Return Of the Immortals

RETURN OF THE IMMORTALS rhetorical tropes to the dark tower came

m. evans

Here, being visible is being white, Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment Of an extremist in an exercise‌ The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.

The long lines of it grow longer, emptier, A darkness gathers though it does not fall And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.

Robert Stevenson

I am in accord with Paul de Man when he states that irony is the “permanent parabasis of meaning”.1 “Poems cannot get started without irony” and neither can architecture that holds central to its concern the poetics of space, however, this cannot be said to be the height of architecture’s ability to present itself poetically. Rather, though this work, I will show that architecture has the ability to conceive beyond irony a cascade of tropes including synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, metaphor, metalepsis and conceit. Where poetry holds fast to rhetoric, architecture can turn to its historical identification with all the arts and in this way make resource of insights from the psychological to the political. Albeit the focus of this project being directed through rhetorical devices present in poetry, I do not altogether deny the entry of these identifications where appropriate in the interest of aiding discursivity in relationship with those disciplines.

Return of the Immortals is best read in the mirror of Robert Brownings’ poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (1852-55).2 Wherein Browning’s quester wishes to separate origins from aims, true in both poetry and human romance, is the irony that aims always “wander back towards origins”.3 Where the aim in the masters was to elucidate architecturally the conceits of light I am led, almost self-mockingly, back to internalised origins. These origins have been echoed in my studies of original myths which include, but not limited to, Plato’s Cave allegory, the Promethean trilogy, and the Origin of Painting and Sculpture left to us by Pliny the Elder, as exemplary myths that, for Leon van Schaik, may be considered knowledge of the informal kind, internalised traditions of society. For myself, the magnetism of origins denote precursors or influences I blindly and passionately follow.

The poems opening is marked by the trope of irony where an interplay of presence and absence is imagistically performed and psychologically bound with the quester’s reaction-formation against his own destructive impulses. This opening veils a literary relationship between the writer, Robert Browning, and his projected protagonist, Childe Roland. The name Roland is a semiotic shifter. The name may invoke a number of historical personages but its main use is as a shifter, or index, through which the author invites the reader to read the poem in the 1st person.4 Nietzsche asserts that “what we find words for is that for which we no longer have use in our own hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”5 Childe Roland is Robert Browning’s disassociated voice that, through deception, can retain the unspoken in his heart.

Childe Roland speaks to us, the reader, as the reader speaking himself (or herself), saying one thing and meaning another in an effort to void the presence of that which Robert Browning attempts to save.

I.

My first thought was, he lied in every word, That hoary cripple, with malicious eye Askance to watch the working of his lie On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

Nowhere, in the rest of the poem, comes a second or subsequent ‘thought’. The “first thought” is the beginning of irony from which we can deduce that what follows is the retelling of one thing whilst meaning another, namely that the cripple is inevitably telling the truth.

Upon entering the gallery space in which Return of the Immortals is exhibited, one is immediately struck by the darkness.

The lighting, directed toward the four paintings that hang upon each of the four walls of the cubic space, originates from underneath the central object which remains unlit. The lighting seems antithetical to contemporary exhibition lighting and marks a rather obvious ironic entry to the work. However this irony works as a structuring device that positions the viewer toward the walls rather than toward the object occupying the centre of the space. One is asked to consider the central concern of the work with their backs toward it. To highlight the initial irony, I am ‘saying’ one thing (view my work) and meaning another (you are not viewing my work); ones first thought might be that the design is somehow lying.

The opening irony yields to synecdoche in the poem, psychologically rendered as a turning-against-the-self. There emerges a will-to-fail, an end to hope, an imaging of a ghost with the volume of a whisper.

IV.

For, what with my whole world-wide wandering, What with my search drawn out through years, my hope Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope With that obstreperous joy success would bring,I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

The will-to-fail is the final threshold over which the quester must traverse in order to advance beyond the sanctity of his precursors. In effect a kind of petit mort is necessary for the quester to face the ‘Dark Tower’ which he seeks on his own terms, beyond guidance. It is a limit of decision. As Herman Hesse powerfully presents in Steppenwolf, in life one always has an “emergency exit”, suicide. When all is lost, when all hope is gone, that the door to suicide remains open means one can remain alive dead, in a state of non-decision.

