part zero: the foreword
There’s nothing more powerful than being able to see yourself in someone else’s work.
This, I always believed and still believe until now. It was a feeling I was cognizant of at a very young age, and it was most likely the truest, most raw emotion I’d felt for the first time in my life. Though I could barely speak or sit up on my own, I knew that looking at a screen or the pages of a book and seeing someone who sees you looking back, is a feeling that transcends words alone.
And that is why, for my WP2, I will be archiving all the media throughout my life that made me feel seen, media in which I saw myself reflected back at me. Truthfully, I struggled in grasping a specific type of media that influenced me over the course of my life. Was it music? Yes. Was it movies? Television shows? Absolutely. Picture books, novels, and poetry? Certainly. Evidently, I was having trouble deciding just the one thing to focus on. Which is what led me to combine them all into one archive.
Now before you call me indecisive or unorganized (both of which I am, I’ll admit), I’ve structured my WP2 to have a method to the madness, a construction to the chaos.
In my WP2, I have implemented a media compilation style colloquially known as “web weaving” to the Tumblr community. For those who aren’t familiar with it, web weaving could be thought of as little archives of their own, often featuring excerpts from novels or poetry, screencaps of films or television shows, modern and traditional art, and/or song lyrics; all written or created by different artists, that communicate a singular idea or theme within them. An archive within an archive, if you will.
Here is one web weaving post from Tumblr, for reference.
For each post in this archive, I have decided to weave my own web using media that has affected me throughout my life, starting with my favorite children’s books going all the way to pieces of dialogue from films and tv, to lyrics, and even artwork.
Why chronologically? Because I find that the simplicity of the lessons in children’s books translate neatly to the more complex interpretations of the themes prevalent in my life. I want to show that a picture book can hold just as much meaning and knowledge as an ancient Greek poet’s musings. That a singer and her lyrics can command as much power in her words as the great immortal poets of old.
Think of it in terms of a spider’s web. The picture books, the ones that shaped me at my most impressionable, are the center of the web. And as I learn and grow and interact more with the world around me, and collect more media that I resonate with, the web keeps growing outwards.
Each web will feature a theme prevalent in my life and the archive should be read as follows:
- part zero: the foreword (you are here)
- part i: chrysanthemums, roses, and wallflowers
- part ii: the ghosts we invent
- part iii: a fine line to walk
To put it simply, all these webs that I’ve woven reflect important lessons I’ve learned throughout my life. And all the pieces of media I’ve collected are the things I’ve learned along the way.
Truthfully though, no one puts it better than Robin William’s does in this scene of Dead Poets Society (1989).
“And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
Sources Used in this Post:
Dead Poets Society. Directed by Peter Weir, performance by Robin Williams, Touchstone Pictures, 1989.
