There’s magic in everything

It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe in something.  The world is full of magic – if you can’t see it, then you are not looking hard enough.  Do you ever wonder what makes the wind blow?  I don’t mean on a scientific level.  Ask anyone who knows me – I am rarely a factual person, except when it comes to matters that are important to me, like childhood cancer awareness and faith and just life in general.  I accept most things as true, because to some people, they are true.

For a while now I have found myself shying away from the topic of theology and religion and even some social issues.  I have had frustrating conversations before, when there is no winning on either side.  These days, I tend to let these things go.  I don’t commit to such conversations anymore.  People believe what they believe, because they’ve been raised that way.  Some people, like me, explore.  There isn’t just one way to look at things, no matter how many people tell you there is.  If that was true, then everyone would believe in the same thing and there would be no conflict stemming from religion in the world.

It’s impossible for people to to look at something and see the same thing.  A child can draw or paint a picture and tell you an elaborate story about what you see as random squiggly lines and tangles of color on the page.  People interpret art in different ways.  Two people can read the same book and come away with a different message.  The same is true for a book you read as a child.  When you grow up and read it again, the story is different. Our ideas and perspectives change with age and experience.

When I was in second grade, my teacher read a story to my class that I instantly loved.  It was a strange and sad story, about a young woman who always wore a ribbon around her neck, and the man who loved her kept asking her about it.  She kept putting him off, until their wedding night.  That is when she told her new husband that he could untie it.  But when he did, her head fell off and she died.

I remembered that story a few years ago, and I found it again.  It wasn’t as magical as I thought.  It was disappointing.  I remembered gorgeous, full-paged colored pictures, but what I got instead was black and white sketches in an I-Can-Read-Book.  Seriously?  Major disappointment.  Was the book my second-grade teacher read to us just a figment of my imagination?  The story itself was less poetic than I remembered it.  It was simpler, somehow.  I wanted it to be Romeo-and-Juliet-esque, and it was a little bit.  No happy ending.  The groom is left bereaved.  He doesn’t even kill himself after his bride dies.  He lives without her.  Maybe someday, I will explore this in my own fiction.  I’d like to take this story and make it my own.  What happened to make the young woman decapitated like that, and how did she get from there to the ribbon?  She must have had nanoseconds to get the ribbon and tie it around her wound.  Did it happen to her as a child?  Hmmm…

The words of that story never changed, but my memory of it did.  Maybe it was the same book, but maybe not.  I’m still hung up on that beautiful picture book I think I remember.  But as we get older, our memories tend to change and even begin to lie to us.  It was the same story, but it wasn’t what I remembered.

I picture her with darker, straighter hair but other than that, this looks about right.

The Reality of Shakespeare

When my high school freshman English class started reading Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, I did not care for it.  In fact, I was so bored by it that I didn’t really read the thing.  What little I understood I got from the class discussions.  In my mind, it was beyond dumb.  What thirteen year old girl even knows what love is?  In this day and age, a eighteen year old Romeo would be arrested for marrying a thirteen year old.  I know all the old arguments.  ”Children were raised to be more mature back then.”  ”Girls were often child brides back then.”  ”In Shakespeare’s day, it was how it was done.”

But in the autumn of 1996, I was 15.  The play didn’t wash with me at all.  I could not sympathize with any of the characters, especially when I did not understand (quite literally) a single word they said.  Romeo was stupid in my book.  Juliet even more so, mainly because she was a girl, and I expected better from the female characters in the stuff I read.  I expected growth.  I expected her to learn something.  But no.  She had to go and ask for a sleeping potion, and when she woke up and found Romeo dead by her side, she stabbed herself.  I was like, what kind of story is this?  Okay, a tragedy, but seriously.  It wasn’t a tragedy in my book.  None of the events happened by chance.  It was stupidity.  Plain and simple.

That said, I loved the movie remake with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, mainly because I loved those actors.  But… still stupid, that Romeo and Juliet.  In my senior year of college, I took a Shakespeare class and ended up writing my research paper on Romeo and Juliet, because at the very least, I wanted to understand.   I discovered that the Romeo and Juliet play did not originate with William Shakespeare but a guy named Arthur Brooke.  I compared and contrasted the two plays, and the paper ended up in my senior portfolio.

The validness of Shakespeare’s work has been repeatedly called into question over the years.  I can understand that – he borrowed heavily from other works that were not his own.  But still Shakespeare made it work.  He added characters here and there to flesh out the stories.  He made them his own.  Now then, there’s this new film called Anonymous .  It poses the questions:  Who really wrote Shakespeare?  Did Shakespeare even exist?  Well, of course he existed.  That’s like questioning the existence of George Washington or Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin or even Jesus Christ.  We can’t rewrite history no matter how much we try.  We only end up confusing ourselves and others.  History is the only thing set in stone.  True, it will always be questioned and should always be questioned.  But the facts don’t change.  It is what makes them facts.  But the fact that history is continuously being called into question isn’t exactly bad – it’s quite good because it makes us think.