Closure at Last

It seems to be leaving me alone now—that dialectic I've been writing about for so many years. You know, left brain/right brain, conscious/unconscious, yin/yang, Apollo/Dionysus etc.

It used to drive me relentlessly, popping up at odd moments and taking over my thinking process, making me write feverishly, but I was only spinning my wheels, getting nowhere.
Then I stumbled onto that video about the Feminine Gaze. That one started me on a massive burst of blog posts that finally connected it all up with that other dialectic I'm obsessed with—Poetic/Narrative. They clicked together, and then while watching The New World I suddenly had insight into how Terrence Malick wove the 2 threads together in his masterpiece film.

A few more quick movie analyses and I had figured out most of the details—how to weave the poetic and the narrative threads together into the same piece. There's still a few loose ideas rattling around, but they seem minor and I don't feel the obsessive need to write about them anymore. Now I finally understand how to USE this stuff.

Next I turn my attention toward ferreting out the story structure in a few movies, and exploring how character web ties in with plot. I think this is a major stage in understanding story, that beautiful but demanding mistress—the penultimate stage before beginning to use it in my own work.