books are mirrors.

I joke about my major.  Not maliciously– I tend to believe that if you’re passionate about something, you should be able to crack a joke now and again.  Like Godzilla.  I love Godzilla.

But it’s hard not to chuckle a little when, in some movies, he looks like this:

 

Godzilla and progeny, Minya (who has a million different names,
but I like that one best...).  The original film, Gojira was dark
and very poignant.  Then, sequels.  Supposedly, the new Legendary Pictures
film is going to be awesome.  My twelve year old self will
be very disappointed if it's not.  #highhopes

So, every time someone asks about my majoring in English and what-exactly-can-you-do-with-a-degree-like-that-hmmm-seems-a-little-silly-maybe-perhaps,  my standard response is ‘Oh, I’ll be a homeless poet!’

The people I’m with tend to laugh with me, and honestly, it’s not impossible that I’ll be a really, really poor writer someday, scribbling poems on subway walls or something cliché like that.

But my response doesn’t actually answer the question.  It deflects it and confirms their suspicions, though I hope the dedication to art that this brand of homelessness implies helps them realize how important writing, my art, is to me.  So, I suppose it sort of answers the question.  It noncommittally addresses the importance of writing to me.

But it barely begins to address the aspect of my studies that’s not dedicated to writing my own poetry, or stories, or this blog.  Actually, I suspect that’s really what they’re wondering about.  Like, why major in reading books?  Basic assumption: well, you can’t really write well without reading good writing, so you may as well pick a major that builds that into the equation.

That’s partially true.  I study English because– I kid you not– writing yourself onto paper is extremely difficult without reading other people on paper.  I’m not actually a big fan of the English poet Philip Larkin anymore, but when I first encountered his poem ‘High Windows, my brain went, ‘Whoah!!!  Depth of symbolism and double meanings is a thing, bro” and my writing, conversely, plunged far deeper than it ever had before– both stylistically and thematically, because they actually go hand in hand.

So.  I’m an English major to facilitate my writing.  A few months ago, I might have told you that’s the main reason.  If you asked why I study English and were genuinely curious, I’d probably give you some shade of the homeless writer thing and mention how you can’t write unless you read.

That’s changed.

~          ~          ~

Before I go further with that bit, I must mention a related issue: people who don’t even make it to the ‘English, hmmm?  Uh.  Why bother?’ but who remain stuck at ‘Well, reading is good and fine and dandy, but it’s hardly a serious business, no indeed.  Readers are just being entertained.  It’s not important.’

Aha.

Suspend belief for a moment.  Take a leap, as Neo did with Morpheus in The Matrix.  What if, in fact, it’s very important?  Not just a little, hey-it’s-a-good-thing important, but more on the this-is-a-piece-of-what-makes-us-human important.

 

 I believe it’s weighed more heavily towards option #2.

The arguments that I come up against most often, whether it be in casual conversation or scrolling through comments on something online (which is an almost reverse transcendental way to lose faith in humanity) is that fiction– such thinkers don’t tend to make it as far as poetry– is, well, just that.  Fiction.  And they unconsciously synonymize ‘fiction’ with ‘false’.  A harmless falsehood, to be sure.  Fine as long as it doesn’t interfere with the business of life.  But false nonetheless.  It’s not real, hence it follows that it shouldn’t be taken very seriously.

The opinion, sadly, isn’t actually very rare.  I even know artistic, talented people who flirt with this idea, which makes me sad.

Because, to be clear, these ideas are false, not the fiction, not the writing.  In a large way, the origin of the argument against the importance of fiction (and, by extension, all forms of creative writing and the art of writing) lies in a misconstrual of words.

Let’s substitute words for a few minutes.  Fiction becomes mirror.  Reading turns into gaze.

Lastly, change reader into soul.

Fiction is not a charming falsehood; it is a dramatic and living portrait of our human self.  Writers, true writers, pour their souls into their work.  And I’m not talking about investment of time– some brilliant things have been written in less than an hour.  I mean that the very essence of a person is intricately bound inside the words they write.  The act of writing, in fact, is an expression of their humanity, poured into words.

Art is a fascinating activity in that its essence comprises the self attempting to express the self.  For writers, this soullular movement arises through language, bringing words together and telling us themselves and, if they are truly wearing the artist’s cloak, shedding light on us in in the process.  A writer’s work is a gift– we receive it, and then, bringing it into ourselves, allow it to tell us a piece of what it is to be human.

The Soul gazes into the Mirror, and sees itself reflected Back.

 

Because it’s not just the human, the normal human, who reads.  Reading, an interior activity, creates a special state present only to the reader and the words themselves.  It’s not like looking in a mirror when there are other people in the room.  You’re alone with the writer’s gift, staring you back as your own self.  Their humanity is present and so ours, recognizing like with like, sees itself.

(Like all analogies, you can only take the whole mirror thing so far, but you get the idea.)

