fairy tales and myths

Rodchenko

  --> Fairy tales and myths begin  with this very situation: A dead kingdom. Its residents all turned to stone. It’s a good way to say it, that something alive is gone..in a myth or a fairy tale, one doesn’t restore the kingdom by passivity, nor can it be done by force. It can’t be done by logic or thought. So how can it be done? Monsters and dangerous tasks seem to be part of it. Courage and terror and failure or what seems like failure, and then hopelessness and the approach of death …The happy ending is hardly important, though we may be glad it’s there. The real joy is knowing that if you felt the trouble in the story, your kingdom isn’t dead (from Lynda Barry, What Is).

marsden hartley

swoon fragment