This semester with Doc. Jason Smith was more of a journey than a regular class, or should i say a supernatural journey.
My first steps into this journey were taken with Asmodeus one of the seven deadly sins demons, more precisely the demon of Lust. With Asmodeus I learned about one of the origins of supernatural on an evil kind of level. I learned that being envious and jealous will most definitely bring the worst out of a person and create something a lot like our friend Asmodeus, so i had to leave him along the road and move on.
Then came along Emily Dickinson. Through a very dark poem of my choice, Emily took me on a carriage for a short and quiet trip with death, immortality and herself. With the guidelines from Jason Smith and what we had learned as a group about taking apart a poem to understand it better, It took me a while to discover Emily's poem and see between the lines, see the actual picture, the movie of what Emily went trough with this poem using the symbols and other clues finally discover where death and immortality were really taking her. I don't know about Emily Dickinson but I wasn't ready for Eternity just yet, so i took a different road and ended up in a very creepy garden of Eden.
As a matter of fact that what Goblins market was. Christina Georgina Rossetti takes us through a very dark and creepy long, long poem changing the garden of Eden from a beautiful and cute place to this very disturbing full of sexual symbols and other violent visual description. I ran away from the goblins with Laura and laughed in joy with both sisters when everyone ended up safe, but the symbolism in this story was so strong, each sentence gave me so much to think about, each action meant so much more after taring it apart. Christina Rossetti also made me discover the Hero's journey and it's scheme. I realized at that point that every single story i had heard, read or seen before was based on this simple circle. I still don't know if this scheme broke the hero's stories for me or made it even better, but what i know is that, from now on, I will always use these kind of structure to follow a hero.
After studying heros in there stories it was time to be a little self-centered and analyze my own hero's archetypes. This is when i learned i was an Altruist and Warrior kind of hero. Trying to make sense of to completely opposite archetypes (from my point of view), it came to me that each of these archetypes represented two important sides of myself, almost equally balanced at the moment. The altruist is the side in me that used to get me in trouble by making me focus more on others problems and forget mine, making me loose all interest in my own plans. The warrior is this other side who decided to take over when i thought it was enough. Time wise I would see this happening as when i moved here (in NY) and decided to take control of my life.
But enough talking about myself. The next step to our journey was MacBeth. I had already had an accounter with our disturbed hero, back in high school and i really enjoyed comparing our way to study this coward looking hero in France and here in New York. Of course the result of this time spent with the Macbeth couple was the same. Full of archetypes and mental breakdowns, our two murderers were a great practice for symbolism and archetypes. But once lady Macbeth ended her own life and her husband was rightfully killed, it was clearly time to move on and find other heros, maybe good heros.
It was time for our final test, each of us had to find our own story, our own heros, good or evil and make them come to life.
My choice was The Beast of the Gevaudan, my evil hero but also a myth walking on the line between fiction and reality. After a lot of research, many different version of the same story, many description of this same beast, i came up with my own version and my own beliefs. Using my arguable skills in cartoon and a few of my friend's voices i put together a 5 minutes video.
My conclusion for this blog series could and should be a whole blog series itself, but to keep it short and rap this one up, through this semester i have followed a lot of interesting, disturbing, scary, lovely, evil, weird, impressive hero's that have taught me how to really look at a story, its details, its characters and there personalities, but also to use this for any literature i will come across in the future. As a fine Arts student it has given a lot of inspiration and will give me new tools to illustrate and create from anything.
Thank you
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