#and conscious/subconscious frameworks are all stories we tell ourselves right?? right?????

[psalmsofpsychosis]

yeah so i dont get the "wasn't that some fucked up shit? anyway i'm Rod Sterling" mentality some people have towards different narrative reads. It's all sweet and cool to want to explore all the different variations of a fucked up scenario, but i'm gonna need the reasons for it. I need the "why"; why are we exploring this thing? Why is it important to explore this story? what am i getting out of it? and no it's not about morality.

I dont need a story to teach me "good" life lessons, though that'd be lovely. I dont need it to be an exceptional and exemplary narrative even, but i need my discoveries to be purposeful and meaningful. Sometimes the aim for an exploration of say, a very tragic story, is to simply experiences the different flavours and nuances and complexities of a deeply held personal emotion; sometimes it helps us find the mirroring and connection and relatedness that we need to feel seen and heard and understood. Sometimes it helps you parse out your own bullshit by taking it out of your head and putting it in front of you– i dont care what the reason is, but there's a reason. There's a purpose for every single endeavour you take on, even if you haven't discovered the reason yet. "i just want to experience a fucked up shit" lazy superficial thinking, dig deeper. I hate superficial and purposeless shit; and no i'm not gonna explore the 863796373th trending trauma porn piece of the day because "wouldn't that be fucked up?" nah. I dont care, it's got no use to me. I will absolutely respect the endeavour and make space for it if someone tells me something as simple as "it is relevant to me and my interests and experiences and my mental preoccupations, and helps me refine my humanity and my understanding of humanity in general", that is a lovely and true statement. But if someone keeps churning out worst possible fucked up sad scenarios one after another under the "wouldn't that be fucked up?" flag, i'm out, i dont give a fuck. take your sad shit somewhere else, i have absolutely zero space for purposeless horrible narratives that positively add nothing to my life and dont help me navigate it in any meaningful way.

[joannechocolat]

ORFEIA: on grief, and the dark side of fairytale.

When my daughter was eight years old, I began to write a crime novel about the death of a child. Nine pages in, I abandoned it. The thought of losing a child like that, even in fiction, was so viscerally upsetting to me that I ditched the idea permanently. Or so I thought.

Twenty years later, I wrote Orfeia, the story of a woman, Fay, who loses her adult daughter Daisy through suicide, and of her journey through the different levels of London, through Faërie, and finally to the Land of Death, where she must face the Hallowe’en King, and enter a battle of wits with him for her daughter’s return. It is a battle she cannot win, as she is losing her memory; and yet I like to think that victory, like love, is in the eye of the beholder.

Why I decided to write this story then, and in that fairytale genre, I didn’t ask myself at first, except that it seemed right, somehow, and because somehow the story wanted – needed – to be told.

In some ways Orfeia closely follows The Strawberry Thief, in which Vianne Rocher has to come to terms with her beloved Anouk growing up, getting married and moving away. At the time of writing it, my own daughter was embarking on the same journey, and it was inevitable that some of my own experience would make it into my fiction. I know it isn’t the same sort of loss, but for a parent, there is a kind of bereavement when a child leaves home, along with a sense of questioning their purpose and direction, now that the child’s upbringing is no longer at the centre of their life. But Fay’s real story comes from elsewhere, and has taken me a long time to process.

We often find in fairy tales accounts of people who die of grief. But I saw it happen first-hand, and it was anything but fantasy. My great-aunt, my grandmother’s sister, had been living as a cleaner in Paris. Her only son, whom she adored, but with whom she was estranged, had been living abroad for years. From time to time she would hear news of him and his family, but he never wrote to her. She had a single – very old - photograph of him with his wife and their daughter, which she always proudly showed me when I came to visit.

One day a friend, assuming that she already knew, made a casual reference to her son’s suicide. My great-aunt found out in this dreadful way that her son had died some years before. The shock of the news sent her into a sudden, dramatic decline. The tough Parisian resilience that had helped her survive a war, an acrimonious divorce and near-financial ruin just collapsed almost overnight. In only a few months, she became completely unable to function, or even to remember who she was. She would look at herself in the mirror and complain that “an old woman” - or sometimes a “witch” - was spying on her through a secret window. She died in a retirement home, less than six months afterwards.