Reading takes the reader to a singular location, independent of the rest of us.  Yet, at the same time, the Soul is then wound more tightly with the rest of humanity, because fiction, remember, is Mirror, revealing the Soul’s humanity in a way far more intimate than is possible during the tremendous distraction of life.  Not that life is just a distraction, or anything like that– but, in doing only exterior activity, often associated with interpersonal relations, it can distract from our awareness of our own self.  And that’s not healthy, spiritually.  We are individuals.

So, the Soul gazes, and sees itself.

And it’s not selfish.  Self oriented, yes, but in viewing ourselves revealed, we become more human– or instead, become more capable of our humanity– and thus are more to the people around us.  Reading illuminates us.

At the profoundest level, I believe such mirrorgazing brings us closer to God.  I don’t mean that in a hardline existential kind of manner, where we become God, but in the sense that, in becoming more human, we are more what we were created to be, and thus closer to God, the Creator.

~          ~          ~

So.  The act of reading, and the value of writing, is actually a reflection that takes us deeper into being human.  Rather than being frivolous, it’s actually a powerful testament to our species.  Storytelling is elemental in us, and essential.  As far back as we remember, we’ve told stories, and for nearly all history we know, we’ve written.  The forms change.  Modernly, you’re most likely to find a Mirror through a novel, or a graphic novel.  Or a film.  Because of the writing aspect, I don’t think it’s inappropriate to include movies.  In ancient Greece, you’d be more likely to jive with a play or epic poetry.  But the form doesn’t matter so much– varying styles tend to suit their era- as the import of the form to its receivers.

 

Architecture of the classical world.  Suited them.
(Actually, this is a heavily romanticized take on it, but still.  It's the spirit that counts here.)
Unfortunately, I couldn't find an image of this awesome
painting (Jupiter Pluvius, by Joseph Michael Gandy) in color... sorrow.

In all honesty (a phrase I never used to use, but one of my best friends says it a ton and since we both work for the same employer, I hear it all the time and boom, osmosis…), it’s not a sign of progress or an enlightened society that we should be dismissive of reading and, by extension, writers.   A society of people who don’t pull inward and face themselves through reading– and I won’t be a snob about it, a similar but different effect can emerge from watching a film with the right intention [i.e., being just entertained] so count that, too– is impoverished.  Spiritually and intellectually.  We deprive ourselves of one of the most essential ways of expression and exploration of the interior by not gazing into the Mirror.

~          ~          ~

And that’s one of the main reasons I’m majoring in English.  It’s of course entirely possible to read, truly read, without a degree.  If it weren’t, this whole post would be a little silly.  ‘Here, let me pointlessly persuade the value of this thing I’m encouraging you to do, and then please forgive me as I tell you you can’t’.

But studying English, in the focused way the major affords, allows you continual opportunities to do so and helps sharpen your ability to gaze into the Mirror.

I don’t believe for a moment my time is wasted in classes dedicated to reading and analysis.  Yes, I could read any of those books on my own.  But the insights of teachers whose lives are dedicated to the art means so much, and the opportunity to discuss the ideas with other students also immersed in it… it’s pretty cool.  I’ll laugh about it, joke about it, but only because I love English.  I might be a poor poet someday.  Probably will be, really.  But that doesn't de-value my studies.  I'm not in school to get a job, and English is a beautiful way to delve deeper into your own humanity.

~          ~          ~

So.  I apologize if this was at all ranty!  I hope it didn’t go too far in that direction.

And, to be clear, this isn’t the only way reading and writing benefit us.  But I think it’s one of the most important aspects, and one of the strongest arguments against the fallacy that reading, and the writing that provided the material, isn’t important.

Take care, everyone!

archetypes, pop-culture, a beardman, and some lyrics. not quite in that order.

Well.  I took something of an unintentional sabbatical.  Oops.

Life has been kind of crazy lately– finalizing the move and a super busy work week grabbed my hands and carried me off to magical places which resulted in me doing little but busy-do-all-of-the-things and sleep.  I did actually try to write, but it was mediocre enough to gently slide into the never-see-the-light-of-day cabinet.

(I promised myself early on not to post anything that wasn’t actually at least a little bit good.)

But I have returned!  With grand thoughts and magnificent observations!  First, though, a picture of Samuel Beam.

Does has beard.
Warning: I'm pretty sure this opening has nothing to do with the rest of the post.

He’s the lead singer/ guitarist/ sole songwriter of my current favorite band, Iron & Wine.  I absolutely love his music.  It’s evocative– almost mysterious sounding.  Picture a woodsy folk man, who listens to jazz and blues records and reads postmodern poetry scribbled on subway walls… that’s Iron & Wine.  Sort of.

They kind of defy description.

