I spent some time over the weekend drowning myself in faerie - again.
I’ve been having very strange dreams as a result of reading more of Neal Gaiman’s infuriating collection of short stories, Fragile Things. What’s so maddening? They all end improperly. They’re all perplexingly curiosity-inducing, and then yank the rug out from under you just as you round the corner to the end.
I’ve come to wonder if I ever understood any of his writing, or perhaps if I’m losing any ability I once had to understand it. Is it a result of growing older? I would think after the strange dreams I’ve had this weekend that this is not the case.
Saturday afternoon, we also saw Pan’s Labyrinth. Not much of a labyrinth, really. A nicely told fairytale.
Later in the evening we were asked what is it about. This part is hard.
A fairy princess gets curious about the world above, and upon leaving her world and entering ours, forgets all about the place of fairy. They know that her soul will eventually return, and so they set watchers to wait for her.
Towards the end of World War II, a girl is taken with her mother to stay with a cruel army captain as they wait for her to birth his son. She wanders into the woods and finds the Labyrinth, where she learns from a faun (a creepy guy that doesn’t look much like Mr. Tumnus from other fantasy stories) that she must perform three tasks before the full moon to prove that she has not become mortal. If she does so, she can return to the land of fairies.
The movie is very, very graphic. It is scary in parts, but interesting throughout. It is “sad” in the end. I suspect that all good fairy stories end “sadly”.
And it’s all subtitled, if that means anything to you. You really won’t notice.
But the zombies…
There had been a recurring zombie theme this weekend. I could give you specific examples, but maybe it would sound crazy. First with one of those blasted short stories, then with people and the radio and just general wandering thoughts.
It pleases me to think that I haven’t been so un-zombie-like for so long. Maybe I’ve finally kicked that feeling. Then again, as the short story says, you might not even notice when you cross the line, but then you’ve crossed it.
