With Apologies To Two Famous Switzers

Tunnel slides

are a common sight in Seoul.  Korean toddlers enjoy them in apartment complex playgrounds just like their American counterparts do at McDonald's.

Every time I pass by one of these, though, I cannot help but recall to mind the art of H.R. Giger, the Swiss artist who revolutionized the face of horror science fiction by designing the monster in the movie Alien back in 1979.  He is famous for the unique style of his paintings, which manage to combine the grotesque yet somehow sleek and erotic, with quasi-mechanical imagery.  While I know absolutely nothing about his private life and proclivities, it seems to me that Giger must have been at least somewhat familiar with the theories of his countryman C.G. Jung, the great Swiss psychologist who popularized, among other things, the concept of the Shadow, the repressed negative aspects of the mind that are largely locked away in the unconscious and that Jung believed needed to be recognized and integrated in order to round out a mature personality.  I believe Giger was well aware of the basic principles of the Shadow -- but of course, Giger the Artist loaded a whole lot of other baggage onto that framework to work out his visual œuvre, such as Freudian sexuality, vagina dentata, the Devouring Mother, rotting babies, and just plain pervy obsession with body parts.

But anyway, what strikes me visually about the tunnel slides is that dark opening/exit that looks disturbingly like a wide-open mouth (good thing the one pictured here is blue, but I have seen RED ones).  Which tends to remind one (me, that is) of other bodily orifices as well as sexuality in general, whose literal and figurative depictions abound in Giger's art (and that's an understatement);  it was easy enough for me to find a particularly apt sample online.

And of course, I couldn't resist the impulse to manipulate my slide photo to "Giger-ify" it (naturally).  I rather like the result -- in fact, I'm proud to note that for a brief moment I actually mistook its thumbnail for one of Giger's own.  Think of it as a droll but earnest tribute to the master from one of his fans.

Related post:  The Wrinkle-Lipped Serpent

Where Heaven And Earth Touch

(What a jumping-off place this turned out to be)

The mythic title of the post was so grandiose, it actually made me think of archetypal dualities, as also happened in the previous post "Puffball And Shadow".  Like:  Father Sky and Mother Earth (instanced, for example, by the union of the god Zeus and the human Danae [leading to the birth of the hero Perseus]; the union of the Titan Helios and the nymph Clymene [resulting in the birth of the tragic antihero Phaethon]; even the angel Gabriel (acting as an agent of, or a kind of stand-in for, God the Father) and the human Mary in the Annunciation.  Some other dualities/polarities that deserve mention would be:  rain fertilizing the soil, the dragon who threatens the virginal princess and the knight-errant who slays him, the chaotic mutability of the air vs the fixity of ground structures, rational man vs the beastly savage (or should I say the beastly potential inside the rational man), the Sun and the Moon, and of course, man and woman.

Which just reminded me -- this is strictly a bonus -- that there is a parallel (hah, "parallelism" itself being a concept requiring two comparable elements feeding off each other -- but now I'm starting to sound a little obsessive) to be recognized in the foundation mythology of Korea.  It is said that HwanIn, the god-figure in heaven, sent his son HwanUng down to the earth to found a kingdom -- which may well be considered a figurative act of fertilization, reiterating the aforementioned archetypes of Father Sky and Mother Earth;  this is even doubly confirmed when HwanUng, the heavenly being, enabled a she-bear, a crawling creature strictly bound to the earth, to be transformed into a woman -- likely symbolizing, in part, (with apologies to C.G. Jung) the transition from the womb of the collective unconscious to individuated ego in the evolution of the Self (a tiger also wanted to become human but he did not have the patience to complete the hundred-day ordeal involved and thus remained a beast;  surely this is the Shadow in "beastly" guise, all the more so since the hundred-day ordeal took place literally in the womb-darkness of a cave) -- and took her for his wife and begat TanGun, the progenitor of the Korean people.

By the way, the place where HwanUng first touched down was said to be the summit of TaeBaekSan ("Mt. TaeBaek"), whose exact location is not known, as the name has been used to refer to different mountains in ancient times.