Extension English 2 — Reflection Statement

“The way up and the way down are one and the same.”

- Heraclitus

Conservative individuals who undervalue the human imagination are confined by a logical mindset. The entirety of the human experience cannot be fully understood by relying on one binary perspective. By synthesising their ideals of rationalism with irrationalist genres such as surrealism and magical realism, I created a unity of opposites, where neither subjective or objective dominates, but intertwine into a harmonious entity to broaden the boundaries of dualistic thinking.

During the Extension 1 Course I was exposed to Romanticism and Romantic influencers such as Coleridge. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan brims with multi-interpretable symbols and simultaneously acts as a metaphor for creativity and creation, and emulates a waking dream. Coleridge’s distinct outlook and attitude towards life emotionally instilled within me an appreciation for nature and the human imagination, and inspired me to research and explore more into the human psyche. I researched Carl Jung’s Theory of Psychoanalysis which exposed me to the idea that the unconscious mind consists of memories, dream and archetypes (which are universal symbols common to all individual minds, literature and cultures). I blindly followed my rigid and vague idea of “portray the world in an irrational way” and researched The Magnetic Fields in an attempt to incorporate irrational elements into my Major Work without any insight into its significance to my purpose. My lack of insight resulted in my original Major Work drafts to be underdeveloped and insubstantial. My obsessive emotional attachment to the Romantic poet John Keats (catalyzed by my passion for Romanticism) led me to research his poems in an attempt to find a way to enrich my Major Work. Keats’ unification of the polarities of life and death into one complementary entity through his rhetorical tone in his poem On Death, “Can death be sleep when life is but a dream?”, provided me with the enlightening realization that death was an experience and not an end. This allowed me to refine my conceptual intention from a vague statement towards my current intention: to unify the paradoxical entities of orthodox beliefs towards death, time and reality, with the unorthodox ideals of the afterlife, the nonlinearity of time and the interconnectedness of reality and the mind, in order to broaden an individual’s perceptions towards the human experience into a non binary possibility.

My Major Work Collection consists of 3 stories. At first I had feverishly contemplated the meaning of “collection” itself to ensure I had met the criteria, but realized that 3 had an important significance towards my purpose; it is a symbol for continuity and wholeness. By having three stories, I can converge their different perspectives towards the human experience so that what was explicitly three can become implicitly one and create a sense of coherence rather than dissonance. My preliminary research into archetypes through the analysis of William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming and his utilization of the gyre archetype (which is a symbol of two vortexes in a continual and simultaneous state of entering and emerging from each other., and represents the continual opposition between two basic elements of existence) inspired me to implement this in my own collection of stories. I again accepted blindly a concept that I admired and later realized that my purpose was to unify rather than to contradict. Heraclitus’ aphorism The Unity of Opposites evident in his nonduality / dualistic monism philosophy, “The way up and the way down are one and the same”, provided me with a way of materializing the abstract symbol of 3 into a tangible conceptual link between my stories.

With a new direction catalysed by Keats’ On Death, I was able to skillfully utilize the Surrealist technique to have a more meaningful significance towards my purpose. The novel The Magnetic Fields (1920) utilizes the surrealist techniques of Automatism and Juxtaposition, “the eyes exchange sulphurous sounds like the murmuring of a dry moon”. It emulates the images formulated in the unconscious mind and recreates a state of a waking dream that is compatible with rational judgement because the images derive from familiar conscious images that are slightly distorted. The incorporation of this technique in Ouroboros, “The grass struck twelve and the flowers screamed at the rain for invading their privacy”, emphasises my intention of suspending the disbelief of my readers in order to deepen their emotional engagement and synthesise their rationalist ideals with the irrational possibilities of an afterlife in order to change their perspectives towards the human condition. I further emphasised this effect of “suspending disbelief” by combining Surrealism with features of the Magical Realist genre. Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate portrays fantastical events in a realistic and matter of fact tone to heighten the plausibility of the magical events. I utilize her skillful embedment of magic within the mundane through my continuous shift between using surrealist descriptions and incorporation of magical realism conventions until the descriptions of life and dreams blend and becomes unrecognizable and “the way up and the way down” become “one and the same”. This alludes to On Death and reinforces my synthesis of objective attitudes and the subjective possibilities of the afterlife. Jame Joyce utilizes the stream of consciousness technique in his novel Ulysses. He implements fragmented, associative and unpunctuated sentences“to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind.” I integrated this technique into Ouroboros to deepen the emotional integrity of my character Milo and represent his initial emotional turmoil towards death, which is later juxtaposed by his change in attitudes, signified by my use of a rhetorical question, “Or was he waking up?” . My allusion to John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale further emphasises my intention of “synthesising life and death”.

I utilized the Ocean and Midnight as the contextual background of the story Starry Night . The Ocean symbolizes timelessness, and Midnight is a moment in between yesterday and tomorrow. The isolation of my character Rafia out of time allows her to be enveloped by the memory of her brother Sai for an eternity and facilitates the link between the past and present. Jame Joyce’s Finnegans Wake employs a cyclical narrative technique, with the ending sentence, “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”, linking to the beginning, “riverrun, past eve and adams” . I incorporated and imitated this technique, the ending sentence of Starry Night ,“her broken promise rang in her ears; cold and harsh like the hollow ” blending into the beginning “echo of the chiming midnight bell, it grew softer…” in order to emphasise the fluidity of a seemingly objective notion such as time and the interconnection and unity between the past and the present; which is further woven together by the flickering associative nature of memory as Rafia’s mind makes connections between the “sky; which was speckled with the light of billions of stars” and her brother Sai’s eyes, “They lit up like the night sky”. Rafia’s profound feelings of sorrow and grief strengthen her need to be in the memory of Sai eternally; and thus further synthesises the past and the present.

In Lunar Synthesis, I characterize Rosita to have the mental illness derealization (feeling distanced from the world and stuck in her mind while simultaneously experiencing reality) and allude to Rhapsody on a Windy Night (the associative and irrational nature of the poem merges together to form a coherent replication of the disillusioned mental state of individuals) to unify the dichotomies of reality and the mind into a coherent whole. I use the Surrealist technique in a disturbing and provocative way to emulate images from the psyche and the stream of consciousness technique to reinforce Rosita’s descent into a mental crisis. I utilized Rene Magritte’s concept of verisimilitude from his painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe which emphasises that a representation of reality can not fully encapsulate reality, and that each individual has their own “island of experiences”. Flower acts as a conceit because I parallel the subjective and abstract aspects of the individual psyche with an objective element of the physical world, a flower, in order to emphasise the unification between reality and the mind.

The entirety of the human experience cannot be fully understood without the contemplation of both the rational and the irrational to form a coherent understanding of both as a whole. The development of my Major Work parallels with my intellectual and emotional growth both as a person and as a writer. It taught me invaluable skills, the importance of self belief and following one’s passions, and allowed me to show others my own unique perspectives towards life.

Word Count: 1440 Words