The other night, while we were watching Nightmare Before Christmas, and Labyrinth, all in a row, for the Nth time, with a high content of vermuth&cola (mostly vermuth than cola… because when Spleen makes them… ;)), all wrapped up in a blanket, I ponderated on what I saw…

Take Jack Skellington: king of Halloween town, sick and tired of repeating, every day and every year, always the same things, while trying to best himself everytime… he want’s more, he want’s new, different, and he thinks he can find it in Christmas Town… but what then? Then things go astray, Halloweenians take it all and translate it all in their creepy language, Jack is so close to death… The quest, in the end, came from the “Who am I?” (can it be any different?) he’s Halloween king because everybody else see him that way, but how does he see himself? He almost dies (let’s skip the fact that he’s a skeleton) and what does he learns from this?? That he is and always be the Pumpkin King…

Hey there mr Burton, are you saying that we’re  what we were born for, or that we are born one way and we can’t escape it?

“You’re taking things for granted, not eveything is what it looks like here in the Labyrinth” says Hoggle to Sara, at the entrance of the labyrinth… and then Jareth (eaven knows how many times I’ve already quoted this) “I’m exhausted from living up to your expectations of me”; basically to me Labyrinth is chock-full of important quotes (I can now allow myself not to focus on the story itself, on details, but just listen to the hidden meanings of words and lines)…

Is it so? Do we really exist through other people’s eyes? Let’s also consider that I’ve been studing Freud, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, Kojève and others just ’till yesterday… one of these men (I can’t already remember if it was Heidegger or Kojève) said that a man is how he perceives himself… aka we are what we see reflected (in a mirror or in others).

Is it still so surprising that the universal question is “Who am I?”? And then you also have to cut it down to “beinga” and “I”, what do these words mean? Everybody, one way or another, tries to answer, philosophers, psycologist, scientists too (otherwise what is the purpose of sectioning reality to the very atom, but to understand what’s life?)… “where do we come from” and “where are we going” are of little importance, if we do not understand beforehand who’s the subject of those actions…

I won’t go deeper in philosophy, not here, not now (and I honestly do not believe that I’ll ever write about philosophy, but this is another tale)… yet I can say that I am trying to understand who I am, and it’s not easy, because the concept of “I” is already quite complicated per se, without adding “being” to the equation… it is for “being” that we need goals, or dreams, call them whatever, otherwise yes we’ll go on, the world won’t stop because you’re dropping off of it, but we’ll go on with a useless and frustrating waste of energies…

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