THE IMAGE: twice the Water trigram. Water occupies a special place in Taoist thought. Nothing is as soft and yielding as water, wrote Lao Zi, yet it overcomes everything that is strong and solid. It always seeks out the lowest places, places that are despised and avoided by others. Without any preconceived plan, it unites with itself. Drops, a puddle, a river, a lake, the sea....
The middle line of the trigram testifies to the unexpected power of water. This is enclosed and hidden by the two broken outer lines, which represent its compliance and outward softness. The opposite is contained within the heart of things.
You’re walking down the street and you hear hurried footsteps behind you. You turn around and get the fright of your life. Someone is running towards you, someone you’d rather avoid. You start running. Faster and faster you go. Then you spread your arms, make some subtle twisting movements with your forearms and hands. There you go, you lift off the ground, you feel the air carrying you, just as the earth always supported your body before. You look over your shoulder again, now diagonally downwards, and see your pursuer staring at you in amazement, mouth agape. What a wonderful sensation! And how simple. You had always imagined flying to be much more complex. Now it’s important to pay close attention, to take everything in detail, so that you can share the secret of flying with your friends later. Just not with that idiot you had an argument with yesterday. And as soon as you think of that person, your eyes open. You wake up from the dream. You make frantic attempts to return to the fantastic flying, to the continuation of the adventure. The more you try, the more that path back to the dream closes.
The girl you secretly fell in love with was unattainable; she seemed to have no interest in you whatsoever. But now everything has changed. After a series of events, she turns around and leans towards you. To give you a kiss. It can’t be, can it? Just before it happens, just before what you had hoped for but never dared to dream of, a voice calls out: ‘Wake up! You’re going to be late for school!’ The story fades and disappears.
Water and Fire, Dark and Light. In chapters 29 and 30 the worlds of the subconscious and the conscious are described. But not as two domains that exclude each other and are separated by a hermetic barrier. The trigram of Water consists mainly of formless, transparent lines. In their midst is that one light line, that of consciousness. The trigram of Fire has an abundance of bright lines, with that one broken line in their midst, connecting them to the incongruity of memory, scent, instinct, and dreams.
In every episode of the unsurpassed comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, little Nemo, ‘nobody’ in Latin, falls into a deep sleep. He enters the wonderful Slumberland, ruled by King Morpheus. Nemo’s fervent wish is to meet Morpheus’ daughter, the princess of Slumberland, so that they can become playmates. Indeed, who wouldn’t want that?
Every week, an instalment of this adventure was printed in the newspaper, initially in the New York Herald. And every instalment ends with Nemo waking up from his dream. By falling out of bed, or from stomach ache, from having eaten too much cheesecake at dinner. However, the main disruptor in his adventures in Slumberland and in meeting the princess is Flip.
Flip is an amiable braggart. He always smokes a large cigar and his top hat has wake up! written on it. Flip is the nephew of the Dawn Guard and although Nemo and Flip get along well, it is inevitable that he repeatedly disrupts Nemo’s dream.
To flip a coin. To flip a pancake. Flip a switch. Flip your opinion. The situation flipped overnight. Flipping out. Flip is change, abrupt change. The unexpected plot twist that takes everything in a different direction. Flip is that annoying alarm clock that ruins that fantastic dream story. But Flip is also clarity, conveying the images and deep insights of the dream world to the prosaic reality of daytime.
Little Nemo in Slumberland was created by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay. Although it was one of the first comic strips, it is still considered one of the very best ever. The characters in the story, the storylines, the perspective, and the boundless imagination in his drawings mean that Little Nemo in Slumberland is still an inexhaustible source of inspiration today.
to be continued …