I turned in my very last project o the semester at 4:45 (fifteen minutes late, but the e-mail attachment got there on time, so that should count for something), and now I am done.
The play is... eh, better. I refer to the one I was in the process of writing rather than either of the two I was in the process of directing. I still don't like it, but it feels more certain of its convictions now and it includes the impossible "mene mene tekel" trick (look it up if you want to know more).
Because of my research into Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle, my father ended up on the Cottingley Fairies. Up to now, he has always wondered how anyone could believe they're real, but that was before he realised that the photographs are not the photographs. 99 percent of the images of Elsie, Frances and the fairies come from the engravings made by Strand magazine, which are slightly different, because, well, they didn't have photocopiers back then.
Upon finding an image of the single known remaining photograph, coupled with having seen the photograph called Fairy Sunbath for the first time, my father has decided they cannot be discounted.
I would disagree with him wholeheartedly but for Frances. In the 70's, in an attempt to sheild their (deceased) father from claims that it was he who perpetrated the entire affair, Elsie released a statement that her father had nothing to do with it, but that she and her sister were entirely responsible for the hoax. This seems in the same vein as the Fox girls confession, except for Frances.
Frances always maintained that one of the photographs is legitimate, not faked in any way. Why would an eighty year old woman care so much about a prank she pulled when she was twelve (or so) that she would continue to claim it so many years later? That doesn't make sense. This is the sort of thing that makes me doubt, human nature is not such to continue to perpetrate a lie when it cannot do harm to admit it. As Professor Kirke said about Lucy, "When an otherwise truthful person gives an outlandish story, they must either be crazy, and one has only to talk to her to know that she is not, they must be telling the truth." Especially when Frances couldn't still profit from the lie, in fact, to cling to the truth has only served to make her look like an even bigger liar than she perhaps already was, since Elsie gave an explanation in order to sheild her father.
Coming at this from the point of view that people are generally good, it's illogical for this to be a lie. Coming at it from the point of view that people will do anything in order to get what they want, what on earth could Frances be getting out of making these claims?
I can believe in fairies, no problem, but photogenic fairies bother me. Consider the Newby Church ghost.(seeing this for the first time made me jump and I love ghost photos) That's just too... well, exactly what it's supposed to be. Even more amazing if the camera picked it up, and no human eyes did.
It's funny that I would be more willing to accept photographs of things that are not obvious (orbs, shadows, etc.) than things that are. In my mind, a shadow is dismissable, but a transparent man, or a cluster of tiny winged creatures? I should notice them. There's no excuse, except to blame my brain for not thinking them remarkable, and I don't like having to rely on something that would prove itself to be so easily misled.
But then, we are. We see things that aren't there, we see things that are there differently. Whether or not I see the same "red" as anyone else will never be understood- I can see it, but what I see as red may be the same thing that someone else sees as orange. We can agree that a particular shade is a particular thing, but if you always saw, for example, green as blue, you'd never know you were seeing green as blue. You would always have heard the colour of the grass described as green, so that colour, however differently your eyes may see it from someone else, will always know it that way.
We know we rely on extremely faulty information of the world around us, and we go to great lengths to try to make our impressions as accurate as possible, but (in true weakest link fashion) we can never be better than the bodies we inhabit.
I think I begin to understand where Plato got the Allegory of the Cave.