Ghosting Collages

Laurie Hoffman, “Red”

GHOSTING COLLAGES

Very nice. Tres spooky. Coming or going? What a mood you must have been in. "Red" is like the other collage with the boy on the bridge. Your collage ghosting almost makes me want to do a story about it. But then, you could probably tell a much more interesting story about the haunting picture than I could. 

Laurie Hoffman, “Boy on a Bridge”

I got into the Red Riding Hood fairy tale thing through a kind of circuitous route. My online astrologer is psychic I think. http://kristo.com/ 

Actually, I'm pretty sure of it. He’s uncanny… but also I've noticed his coincidences and synchronicities help my intuition to grow in ways I never quite anticipated...

He's a Jungian astrologer into dream analysis, fairy tales, intuition. He did a couple of horoscopes for me and CD disks that pretty much predicted my 2009 open heart surgery episode. His daily horoscope page is synchronistic with his intuitive insights right into my "now." He's not updating right now because he's working on a grant for a book on his Astrology Theory. He's an M.D. in Chicago. 

Anyway, his read on fairy tales and dream interpretation appealed to me & still does. He stresses "intuition" and how to develop your own intuition via synchronicity, coincidences, etc. 

Making the Red Riding Hood fairy tale 'relevant' to my life (growing up in Kansas), the Red connection goes into this poem "Telemachus" giving my parent's divorce a Greek-Fairy Tale twist... 

http://www.snarke.com/2013/10/telemachus.html

It's about the way I felt back then when my father returned from Korea in 1954, found out his wife wanted a divorce & didn't want to take us all back to Japan where he had an assignment as a military attache in Tokyo. 

It wasn't a pleasant divorce. Me and my 2 brothers got whisked away from Emporia and dumped up in Republic County in Belleville where my father's parents lived. My stark lonely memory of being stuck out there on the High Plains prairie not knowing what was going on...  

It had a bizarre nightmare fairy tale twist to it that encapsulated the Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Kinda. Off to Grandmother's farm. Kidnapped by the Big Bad Wolf in his sportscar. Stuck out there in the middle of Nowhereville. In the middle of winter. Nothing but snow and endless flat Kansas prairie. It was just awful.....

I'll probably never go back to the Midwest... but still my Kansas bildungsroman will probably never leave me either. A kind of reverse Thomas Wolfe "Look Homeward, Angel" trope... with the exception being one can never go back home again... but also one can never 'leave' home either. I'm stuck with growing up back there. A sort of sweet-and-sour sauce predicament... :-)

Jungian fairy tale analysis with archetypal interpretation is interesting. My lifestyle back then... Even tho difficult, I can still imagine a gay doppelganger double of me still living back there. 

Ending up a gay librarian or high school English teacher and pretty much a Homonormative recluse like me now. Maybe not a gay published poet... but still back there in that little college town. A couple of blocks from the KSTC campus. Weird, huh?