“I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape. There are a great many suicides to whom this thought imparts an uncommon strength.”6 Synecdoche, from the Greek, means ‘taking up together’ where “the part stands for the whole, and thus something else is understood within the thing” given as a part.7 “Any quest is a synecdoche for the whole of desire; a quest for failure is a synecdoche for suicide.”8 The poems move into the synecdoche for suicide is an antithetical reversal that triumphs in its power to provide the strength to endure the end of hope. For Childe (“a well born youth who is still a candidate for knighthood”9) this is a crucial move toward manhood. It is the point where the waning of trust in his guide moves into dark despair of being, the being who requires guidance. It is the turning phase of distrust into complete uncertainty, an uncertainty which leaves him with no place to turn, so in a state of indecision he turns toward that which he regards with suspicion. This doubt, similar in regard to Descartes first meditation, is a limiting of the follower and, in a reversal, the dawning of a leader.

VII

Thus, I had so long suffered in this quest, Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ So many times among ‘The Band’ – to wit, The knights who to the Dark Tower’s search addressed Their steps – that just to fail as they, seemed best, And all the doubt was now – should I be fit?

The synecdoche within Return of the Immortals lies within, or rather upon, the paintings on the walls. They are large light on white paintings that utilise an array of white paints with differing refractive indices to produce a shimmering effect when passing. The illusion of movement arrests the viewer to take a closer inspection. Due to the lighting of the space, the viewer is invited to stand directly before the painting with the central object directly behind them. The paintings are actually sectional depictions of their respective facades to which they correspond with the central object. They are the parts that communicate the whole.

The paintings, as sections of the object, provide a transparency, a seeing-through, a letting-through. “Understanding means being able to stand before something, to have an overview of it, to see its blueprint.”10 To see this ‘blueprint’ there must be a kind of transparency that secures visibility. Unlike the way in which a brick wall is untransparent in that it cannot fail in making something visible for it possess in no sense a way of securing visibility, i.e. it has no transparency; darkness is untransparent in quite a different way. The shadow of the viewer is cast before them upon the painting, a silhouette of themselves. Where the light secures the visibility of the painting by letting-through sight, the darkness of the shadow lets through the invisible. Darkness “is only a limit case of brightness and thus still has the character of a kind of brightness: a brightness that no longer lets anything through, that takes away visibility from things, that fails to make visible.”11 The shadow silhouette of the viewer, immediately recognisable to the viewer, takes away the ability to view the painting’s finesse. It no longer lets the visibility of the painting through, the painting in which the sections are understood through their different refractive qualities.

The shadow, belonging to a long heritage that marries it with concepts of the soul, doubt and the other12, will not step aside to let the visibility of understanding through. Though the parts communicate the whole, there is a shadow of doubt that stains the view, one can not see the whole, only the incomplete parts of the part. But this thing that interrupts the view of the viewer, the thing that will not allow the visible, is the other of ourselves, the other of the viewer. One is invariably face to face with their own cast shadow, cast before them upon the canvas, the shadow of doubt that invades and limits understanding of the whole is none other than the other of ourselves. We cannot see beyond that which we do not understand, and this understanding is always determined by the other we can not see through, that which we doubt or disbelieve.

I expect the viewer to consider that something is wrong with the installation. Traditionally viewing a work and understanding it is the aim of presenting it. In this scene however, synecdoche is at work and the viewer continues, without decision, to contemplate the work, even if they consider it already failed in its intelligibility.

VIII

So, quiet as despair, I turned from him, That hateful cripple, out of his highway Into that path he pointed. All the day Had been a dreary one at best, and dim Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim Red leer to see the plain catch its estray.13

To return to the poem, “estray” is founded on “extra” + “vagare”, “to wander beyond limits or out of the right way.”14 Childe Roland has wandered, albeit on the ‘right’ path, beyond the limits and rights of the way. He wanders precariously into the darkness where one final “red leer”, a reference to the last rays of light of the sun and the ability to see or understand clearly, catches a last glimpse of him. He wanders headlong, over the threshold of twilight, into the darkness of doubt.

