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Three Golden Keys and Tibet
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From: Megan Schliesman <Schliesman>
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 08:35:31 -0500
I've just been rereading The Three Golden Keys and Tibet, and found it
a great experience to look at these two books together for the ways they inform one another, and inform me about the complexities of the narratives and art and the author/artist's life.
Both books are, in a sense, like wandering through a maze, and one maze figures prominently in Three Golden Keys near the beginning, while the whole book has the feel of exploration and seeking that a maze implies. There are mazes pictured throughout Tibet. It's such an apt metaphor, of course, for the experience of revisiting and attempting to unravel pieces of our past.
As I was looking at Three Golden Keys I noticed the fish with human faces and as I was reading Tibet there was the explanation in the preface to the story "The Bluest Lake": "I remember this story from the white bed, too, and I drew many a fish with a human face. I still do."
Now I want to look more closely at Peter Sis's other books for older readers to see what connections I can find in them to these two semi-autobiographical stories. No doubt there are many more connections between the two books as well.
Ginny and others have written about imagination in Sis's books, and looking at Tibet and The Three Golden Keys, and thinking about mazes and memory, and our desire to make sense of our past, and to understand the world in which we live (as we see Madlenka's understanding of her world), one sees that imagination is offered in his works as something essential to living in and making sense of our lives and our world, with all that this encompasses (and we can't possibly know what all that is--we can only begin to imagine...)
Megan
Megan Schliesman, Librarian Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education UW-Madison 608&2?03 schliesman at education.wisc.edu
Received on Wed 20 Jun 2001 08:35:31 AM CDT
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 08:35:31 -0500
I've just been rereading The Three Golden Keys and Tibet, and found it
a great experience to look at these two books together for the ways they inform one another, and inform me about the complexities of the narratives and art and the author/artist's life.
Both books are, in a sense, like wandering through a maze, and one maze figures prominently in Three Golden Keys near the beginning, while the whole book has the feel of exploration and seeking that a maze implies. There are mazes pictured throughout Tibet. It's such an apt metaphor, of course, for the experience of revisiting and attempting to unravel pieces of our past.
As I was looking at Three Golden Keys I noticed the fish with human faces and as I was reading Tibet there was the explanation in the preface to the story "The Bluest Lake": "I remember this story from the white bed, too, and I drew many a fish with a human face. I still do."
Now I want to look more closely at Peter Sis's other books for older readers to see what connections I can find in them to these two semi-autobiographical stories. No doubt there are many more connections between the two books as well.
Ginny and others have written about imagination in Sis's books, and looking at Tibet and The Three Golden Keys, and thinking about mazes and memory, and our desire to make sense of our past, and to understand the world in which we live (as we see Madlenka's understanding of her world), one sees that imagination is offered in his works as something essential to living in and making sense of our lives and our world, with all that this encompasses (and we can't possibly know what all that is--we can only begin to imagine...)
Megan
Megan Schliesman, Librarian Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education UW-Madison 608&2?03 schliesman at education.wisc.edu
Received on Wed 20 Jun 2001 08:35:31 AM CDT
