Scent of a flower we have not yet found.

[pyat]

Over the last few days, I've been finding torn pages from a copy of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe fluttering in the street, stuck in trees, etc., as well as page fragments from a Dragonlance novel. That tugs at me in an odd way. That, and belief in unicorns.

Elizabeth and I browsed through Youtube before bed. We watched the opening credits of The Last Unicorn, which she recently declared as the "best movie I ever watched!" This video led to clips of the unicorns from the live-action film, Legend. which prompted Elizabeth to say, "Unicorns are real? I thought they were make-believe!"

I replied, "I think they put a horn on a white horse, to pretend, for a movie."

She looked at me seriously, and said that no, she was very sure it was real. I said, I didn't think it was, and she did the little eye-roll thing that all children do to their parents, sooner or later.

I admit that I have no desire to press my six-year-old daughter on her belief in the existence of unicorns. It's a good world to live in, if it has unicorns in it. It put me in mind of C.S. Lewis, and his description of "sehnsucht."

"That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves..."

And, tying this all together, consideration of the fellow who committed suicide last week. Not a friend by any means. A friend of a friend, and someone I'd not met, who seemed to have dedicated his few years of adult life to trying too hard to hold on to something, a bent and battered vision of the "unnameable something" that ended up bringing him grief.

"These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

The only way to go on, really, is to keep going on.

Comments

[relee.livejournal.com]

Ahh, Legend was a nice movie. Even better screenplay.

If you can find it, the screenplay Legend of Darkness that the film Legend was based on is so much more awesome. It's too awesome. They had to make the movie less awesome so that they wouldn't blow people's minds.


The book thing is neat too. My brother told me a few months ago, that Dragons of Winter Twilight was the first novel he ever read. Ever. He's an author now, too. ^.^

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I hear the film would have been much better, except that the studio and sets burned down a few days into filming, and they had to make do with much less ambitious replacements.

[lee-in-limbo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was the 007 stage at Pinewood Studios, wasn't it? EON had to rebuild the whole thing so they could shoot A View To A Kill. Too bad. I'll bet Legend would have looked amazing if it had all been shot there. The place is frickin' huge.

Lee.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

That's the one!

The film might not have been more coherent, but the outdoor scenes might have been more... outdoorsy?

[lee-in-limbo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was one of those films that needed a certain amount of scale, and several of the sets they ended up with were much more claustrophobic than I imagine Ridley had wanted. Lots of close shots and tight camera angles because there simply wasn't room or budget. I still think it's a pretty great looking film. Some of the sets and costumes were fantastic, and the lighting was pretty cool, even when it's obvious they were shooting on a small sound stage and the lighting was pretty artificial. Really, the only truly dodgy bit was probably Tom Cruise, and I try not to bust his chops over that, because it was a bit of a stretch.

Lee.

[relee.livejournal.com]

Yeah the original was pretty outdoorsy. Jack wasn't just a forest dude, he was The Green Man, and Lili didn't just get a wardrobe change, she turned into an anthro black panther. Darkness wasn't a classical demon; there's no doubt they made a beautiful demon for the film but originally he was an anthro wolf with bat wings decked out in black armour. He had a dark citadel that would make Sauron blush and part-way in there's a fight scene like out of 300 where a phalanx of faeries are fighting an army of giant insects, trying to protect Jack. When he finally gets into the citadel he finds the transformed Lili having burning hot demon sex with Darkness, and she tries to kill him, and only transforms back when he stabs her. Then he chases Darkness across the plane of Hell itself to finally end his dark reign and restore the mother unicorn's horn.

It was awesome.