In class today

Did everyone catch the tautology in Beauty and the Beast where the suitor says "Glass is just glass" when he kicks the window in? I did some wiki's tonight and found the Jean Cocteau was also a ceramicist, so we have that in common. Click here http://www.cocteau-art.com/ to see more of his art. He decorates his pots and platters with many stick figure images and portraits. The movie poster, incidentally, as most movie posters tend to do, looks like a pulp fiction cover. Here are the opening lines of the movie if anyone is interested:

"Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim and that this will cause the beast shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. They believe a thousand other simple things. I ask of you a little of this childlike simplicity, and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood's 'open sesame,' "Once upon a time..."

"Jean is telling us to appreciate the story for the story (some more tautology for you), that the moral of the story is the story and he's making a great excuse to start with "once upon a time." Maybe the story, maybe all stories, are only as good as our imagination. There are no boring things, only boring people. Children are the least boring and the most exciting of all people, possibly because all they have is an imagination. They don't have the logic to dissuade the imagination, the world is their oyster and they can have it any way they'd like. It would be nice to be a child again and this is the point of nostalgia. This is also known as Puer Aeternus, which is Latin for eternal youth, or the Peter Pan Syndrom. If image is everying, and I believe that it is, then so is imagination. Imagination gives to every nothingness a location and a name, it changes simile to metaphor.

I was also reading Ben's blog and he was wondering if children are corrupt as soon as they begin to read. I think they probably are corrupt before that, but if they aren't, literature will surely do the job. Ben also mentioned that literacy is a port-hole and authors write in an effort to get in touch with their lost past. Well, if that's the case, and I agree that it is, then we are teaching our kids the recycled images of a nostalgic author who has been around long enough to have been corrupted to the point of wanting innocense. I believe that both writing and reading are port-holes, but not to a concrete image, a particualr origin or ur story, but to other images, which only lead us to more images, and so on until you've completely convinced yourself that there is no reality. And dag-nabbit there is no reality!