The name Nemo lost in Slumberland is obviously an allusion to the work of Winsor McCay (1871–1934) whose Little Nemo in Slumberland[1] I discovered in secondary school, an intriguing dog-eared comic book lost in the school library among a pile of other jumbled comic books.
Back then, I found that the art of Winsor McCay was a powerful conveyor of emotions, immensely influential at a subconscious level, McCay[2] being a real virtuoso at drawing dynamic and vivid (yet uncanny) scenes. And after all these years still notably unimpaired and unrivaled.
The plots of the comics involved the young Nemo (latin word for “no one”) whom we follow in his night adventures in Slumberland, an oniric country ruled by kind King Morpheus.
A few days after putting the struggle with this painting to an end (ok, I might even admit I was satisfied with it), I came across the following excerpt in Ken Wilber’s Marriage of Sense and Soul (Integrating Science and Religion), chapter Evolution as Spirit in Action.
More than just a paralleling use of the word “slumbering” in the text, I find that it casts a new light on the underlying meanings I sensed beneath the picture.
[Explaining Friedrich Schelling’s works] Absolute Spirit is the fundamental reality. But in order to create the world, the Absolute manifests itself, or goes out of itself-in a sense, the Absolute forgets itself and empties itself into creation (although never really ceasing to be itself). Thus the world is created as a “falling away” from Spirit, as a “self-alienation” of Spirit, although the Fall is never anything but a play of Spirit itself.
Having “fallen” into the manifest and material world, Spirit begins the process of returning to itself, and this process of the return of Spirit to Spirit is simply development or evolution itself. The original “descent” (or involution) is a forgetting, a fall, a self-alienation of Spirit; and the reverse movement of “ascent” (or evolution) is thus the self-remembering and self-actualization of Spirit. And yet, […] all of Spirit is fully present at each and every stage of evolution as the process of evolution itself.
When Spirit first goes out of itself to create the manifest universe, the result is Nature, which Schelling calls “slumbering Spirit” and Hegel calls “God in its otherness.” Nature is a direct manifestation of Spirit, and thus Nature is sacred to the core; but it is slumbering Spirit, simply because Nature is not yet self-reflexively aware. It is the lowest form of Spirit, but a form of Spirit nonetheless. It is Spirit in its objective manifestation […].
In the second major stage of development, Spirit evolves from objective Nature to subjective Mind.
Thus, Spirit has now developed from subconscious to self-conscious […], and thus begins to reflect on its own existence. Where Nature was objective Spirit, Mind is subjective Spirit, and thus we see increasingly more conscious forms of Spirit’s own self-actualization and return to itself.
- ^ Little Nemo in Slumberland is now in the public domain since 2005, 70 years after the death of the artist. Some of the strips can be seen at Wikipedia
- ^ McCay is also known for Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), the first animated short films starring a cartoon character, almost twenty years before Walt Disney’s successes.
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