Falling in Love with the Imaginary…

Friday Lunchtime Ponderings…

…I think I have covered, or at least started to cover, this topic before… But I possibly got distracted and danced off on another train of thought before I could put finger tips to keys and pull the words out my brain…

Disclaimer: I’m not clever, I don’t understand  psychology, nor pretend to, I can not include any intelligent quotes (because I’m not sure what they mean) nor do I have any answers… Sorry my friends, all you get here will be some mad ramblings…

Rambling Commencing: Isn’t it just delicious how we, as normal every day mortal folk, can find ourselves in love with the imaginary. The characters that grace books, screen, cartoons, comics, games, movies and so on… The lovable rogue, the bumbling fool, the anti-hero, the stone cold killer, the gunslinger or the sheriff… No matter what genre of fiction we embrace, we will find these archetypes and we embrace them, we follow them through their ‘lives’ we may visualize them differently from authors descriptions, artists representations or actors, er… acting…

Fandoms are born from people sharing the same passion for certain characters or series of adventures, it expands, morphs into Comic-Cons, beyond that to entire theme parks, events, studio tours… Where we the mundane can step into the world of Fantasy, Fiction or Sci-Fi etc… We dress as our favorite characters, we have lightsaber  battles with Jedi when we’re dressed as Sith… Wand duel with a Slytherin while taking a selfie and sharing it on social media… These things bring total strangers together, we can talk about the ridiculous without actually sounding ridiculous, because the stranger we’re chatting too understands perfectly the made up jargon you’re talking about…

It makes me (personally) feel like I am part of a huge family, I am a cosplayer, I admire the creativity the dedication and perfection of come costumes. I’ve never tried LARPing, but this could prove to be the ultimate step (for me) as a (non)writer, to become your own character, to act as they would act and put yourself in their shoes…

This whole concept is so expansive and so inclusive, I don’t think I’ve really scratched the surface here and could express myself further, include more examples, genres or characters… Good or Bad, Love them or Hate them… None of this ‘world within a world’ would even begin to exist if people hadn’t sat down, picked up a pen and wrote about the imaginary people inside their heads, by doing so, they crafted life, love and a whole realm where nothing is impossible in a world where we are restricted to reality, sometimes the incredible can be tangible.

Yet none of it would be so if there was never a ‘Once Upon a Time’ …

I’m going to get back to my own writings shortly and I’m going to leave you with a passage from Michael Moorcock, introducing one of his most chaotic anti-heroes… This is where I fell in love with the imaginary…

“It is the color of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the color of bone. “

 

Anne Harrison 17.02.17

From Exploring the World to my Inner-World

I found an amazing amount of inspiration while I was away, then the enforced return to normality saw my mood drop and inspiration along with motivation packed their bags and left, ran away together fleeing the daily bus routes and the never ending pressing of buttons. I felt lost and empty for a while, as I struggled to adjust to my mundane life. Never before has 10 days of my life changed my life so much – apart from the exception where I was ill in 2013 – but that’s another story.

I think you get the impression, it sucked being back at work and I couldn’t be arsed with anything. However having said that I do love my job, I love where I live and I love my life. I just dip at times – Everyone does…

Moon, Mood, Hormones, Mundane, Circumstances, People, Politics, Money… There are endless causes for down days and as such I found myself writing a note to myself which I posted yesterday entitled Reading List.

Not only was I lifting my current gloom, I was writing again! This felt like a flood of relief, my words, as simple as they were, were still my words. I write sometimes and I do not know where these words come from, I write without thinking, by just letting them flow through me onto the paper. As some would say Reiki is channelled from a higher source through a healer, or other similar concepts.

I am reminded of a quote from ‘Eat, Prey, Love’ where Elizabeth Gilbert writes to herself in her darkest moments:

“I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

I’m not sure I was doing the same thing or not? My words were more simple, I heard them in my mind, in a voice I did not know. They appeared on the paper unconsciously and once I read them back to myself I was reminded of the lines in a long poem at the end of the Nightwish album Imaginaerum:

“Dear child, stop working, go play
Forget every rule
There’s no fear in a dream”
Song Of Myself

Is it possible that my mind had subconsciously spliced together these two random influences to create my own inferior replica of sorts? … I honestly do not know …

For where do words come from when they pop into our thoughts? Outside influences are unavoidable as we are surrounded by information and technology throughout our waking days, which our mind records and soaks up like a sponge, even though we are unaware of this process and recall very little of everything absorbed. I have to wonder, is there anything really original anymore?

But at least these questions have awakened my dull thoughts, my words (however influenced) have inspired me to write once more and this heavy weight which had been dragging me down has been lifted. I would like to write some more about the marvelous mind, the squishy mass inside our skulls, though that is a blog for another day – I did say I had been re-inspired  – even if my mind does go off on various tangents at once… I suppose I should apologise in advance, for I have no idea where this adventure of the mind/writing will take us.

 

Anne Harrison 05.05.16

Nightwish – Song of Myself – Video with full Lyrics.