I have edited the post, and also, finally managed to upload all three drawings (21/05/2024)

Life and art

“A window. How I love a window. A bird, whizzing by. Bumblebee. It’s always different. The whole of life. The whole of life already framed. Right there.“ Maud Lewis

Today’s post includes three bigger drawings-collages, I’ve been currently making, inspired by archetypes in films, stories and art, and ancient Greek models of the mind. I’ve also, read a very interesting analysis by Benjamin Haller of Chris Nolan’s somewhat complex, and with an ambiguous ending, film Inception, which I write about in today’s post. I found Haller’s piece interesting and worth reading, irrespectively of whether one has seen Inception or not. I also make a brief reference to another film I watched recently, Maudie, inspired by folk artist Maud Lewis. Both of the film themes or characters have found their way in my artwork.  The writing, the art making, the books and films, and the brief research on Jungian archetypes and the ancient Greek use of architecture as a metaphor for human consciousness and the mind, have in some sense all been one interrelated art-life process.

In his film Inception Chris Nolan, the director, explores the idea of people sharing a dream space, which gives one the ability to access somebody else’s unconscious mind, and also, how this could be used and abused. The majority of the film’s plot takes place in these interconnected dream worlds. Cobb the protagonist and his team seeming steal information from people’s dreams, which requires finding a safe within the dream that protects valuable information. Inception in the film represents a process of planting ideas in person’s mind without them being aware of it.

In his 2014 paper , The Labyrinth of Memory: Iphigeneia, Simonides, and Classical Models of Architecture as Mind in Chris Nolan’s film, Inception, Benjamin Haller  discusses how Chris Nolan’s film Inception uses architecture as a language to comment upon the relationship of the protagonist, Dom Cobb, with his deceased wife, Mal. He argues that the film draws upon three classical models that use architecture as a metaphor for mind: Homer’s tomb of Myrhine in the Iliad, Iphigeneia’s dream of the collapse of the House of Agamemnon in Euripides’s  work, Iphigeneia Among the Taurians, and Simonides’ Memory Palace mnemonic technique**.  He argues that Nolan’s film similarly to the Greco-Roman tradition use architecture as a metaphor for human consciousness in a manner that reminds one of the work of Carl Jung, who drew on Greek and Roman mythology in framing his psychological theories, the anima, the shadow, and Minotaur-mother archetypes.

** Simonides of Ceos was the inventor of the technique of loci or otherwise, called, memory palace and mind palace, which allows one to memorize vast amounts of information by envisioning a large physical space like a palace or a big house that one is extremely familiar with, and placing the information we want to memorize in various locations within the space. Then by mentally retracing one’s steps through the space one can recall each fact from the feature where it was placed.

The film Inception identifies each of its main characters: Dom, Mal and Ariadne with architectures and modes of cognition.  Mal in Dom’s dreams is identified as a force in his subconscious that Nolan associates with amorphous architectures and spaces like water, which Haller suggests represents the subconscious with all its perilous and salvific potential, and also, in Christian tradition, a symbol of redemption. Dom is the opposite of her and is identified with linear architectures like palaces and straight-line mazes. Ariadne is identified with circular mazes. She is the one who mediates between Dom and his memories of his deceased wife in order to help him overcome his guilt and grief, and also, to complete his greatest heist.

Haller argues that in the film Dom represents the analytical conscious mind, Ariadne the intuitive mind, and Mal the dangerous depths of the subconscious, and that Nolan draws on Jungian ideas about the relation between conscious and subconscious modes of cognition in order to critique gender norms often associated with male protagonists in detective  films and stories. Haller writes: “In Inception, Nolan identifies the architectures of the rectilinear palace or labyrinth, the circular maze, and the amorphous mutability of water as metaphors, respectively, for the conscious, intuitive, and subconscious mind. Nolan’s use of this metaphorical mental architecture is broadly Jungian, especially with respect to the two female leads of the film: Ariadne’s ability to thread psychological labyrinths for Dom recalls the Jungian anima and Mal’s function as part of Dom’s subconscious, which undermines his conscious enterprises, resembles Jung’s shadow and mother archetypes. ……  As Ariadne grows into her anima-like mythological role as threader of labyrinths to rescue Dom’s psyche from dissolution, an alternative narrative of Mal’s self-destruction emerges – one which differs significantly from that related by Dom.” It seems that Dom’s invasions of his wife’s internal architectures, which are embodied in her childhood home in the subconscious realm, and his insistence on linear rationality, have proved destructive.