That memory has stayed with me, and I used it in Orfeia. I wanted to take a familiar story (the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice) and use it as a metaphor for a woman’s journey from grief to a kind of acceptance. The fairytale and fantasy details act as a reflection of Fay’s mental state, as her life (and maybe her sanity) begins to unravel. I also wanted to hint on some level that her growing confusion and memory loss might be something to do with grief-induced dementia.

             If that sounds a little bleak, it is - which is why I also wanted to give Fay some kind of resolution. It’s also the reason I chose to tell this story through the lens of fantasy; because the truth underlying it – the raw grief of a mother robbed of her child – was still too much for me to explore within a real-world setting. But fairy tales are dark tales; in spite of attempts to make them into harmless stories for children, they deal with the darkest of issues – grief, loss, murder, abuse, monsters both human and inhuman, and of course Death, that ultimate monster, and our constant struggle with him – which is why they speak to us on a deeper, more intuitive, more primal level than stories of the real world.

In pre-Freudian times, fairy tales were the only means to express deep and unspoken feelings that could not be otherwise expressed. Now that we understand more about the workings of the human mind, they emerge as a kind of counterpart to the human subconscious; a direct conduit to what we feel; the secret language of Humankind.

During my time as a Languages student I fell into the rabbit-hole of German psychoanalysis. During that time I came to believe that there’s a direct parallel between the levels of the conscious and unconscious mind and the different narratives that we use to express our identity. History is the ego; the conscious, rational, factual mind and the official identity of a culture. Story – that is, fantasy, folklore and fairytale - reflects the human subconscious; its needs, fears, and dreams throughout the centuries; the secret, hidden identity running alongside the official version. So the further we look into ourselves, and the more we explore our cultural identity, the more likely we are to find value in these “fantasy” narratives, which are in fact the truest expressions of our collective unconscious.

In Orfeia I wanted to challenge the distinction between what we think of as “reality” and “fantasy.” Just as Fay slips from one state of consciousness into another, the story slips between both worlds, from the familiar ego-London to the World Below of London’s subconscious and its secret, forest heart.

The framework of existing folklore is surprisingly receptive to this. The two Child Ballads I chose as the foundation of the story lead naturally to each other. King Orfeo – the Celtic adaptation of the Orpheus myth - already contains many fairytale elements, which made it easy to incorporate the further elements from The Elphin Knight. And the idea of riddles as a means of communicating with Death (the unknown, the unconscious mind, etc) just seemed like the next logical step. To expand my theory of the conscious and the unconscious mind as a universal analogy, I was trying to introduce the idea that fantasy and reality are all part of the same world, just as the conscious and the unconscious mind are all part of the same brain. Anything that can be imagined is real on some level of existence. That means that all my books – including the ones not generally seen as fantasy - are actually part of the same extended multiverse. Whether I’m writing fantasy as Joanne M. Harris, or literary fiction as Joanne, I like the symmetry of that - and also how much it will annoy those among the literary community who refuse to acknowledge fantasy as the legitimate art form it undoubtedly is.

[happysublimewizard]

As I close my eyes to sleep, I go into the darkness of myself to find some peace. I know that I am on my way home to recharge, to restore and take a break from the world outside my eyes. All of the organs in our body complete their actions in total darkness. Our cells require no eyes or an actual need for physical light. Darkness is the natural state within us; the sun creates light in the external world. The rays of the sun fuse with the dark molecules in the air; the reaction from this fusion is what we call light. Day time is based on which part of the earth is facing the sun, night time is the natural state, and we have created the story of our lives on the relationship between the sun and the earth. The fact that our eyes resemble the shape of the Sun; we are part of this relationship with the glowing one. The dark matter corona of the Sun is where its glowing power comes from, our inner dark matter intelligence sun, is where all our power to create our external experiences comes from. Out of the dark matter consciousness comes our light, our thoughts, our feelings and everything else we need to experience this life. Light is only required in our lives in the moments when we are looking at the world outside, visually replaying our memories, visually creating image sequences for possible outcomes for future events and travelling into other dimensions also known as dreaming. The need for light seems only necessary to experience the external world. Your body does not need it. Our true selves is the part of us that lives inside, unfortunately that part of who we are has become a slave to the external identity we live for on our outside.Just before we open our eyes, we are in a dark mind room where we feel just fine. We know that we are still at peace, which as soon as we open our eyes that feeling will cease. We can ask ourselves questions about how that day may be like, the outside world is still a distance away, our consciousness may be wide awake, but have not yet open the curtains to the situations awaiting us that day.