And the lyrics.  Poetry.  Not ‘poetic’ or ‘Hey, that was a good line,’ but ‘Huh.  This dude’s a better writer than me.'  Check this bit out:

Some days her shape in the doorway will

speak to me, a bird's wing on the window

Sometimes I'll hear her when she's sleeping,

her fever dream a language on her face

I want your flowers like babies want God's love

or maybe as sure as tomorrow will come

(Taken out of Fever Dream, from the album Our Endless Numbered Days.)

Anyways.

I spent $100 worth of Amazon gift cards a few months ago.  All on books.  Well, mostly on books.  I did buy a Sonic Screwdriver, too.

I regret this purchase not.  It sits in an honored place on my dresser,
and frequently comes with me to the outside world.

But mostly books, one of which was The Archetypes and the Collective Unconcious, a volume that collects Carl Jung’s basic writings on, well, the archetypes and the collective unconscious.  In case you don’t know, Jung was an early psychologist– he studied under Freud, though he came to depart from his teacher on many issues.  Significantly, they disagreed on the factors defining the human psyche.  Freud, of course, was mostly concerned with the individual consciousness and the pathos that defined it.

Jung didn’t disagree that the individual’s personal consciousness and the personal subconscious– or, as they refer to it more often, unconscious– were factors in the human person.  Far from it.  But he didn’t consider those to be the only factors influencing human thought and behavior.

This is where things get cool.

He postulated that there is a collective unconscious.  Quick breakdown: we all have our personal conscious and unconscious, unique entirely to us.  Jung, though, believes that another level exists, a shared unconscious identical in every human being.  It’s a reservoir of archetypes that are essential to humanity.

 You’ve heard the word archetype, before, I’m guessing.  To be honest, it gets thrown around inaccurately a lot.  I’ve seen review blurbs that utilize the term as if it meant cliché or stereotype.  Reader, beware.  That’s not what archetypes are.

Rather, an archetype is an unconscious and primordial psychological presence common to all humans.  We make sense of the world through them, without realizing it.  They are to the collective unconscious what the pathos are to the individual unconscious.  Almost like instincts, but not exactly.  They’re like an enormous thought that everyone’s always thinking without realizing it.

Representations of them appear in every world culture.  The archetypes– which are in themselves formless, or at least beyond human comprehension if they actually have a true embodiment– find physical representations in human art and beliefs throughout human society.  One of the most recognizable is this:

The Ouroboros.  This image is from Wikipedia.  Totes authentic, y'all.
(Sarcasm about Wikipedia aside, I'm fairly certain this one's real.)

It’s crazy how much that one comes up.  The oldest example is Egyptian.

The Ouroboros symbol appears in Nordic mythology.  As a timeline, ancient Egyptian culture flourished over a thousand years before the birth of Christ (I know it’s more correct now to say BCE, but seriously, the CE is based off of a Christocentric timeline…).  The mythological life of Scandinavia barely began before the early Middle Age.

Confession: that’s the easiest one to point out.  Many others are more ambiguous, and I haven’t quite read enough Jung to adequately explain.  But I hope that gives you an idea of the whole archetype jam.

Importantly, the ways we represent archetypes are not the archetypes themselves.  As I mentioned a little bit ago, they don’t have an actual physical form.  They are primordial and permanent thoughts present in everyone, and find different expressions in different ways through the lens of human experience.  But, as with the ouroboros, they can also be strikingly similar across cultures.

~          ~          ~

Now, the modes of the expression, to be totally clear, are not the archetypes.  They’re almost like art– imitations, reflections, personal interpretations of something profound.  E.g., one of the most striking moments of my life was on a bus with my best friend on a trip we both attended to Niagara Falls.  I published a poem earlier this year that was about said experience, but if I hadn’t told you, you’d never know.  The poem’s language is about trolleys and Victorians and the road getting washed away.  Think of our representations of archetypes like that.  Distorted, though the distortion is actually a good thing.

For art, distortion is good because honestly, what actually happened on the bus wouldn’t be terribly interesting to anyone other than my friend and I.  But couched in the poetic language, it transcends and becomes something other people want to hear about.  At least I hope they’d want to hear about it.

But the reason the archetypes take forms, rather than manifest as themselves, is a bit more dire.  Just a bit.  On one hand, it’s fairly obvious why– they’re incorporeal mental nonentity entity-ish things.  But think about that for a moment– the concept becomes alarming when you realize that, if Jung is correct, the archetypes really define a lot of our basic behaviors, which in turn define a lot of the way we lead our lives.  Encountering one, in its pure, raw form, would be unbelievably unsettling.  The least cloaked versions of the archetypes are often the scariest.  Kind of like Cthulhu.

Come to think of it, it might be best not to think too hard about
which archetype Cthulhu falls under.  The implications are
probably unsettling.