IX

For mark! No sooner was I fairly found Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two, Than, pausing to throw backward a last view O’er the safe road, ‘twas gone; grey plain all round: Nothing but plain to the horizon’s bound.

I might go on; nought else remained to do.

X

So, on I went. I think I never saw Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve: For flowers – as well expect a cedar grove!

But cockle, spurge, according to their law Might propagate their kind, with none to awe, You’d think; a burr had been a treasure-trove.

XI

No! penury, inertness and grimace, In some strange sort, were the land’s portion. ‘See Or shut your eyes,’ said Nature peevishly, ‘It nothing skills: I cannot help my case: ‘Tis the Last Judgment’s fire must cure this place, Calcine its clods and set my prisoners free.’

Browning continues into fields of metonymy. Here the psychic defence of repression defends against the ordeal of death.

This death has two sides; the first being the repression of his own internal suicidal impulse, the second being the repression of failure of his precursors: the knights of “The Band” in whose footsteps he follows and to whose fold he feels himself elected. “Roland’s landscape is a kind of continuous metonymy, in which a single, negative aspect of every thing substitutes for the thing itself.”15 The negative aspect in Return of the Immortals is the shadow. It is the recurring metonymic device that reappears on the canvas of synecdoche. After a time, its nihilism, thoroughly of Nietzschean descent, reverts into a kind of defence.

A displacement occurs from the traditional conviction that dominates a reading of an installation into a revision that considers the repositioning of the shadow. The shadow is hiding something. And this something that the shadow is hiding or repressing is crucial to understanding the work, an apprehension unavailable if the sectional light on white paintings were available to vision complete. “See, or shut your eyes”.

Plato’s Cave Allegory echoes here. The shadows cast upon the wall to which man is bound constitute his reality and are interpreted as such.16 They regard the ‘unhidden’ as true. It belongs to the nature of being human that we stand before truth and comport ourselves to the ‘unhidden’, to the shadows. In the context of the cave man is incapable of regarding the ‘unhidden’ as unhidden. “The prisoners know the distinction between hiddenness and unhiddenness as such just as little as they know the distinction between shadows and the things that cast shadows, or the distinction between light and dark.”17 “For a Post-Enlightenment poem to begin, it must know and demonstrate that nothing is in its right place.”18 By invoking the allegory of Plato’s Cave I am demonstrating that meaning is not in its right (traditional) place and, by doing so, transferring the key to meaning from the fractured ‘blueprint’ to the unhidden that will not vacate vision and instead stands directly before the viewer. The shadow is the unhidden, repeated upon each of the paintings, which points toward the hidden by way of association, and its association is only available through a revision of the traditional meaning of shadows overcast into the modern.

This revision is a striving to find meaning. Courting the ruinous state of despair that accompanies any idea of failure, interpretation attempts to fill the void of meanings’ absence. The transfer of attention from the painted light on white sections toward the shadow that stubbornly will not stand aside moves the work into hyperbole. The shadow, larger than the viewer, is exaggerated in its presence. It seems to stare back at the viewer.

XXVIII

For, looking up, aware I somehow grew, ‘Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to mountains - with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view.

How thus they had surprised me, - solve it, you!

How to get from them was no clearer case.

XXIX

Yet half I seemed to recognize some trick Of mischief happened to me, God knows when – In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then, Progress this way. When, in the very nick Of giving up, one time more, came a click As when a trap shuts – you’re inside the den!

XXX

Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! Those two hills on the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the left, a tall scalped mountain… Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, After a life spent training for the sight!

Robert Browning moves from metonymy and hyperbole into metaphor; the carrying of meaning from one place to another.

