Wind Waker: Flawed but Perfect

Ten years and two days after its Japanese release I began Wind Waker.  You’re probably wondering why, after all these years, I decided to buy a Gamecube.  There were two main reasons.  The first is that my interest in gaming, which had been waning for quite some time, was given a near fatal blow by Halo 4 (the review I co-wrote can be read here).  It managed to almost kill both my passion for a franchise that had occupied my devout attention for a decade, and for Xbox in general.  I could no longer stand the direction the gaming industry is inexorably moving.  The second reason was a concoction between longing to relive my memories of Ocarina of Time, and having a close friend who was forever reminding me of what I’d missed out on (or more accurately tempting me, and sharing pictures of their very pretty limited edition Zelda 3DS).  Finally I decided to begin making amends.  I sold Halo 4 and put the money towards a number of Ebay bidding wars.

Perception: not as constant as you might think

Reality cannot be accurately defined by the eyes of man.  This is because what we see and how we process it has infinite variation, dependent upon both characteristics and conditioning.  We’re already aware when walking through an art gallery that some see art and others see a splattered canvas.  What I want to talk about is how perception has more depth than the visual, and can be altered.  It was in reading two books randomly alongside one another, The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley and The Chosen by Chaim Potok, that I really began to appreciate this fact.

In The Doors of Perception Huxley recounts his experiences in taking mescaline for the first time.  Upon taking it he finds his world completely transformed.  Colours, ‘an intellectual luxury rather than physical necessity’, took upon new vibrancy and became ‘innumerable in difference’; folds in trousers became ‘labyrinths of complexity’; and a chair could be gazed at for hours. This chair, it is claimed, was ‘obviously the same in essence’ to that seen by Van Gogh (embedded after the jump).  In looking at his piece there is a certain… seductive phosphorescence, but Huxley feels that even this, in spite of Van Gogh’s genius, fell short of the extreme reality. 

Doomed Youth?

I was looking through my old school work, and happened to stumble across a gem that I thought lost, after my old computer was wiped by a virus.  What I found was a near completed draft of a ‘creative coursework piece’.  It was the only real opportunity throughout the entirety my A Levels to write something creative, and it was entirely optional:

Prose Text Coursework on Regeneration by Pat Barker

For this essay you can:

·         Either write a conventional essay that explores some aspect of the text, like characterisation, theme or structure, with a focus on your personal informed interpretation of the text.

·         Or you can do a piece of creative transformational writing, such as an alternative ending, a ‘missing chapter’, a letter from a diary of a character in the novel.  This piece will be assessed against the same Assessment Objectives as a more conventional essay, so it will need to reflect the writer’s style, the way the characters are realised etc. 

What might surprise people is that only two members of the class (perhaps even the whole year!), including myself, took up the opportunity.  For education to have crushed creative sparks so completely that the majority are inclined towards the conventional stresses the conformist, and almost drone like quality, that is unfortunate outcome of our education.