Isle of Nines

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Isle of Nines
4–6 minutes

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Welcome to my collection of YouTube adventures. I have started my Isle of Nines channel in 2023 and it has been a wonderful adventure. Since I was a complete “nube” at editing videos or animating content, each of the videos was a stepping stone to consolidating my skills. Here is a summary of the playlists you will find on my channel and what lead me to create them. I hope you enjoy exploring them as I have enjoyed creating.

Playlists

Stories translated from Spanish

I confess a fascination with the magical realism of south american authors. The charming and misterious stories have always touched me and I wanted to be able to read them in original. Since I never learnt Spanish, I had to rely on the latin roots of my native language when reading these stories. In the translations that I have published on Youtube, I had to rely as well on Chat GPT translator.

Here are the first installments in this series, stories from Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Benedetti. I hope in the future to expand this collection with the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges and other intriguing authors.

The Little Prince and Marilyn Manson

First time I read the Little Prince, I was a child and it stayed with me more as an impression than a story. When I reread the story of Antoine de Saint Exupery in 2023 again, it struck me as a deep reflection of a lost soul searching for its way back.

As an adult, I read the Little Prince as the child self of the author who finds himself stranded in the desert with a broken plane. How many of us found ourselves alone in the desert next to our broken plane! The lost pilot finds his way back by listening to the stories of the Little Prince. Looking again at the world through the eyes of a child, of one’s own inner child, he learns, commitment, love, curiosity and to purely see things as they are.

Rereading the story I felt deeply unsettled and confronted with what is essential in life. I wanted to capture this feeling by using the soul retching music of Marilyn Manson. Antoine de Saint Exupery has made his own illustrations of the book and nearly all editions published have his original drawings. But in this project, I took the liberty of reimagining the Little Prince. The illustrations are AI generated in Adobe Firefly with a prompt asking for monochrome surrealistic style.

After completing this project I look upon the Little Prince story as a journey through and out of a depressive episode. It is a soothing thought to have this step by step guide on a journey back to the world.

The Isle of Thoughts and confessions

Another adventure in the land of words, images and music are my essays on leadership. I cannot track the exact motivation that pushed me towards reflecting upon leadership but it has stayed with me for a few months and here is the result of that period.

The essays take on the subject sideways, by exploring alternative narratives. What if Robin Hood will actually be the ruler? How can you lead a cavelry charge when you think you look funny on a horse? What if Romeo never met Juliet? And besides these original pieces, I have also included a moving speech that is attributed to Nelson Mandela but which origins I found extremely hard to track. In any case, it is a powerful encouragement to stand in the light so that others may follow you.

The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade is an author I have discovered in high school through his hallucinogenic inspired literary works. he was not shy to describe his erotic adventures and for a teenage reader that seemed intriguing. They are nevertheless standing an original body of work from a most unusual author. As a young man, he has travelled to India and has studied the Romanian Folklore and this traspires through all his works. Being seduced by the populist movement and the fascist regime in Romania , he chose to fled the country and continue his explorations into myths and cultures across the world from a western country.

He eventually arrives in USA where he becomes a lecturer at the University in Chicago. There, he publishes a two volume History of Religious Ideas and a body of essays in comparative religion. Even through his analytical works he maintains a mystical tone that gives his writings a literary charms and makes them popular to a wider public. This whimsical style of approaching comparative religions has attracted criticism and many scholars have criticised his methodologies or lack thereof.

But even with a lack of academic rigour, his writings have endured the test of time and represent a charming way to be introduced in the mystical world of religious thought. Mircea Eliade is an original and stimulating read that invites reflection and further exploration of these concepts.

In this series, I am summarizing, with the help of Chat GPT, each chapter in his book the Sacred and the Profane.

Each chapter addresses a different aspect of the sacred: Chapter 1. Sacred space; Chapter 2. Sacred time; Chapter 3. Sacred nature; Chapter 4. Rituals of initiation into the sacred.