Cris (some write “Chris”) Galera is 33 (some say 31, but never ask a woman her age). A Brazilian from São Paulo, with curves in all the right places, she is a lingerie model. In September, she got married. But now she’s getting a divorce, after only 90 days. She is getting a divorce because she realized she had married the wrong person. She has in fact met someone else, fallen in love with him, started an affair and now she is resorting to “reparative” divorce.
A story common enough, some would say, in our world where such things happen quite often, a world where people change wives or husbands like clothes.
But this story is different. Because in September the busty Cris “married” herself and is therefore now “divorcing” herself. She was “married” to the wrong person–herself–and now she is distancing herself from the mistake, i.e. herself. But she comments that it was good while it lasted.
Yes, go ahead and laugh. I, too, laughed when I read the news. But in fact, this can also make you cry.
The truth is, we have reached a point of permutation of all values; the subversion of language, the shipwreck of reason, the deterioration of the spirit. We are now only what we decide to be and what we imagine ourselves to be. The prophets of “concrete utopia,” who cried “so much the worse for facts”, were just amateurs fooling around with intellectual trinkets.
Here, on the other hand, it’s serious; it reverses everything that smells human. And the increasingly terrifying thing is that most of us will probably find Cris’s story quite normal, perhaps even exemplary, and that tomorrow we will have already moved on, ready to digest the next disaster as soon as it comes our way.
More and more is true–on a daily basis–what the great Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) said in Heretics back in 1905: “Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.” We, knights of the obvious, guerrilla fighters of normality, destroyers of the absurd and saboteurs of the surreal; today–on just another Saturday–we established the Green Leaf Club. Official membership is open.