Cthulhu's city of R'lyeh, by Marc Simonetti
I made a decision last week not to draw my young daughter a picture of her imaginary friend.
I've drawn other monsters and fairies from her rich inner world - one was the Magic Space Pickle. Another was Bad Plus, an incorrigible villain who eats garbage. Thusfar all have been well-received. But despite having talked several times about drawing Sussa, her octopus friend from Neptune, I changed my mind. I think it would be cruel. I would be taking something away from her.
By summoning these creatures into the real world, or at least the concrete sensory world, you nail them down. You take the emotional experiences that are the important things about them - what they're really made of, what they're for - and you neuter them, constrain them, and tame them. You trap their unbound and supernatural essence inside something mundane and concrete. You've stolen it and broken it.
So here's an example: Grendel, in Beowulf. In the poem, Grendel is utterly terrifying. But even when it's rendered accurately according to the text, it loses something. 2005's Beowulf included the sinew-and-bone-chewing noises which at that time I didn't remember were actually in the text. But the distorted misshapen creature they dragged into the light just didn't feel like the vaguely sort of spiny reptilian insectoid thing I had imagined. It's not that the CGI people did a bad job; they could not, in principle, have done a good job. In the same vein, many otherwise enthusiastic fans of the movie Alien feel similarly deflated when the overall shape of the xenomorph is revealed as disappointingly humanoid as it disintegrates in the glare of the shuttle's engines.
I think my daughter understands this too. She did harass me for an image of the Space Pickle once I mentioned drawing him. But, interestingly enough, she has colluded with me in forgetting the decision to draw Sussa.
For this reason, Sussa and her ice cream powers and solar-system-spanning tentacles will remain forever as words and feelings in my daughter's mind - where they belong and flourish.
1 comment:
Complete agreement. Basically any method to avoid diminishment of the possibilities into a single representation. If that's not feasible then an alternate path might be to have a group all make simultaneous drawings without looking at each others', then present them all as ways it could be. Either way, though, an original single representation is still the output of the imagination, whereas observing an external representation does not always lead to the same and is therefore inferior in nature.
This is one strong reason why I resist watching films made from books that I love. Why I wish the D&D books had no drawings of people or creatures, and why the D&D cartoon was an abomination. Think:groupthink::imagine::groupimagine.
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