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Reading List, April 2022

  • 2 min read

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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.

We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.

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Rasa → Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Colour: yellow, Bhayānakam (भयानकं): Horror, terror. Yama. Colour: black

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Archetype → Sage

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To know more is having more keys to doors, but to understand, is to really be free.


The Jungian character archetype that we’re looking at in this monthly story is that of the sage—the pursuer of truth and understanding as the way to real freedom. In this story, we explored the shadow of this archetype through R. M. —the sharp politician who underestimates the possibilities and viewpoints beyond his sensible frameworks. The mood we wanted to create in this story is that of wonder, or adbūta, identified in the eastern aesthetic theory of rasa. We used the mood bhayānaka, or terror, as an undertone to give more dimension to the story.


In this reading list, you will find books, films and other works that shaped this story through interesting ideas exploring the process of unravelling that takes place during death. This disengagement of the mind’s many layers during death became a context for us to explore the shadow of the sage archetype that values understanding the truth more than anything. Events and stories like the assassination of S.W.R.D—one of Sri Lanka’s sharpest politicians—and Oppenheimer—one of the masterminds behind the atomic bomb—speaking about what it felt like to understand the gravity of what they have created, are links to exploring a common blind spot of the sage archetype where knowledge is mistaken for actual understanding.

Reading List, March 2022

  • 3 min read

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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.

We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.

-



Rasa → Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Colour: yellow, Śāntam: Peace or tranquillity. Colour: perpetual white.

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Archetype → Humorist

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We carefully chose the word ‘the humorist’ to describe the personality archetype used to construct Johnny’s character. This is to avoid the biases and connotations associated with the other names of this archetype—like ‘the trickster’, ‘fool’ or ‘clown’. For centuries, even millennia, and in the widest variety of cultural and religious belief systems, humans have told and retold tales of humorists—archetypal figures who are comical, yet serve to break down social constructs. In its shadow, the humorist is irreverent and deceptive; In its wisdom, this archetype crosses boundaries and exposes the folly of human superiority, bringing us to understand the fragility of the status quo. We found this archetype helping a man find redemption in the 1991 film The Fisher King starring Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges; we reencounter the same archetype in its destructive shadow through the iconic pop-villain Joker and in the childish mischief of Don Quixote, Krishna and Bugs Bunny.


One of the most interesting thought-seeds connecting to the wisdom of the humorist archetype comes through the works of Albert Camus and his philosophy of absurdity. In ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, where he compares our human existence to the story of the Greek king condemned to roll a boulder uphill for eternity as punishment for his attempts to defy death, Camus suggests that life is, in fact, meaningless. He also suggests that finding joy in life’s meaningless struggle is the only way to overcome the absurdity of the situation. As Camus puts it: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”


Maybe, we are Sisyphus. And maybe, we are shouldering a pointless boulder up a mountain. But what if, meaning is the thing found when going up the mountain laughing?


This reading list contains some of the literature and ideas that helped us answer these questions on life and meaning, as well as links to social and environmental issues hinted at in Johnny’s story.


TTT.S1E2 ✺ The fish-woman's son

  • 2 min read

This time tomorrow is an on-going story experiment that explores questions we have about the future. How will people connect? How would we work, consume and unwind? What would we value? What would we search for?


We asked some interesting people to imagine a year from now and brought their predictions alive through stories. This is what we see.


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Predictions by Dr. Asoka de Zoysa

Photography by Reg Van Cuylenburg

Story by Public Works


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The fish-woman's son


Channa met Johnny almost thirty years ago, when they were boys. Johnny came shouldering a pingo load of fish, accompanying his pipe-smoking, loud-mouthed mother. While cycling down the alleyway by the sea, Channa would peer at Johnny’s makeshift house near the dirty beach. Like in a television show, Channa could piece together Johnny's days made with the endless cycle of his fisherman father sailing out to red sunsets, returning at pink dawns with the catch and a bottle of arrack, only to sing himself to a drunken stupor; while his mother cursed, cooked, fed Johnny and the kids, packed her pipe and loaded fish into the pingo—sometimes all at once. Later, these huts were demolished, and the fishing families were moved somewhere else by the Municipality. The alleyway became the Marine Drive; it even had a supermarket.


Channa forgot about Johnny until thirty something years later, when they reencountered during the sixty day curfew. Johnny flashed the same bent smile that his mother had, holding back the smoke. Throughout the curfew, Johnny would risk selling fish along Marine Drive before the cops caught wind. Although Johnny continued to sell fish even after the curfew, he eventually stopped coming.


Channa often wondered about the old fish-woman’s son—half out of some inarticulate guilt, half out of the nostalgia for his boyhood’s typical Sunday when Johnny’s mother would sit in the garden smoking her pipe and cleaning fish. He asked around the neighbourhood; but, already knew the answer. Nothing is poorer than the dreams of the poor.


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