Thus, even a relatively tamed version of an archetype (because, let's be honest, Cthulhu doesn't really fit the normal definition of 'tame') will contain tremendous power.  Jung theorizes that our mythologies, religions, stories, and the universal tenets and characters that appear, are all at least partially the archetypes’ manifestations.  Without those, we would encounter the archetypes in their raw– or at least very much closer– form, a dangerous proposition.  They’re too much for the human consciousness to handle.  Actually, Jung sees them as a root cause of mental illness and a catalyst for the development of the pathos in the personal psyche.  Don’t get too close, or they’ll get’cha, to be a little crude in expression.

So, we develop all sorts of ways to react.

He gives particular props to Roman Catholicism.  He regards the complex symbology of the Church and the intricate layers to those symbols as huge layers of safety netting over the archetypes.

He’s a little less enthusiastic about Protestantism, because, historically speaking, the movement within Christianity largely denied the ornate nature of the Church and focused on a de-mystification of the business of faith.

Skipping things so we don’t get boring, one thing leads to the next, the questioning of traditional authority brings on the Enlightenment, we jump back a bit and get more symbolic with the Romantic movement sans the authority of the Church bit, skip hop jump 20^th century and Modernism.  The Church remains an enormous institution, even in the historically anti-Catholic America (which is kind of weird, given America’s reputation for tolerance, but oh well…).  But the layers of imagery and symbolism have been divested of their power, at least where archetypes are concerned.  The Protestant and secular worlds have both questioned them and, resultantly, rendered them unable to form an adequate processing barrier between the archetypes and the human person.

~          ~          ~

I want to be clear– I’m Catholic.  Passionately so.  I believe in the cosmology of the Church.  The Triune God, Mary, the Mother of God, the saints, angels, demons, and the odd nephilim or two.  Jung’s theories are compatible with this belief.  Actually, I’ve toyed with the idea that the archetypes do, in fact, have their fundamental origin with the Catholic cosmology.

That’s another story, though.

Basically, I just wanted to reassure any concerned readers that I’m not, in any way, calling into question the truths of my faith.

~          ~          ~

So.  Falling back on the Church’s cosmology as the safety net against the power of the archetypes no longer works, societally, because they’ve been called into question by so many people and have been deprived of their former power, as images.  Not as actual independent realities.  Just psychologically.

This was well in place by the time Jung was writing.  In the early 20^th century, he believed, the West was turning to the East and attempting to borrow their symbols and images, to re-clothe the increasingly naked and powerful archetypes.  Generally, he thought that was a pretty bad idea… “It seems to me that it would be far better stoutly to avow our spiritual poverty, our symbol-lessness, instead of feigning the legacy to which we are not legitimate heirs at all.  We are, surely, the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage.”

Borrowing those images, Jung believes, won’t work.  We don’t have a legitimate claim on them, because we haven’t built them up over centuries and made our delicate psyches dependents upon them.

It’s vaguely akin to current poets who try really hard to rhyme and maintain a stiff meter.  The schools of poetry that wrote like that did so because it was the mode of expression natural and appropriate to them, in their time and place.  Now, it– generally, not always– comes off as very stilted and awkward.

So, stealing other people’s coping methods, he thought, was basically ineffective, and maybe a little rude.  Making the archetypes conscious was important to him– recognizing them in whatever way they manifested, often in dreams or through neuroses– and then allowing them to go back safely into the unconscious.  This may be a good clinical way of coming to terms with the rawer archetypal presence in our lives.  I don’t really know, not being a psychologist.

Come to think of it, I’m fairly uncertain as to how seriously these aspects of Jung’s theories are taken in current psychology.  He was always adamant that he was a scientist, but his ideas seem, at least on the surface, fairly hard to empirically prove… to be fair, he saw hard line empiricism as a hindrance.  Hmmm…

Besides the point.  We are getting to the point, I promise.  My blog posts are the opposite of my academic papers.  In MLA format, you’re supposed to introduce the thesis at the beginning, but in my posts, I always throw it out somewhere towards the middle.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to switch back by September, when classes begin.  And stop writing so much in the passive voice.

The coming semester will be interesting.

Ok.  So.  Archetypes.  Layers of images and symbols.  Stripped of their power.  Whoah.  Now we’re way to close and, Jung thought, getting alarmingly neurotic as a result.  Enter therapy to help identify and thus allow the archetypes passage back into the slumbering realm of the unconscious.  Don’t bother bothering other cultures’ cosmologies.  Won’t work, man.  Sorry.

But.

~          ~          ~

Have you noticed how important pop-culture characters are to us?  They weren’t, not so long ago.  If you talk to people who were teenagers or twenty-somethings in the 70s, they had their heroes and things they thought were groovy. (I'm not being facetious by using groovy.  It's one of my favorite words.)

Robert Plant, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin.  He had some great hair going on.

But, by and large, Batman didn’t have the power he has today.  He was a character in comic books, and he had a really terrible TV show.  Think about Batman for a moment.  He’s now a symbol to the actual world, not just to the fictional Gotham City.  The Joker is too.  Within popular culture, they’ve taken on mythic proportions.