Our eye are open, is it dark outside or is it bright, we need to look at the clock to see if we have any more time. The sleep was sweet, but now we are back in the world, our storyline is about to hit us as we decide if we should get up or shut our eyes again just for a minute.

The peace has gone, we have a story to write, our thoughts are the letters, what we see is the paper on which we scribe. The judgement gives the story framework, our emotions bring it to life and all of this is created from our dark matter inside.

The hand that winds the clock, wants to dictate the time in which we live our lives. The frame work, the tempo and what we should aspire to be each day. We follow like sheep as we feel it is the natural thing to do, but hold on, if I am creating all of this, why the hell do I need you?

If a picture paints a thousand words, am I using my own words to describe it? We open our eyes, then shutdown our minds and just let our conscious as well as our subconscious education to takeover and guide us.

We only see moving pictures, we no longer mentally interact with what we have just seen, and we try to remember the name someone called these images, as we search for what to believe. We do not call the shots in the world that we have been made to believe and now we all complain that we are powerless, yet we have just created what we have just seen.

We are all suffering from amnesia; we no longer remember who we really are. We live through an externally created identity based on how we look and the stories told to us as a child. Our names, our families, our status within the illusion, however no one can tell us, who we really are and why do we do this.

No one is going to tell you, you are the maker of this dream and your dark matter consciousness is all that you need. This illusion is built in layers stripped away from who we really are; now we can only function within the clock maker’s morality. Our intelligence has been reduced to our capacity to recall what we have remembered, from our external education thus far. Nobody knows as everyone just follows.

All you need is trust not love. As trust is the father of truth and truth is mother of love and fear, as if you do not trust someone you cannot love or fear them. We have fear for what we love and show love to what we fear. The illusion has been built on this principle.

Education is built on the teacher first establishing a foundation of trust between them and the student. The concepts of right and wrong, has to be implanted as ideas when the person was young or new to the subject. Rules are introduced at this point, to maintain order and mould the person`s mind as they want.

The illusion is built on you trusting the system and not trusting yourself. You cannot create truth outside religion / laws and you can only fall in love with the idea of your external self. We spend all our life in fear that others will not externally love us and we only really fight to gain other people`s admiration and respect for this external image identity.

We have been reduced to how we look, as opposed to who we really are. Our conscious mind now only lives to serve this external image identity of ourselves and no longer who we really internally are. As beauty is now only externally judged, we have given away our power very cheaply, to anyone who would care to express an opinion. Is it not crazy to put your state of mind in the hands of other crazy people?

You are the dark power creative energy. When you are looking at another person, you are only seeing the light image they have created out of their dark matter as they are only looking at yours. We are only just expressing what we think and our feelings through our bodies.

Our thoughts are our inner voice dialogue, what we express out of our bodies and out of our mouths are the conclusions of our inner thought conversations. Our bodies are merely a reflection of what we think.

Now as you are the dark matter consciousness, that runs all your internal functions without any need for light, which gathers the different external light wave forms and converts into moving images, that creates all your emotional response and in reality you are the one creating your awareness and sensation of every experience you have ever had. Who owns you again?

Nobody owns you; they only own the ideas that you believe that now controls you. Your existence is based on your ability to interact with the world outside of you as well as the world inside of you. It is based on the ideas and questions generated from within you about yourself.

World history is great, but how come you do not know how you do what you do. I can only tell my story, however mine is mine, you need to look inside you for yours. Your darker matter consciousness is doing and controlling millions of things at once. That is your intelligence inside of you that is available to you. This is the true essence of spirit in reality. All religions have one thing in common they all need you to believe before they can become real.We close our eyes to find some peace. The blank darkness we see is merely the black board for you to create what you feel. If I ask you to visualise your favourite thing, it would appear on your mental screen, would that make you the creator of all that you see. Dark matter exists within all things in existence, it connects us all to everything and is part of the reason we can see each other on this dimension. It holds all of our stories, our potential, our past lives and our creative power. Within it is the language behind everything. This is not about external religions, it is more to do with looking for the science that separates yet unites all things. It`s time to trust yourself and fall in love with all of your being, Your power to live comes from within you, stop fearing yourself as you are the true religion that you seek