that still shimmers in the light.

While the names of God were used

By the best and by the worst, by the clean and by the dirty

By the white and the black, by bloody murderers

And by victims flaming gold with napalm

While Nixon with his hands

Of Cain blessed those who he condemned to death

While fewer and fewer divine footprints were found

on the beach.

People began to study colors,

The future of honey, the sign of uranium

They looked with anxiety and hope for the possibilities

Of killing themselves or not killing themselves, of organizing

themselves into fabric

Of going further on, of breaking through limits without stopping

What we come across in these blood thirsty times

With their smoke of burning trash, their dead ashes

As we weren’t able to stop looking

We often stopped to look at the names of God

We lifted them with tenderness because they reminded us

Of our ancestors, of the first people, those who said the prayers

Those who discovered the hymn that united them in misfortune

And now seeing the empty fragments which sheltered those

Ancient people

We feel those smooth substances

Worn out and used by good and by evil

The Point

Will in Big Fish is an example of how people can be ignorant. Will thinks his dad's stories are pointless and even gets annoyed by them. Because of this ignorance, he often misses the point. When Ed tells Will how he went to Sandra's college and how he planted flowers and how he wrote his love in the sky, Will is skeptical and annoyed about the number of times he's heard the story. Ed is trying to explain his love for Will's mother and how he fought for her, but Will doesn't get that because he's caught up in the sheer improbability be of it all. Another example of Will's ignorance is when Ed tells him the story of the big fish. Ed was intending the big fish story to be an example of how Ed never really fit in his life. Will completely misses the point that his dad is trying to tell him that it's ok not to exactly fit the mold of what other people think. Because of Will's ignorance, he totally misreads his dad as an immature liar, when really, all he wanted to do was teach Will the most important parts of his life.

Pelayo and Elisenda from A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings: A Tale For Children are examples of how people can miss the point of things in life. An angel appears in Pelayo and Elisenda's yard and instead of realizing it's importance and beauty, they doubt it's importance. They lock the angel up in a cage and sell tickets to it. The angel then performed miracles but not the one's that that they had expected. "Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn't recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didnt get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers" (Marquez 4). The couple doesn't see these things as miracles even though they are. The angel gave hope and turned something that was seen as a bad thing, into a good thing and that was the miracle  The couple missed that because they were caught up in what they expected was going to happen. Even at the end of the story, Elisenda still sees the angel as a nuisance. "She kept watching him even when she was though cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him., because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea" (Marquez 5). Elisenda saw the angel as an annoyance instead of a blessing. The couple didn't see the true majesty of the angel because it wasn't what they had expected an angel to be like. This shows how people can miss something beautiful that's happening right in front of them because it's not what they expected.