misqueue: grey titmouse(?) sitting amongst blossoms (Default)
misqueue ([personal profile] misqueue) wrote2012-08-04 11:11 am

[Meta] Kurt & Wings -- some brief thoughts

An attempt at meta, sorta. I posted this over on dreamwidth and thought I'd toss it up here too.

So I have kind of a head canon thing for Kurt as the Egyptian Thoth* (magician, boundary crosser extraordinaire, presider over ceremony & ritual [e.g., weddings, funerals, coronations, judgement of the soul] healer, arbiter of death & resurrection), who is associated strongly with the Greek Hermes, and I just spotted Kurt in these shoes on the Fashion of Glee blog. More Kurt + wings/birds/flying, which is even extra neat in my brain given the Kurt's travel by airplane spoilers du jour.

*Thoth/Hermes is like the primo Jungian animus archetype. Oh, is it worth mentioning, Thoth is a bird (Ibis headed)? ETA: Also Odin, whose symbol is a raven. Kurt wears a raven brooch in "Goodbye".


Also, while I'm thinking about Kurt & wings, here are a few bits relevant to ITWOS: Cupid and Psyche.

Cupid is not Hermes-like, but he is another winged thing, and Kurt plays Cupid to Blaine's Psyche in Part V, so I thought it may be worth mentioning a couple things about Kurt (and Blaine) and wings.

The Roman Cupid is interesting, but I am even more interested (in my story) in the resonance of Kurt with Eros (Cupid's Greek counterpart/predecessor/analogue) in this part. Eros, in the Greek take on things, is one of the primordial Gods, and he's no cutesy diapered renaissance cherub, he is Human Desire and sexual power, born of Darkness and Night. He mates with Chaos, within the Abyss, to produce humanity. This is just Wikipedia level stuff, but it's not irrelevant. I believe in symbolic resonance.

Psyche is also winged, once she gains immortality (the girl is a BAMF--I mean, she travels into and out of Hades on her own); she is depicted with butterfly wings. Psyche is both the Greek word for butterfly* and the human mind.

So, the marriage of desire & mind is kind of a potent thing. With wings.

*I won't ramble on about butterfly symbolism too much here, but there is so much with butterflies, not just metamorphosis, but also stuff like healing grief and keeping/transporting secrets and the love of young men and marital bliss and death & resurrection and apparently I am rambling.

eta: I'm a little behind schedule with writing this week, but have good traction today, so I hope I have the next part of ITWOS ready soon, but it may not be posted over the weekend. <3
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[identity profile] likeasouffle.livejournal.com 2012-08-04 03:35 am (UTC)(link)
If canon Blaine was representative of Psyche, would that make McKinley Hades? And does that mean he has to leave again? Maybe not because he didn't go on his own, he had Kurt with him.

I don't know anything about Eros or Cupid. Do either (or both) of them have a period of sexual purity (baby penguin-ness) as part of their story? And a lead up to sexual awakening, and then some kind of public display of prowess/virility a la Not The Boy Next Door? Because that would be rad.

[identity profile] misqueue.livejournal.com 2012-08-04 04:36 am (UTC)(link)
Hmm. You know, I hadn't honestly even tried to apply the Cupid/Eros and Psyche stuff to the series canon proper; it's more a thing within my own head for this story. Kurt adopts Blaine's fantasy for Valentine's Day night and uses it as a moment of personal transformation--the marriage is happening within him as much as between them--if that makes sense?

I think Psyche is an interesting character because of how she goes to the underworld (alone) and back again. She runs into trouble after getting out (from which Cupid saves her), but the getting out on her own, in and of itself, is kinda cool, and if I remember my Greco-Roman myths well enough, rare.

For my part, I tend to view Dalton as Hades/Otherworld/Fairyland. Kurt and Blaine both enter the underworld of Dalton and exit again, Kurt with Santana's help, and Blaine with Kurt's (I have a little working theory that Santana has an Anima role vis à vis Kurt in places, and Kurt is certainly an Animus for Blaine...which prompts a discussion of gender, but Jung is rubbish about gender so...urgh, this would be for a different post, I think ^^;;), but I don't know that I can easily draw a parallel between Blaine & Psyche in any broader sense. It's rather ephemeral in my story, and mostly internal to Kurt. I just wanted to mention it, since it builds on butterfly stuff, transformation, and winged things.

