“Oculus”, or the deceptive safety of life inside a bubble

This drawing is an illustration to a story I’m writing, in which the domed nymphaeum forms part of a fictional building that makes up some kind of underworld. For this part of the building complex, I was thinking of the Pantheon in Rome... if it were a garden instead of a temple. The title, “Oculus”, refers to the circular aperture in the centre of the dome which lets in the sun and the rain, or “eye” to the outside world (or of the outside world gazing in). I slightly tilted the drawing to create the effect of being on the inside of a globe.

The image came to me intuitively, but later the idea of life being contained within a hemisphere reminded me of the late 19th-century "Flammarion engraving" in which a pilgrim pokes his head out of a gap between the dome of the heavens and the horizon - or, more precisely, between the vault of the sky and the edge of the flat earth - to gaze into the cosmos and is able to see the spinning of the mechanical gearwheels of the universe.

The wood engraving first appeared in Camille Flammarion’s 1888 scientific account on meteorologic phenomena, L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (p. 163), and was possibly created by the author himself. He refers to “(a) naïve missionary of the Middle Ages”, who “tells us that, in one of his voyages in search of the terrestrial paradise, he reached the horizon where the earth and the heavens met, and that he discovered a certain point where they were not joined together, and where, by stooping his shoulders, he passed under the roof of the heavens” .[1]  Flammarion refers here to a pre-Enlightenment notion of the firmament as a translucent, but solid hemisphere forming a boundary between the earthly realm and that of the Empyrean, or realm of the divine.

This made me think about how from the Scientific Revolution in the late eighteenth century onwards the division between man and the divine began to fall away, and inadvertently also his sense of place in the universe: with Isaac Newton the notion of the universe itself became more mechanistic and the advance of technology in everyday life gave rise to the question what machines might be capable of, now or in the not-so-distant future and what constitutes our role as humans in all this. When the firmament fell away, and we couldn’t see the gods, did it make us bigger or smaller as humans, and what should our responsibilities be in a heaven-less world? These are questions that haven’t stopped being relevant since, as they always seem to lead back to man’s desire to know himself and his purpose in the universe.

The idea of an existential bubble providing safety but predictability and therefore taking away one’s purpose and meaning in life is a concept explored in film “The Endless” (dir. Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, 2017) where a monstrous, invisible entity tries to trap people in invisible bubbles of time. When you die in one of the bubbles, you are immediately resurrected. The time bubbles seem attractive as they provide eternal safety. However, as the loops constantly reset to increasingly shorter timespans, they also enforce predictability to the point of torture, since eventually no time remains for anything but dying… endlessly.

Living “inside” a bubble seems safe, but, being reduced to figures in the snow globes we probably all had as kids, all life and purpose is lost, whereas being “outside” in a bubble-free world might feel scarily exposed, but also provides a life full of freedom and possibility in which you can discover who you want to be. (I just realised that this is also the theme of the Jim Steinman and Michael Kunze song “Draußen ist Freiheit” in my favourite musical “Tanz der Vampire!”.) Perhaps Adam and Eve were always meant to leave the safety of Paradise, and the pain from the loss of innocence is nothing but the inevitable and essential result of growing up as human beings.

The male character in my story and drawing, who was born in the eighteenth century, despite his old age, is trying to understand who he is. The years seem to be repeating themselves and he realises he has never truly lived as he merely let life happen, rather than taking charge of it himself. The “eye” to the outside world in the centre of the dome, which allows the rain to fall on his face, seduces him into changing his ways. In the image the spherical space, the deciduous trees, and the ouroboros symbol of the dragon devouring its own tail, are symbols of infinity and rebirth.

[1] Camille Flammarion, The Atmosphere (New York 1873) p. 103.