Life Within the Fiction

They say the best actors are the ones who can become the role they play. So wouldn't that mean an actor is inseparable from his role? If the actor disagrees with the role he plays, he's not going to do a very good job at acting it, so he wouldn't get the part. Therefore I say that there has to be some connection between the actor and his role. It might not be that the actor is in agreement with the lifestyle of the character he plays, but that he promotes the overall message of the film. For there to be films about a serial killer, an actor has to play the part of the criminal. That doesn't mean the actor is a serial killer himself, or that he thinks mass murder is okay, but the opposite. The film would be about the serial killer getting caught and punished for his crime, so the actor would be in agreement with stopping serial killers. Nonetheless, you cannot act objectively in a film because no one is completely objective, and you cannot be a great or successful actor in a role against your own moral values.

~Scribbles

Peter Pan Syndrome

It seems the type of interaction the narrator has with the darkness is an avoidance of it. She (I'm assuming it is a she) isn't in complete darkness because the moon is shining through the window, she doesn't reply to the ink-colored seals, and she's on the edge of darkness. Also, the last line, "Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue," seems to imply that she hasn't accepted it yet - something is on the edge of your tongue before you eat it. In light of the poem being about adolescence, I would come to the conclusion that the darkness is adulthood (darkness perhaps because it is unknown and intimidating). She's afraid of growing up and becoming an adult so she shies away from it. The thing is, however, that she cannot avoid it. The seals will come back.

~Scribbles

Futility

The moment a word leaves our lips it is subject to deconstruction and subjective meaning. For example, in Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, a snowman attempts to put meaning to the word "toast", but ultimately comes to the conclusion that "toast cannot be explained by any rational means." The way we describe what a word, object, or idea is by using other words/objects/ideas. There is no absolute meaning we can boil a word down to other than "thing", which is no description at all. After a failed attempt at describing the word toast, the snowman muses that toast is "a pointless invention from the Dark Ages" or "an implement of torture." The conclusion he reaches is that toast - or any other word for that matter - is exactly what you want it to be. Toast is different for each person according to his/her subjective knowledge of it. We can never know what a word/object/idea truly means because there is no original word/object/idea we can relate it to and derive its meaning from.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

~Scribbles