Post by Deleted on Sept 22, 2015 22:25:52 GMT 8
Hi, Everybody!
I don’t know how many of you are “Cloud Atlas” fans. In recent weeks I’ve read the book (written by David Mitchell) once and watched the film twice, and every time I listen to the music from the film—
www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2U-lL_qdTI
which for me is about the most gorgeous music ever written—I figure that if a story can inspire music like that, it must be among the greatest ever conceived.
Yet I’ve had misgivings about both book and film, which were only reinforced when I turned to Mitchell’s first novel, “Ghostwritten”. Now the two books are written according to the same scheme, a series of interwoven short stories, nine in the case of “Ghostwritten” and six in the case of “Cloud Atlas”. Yet in my view the stories in “Ghostwritten” are so uniformly superior to those in “Cloud Atlas” that the former wins the contest hands down over the latter.
But it’s not my purpose here to argue about which book is better. Everyone has their own view on such matters, and anyway my focus in this post is elsewhere—viz., one of the stories in “Ghostwritten”, which I find very interesting from a transgender point of view.
I’ll try to explain the essential in as few words as possible. The story is set in Mongolia and concerns what I will refer to as “US”—an “unattached soul”, that is, a soul that possesses no body of its own, but can transmigrate between different bodies whenever two people touch each other. Now US has been travelling all over the world, from body to body, for two main reasons: (1) to try and find out if there are any other unattached souls in the world and (2) to discover where it originally came from.
But US has one over-riding fear: that it might get caught in a body at the moment that the person in question dies, in which case it doesn’t know what will happen to it. This is in fact what happens in the story, and US finds itself in a sort of limbo with other souls that are waiting to be reborn in new bodies. Eventually, US’s turn to be reborn comes, and it discovers it doesn’t like the experience at all. It quickly passes from baby to mother via the umbilical cord and thence into the husband when he touches his wife.
However, it quickly becomes apparent that the baby will die without a soul, and thus US has to decide whether to continue its wandering ways and allow the baby to die or to allow the baby to live by agreeing to inhabit its body for good. Despite the advantages of being able to move between bodies, it decides to accept being limited to one.
But from the transgender point of view, here’s the crux of the matter: note that up to now I’ve been referring to US as “it”. In fact, as I was reading the story, I thought of “it” as “he”, since it struck me as a “male soul”. Now some other reader might see it differently, but in fact when in the course of events US discovers his origins, it turns out that “he” originally occupied a male body. He was a boy. And there’s no indication whatsoever that he was in any way uncomfortable being a boy.
Yet at the end of the story the body he agrees to inhabit is female. That’s what caught my attention: how’s that going to work? My view of transgenderism comes into play here: if a soul can be comfortable in a male body, it cannot be comfortable in a female body. In my view, at the end of the story US has agreed to become transgender.
Does this mean that the author, David Mitchell, sees souls as agender? I seriously doubt it. I’ve glanced at his biography and I see nothing that would suggest that he’s transgender himself. I doubt he even thought of the problem. This is just a story, and he probably never considered the question whether a soul has gender and whether it can inhabit any sort of body indifferently. It takes a weird transgender person like me to raise that question.
This is fact my view of transgenderism: a soul is by its very nature male or female and would prefer a matching body—except in the case of those souls that might describe themselves as non-binary, agender, gender fluid, etc., and I’ll let them speak for themselves.
As for the transmigration of souls after death, which is after all a widely accepted belief in certain parts of the world, do those who hold that belief consider souls to be agender, able to slot into any sort of body comfortably? Again, unless they’re transgender, I doubt that they ever consider the problem.
Some people believe that if a man lives badly in one life, he might be punished by being reborn as a woman. (And note that this isn’t sexist: it’s merely the natural order of things, right?) As for me, I contend that a soul is what it is, so that if it can be reborn into another body, I figure that in my last life I must have been a poisonous b**** and thus was punished by being reborn into my present body. If that’s so, I’d simply like to declare to whatever celestial power is in charge of these matters that I’ve learned my lesson. I promise in the future to be very, very good so that this will never happen to me again.
