The Statue

I was reading Jenny's post about the statue and the question as to whether the statue was real or not. It got me thinking about the fact that "we see what we want to see"...usually- or sometimes we see exactly what we DON'T want to see. Either way, the mind and the imagination are so complex that what we think we are seeing as real are really just figments of our imagination. Jenny also asked why Shakespeare would create such a statue with wrinkles, etc. with age comes beauty and wisdom (or so I like to believe) For me the statue represented not a perfect image but an image of flaws and imperfections (mirroring Leontes' own qualities.

I can't help but think though that Hermione and Paulina were staging some sort of clever plan to get Leontes to want Hermione. It reminds me of a really depressing country song my sister told me to listen to ("If I die young")...part of the song goes:

"A penny for my thoughts, oh no I’ll sell them for a dollar,
They're worth so much more after I’m a goner
And maybe then you’ll hear the words I've been singin’
Funny when you're dead how people start listenin’"

It's just like real life! Leontes doesn't realize her worth until she is gone (or so he thinks) and then when he sees that she is resurrected he wants her back. Does love have no worth until it is lost? That is what it seems to be, tragedy or comedy. Love has to become nothing before it really becomes something.

Tying back to my previous post, I am thinking about how much a statue stands for remembrance. We have a statue to remember a person by, yet we also have this disconnectedness through the aging process- she is both known and unknown. This helped me to create my own vision of the statue and allowing room for imagination to flow. Is it real or not? Why is she imperfect? Let's see how far our imaginations can go...

Another part I loved, that could have blown right past me:
"she thrice bowed before me,
And, gasping to begin some speech, her eyes
Became two spouts"

There is such a fine line between dreams and reality. Dreams foster imagination, they show us what is both real and not, creating these false emotions in what I like to call "the other life". To me, my dreams are my other life. I am there in them, I especially felt this in the summer when I dreamt of something absolutely horrible, something I had never experienced and wish I hadn't. Just 2 hours after I woke, this horrible "dream" was a reality. To feel such emotion and disturbance through dreams is something I will never truly be able to explain.

So, I continue to ask, what in Shakespeare is real and what is not?! I can never quite tell. Thankfully, shakespeare is a supporter of dreaming and imagination so I will continue to wonder and create while reading his works.