Star Wars.  My close friends know I’m a little obsessed where Star Wars is concerned.  But I’m not the only one.  It was popular in the 70s and 80s.  It’s a phenomenon now.  Crazy huge.  It doesn’t matter that they’re just movies.  The characters, phrases, and iconography of the story are endemic in us.

There are almost endless examples.  Head to Hot Topic sometime soon, which picked up on the trend and reflects our societal obsession with these pop-culture images.  I’ve been saying 70s and 80s, but it’s honestly only been in the past few years.  In 2006, Hot Topic was the super commercialized emo fashion store.  Now, it’s a little pop-culture shop.  This trend towards a boredline idolization of pop-culture figures is new.  It’s been building up for a while, certainly.  But to the level it’s at?  Very recent.

The one that’s biggest for me has been exploding lately– Dr. Who.  It’s hard to put into words what the story means to me.  Almost nothing has affected me as much in my life.  The experience borders on religious­– not in a worshipful sense, of course, but in its sheer import.  The Doctor himself is titanic in my imagination.

My favorite Doctor is the Doctor, but I figured it'd be safest
to post a Tennant/ Smith duo pic, lest terrifying fandom people
come demanding which I like best and shunning me
when it's not the answer they wanted to hear....

I’ve cried more, been more moved by the Doctor than any other story, or particularly fictional character, in my life.  That in and of itself is a bit strange.  The writing for the show is brilliant, admittedly.  But it’s not the only brilliant thing ever written.  The characters are excellent, especially the Doctor himself, but they’re not the only amazing characters out there.  But I can’t escape the potency of what it means to me.  I can’t even tell you exactly what it means, but it’s beyond appreciating a work of art.  David Tennant, who portrayed the Doctor from 2006 to 2010, said recently, “The show has a particular place in people’s affections.”

I suspect that affection may be kind of archetypal.

~          ~          ~

Jung thought it best to recognize whatever weird way the archetypes made themselves apparent in the personal human mind, rather than trying to appropriate symbols devoid of such meaning when stripped of their true culture.  Yes, they’d manifest themselves in many ways throughout the broad spectrum of people; the psychologist’s duty, then, was to identify the symbols and associate them with an archetype.  But the old way, wherein a complex net of symbols usually prevented archetypes from manifesting in a rawer form at all, seemed obsolete.

What he didn’t predict, what he, from the perspective of the early 20^th century, probably couldn’t have predicted, was the ability of the human mind to create images and our weird proclivity for sharing.  We may live in a postmodern world that loves individual experience, but we’re pretty convicted about sharing stuff.  I might use post-post-pre-cyborgization criticism for Harry Potter and you might look at it from a modernistic new historicist viewpoint, but we’re both reading it.

Harry Potter.  Star Wars.  Doctor Who.  Death Note.  Let’s be fair– My Little Pony.  Even bands are taking on an almost mythic proportion.  They’re beacons of hope, huge beyond who the people in them actually are.  More examples.  The Lord of the Rings.  Game of Thrones.  Pokemon.  Avatar: the Last Airbender.  The Lovecraft mythos that I’m always vaguely referencing and posting depictions of.

All of these have a massive and maybe a tad bit irrational following.  Yet the irrationality, I think, might itself be essential– Jung actually warns against trying to rationalize the archetypes away or pretend as if we’ve developed beyond their influence.  He wrote, “I am far from wishing to belittle the divine gift of reason, man’s highest faculty.  But in the role of absolute tyrant it has no meaning– no more than light would in a world where its counterpart, darkness, was absent.”

Thus, I suspect that those being touched by these pop-cultural giants are in fact interacting with the archetypes that exist in our collective unconscious.  The fact that it’s collective might even explain the broad appeal of series that, less than twenty years ago, would have been (or were) regarded as a fringe element, of limited appeal to the masses.  Now, many of them are acclaimed and popular.  We love them with a fervor that’s honestly a little weird.  Not a criticism– as I write, I’m looking at one of my Doctor Who posters, and if I turn around, I’ll see a map of Middle-Earth flanked by Narnia and Westeros– but an observation.

We have entered the new archetypal age.

~          ~          ~

Sorry, I couldn’t resist the chance to make a dramatic statement.  I don’t know if we have or not, but I think it’s a compelling idea with enough evidence to make it credible and not just weird.  Ponder it.  I'm not 100% certain I believe it myself.  But I think it's interesting.  Maybe I’ve been reading too much old psychology and philosophy lately.

Let me know what you think, if you’d like, in the comments.  I’m heading into another week where busy will probably be the word of the day every day, but I promise I’ll read any thoughts you leave and try to respond soon!

Also, this might be the first in a cycle of related posts.  Ummm, I'll let you know at the beginning of a new post if it's one of the closely related ones.

