Spiritual Education in Fantasy

I am confused this week and I don't think I understand exactly how spiritualism in fantasy works. What I remember from class is having a realization and becoming frustrated with the education system. I guess this spiritual kind of education is something that is sorely missing from public schooling. That's a topic for another time I suppose, I just get angry thinking about it.

It just seems like people look at things too much in objective terms. They see Harry Potter as just magic and wizards on flying brooms and whatnot, or even The City of Lost Children as just being a trippy, crazy kinda movie. It's annoying how these things... how arts are kinda thrown aside and neglected belittled. A lot of people see things only as good if it makes money. These stories really, literature, art, they do so much for the growth of individuals, about what the hell it is to be human and having the freedom to live. It's so much more, so deep that I don't understand it, but I know it's there.

It's like learning to un-see things in painting. Not being concerned with painting an apple or the details of a person's face. It's about the shapes, the tones of things. Like in these stories, it's not the magic or the creatures. It's about exploring deeper meaning and subjects through the use of these things.

I still have a lot of questions about this, I'm a bit scatter brained at the moment.

Fantasy and Tolkien

So now we have just begun our start into fantasy. From what I can gather it's a pretty broad "genre." It can be set in almost any time and anything goes as far as subject matter (dragons, creatures, cities in the sky ect). What I found interesting is that fantasy is really a way to discuss topics that relate to the human condition from a 3rd person point of view. Well okay, maybe not all the time, but I think being able to tell a story that deals with such things are more interesting and lasting for me. Substance. Depth. Character. Challenging your points of view, what you think you know. Urging you to find out who you are and to understand. Outward social commentary and inward scrutiny of self. Fantasy seems like a good medium for that. I'm not sure why yet. I don't quite understand it, but I like where it's leading me. As far as Tolkien, The Hobbit is a fun story. I had read it years ago and saw the movie recently a few months ago. I found it interesting that he had taken such an interest in language and build his world from that. Also, reading the annotated version, thought it was interesting he thought maybe the plural of dwarf should have been dwarrow, not dwarves. The talk about the hero's journey was also very insightful. I had always thought the journey was a straight line, from point A to point B. Actually, it seems to be a circle, a cycle. Things go down before they get better and it can restart at any moment. I felt like the hero's journey tied directly into life, anyone's life. Going to school, learning a craft, love, anything, ultimately ending up at having the freedom to live. Can't wait to learn more about it.

Witches

Witches were probably my least favorite of the kinds of horror figures found in literature. In a lot of movies they always just seem to have a hint of omnipotence and can do anything they want, usually for malicious purposes. For example, they can injure or kill anyone at will in Dario Argento's Suspiria. Suspiria had the kind of witch I usually think of, the evil kind that usually wants revenge or power and seems to live forever. The movie itself was really a ton of fun to watch. The scenes were really nicely designed with how they handled lighting, the music was creepy and gave a really ominous and frantic vibe and the deaths were blood splatteringly good. Compared to Hiyao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, it's a much different kind of witch. Both have the independent, strong female witch, just in different ways. Suspiria's witch is independent and strong in a brutal, rogueish kind of way, while Kiki's is closer to the coming of age independence, youth into adulthood and strong in that she can just go out into the world on her own and not be the property of anyone. I thought that was interesting how witches are earthly and have a closer connection to earth, where it's not about the witch, but the power that flows through the witch. It's easy to see why the Christians didn't like that as they saw the body as the source of all sin. It was also mentioned that having a child is the closest thing to coming close to nature and how women are associated with being more in tune with the world. The women part led into talking about women's sovereignty and power and intimate relationship struggles and how typically in society men are a bit engrained to try and own the women. People trying to own each other in relationships, men or women, is where the power struggles of a relationship can stem from and it was mentioned it is better to try and nurture a more intimate relationship and have a fair distribution of power and good communication.

Haruki Murakami - A Wild Sheep Chase

I've read a little bit of a previous Murakami novel before, "The Elephant Vanishes," and really enjoy the way he writes. The stories are just written in a way that flow really nicely and the way he describes things is so off the wall and colorful. I mean, reading Wild Sheep Chase was awesome. I was actually enjoying the act of reading and every page I turned, in my head I was shouting, "This is awesome!" One of my favorites parts was when he was describing how beautiful this girls ears were. It was something like how they radiated down the oblique face of time and emitted protean beams of light. Man, it's just a really enjoyable book, not quite a horror story, certainly not like Frankenstein or anything of the others read so far, but incredibly enjoyable. We also watched the Japanese ghost stories in class and I thought the whole concept of ghosts not really being good or bad was interesting. It was mentioned that it was a very western thing to label things in black and white, good and bad, where in Japanese horror there is a lot of gray areas. The ghosts are really not good or bad and nothing is really labeled as such. I was also having my mind blown over the idea that everything is an allusion and you can't be certain if someone is experiencing something the same way you are.