The calendar cycle seems like a great project, for many positive reasons, but also one negative: it is a narrative but not an explicit story. It doesn’t have to have the logic and drive of a story - it is 12 (well, 14) pictures, and I can let myself create what I love - relations of psychic and visual elements. I can imbue meaning, without making it ‘entertaining.’
Who I am writing this for? I don’t intend for this blog to be a journal, but I do like a platform to chew on the thoughts that occupy me. And the fact is, this thought, both my love of story elements and my hardship with creating story, is a big one.
Let’s look at the terms.
Story. An entertaining narrative, that proposes certain values, enacts their complications and oppositions, and arrives at a satisfying resolution or testament to that conflict of those values.
Story Elements: These are the values and relations that are embodied in the story. The shape of the story as well.
I love reducing story to static images, to dense imagery, to a kind of iconic level of visual understanding.
Also, I am exciting to layer, to really stack the images and the cycle. I want there to be a surface narrative (the girl is looking for something, struggling for something, achieving something, losing something, celebrating), a showcase of the months and seasons, an allegorical relation between her life cycle and the life cycle of the earth. Whatever else we can get in their, via border subplots and other characters, is great. Density os beauty here - what draws people in and asks them to unpack the images.
I am thinking of poems for each month, too - very rhythmic, very structured - four lines of iambic pentameter, ABBA.
December: The Winter Feast.
"Please toast again what always burns,
Our love of life; of this I never tire,
Of this, I will not mourn.
Oh, wake me, love, when spring returns."
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