Week 3 CIM417 Bricolage Activity 

The opportunity to wax lyrical about one's chosen topic – what better way to at least inform you all about my formative inspirations. What you see in my bricolage is a homage to the authors and artists, painters and creators, and animators who left a mark on me. At the bottom of the image, we see them in greyscale and in print; some are living, some are dead. Their works above are in muted tones, as a memory. The authors will eventually be forgotten, and their work also, but some sustains a little longer… I sit here tearing up a little. Collecting each image was a scenario of shock and reminiscence, a little like grief in a way – a wistful memory unlocked to another place and another time. I look at each of the faces in the images I have collected, and their smiling or thoughtful expressions, each one unknowingly contributing to me. I know I am unable to include all the souls who have left a mark on mine. I want to thank them. From my earnest and most gracious place, I want to say thank you to you all for existing! Rising up, making and creating, telling, drawing, painting, sketching, typing and scrawling, describing, managing to spread your creativity, and I am grateful for that. And I respect and admire your endeavour, aspiration and enterprise.

And you know what? Each one of these authors and artists has collaborated in the great “remix.” My interpretation here postulates that everyone, plus many others I didn’t have the space to include in my image, has reincarnated, retold, and reinvented the “Heroic Myth,” the “Hero’s Journey,” the “Monomyth” Joseph Campbell and David Kudler describe various interpretations and origins of the hero’s journey. A story that is as old as humanity and as new as last night’s dream. The monomyth is the telling of tales of “the hero with a thousand faces” (Campbell, 1949). It is the eternal and enduring universal tragedy of man. Jack Vance, one of my favourite authors, first caught my attention with the tale of a spaceman and human, Adam Reith, who crash-lands on an alien world bursting with a menagerie of alien cultures. Adam, through a series of trials, finally builds a ship and returns to Earth (Vance, 1993).

Author Meagan Lindholm, also known as Robin Hobb, has many, many books that all tell the “tale of the adventure,” all comprising key components in the hero’s journey: a departure, an initiation, and a return (Campbell, 1949). I could continue with describing Frodo’s journey with the oh-so-weighty ring (Tolkien, 1954), Conan the Barbarian’s trials as a child only to return a fearsome warrior who himself becomes king (Howard, 2018), and George Lucas’s Luke Skywalker, who is orphaned on a backwards planet only to be trained to be an all-powerful Jedi and return to pivotally assist the rebellion to victory over the Empire (International Movie DataBase, 1977)

Feist’s character in "Magician" is transformed from a very low-level magician barely able to conduct the most basic of spells. He is transported through a rift to a world whose empirical and tyrannical system enslaves and abuses him. He is then, through luck, trained in a higher form of magic and wreaks havoc on the system that trained him. He returns to his home world, now transformed into someone so magically powerful he no longer resembles himself (Feist, 2010)

The heroic tale resonates in my opinion with everyone. Joseph Campell in his book “The Hero with a thousand faces” has the most interesting chapter ”The World Navel” where he describes the effect of the successful adventure as an unlocking and a release again of life flowing into the body of the world (Campbell, 1949) and he then goes on to describe how the hero may return in a state of grace. This life energy I interpret to be life affirming, it could also be described as a success, and a tangible improvement or or a remarkable experience that has changed a person for the better.  Something I think we all aspire to, one that is a part of the human condition. One might also call it the journey of discovery, then incremental improvement, that eventually through the trials of life reaches a point of recognition and approval. Or maybe as humble as it might sound, just maybe just acceptance.  Depending on the journey, it might just be that self acceptance is the final destination.

Ron.

References

Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Fontana Press.

Feist, R. E. (2010). Magician. Voyager.

Hobb, R. (1995). Assassin’s apprentice. Harpercollins.

International Movie DataBase. (1977, May 25). Star Wars. IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/. Writer, Director, George Lucas.

Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954). The Lord of the Rings. Harper Collins Publishers.

Vance, J. (1993). Planet of Adventure. Macmillan.