There is no narrative or allegorical program to the image. It is a Magus-like moment and place suggesting import but eluding explanation. Much has been done to suggest that my true subject may be that which is not there at all. All smoke and mirrors. The sheer ebullient space of the space itself.
A Few Sources
- Two opposing interior views of the St Paul’s cathedral in London.
- The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan—with an impudent reshaping of the passages to enlarge the dome.
- The running dog, café scene and medallions—which are other quotes from that same 2006 Galleria print Continuum.
- A film shoot of a 1926 Lillian Gish film, The Scarlet Letter.
- Gish’s Swedish director, Victor Seastrom, who much later played the aging man in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. Bergman died during the course of my working this image out.
- Mexican girls running from a wind storm.
- The two conversing men—both James Joyce. The older, much-feted Joyce of the post-Ulysses Paris years, is arguing with a younger Trieste Joyce, who is still trying to work the tangle of his Ulysses novel out. This vignette is a hidden reference to the 2004 Bloomsday festival in Dublin where I saw a private viewing of a 2004 Ulysses film (Bloom), and have been mentally arguing with Sean Walsh, the director, about the Nausicca scene ever since.
- An umbrella from a Beatles poster and a rather startled dog from the dog album of Elliot Erwitt, the same source as for the Continuum dog, whom I had turned into Cerberus, guard dog of the underworld.
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