The premise of this science fiction film is that Dom Cobb (Leonardo Di Caprio) and his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), are dream architects, who design and manipulate architectural spaces in dreams within their own and others’ minds, but this activity results in Mal preferring the world of dreams to that of reality. Dom’s plan of action to stop this results in her suicide, when Mal becomes convinced not only that the dream city which they have constructed together is unreal, but that the “real” world is also a dream. The memory of her, gets lodged in the depths of Dom’s subconscious, with disastrous results for his attempts to use his skills to earn money by stealing information from unsuspecting marks’ minds. So, Dom requires the help of someone, who can negotiate the different spaces of the mind in a different way from his own habitual way.  Haller writes: “Just as in Jung’s writings the mythological figure of Ariadne serves as a metaphor for the therapist, Dom’s new assistant, significantly named Ariadne, will fulfill an analogously therapeutic function for him vis-à-vis the architecture of the mind, designing mental labyrinths specifically tailored to thwart unwelcome intrusions by Mal into Dom’s dream palaces…”

Haller additionally discusses how “the architecture of Nolan’s dream world participates in a long tradition of gendering architecture: “feminine” architecture is identified with suppressed, subconscious, or forgotten discourses, and “masculine” architecture with a dominant voice of strident rationality and rhetorical deliberation whose inability to access these suppressed discourses proves its fatal weakness…” He refers to Iphigeneia’s dream, which also attaches gender to architectural spaces. The house is typically divided into male and female spaces, the gynaikonitis, where Iphigeneia sleeps.  Haller explains that the pillars are considered masculine: “the pillars of the home are masculine offspring  (στῦλοι γὰρ οἴκων παῖδές εἰσιν ἄρσενες),” and they have a voice, whereas the females are relegated to the passive female role of lamentation (κλαίουσα).

Haller points to similarities between this architecture and that of Inception. In the film the architecture in Mal’s interior life is encircled by a moat / water, which, he notes, could also suggest that Mal is protecting herself from Dom, who violates her childhood home to implant the idea of the illusory character of their city. Haller adds that Dom’s penetration of Mal’s interior world is represented as a violation of an interior space of her consciousness. Similarly, Iphigeneia’s dream at the start of the tragedy asserts the house of her father as a violated   interior mind space. In the dream this space is also surrounded by the Black Sea. The water both separates her from Greece and protects her.

I will end this piece with two lines from the movie:

“What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.” Dom Cobb

“The seed that we plant in this man’s mind will grow into an idea. This idea will define him. It may come to change everything about him. The way he thinks, the way he acts. It may even come to define his entire worldview.” Dom Cobb

Additionally, I will briefly refer to a film I watched recently, Maudie, directed by Aisling Walsh, with a script by Sherry Whit, and which became part of my drawings. The film is not a biopic, but rather inspired by the life of Maud Lewis, a celebrated Canadian folk artist, who as a child battled with the juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (1901-1970). It focuses more on Lewis’ optimism, determination and perseverance with her art amidst extreme physical pain, hardship and unnecessary poverty. The leading actors’ performances are very impressive. In one review I read, the leading actors Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke are described as “a beautifully matched pair who open up two closed people, unleashing torrents of feeling.” Sally Hawkins’ performance, in particular, is impressive. It’s as if she transforms physically, as if she shrinks and twists into the role, as Maud ages and arthritis ravages her body.

And finally, I will include an extract about art and life from Rebecca Solnit’s book: The Faraway Nearby

“Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so. Up close you witness suffering directly………. Suffering far away reaches you through art, through images, recordings, and narratives; the information travels toward you and you meet it halfway, if you meet it………”, and later in the book  “….  that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. The sudden appearance of the patterns of the world brings a sense of coherence and above all connection. In the old way of saying it, tales were spun; they were threads that tied things together and from them the fabric of the world was woven. In the strongest stories we see ourselves, connected to each other, woven into the pattern, see that we are ourselves stories, telling and being told. Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won’t mark you out as special, though your response to it might.”