To open out a new wide area of consciousness means to slough the old
consciousness. The old consciousness has become a tight-fitting
prison to us, in which we are going rotten.
You can't have a new, easy skin before you have sloughed the old,
tight skin.
You can't.
And you just can't, so you may as well leave off pretending.
D.H. Lawrence - Studies in Classic American Literature
Plastic Surgery is big business-as-usual (b-a-u) in Colombia.
This industry's origins are said to be an artifact of Colombian
gangster culture. Buying your women new tits, buying yourself a
bigger penis, buying a new Hollywood cinematic physical make-over is
the most tangible sign that a ganster has arrived in their own
personal realismo magico/Hollywood fantasy/reality.
People fly to Colombia from all over the first world in their attempt
to cheaply, economically slough-off the old skin and to come into the
new plastic surgery skin. I have been modestly proposing that all
slough-off-ed, the lipo-sucked fat in Colombia should be efficiently
utilized so that this country could emerge as a major producer of
premium soap (see the movie 'The Fight Club').
There is something monstrous about the art and science of plastic
surgery applied to Colombian women. Colombianas are some of the most
beautiful women I have been blessed in being in the presence of. I
never tire of watching them walk/dance down the streets, in all their
grace and loveliness.
I say, Vive Colombianas!!!
But then there are the women who, as they walk down the street, must
find clearance for their hugely technologically enhanced breasts,
must suffer lower back pain in their misguided attempts to come into
the new skin.
And of course women are not the only ones subject to this
affliction. Men are just as predictably b-a-u about what plastic
surgery 'enhancement' they want.
The Sumerian culture hero Gilgamesh is said to have dived to the
bottom of the ocean and found the secret of immortality. But this
secret was stolen by the snake who achieves immortality by the
constant sloughing off of the old skin to come into the new skin.
Plastic surgery is a horrible, monstrous parody of this. It is the
sloughing off of the old skin to come into some more tight-fitting,
older skin. It is pretending. It is nothing but bad posture before
the mystery.
The secret that humans once knew, and the mystery that is the snake's
is the mystery of end-less, beginning-less transformation, of never
abiding in the stagnant, static, old, repetitious tight-fitting skin,
of seeing the mystery of aging not as a diminishment, but seeing IT
as the coming of greater power, as the coming of the real, new,
beautiful skin.