Flaky Introspection
Grappling with identity questions in my old comics journal
In my last post, I ended with a page from my old drawing book that said, “All this illustrating is prompting some flaky introspection.” Yeah, I guess you could say that about these upcoming pages, too.
It was 1999, and I’d moved back to Calgary one year before, to work as a flight attendant with Air Canada. I was still trying to get used to that new identity, after having been a gloomy art school student in Ontario in the time before that. And on top of everything else, I was trying to come to terms with being single (i.e. being the second choice of the guy I was hung up over)…
I was lonely. I still missed my old life in Toronto, and I didn’t feel at home yet in Calgary. In my drawing book, I drew “the Wood Between the Worlds,” in a reference to C. S. Lewis’s book “The Magician’s Nephew.” In the book, the Wood Between the Worlds is a neutral place, full of trees and ponds, where you stop on your way to or from other magical worlds. I drew myself sitting on the rocks in Penetang, Ontario, where my grandparents had a cottage for a while. It felt like the “Wood Between the Worlds” there: a kind of neutral halfway place, a place that stayed the same, while I shuttled between my two identities in Calgary and Toronto.
On the “page of esoteric wacked-out flakiness” (above), I pondered whether I was just a construct, made up of so many outside influencers, like my mom and my ex-boyfriend. I felt like the main character in Virginia Woolf’s novel “Jacob’s Room” - a person that the reader only ever hears about from the perspectives of others - a person you never actually meet yourself.
I mentioned a few phrases that I’d picked them up from other places, which had become part of my own everyday language:
“As usual, King Friday:” Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood
”Goodbye, Thing, you sing too long:” “Hop on Pop” by Dr. Seuss
”On to the City of God:” Something my Victorian English prof used to say (quoting St. Augustine) at the end of every class (there’s a picture of him saying it, in this episode of The Drawing Book)
“Ich bin erschoepft:” Something my German friend used to say
“All hungry people, step this way:” Something my grandmother said when she rang the dinner bell at that family cottage in Penetang
I was really struggling to figure out my identity. Which city did I belong in? What was I really like? (I feel lucky, in hindsight, that these were the only kinds of struggles I had to grapple with in my mid-twenties. I am hoping the generations who come next, will also be so lucky - but these days, there seem to be a few extra challenges too…)
My Life as a Movie
On the next page, it says: “You’ve read “My Life as a Book.” Now see… “My Life as a Movie!” (You can read “My Life as a Book” in this earlier episode of The Drawing Book.)
I still love all of these movies. A Room with a View; Moonstruck; Roger Michell’s Persuasion. (I really love this movie version of Persuasion and even modelled the Captain in my comic about the song “Canadee-I-O” after Ciaran Hinds’ depiction of the Captain in Persuasion.) Those three movies are about sad, lonely women who are waiting for some kind of transformative experience. I guess the other two characters I mention on this page, are something along the same lines: Cassiel, from Wim Wenders’ Faraway, So Close! and Tommy from… Tommy.
Guess I still had Tommy on my mind when I started the next page, using lyrics from one of the movie’s song to show myself finally ditching that guy who broke my heart.
“The tune I was singing a year ago,” according to this page, was “Lucy Ashton’s Song” from the novel “The Bride of Lammermoor” by Sir Walter Scott. It’s a tragic story about a young woman who’s persuaded to do what society demands of her, rather than follow her heart. I knew this song because it’s quoted in both the book and the movie of A Room with a View (a story about another Lucy). I wish I could find a clip online of the the tune sung in the movie, because the melody is really beautiful.
Why had I been singing such a gloomy tune a year before? Back when I was an art student at OCAD in Toronto, I was living with my then-boyfriend in Hamilton, Ontario, an hour’s drive away. It was a gloomy time, and I spent a lot of hours in my car looking out at Lake Ontario during my commute. I also sat on the stairs of our basement apartment, reading (that was one good thing about my gloomy year in Hamilton: the awakening of my lifelong interest in children’s literature!!). I recently found an old art school sketch of those basement stairs, actually…
During this time of flaky introspection about my identity, I read a lot of children’s literature (like the aforementioned “The Magician’s Nephew”), and I also read a lot of escapist stories, especially stories of people who ran away to sea, like Joshua Slocum’s amazing book “Sailing Alone around the World.” I hadn’t yet made peace with my new life and my new surroundings in Calgary… but that would happen eventually. In the meantime, my drawing book helped me to get through. I hope it brightened your day too, in spite of all the flaky introspection!
