Sick Days...

[written back in late September, but for some reason I haven't uploaded it?!?! I don't understand myself...]

I think one of my greatest regrets this year is that I was unable to make the trip to Andong with the rest of my class… all because of an unfortunate illness that thereby lasted for two more weeks. However, through an experience lost, I suppose I also have an experience gained – I spent the time I was ill, reading. Well, at least when I was lucid enough to do so.

It was then that I discovered that it was fascinating to imagine some of my favorite novels as stage plays. Perhaps it was due to the numerous ‘space studies’ that we had worked on in class, but instead of the usual immersion, I suddenly found myself blocking movements and placing actors inside a room in my mental image. This novel was none other than my favorite Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. 

Please forgive me for the incoherency of this post, since I am still under the influence of cold medicine. Perhaps this is not even what the blog posts were supposed to be, but the idea’s been harassing me for some time, and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get it down on paper… or a blog.

In any case, it was an unusual experience. Many people know of one interpretation of the novel as an animated film, and have experienced the world of Ingary in that manner… but as far as I knew, no one had yet to explore this fascinating world on a stage when it was literally a plot and setting with infinite possibilities… particularly in conjunction with space.

Diana Wynne Jones was an authoress who greatly enjoyed playing with the boundaries of reality and twisting it to her own will – this is even more prominently evident in her distortion of space. For example, the moving castle mentioned in the story is a strange one: it is just that, a castle that travels across the wastes… however, that is only one of its doors.

Should one visit and enter a store in the district of Porthaven, they will be entering this moving castle. Should one visit the shop in the other district of Kingsbury, they will find the same room of the castle. Doors do not lead to where they should, or rather, the rooms they lead to are not always the same. Who’s to say that rooms do not change and move about when we leave a door closed?

I just thought that this would be a fascinating idea to explore through space studies – doorways. Perhaps a stage play of this specific book might not work, but rereading this made me realize that there is a lot to be explored in the most simple of things: doorways.

What can we do with doorways?

… I think I’ll revisit this idea when I’m more coherent…