He does this at the very point where Childe Roland has borne out all he can over his wanderings, wanderings in which his vision let-through only the grotesque and the isolated. “In the nick or crucial moment of giving up, which would be the prolongation of a wholly negative repetition, Roland is suddenly startled into a climactic recognition, which is that he is trapped, yet paradoxically this entrapment alone makes possible a fulfilment of his quest.”19 He employs metaphoric juxtaposition between inside and outside, a vast plain and mountains, between outside and the interior of the Dark Tower.

XXXI

What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?

The round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world. The tempest’s mocking elf Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf He strikes on, only when the timbers starts.

The resonance of inevitability highlights “Browning’s perfect choice of the Dark Tower as the ultimate metaphor for art’s Scene of Instruction”.20 21 Childe Roland recognises the Tower and in doing so, recognises his blindness. The tragic poemagogic imagery expresses “events within the creative personality”22 and involves a measure of self-destruction. The ‘tempest’s mocking elf’ who ‘points to the shipman’ serves to emphasise Childe Roland’s Oedipal return to his precursors, ‘The Band’, who stand on the hill sides watching him. He had been blind to the Dark Tower, blind to ‘The Band’, until the moment when the overcast metonymic imagery finds itself falling into juxtaposed metaphor. He stands on the other side of the viewing, on the side of his blindness. He triumphs in obtaining the visioning of his precursors, and may move to their company, at the cost of his life as Childe Roland.

XXXII

Not see? because of night perhaps? – why, day Came back again for that! Before it left, The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay, ‘Now stab and end the creature – to the heft!’

XXXIII Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled

Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears

Of all the lost adventurers my peers, How such a one was strong, and such was bold,

And such was fortunate, yet each of old

Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

XXXIV

There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! in a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, And blew. ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’

It is over these last three stanzas that the trope of metalepsis “leaps over the heads of other tropes and becomes a representation set against time, sacrificing the present to an”23 end in the moment. The sense of time (note the missing stanzas) during which Roland was wandering is a delusion: “the dying sunset rekindled” is identical with the “red leer” of the sun at the end of stanza VIII. The twilight of the evening is the figure of doubt in which the whole of the poem is played out. “The precursor-questers meet to view the last of Roland, as an outside to his inside, but he has attained what Yeats was to call the Condition of Fire, and in that flame he views the last of them, and unlike them he both sees and knows what he sees. Because he has attained knowledge and is transformed, they no longer know him. Undefeated by his total knowledge, he abandons the world of romance and enters prophecy, by setting the slug-horn of the tragic, suicidal, too-early Romantic poet Chatterton to his lips. What he blows is his poem, as we have to read it, the trumpet of a prophecy because of its transumptive relation to Romantic prophecy.”24 Return of the Immortals moves into metaphor upon recognising the shadow as key to understanding the work. “See, or shut your eyes” becomes ‘see, and shut your eyes’; the meaning is transferred from the viewer to the thing viewing, the Oedipal shadow that has no eyes. This sudden shift juxtaposes bodily presence with its shadow, the self and its other, light and darkness, life and flat death, and allows for a revision of the instructive scenes of origin which foreshadow the meanings available to the shadow.

This ‘shadow stage’, as opposed to Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’ where the primary identification is of the I, involves an identification of the other.26 This identification brings with it an imaginative transposition, a transposition which, thoroughly metaphorical, draws attention to what the shadow points to in the hidden, what the unhidden is hiding. As the attention of the eye, now filled with shadow rather than light, is prepared through opening the pupil, the ‘Dark Tower’ becomes more clearly visible.

The ‘Dark Tower’, the central object, is not poemogogically equivalent to Childe Roland’s tower. For Roland the ‘Dark Tower’ is uninhabited and windowless, it is purely a figurative image for art’s Scene of Instruction as the destination of a quest; in Return of the Immortals the ‘Dark Tower’ is inhabited, and its ‘windows’ (small holes on three sides) are fit to receive only light. There are no doors, no other access into the central chamber, than via these small orifices, and no exit. The ‘Dark Tower’ is inhabited by light, but its space is filled with shade. However, this light is not arbitrary, and neither are the locations of the holes.