(Also, many thanks to my friend Jacob.  He helped get me into archetypal theory.  We discussed this idea yesterday, and he thought it meritorious, so give him a mental high-five if you liked it!)

the adaptor's quandary. and king arthur. lots of king arthur.

Ok, show of hands.  Who’s been super excited for a movie/ tv show/ whatever medium was being used to adapt something you loved, only to have your heart dashed on the rocks because the person in charge of transferring your passion into a new medium totally ruined it?  Like, everything good in the thing you loved was killed, fed to wolves, regurgitated, and then burned, only to be replaced by some weird statement on the political tensions between puffins and guacamole knights?

I remember the first time this happened to me.  2004.  Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur comes to theaters near you.  A live-action movie about Arthur and his knights?  Intriguingly advertised as historically accurate?  I was so there, man.

Yup.  Talk about awesomeness.

I should explain why I was so there.  Man.

I literally grew up on the Arthurian legendarium.  The first stories I remember hearing where the adventures of Arthur and his knights, Merlin, and Morgan le Fey (in about a million different versions of her names and sometimes including her sisters); of Camelot, Excalibur the Round Table, the Sword in the Stone, and, well pretty much everything.  My mom read me those stories so many times, and when I was old enough to read on my own, I re-read everything we’d done together and then added dozens to the pile.

The stories about this beautiful, tragic, and lost Britain have shaped me in ways I doubt I fully understand.  I love history.  I think swords are basically the most amazing things, and I’d love to live in a castle (although I’d add modern amenities… once you’ve supped at the table of indoor plumbing, there’s no going back).  I tend to think a just monarchy is vastly superior to any other form of government.  I love fantasy, and while the Arthurian legends and romances aren’t fantasy, they’ve had an enormous impact on the genre.  Also, my grasp on reality is a bit tenuous, and that’s actually kind of true of most Arthurian stories… I’m sure there are other ways it’s impacted me, but you get the idea.  Big part of my life.

Hence, I was really, really excited for King Arthur.

~          ~          ~

Aaaaaaaaand, as you probably guessed from that lead in, I was a little less than thrilled.  There were so many things wrong with it.  It seemed so bad, I wasn’t even angry.  I could only be disappointed. A King Arthur movie finally comes to theaters (I’d been waiting since about 2001, when The Fellowship of the Ring was released), and the don’t even have the decency to give Merlin more than a supporting role?  Madness.  I called my mom afterwards, despondent.

Seriously.  Arthur as Mr. UberRoman for most of the movie, Merlin his enemy for a while and barely better than a supporting character, Guinevere decidedly not a courtly lady, and the knights a bunch of indentured soldiers?  And that whole Pelagian subplot?  What gives, guys?

Ok.  I know, this looks a little different– the Arthurian legends aren’t a single piece being adapted, like Watchmen or The Great Gatsby, but are rather a large body of works that are, on the whole, fairly contradictory.  At the same time, the stories are almost always derived somewhat directly from the Sir Thomas Mallory take on Arthur, found in his work Le Morte d'Arthur– The Death of Arthur.  (Yes, it’s a grimly brilliant title.  Camelot doesn’t end so well.)

And you don’t encounter a gritty, post-Roman Britain for the bulk of those retellings.  A little in the beginning, which centers around Merlin more than Arthur, and then Arthur’s early victories over the Saxons, but by and large, the portrait painted is one of an established Medieval world, with courts and lords and noble ladies and courtly love and jousts.

Look at those knights, jousting away.  Joust on, guys.

There were not jousts in the fifth century.  Or the sixth.  And definitely no courtly love.

But it’s all part of the story!  It’s part of the beauty and otherworldliness that permeates the Arthurian legends.  We don’t really know what happened, but the point is that whatever Arthur truly was, his ‘reign’ represented a brief period of victory of the native Britons against the Saxon invaders.  After him, things got rough for a while.  The legends reflect that, but flesh it out into a powerful drama.

In essence, the details are all the various authors’ interpretations.  They read into the Arthurian framework elements that were important to them, then wrote those ideas onto paper.  Well, maybe not paper.  That might depend a bit on the era.  But nonetheless, they transcribed their versions of the Arthurian legend, and these accounts all became part of the way we now see the stories of King Arthur.  They’re all takes on the legend.  Most don't deviate too far from the now classic version of the story.

Back to the movie.

I was disappointed, as I said, at the time.  I now like the movie a lot, and re-watch it every few years.  There’s a lot of cool stuff going on.  The intense focus on Arthur as the last remnant of Roman authority in the process of going native is awesome.  The film’s efforts at reconciling the historical context of Arthur’s world with the characters that came to people Camelot is really cool.  Like, the knights as soldiers conscripted into military service?  Brilliant, and reasonably accurate with regards to Roman recruiting practices around that time.

Plus, there are some pretty epic lines.

