“Labyrinths of Legend”
"Labyrinths of Legend" – May 1st, 1986
There was a magic to the theatre. A sacredness of story. I considered going to the theatre to be equivalent to attending the temple of the gods, a tabernacle of story which opened portals into other worlds.
April 18, 1986 – Legend
Like the other bits of media i’d encountered there was something beneath the story, something meaningful. I believed in the world the characters came from. In it’s own way, it felt realer to me than the world I was encountering, that it was made of something finer, something more constant than what things appeared to be on the surface.
June 27, 1986 – Enter the Labyrinth
Jim Henson’s Labyrinth was deeply formative for me, and would serve as a foundation for my understand of the Quest and the work that would emerge as the Mythica.
This would be the only time i’d ever snuck my way from one theatre to the other to watch the same movie three times in a row, yet there was something special here. Something that spoke to the energies behind and beneath what flickered upon the silver screen.
Yet the Gods were real, and they were everywhere.
There was something special here. Something that spoke to my very soul, that sang of the ideas of Faerie, of the labyrinth of one’s life and the saving of the child at the center of one’s journey.
Someone I knew, everything was the territories. The worlds that existed within films and media were an echo of something else. A fact within the fiction.
July 2, 1986 – Big Trouble in Little China
September 1986 – Who Watches the Watchmen?
There is something there. Something in the play of the characters. A gravity that pulls at me. That speaks to something deeper. A color, or the taste of a sound which moves across my awareness as I turn the pages …
Even then I saw the characters were reflections of the aspects of our selves, of the potential ways in which we could interact with the world through our senses and sensibilities. In Watchmen I saw the extremity of personality made real, the quality of devotion or design that sat behind the true superheroic persona.
May 3rd, 1987 – The Dark Tower – The Drawing of the Three
It was these things, these things that revealed their relevance over time that truly anchored my sense of one’s mythos, of the story above and below the middle earth of our travels through the mortal plane, which gave me the sense of time, space and dimension that helped me navigate the twilight zone of my perception of the akasha.
Paths of Mid-World
I had come late to the Stephen King series ‘The Gunslinger’ yet it’s significance in my story was vast. For me it was the tale of the last knight, the last of the House of Eld, finding his way across the blasted remnants of the once-worlds in defense of the Rose. Of the Dark Tower that sat at the center of the worlds.
Was it Roland’s nobility that inspired me so? Was it his relentless perseverance, his willingness to do whatever it took to reach the Dark Tower? There was a truth within the pages. One that spoke to the Rose and the Tower at the center of the Creation, which the wordslinger King was a sacred conduit.
I saw it clear. Roland, the last Gunslinger, was a paladin. A knight in iron and leather making his way across the territories.
The world was broken, and the stories were lies. The Tower needed her champions.
1987 – Ace of Wilds
And this, I realized, was the power of stories. We identified with them, and in that declaration and affirmation of identity, gave birth to a gravity which created our manifest world from the inside out. With no resonant reflection from the mundane world, the comics became a foundation for me, a way of understanding and integrating the extremity of my sensory overload. I related to and identified with the superheroes, with those who had mutant powers and special gifts, blessed and cursed to curious placement in the everyday world.
More than this there was power. A real power which existed in the space between the letters, and to the gravities of meaning that existed in those spaces.
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