McKinley as Hades is interesting though, and I've read some interesting meta that pegs WHMS as the fairyland (see Prom stuff) which maybe makes Dalton the Unseelie Court, particularly after Sebastian gets there. Anyway, that's a tangent. I've also heard some liken WMHS to Hell, which, by some sort of parallel, if we consider Hell the place where you go to suffer, makes WHMS (in Greek mythology) The Abyss (Tartarus), which is sort of the under-underworld, I guess. This is making me smile a lot, because the adults there certainly seem to be stuck in their Sisyphean tasks with no hope of escape. Will keeps trying. And (here's me overreaching absurdly for the fun of it) does Sue's hepatitis make her Prometheus? Is she punished for giving fire (Would fire be winning, self-esteem?) to the students?

As for Cupid/Eros and baby penguinitude? Eros doesn't have any connotations of sexual purity that I'm aware of; he's all about the sexual power and desire. Cupid is somewhat less potent than Eros (i.e., he's not a primordial creation deity, but the son of Venus and Mars), but he is also not sexually pure: he's definitely associated with sexual desire and erotic love. So, for me, Kurt was, by adopting Cupid/Eros for the moment, allowing himself to embrace his own erotic desire, and also integrate it more comfortably within himself. And again, this meta only applies within my own head canon for ITWOS. I'm hesitant to try to expand it beyond to the series overall. And obviously, as the author, I am dead; my opinion or intention doesn't really matter. Readers can read it however they like. :)

Mostly I'm just being self-indulgent. I don't talk about the guts of my stories often, at least not unprompted, but I was in a sharing mood and feeling overstimulated by all the cut scenes and S4 spoilers and speculation.

And! I am intrigued now to know if there are any other stories (myths, fairy tales, other folklore) that might follow the pattern you describe for Kurt (baby penguin->sexual awakening->display of virility). It feels like there should be, but then Glee is forging some new ground with Kurt and gender presentation stuff, so I really don't know. If you think of anything, I'd love to hear about it.

And I fear I am really far into the tl;dr babble land. I hope this made some sense? My brain's being kinda weird for me presently.
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[identity profile] likeasouffle.livejournal.com 2012-08-05 04:17 pm (UTC)(link)
LOL I'm so tempted to compare Kurt to Bambi. Ok I'm doing it. Here goes:

Our hero (Kurt/Bambi) starts out naive and innocent, making friends and learning about the world. He sees his mother die when he's very young, and his father takes over raising him. He watches his friends fall in love and become more interested in their love interests than in him. He falls in love himself (Blaine/Faline), and things are great until his relationship is challenged by another aggressive and persistent suitor (Sebastian/Ronno). Our hero proves himself worthy, and his love interest chooses him. They grow in their relationship, but then there's a threat to himself and all his friends (Warblers/fire), and his love interest is injured (rock salt/hunting dogs). But they all get to safety. Later his virility is proven to everyone (Not the Boy Next Door/Faline gives birth to twins) and he becomes the Great Prince of the Forest. Dude, check out the size of his balls antlers!

[identity profile] misqueue.livejournal.com 2012-08-05 08:12 pm (UTC)(link)
OMG, that's awesome! If Bambi hadn't made me cry like I was dying, I'd be tempted to go reread it now.
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[identity profile] likeasouffle.livejournal.com 2012-08-05 08:25 pm (UTC)(link)
I've never read the book. I was talking about the movie. Hopefully it works either way. :)

[identity profile] misqueue.livejournal.com 2012-08-05 08:45 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't know that I've actually seen the whole movie, which is a terrible thing to admit to since I love Disney. Bambi makes me hurt. There's so much pain and death colliding with innocence and hope (so Kurt, yes). The book is good, though, and has the same overall patterns you describe, iirc. Though it has been a really long time since I read it. :)