This is Cerdic, in all his grainy quality.  He's the requisite bad dude in King Arthur, a Saxon warlord bent on the conquest of Britain, and he is a seriously violent and scary man.  Scarier than the Grinch pre-mountaintop conversion.
So, Arthur goes up to him and says:

'… it would be good for you to mark my face, Saxon, for the next time you see it, it will be the last thing you see on this earth.'

Just before the huge battle.  It was quite the statement.

~          ~          ~

Ironically, the very things I at first disliked came to be the things I loved about the movie... yes, it differs tremendously with the stories I grew up on, but still represents a creatively strong take on Arthur.  The film isn’t even more or less correct, to my thinking, than the courtly Romance version of Camelot.  Both are based on supposition and creatively reading into a simple and historically vague time period in Britain’s history a fully imagined story.

~          ~          ~

The transition, though, kind of begs the question: what changed?  The movie’s the same.  The things I like about it are even the things I used to find loathsome.

I mean, you could watch the director’s cut if you want.  That’d be a bit different.  But the basic idea remains.  So, nothing about the movie is different now.  Rather, it’s my perception of the film.

Nothing brilliant there– our views on things change all the time.  It’s the nature of the change that matters.  A long time ago, I viewed King Arthur as a child whose own interpretation of the Arthurian legends was so different from the director’s that I couldn’t get my mind around it.  By the time the movie came out, I had six years or so of memory detailing my view on King Arthur.  The film was jarring, because it didn’t line up with that view at all.  At my age, I couldn’t reconcile the two visions.

A director’s adaptation– although now I’ll widen the scope to include any artist using a new medium to tell an old story– is, in essence, their critical take, their ‘reading’ of the story, put onto screen or brushed in paint or fanfictioned.  The artist delves into their source material and absorbs it into their creative subconscious.  It dwells there, but it can’t remain purely itself, by virtue of having been taken into a human being, specifically an artistic human being.  All of us are dominated by our own perceptions, and an artist takes this a step further by actively trying to express these perceptions through miniature creations.

Actually, it’s not unfair to say that no art is truly original.  Our creative minds are a portmanteau of influences.  At the same time, we, as humans and artists, are incredibly original, or at least have enormous potential to be incredibly original, if we let ourselves be ourselves.

(I felt a little wise there.  But only a little.)

Yoda, being all wise and stuff.  Not as wise as me, but, you know.  Pretty wise.

So, the originality in art– and I use art in the broad sense to mean the output of the creative mind– comes from the person themself, but the art itself is also wonderful swirl of other art, subliminally coming forth through the unique expression of the new creator.

Thus, adaptations become a problem, because a pure adaptation can’t truly exist.  Just as no human is identical to another human, just as no pathos has a mirror image, no artist can create the same art as another artist.  We’re all different, and thus a ‘faithful’ adaptation is a difficult concept.  What is a faithful adaptation?  We all ‘read’ into works different things.  Of course, there are underlying concepts and ideas that most of us will pick up on.  Anyone who reads Cormac McCarthy’s The Road will pick up on the core theme of love, expressed between the father and the son.  If you read Revelation, the final book of the Bible, you’d be hard pressed not to find the theme of judgment.  There are certain elements that everyone’s going to see, and those will make it into most adaptations.

King Arthur, since I spent so much time rambling on about it.  Fellowship of knights, attempting to define their kingdom.  That’s a pretty central element to most Arthurian legends.  But the intense focus on fighting the foreign Saxons, that’s pretty different.  Most Arthurian re-tellings (not a word I like to use, but my continuous variations on ‘takes on the Arthurian legend’ are getting a little stale…) don’t focus much on that aspect of the story, but to the film, it’s paramount.

That’s really only aesthetic detail, though.  A little deeper– the film focuses more on beginnings and a new world, being created by Arthur and his ragtag knights.  Fuqua’s reading of the Arthurian legends finds the promise of hope represented in Arthur’s Camelot and dramatizes the sacrifices and heroism structuring themselves into the kingdom.  The grittiness, and the choice to portray Arthur in a violent post-Roman Britain, rather than in an idealized medieval world, is almost required by Fuqua’s interpretation.

My reading of Camelot, though, doesn’t really focus on the hope of the beginning.  Mallory’s title, translated, The Death of Arthur, is very close to how the Arthurian legends have always presented themselves to me.  Camelot’s beautiful tragedy and the family drama (there’s the really important bit) that plays out through Arthur’s conception and the eventual ruin of his kingdom are the parts that resonate most inside me.  For me– and not necessarily anyone else, although in this case my feelings aren’t uncommon– this is the most important part of the Arthurian legends.  But that doesn’t make my reading the only valid way to view the legends.  Different minds, and many different artists, have latched on to different portions.

A rendering of Arthur killing his son, Mordred.  Things go very badly towards the end. (On the plus side, the versions I like best don't actually end in Arthur's death, but rather the beginning of his long sleep in Avalon.)

