Grand poems and epics are written about one who follows his beloved to Hades. The personal challenges and pains that are met along the way there and back are illustrated with demons, entrapment, tortures, battles with outrageous creatures.
I take the worth of these stories mainly as allegories, perhaps unselfconsciously, for the real experiences some people feel when trying to hold on to someone who is disappearing, perhaps into depression, into addiction, perhaps just away.
So easy to read about facing a gorgon or being pierced or cast adrift in cold blackness. This is the trap of fiction: there are no gorgons, no vultures eating away at your liver, no black void; but the fears and pains we may face in our own heads on a single quiet night are not expressible without such devices.
my comment here: i'm speechless other than to say: nice broad review of art.
ReplyDelete