My group, Rio, Alex, and Matt, were incredible to work with and I learned more about what makes up the perfect romance by working with them. We met roughly seven times in preparation for our performance (along with numerous email exchanges) and our discussions were insightful. The course of our dialogue started with the impetus of our project and ended with our performance, which was very different from where we started.
We started with an ancient story mentioned in Heinrich Zimmer's book, The King And The Corpse. What was so intriguing about this story was that it was so ancient. The story is the story "of the Marvelous Castle, Le Chateau Merveil: a place full of frightening trials and amazing experiences, comparable to Merlin's 'Valley of No Return.' Three queens and countless maidens are its prisoners; the mistress is a lady of superhuman beauty; the Chateau is a veritable 'isle of women.'" Life the nether world of antiquity, it is approached in a little boat, under the guardianship of a ferryman, or according to another version, by a tiny floating island (81)." I remember thinking when I read this about the recent film series Lord Of The Rings, and how the author borrowed this idea at the end of the story when the main heroes left for an ancient magical land in a boat.
Zimmer goes on to describe this magical place as, "the everlasting sphere of womanhood, representative of the timeless abode of inexhaustible life, the well of death from which life pours forth in perennial rebirth" (82). This section made me think of the current very popular film series The Pirates of the Caribbean. In the last film that recently came out, Captain Jack, along with all his rival pirate captains, are in pursuit of the fountain of youth. This ancient story of this magical matriarchal land seems to be the root of the story of the fountain of youth. I wondered if the people who wrote the film scripts intentionally puledl from these ancient stories and myths and displace them in popular culture.
I was very intrigued by how old this story is. Zimmer mentions two ancient sources of the myth. First he says, "The representations that have come down to us is Celtic fairy tale and Arthurian romance disclose features deriving from the primitive matriarchal civilization that flourished throughout western France and in the British Isles in pre-Celtic times. Among the multitudinous females of the ageless lineage of motherhood, descending age by age from the primordial great-great-grandmother of the matrilineal clan, the knight, the manly youth, the boy hero (puer aeternus), being wearied of his long adventure, discovers at last his rest. Hither he has come--to this hidden sanctuary of the fountainhead--for solution of the riddle of life and death"(82-83). So many of the quests we have read about and discussed in this class tend to deal with this theme, the human condition of trying to understand where we came from and where we are going after we die. It's astounding to me that human civilization is still struggling with these same issues after so many thousands of years.
In fact, Zimmer places the oldest root of this story, "the 'Land of No Return' (Hamlet's 'undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns') is very ancient standing as a term for the kingdom of the dead. It derives fro the Mesopotamian tradition, first appearing, as far as the extant records are concerned, on a greatly damaged series of cuneiform tablets (c. 2000 B.C.) recounting the descent of the Sumerian goddess Inanna (=Babylonian Ishtar) to the netherworld. That dim domain has been for millenniums the holy goal of all the great questing heroes, from Gilgamesh to Faust, for it is the repository of the spiritual treasure of the mystic wisdom of rebirth" (83-83). Zimmer points us to the core of human desire (which apparently hasn't changed), the search for everlasting life. Today, corporations have made billions of dollars paying scientists to produce anti aging potions. Perhaps film script writers aren't the only ones pulling from the information stored in these ancient stories and myths.
Anyway, our group moved away from this ancient story for two reasons. First, Rio would most likely have played the hero who was on the quest to this ancient magical land, which would have given Matt the very small part of being the ferryman, and second, after the video clip of The Holy Grail was shown in class we felt like the story had already been performed (and produced with a much larger budget).
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