The adapter is faced, really, with an impossible task.  Fans of the original work will expect the adaptation to be ‘faithful,’ but what do they mean by faithful?  If they themselves are possessed of any originality, what they think constitutes faithful won’t truly match anyone else’s, and it likewise won’t really be the original creator’s meaning, either.  The closest anyone can come is basically recognizing the central tenets of a work, but beyond that?

Trying to be attentive to the original creator’s ideas is important, certainly.  But it’s only possible to a point, because we all read as ourselves.  Fuqua sees the hopeful beginning of Camelot; I see the sorrowful end.  The difference with our interpretations and the original is perhaps even more marked in this instance, as there is some historical basis in the Arthurian legend– but it’s vague enough that we really have no idea what truly happened.  We may never know how close either of our readings of the legends are to what actually happened.  Similarly, we, as outsiders, can’t truly claim to have access to the creator’s mind.  The mind of another person, especially when that person is consumed in some kind of sub-creation, is even more foreign than sixth century Britain.

There are rare instances when an artist tries to explain their own work, but even then, it’s only a transfer of what they truly mean, an attempt to explain an explanation.

An adaptor’s work, then, represents their reading of the source material.  The new work is a critical interpretation of the original, and this is one of the primary reasons we often respond negatively (at least at first) to an adapted version of a work we love.  The way we see the work is our way, and in a way, the work is ours.  Our reading of the work operates independently of any other person’s.  It might be influenced by those views– it’s safe to say that many fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings have had their views intensely shaped by Peter Jackson’s ‘reading,’ exemplified in his films– but it is still uniquely our own.

Thus, our reaction depends a lot on how closely the adapter’s reading aligns with ours.  If it all matches up pretty well, or (somewhat more rarely) if we like the director's reading better than the original work, fabulous, chuckles and smiles, you don’t regret the money spent.  If their reading is radically different… well, you can still end up liking it, but it takes work.  And sometimes time.  It’s a complicated interplay between the original artist, their work, the adaptor, and the fan. (Fan being used loosely here to indicate another person who experienced the original and is now in the process of experiencing the adaptation.)

Of course, this isn’t the only factor.  The sheer change in medium radically alters the way a story is told, and that in and of itself makes for some substantial differences.  Comic books, for instance.   Their film adaptations are often among the most controversial of adaptations.  The director’s reading vs. your reading remains, but the difference in length is also central– a high selling comic series is a publisher’s dream, and can run for years unabated.  Movies, if you want them to be good, can’t keep going along those lines.  Just an example.  I do believe the whole adaptation-as-a-form-of-reading remains central in most instances, but there are definitely other factors.

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Also!  This is an aside, but I think it’s important.  Of course, I think all of my asides are important, and I have the hardest time organizing my thoughts these days…

Bill is confused by my thoughts.  It's ok, Bill.  I am too.

The idea that the book is always better than the movie is ridiculous.  Ok, yes, proportionately there are more instances of an original work being better than the film version.  Often, the adaptor’s reading ends up being shallow and focuses mostly on what will sell, rather than actually viewing the source material with creative integrity.  I get that.

But there are instances where the adaptor’s reading is actually stronger than the original creator’s work– my favorite film, Howl’s Moving Castle, is based on a novel by Diana Wynne Jones.  It’s a good book.  But the movie… it’s profound.  To some extent this is subjective, and it’s not really a point I care to argue (both versions are beautiful and don’t deserve to be debated into the ground), but I believe Hayao Miyazaki’s interpretation, played out on screen, is actually a more powerful piece of art than the original novel.

A still from Howl's Moving Castle.  All of the beauty.

You can feel free to disagree with me about Howl’s Moving Castle.  Please do, if the book resounds in you more than the film.  But you get the idea.  Movies can be better than their original inspiration.  Some adaptors' reading is actually stronger than the original.

So, the next time someone tries to tell you otherwise, call upon Cthulhu to punish them for their transgression.

~          ~          ~

Closing thoughts!  Thanks for reading.  I suspect this one’s probably not terribly entertaining– life has been rather stressful for a bit, and I’m concerned that my writing is a little lackluster as a result– but I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless.  As you can probably tell I’m very into discussing and trying to understand more intimately the creative process, and the relationship between the artist and those who embrace the art.  The interplay is all part of the same creative process, and I think it’s important for artists to delve into it ourselves, being that we’re all lovers of art in addition to being creators.

Also, props to James Franco!  He wrote an excellent article (check it out here: http://www.vice.com/read/james-francos-impressions-of-gatsby) that first got my thoughts rolling in this direction.  I’ve always liked him as an actor, but every once in a while I stumble upon something he’s written and am impressed by what a smart guy he is as well.

Is a James Franco.  He's probably James Franco-ing in this picture.

Take care, everyone!