the gulf is being torn apart by the strongest hurricanes ever and literally the entire west coast is on fire but the instant a snowflake touches the ground there’s going to be 400 political cartoons going “so much for global warming!”
In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.
Fairy tales were born in times of trouble, in complicated times – when hope felt lost. I made The Shape of Water as an antidote to cynicism. For it seems to me that when we speak of love – when we believe in love – we do so in a hopeless way. We fear looking naive and even disingenuous. But Love is real – absolutely real – and, like water, it is the most gentle and most powerful force in the Universe. It is free and formless until it pours into its recipient, until we let it in. Our eyes are blind. But our soul is not. It recognizes love in whatever shape it comes to us.
Molly Anne reminded me of one of my favorite poems/stories of all time – ‘Toad Words’ by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon, author of the Digger webcomic). You can read it here, or purchase a Kindle copy on Amazon as part of an anthology of other stories.
It’s a beautiful story, and makes me long for fairy-tale curses, and I wanted to read it aloud. You’ll forgive me if my own words start to turn into polliwogs towards the end.
daisychainnihilism 