As Dr. Sexson was talking about Pooh Bear and Wilber, other media which explores similar themes kept popping in my head: Peter Pan, Narnia, The Golden Compass, Calvin and Hobbes, and Toy Story. They deal with the power of children to see things which adults can't, and as kids grow up, they slowly lose their old make-believe friends until they barely remember they existed at all. They are thrown aside for new things like school, relationships, careers, kids of their own, and old age (I feel like that list is close to mimicking Jacques’ speech in "As You Like It").
Sadly, I think back to when I was younger. I never had an entirely imaginal friend who didn't exist in a corporeal sense, but I had many, many toys, and many, many grand epics I played out in my head. There was the great Chicama and Sharkey. Chicama was a stuffed chimp my great grandma Myrtle gave me which became the star of his very own television program. His costar was my next-door neighbor's shark toy, Sharkey. Together they were a comic team. Prat-falling down stairs, smashing into each other, all for their fictional fans viewing them from their fictional television sets. I went as far as to make up an episode guide and what happened in each one. My whole childhood was littered with this kind of play. I created massive sequels to Star Wars, to Dragonball Z, to Jurassic Park, to X-Men, to Harry Potter, and Beast Wars, and they were all stored in my mind. I replayed them over and over. I ran around the living room, bouncing off banisters, jumping off chairs, and flying off couches. I dodged bullets, was blown in the air by explosions, and my characters died. They died a lot. This was a very 'boy' universe.
This continued into high school, though became increasingly sporadic. Often my attention would turn to a comic book I drew known as 'Piggy the Super Heroe' if I was in a creative mindset (yep, spelled wrong on accident at first, then a joke). I wrote many 'issues' through my middle and high school career. Every character was an aspect of myself, battling for attention. I had a sadistic side back then. I also had self-esteem problems (what kid doesn't?). These all came out in the characters I drew. I wrote a paper on this a year ago for another class and attempted to draw a new Piggy comic. It turns out the characters are still pertinent to my life these days. At the time I was writing and drawing anew, however, my friends that I knew since elementary school through college were graduating. I was going to be alone this year. I loved my friends and they were leaving. I wanted the comic to represent that, but I couldn't. My life was changing too much and I didn't have the ability to put it into words.
Watching the end of Toy Story 3 again the other day, I couldn't stop wanting to cry. It was the same damn thing when I saw it in the movie theater. Woody just seemed like a perfect surrogate for my dog, Barkley. Growing up, I loved nothing more in the world than that dog. I actually looked up to him, which is pretty good for a Shih Tzu with kidney problems. He was grumpy and growled at me all the time, but he loved to play ball, and most definitely he loved me more than anyone or anything else in the world. When I was in elementary school, I remember getting a phone call from my mom while at a friend's house. She told me Barkley wouldn't live past five because of his condition. Well, with treatment he survived to almost 12 years old. The last two years of his life I was in college. Every moment, every time I spent with him I cherished because I always feared it would be my last. Finally, one time I came home and I knew, I knew something was wrong. He was skinny. He looked ill. I couldn't let my mom do it. I couldn't let her kill him. I knew if he died the world would be a worse place, that it would be irrevocably less. I couldn't say goodbye, not to my best friend. I still remember the last time I saw him. My mom drove up for the day and brought him with her, and then the car driving away with him in it. I couldn't bear it after he died. It was just too much. I was too attached. My mind kept replaying what I could have done differently. He died a week before I was supposed to go home for the summer, if he could have just made it. But it's like he knew that would be the last moment he would see me. Entering the house I grew up in without him there for the first time was one of the worst experiences of my life.
When you love something too much, you kill it slowly. You try to control it, to make it last forever, and this is tyranny. At the same time, it is part of life to become attached, to experience love, hate, emotions that let you know you're alive. Anyway, I am actually fearing posting this, but the themes which run through it are strong and relate well to what I have been talking about. I am sure everyone has experienced these sorts of things because they are part of life.
I guess I should add a disclaimer to this video for some sexual things. Though, it isn't as bad as the capture might suggest.
For some reason that video is always entwined in my mind with this next one because I watched them fairly close to each other. Anyhow, if you are curious, you can remember them the same way I do:
I also want to slightly modify something I said in my last blog. I do believe the ideals which a particular image or symbol can represent can change. However, if it is a good one, the image itself should stay relatively consistent. My example would be a cultural figure like Batman. Though his image has stayed for the most part constant throughout his existence, the ideals which society has chosen to represent through him have changed. You could do an analysis on that character's representation during a decade and have a pretty good understanding of the particular era which that version of the character came from. Grant Morrison in his book about super heroes, Super Gods, says characters like Superman and Batman didn't exist in a "close continua with beginnings, middles, and ends; the fictional 'universe' [of DC and Marvel] ran on certain repeating rules but could essentially change and develop beyond the intention of its creators. It was an evolving, learning, cybernetic system that could reproduce itself into the future using new generations of creators who would be attracted like worker bees to serve and renew the universe" (117). His emphasis, not mine.
He continues, saying "These characters were like twelve-bar blues or other chord progressions. Given the basic parameters of Batman, different creators could play very different music. This meant interesting work could be done by writers and artists who knew what they were getting into and were happy to add their own little square to a vast patchwork quilt of stories that would outlast their lives" (118). This image of a quilt is similar to how we construct our own memory structures. Each particular "image" becomes a part of a greater whole and is stitched together with others. In this instance, you begin to wonder who serves who? Do we serve our memories? Do the writers of Batman, Spider-Man (the examples Morrison gives) serve them, continually feeding the fictional heroes so they continue to live? "Everybody's heard writers talk about a moment in the process of writing a novel or story," Morrison says, "when 'it was as if the characters took over.'" I will cover this more in my next blog, but what makes ideas less real than the material universe? When do ideas decide to emerge and possess us? Maybe man didn't create Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, or Wolverine, what if they were just particular powerful gods who wanted to be known and they are feeding off of us--their notoriety--to live? Is this why children can play so intensely, because they have not yet separated the material world from the spiritual ideal one? In The Secret History of the World, Mark Booth quotes Dylan as saying that to change the age "'you have to have power and dominion over the spirits. I had it once ... ' He writes that such individuals are able to '... see into the heart of things, the truth of things--not metaphorically either--but really see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it is with hard words and vicious insight'" (Booth 36).
Booth says of this:
"Note that he [Bob Dylan] emphasizes he is not talking metaphorically. He is talking directly and quite literally about a powerful, ancient wisdom, preserved in the secret societies, a wisdom in which the great artists, writers and thinkers who have forged our culture are steeped. At the heart of this wisdom is the belief that the deepest springs of our mental life are also the deepest springs of the physical world, because in the universe of the secret societies all chemistry is psycho-chemistry, and the ways in which the physical content of the universe responds to the human psyche are described by deeper and more powerful laws than the laws of material science" (Booth 36).
There have been rumors of artists selling their soul to the devil at the crossroads, Robert Johnson being the most famous. However, I have heard tell of John Lennon giving his soul over for twenty years of breathtaking music and worldwide fame. He had access to the gods, demons, and spirits which the rest of us do not. Or was he communing with his own particular muse? Let's hope it wasn't Yoko Ono.
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