The holes face the centre of each of the light on white sectional paintings. The viewer, interrupting the passage of light from beneath the ‘Dark Tower’ to the paintings, is arrested before the orifice, their backs facing the tower. Upon turning to the tower, ushered by the unhidden, the hidden is revealed as hidden. They cannot enter, and paradoxically already have - through the action of the camera obscura. Light is employed to enact the trope27 of metalepsis. Figuratively, the wandering through doubt in the shadows of otherness is condensed upon recognition of the action of the camera obscura.

The viewer had, as soon as they sought to regard the light on white sectional paintings and finding the shadow in their way, and further, meditating on the metonymy and metaphors of the shadow, been already inducted into the interior of the ‘Dark Tower’. They had always been there.

The paintings are hung on the opposite wall of the gallery to the side of the ‘Dark Tower’ to which they correspond. They echo the receiving surface upon which the action of the camera obscura projects the image of the viewer. The paintings are therefore, on the sides facing the orifices, hung up-side-down. The shadow cast upon them by the viewer marries the spatial envelope of the image projected inside upon the corresponding interior face of the tower. Due to this, the scale of the ‘Dark Tower’ is proportional to the distance the viewer stands from it. The further one is from the tower, the larger the image in the interior. Unlike Childe Roland who never entered or approached the tower, Return of the Immortals receives the viewer without his being aware; the presence of the shadow on the painted sections marks his arrival.

Figuratively the viewer is split in two, their image in the interior and their shadow. The space of the installation is a double interior; there is no exterior. Transposed from rhetorical terms where everything is already interpretation28, the interior is already interior29. The position of the paintings, relating to the tower, surround the viewer and the casting of their shadows upon them testify to their capture within the tower – on both sides of the façade; the viewer is both inside and outside both of the tower and of him/herself. From the metalepsis which tropes upon failure, the conceit carried out and enacted by light marks arts Scene of Instruction as being a place where the student has always been – but could not have previously known. The journey itself is necessary, and at the same time, a delusion of necessity.

Conceit, particularly associated with the metaphysical poets, “is a fairly elaborate figurative device” which, from Latin, means ‘concept’. It is “a synonym for ‘thought’, and is roughly equivalent to ‘concept’, ‘idea’ and ‘conception.”30 Conceits incorporate a number of rhetorical tropes including, but not limited to, “metaphor, simile, hyperbole [and] oxymoron.”31 Often it seems like an ingenious act of deception, however this deception is not necessarily the bearer of ill tidings. A more rigorous conceit is a necessary deception, a deceptive means to reveal something particularly difficult to bear otherwise.

Truth is often unbearable, and as both Nietzsche and Freud concede, truth most often needs to come shaded. Alenka Zupancic makes a stronger point: “The truth is (by definition) elsewhere.”32 The necessary deception for Childe Roland is his belatedness and failure, that he is too late and that he will fail. Both these deceptions are in reference to his precursors – ‘The Band’ who are the spectator audience of the poem. In Return of the Immortals the deception is an encounter with ‘truth’33; the elsewhere of our other and simultaneously the elsewhere of our image. The precursor has always been the projections and introjections of ourselves.

These projections and introjections determine modes of creative action put into practice and are mechanisms of defence, defences whose most central nature is to trope against the presence of an absence; namely, the absence of being. “Tropes or defences are the “natural” language of the imagination in relation to all prior manifestations of imagination,”34 and in yielding to production, manifest presences that testify to the self authoring of being and becoming.

The deception of Return of the Immortals, as an encounter with ‘truth’, is an apprehension by the imagination of an idea, a concept. This idea or concept is that we are deceived into being the authors and creators of ourselves. I make the suggestion that we are not. Rather, we are the composite appearance, cast from a cascade of tropes, which interpret from shadows and imagined images, a presence capable of restitution; the restoration of a necessarily deceiving idea of being that can face the absence of being.

Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents… But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high.

He adores timidly his own work… Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it…35

Just as Childe Roland “both sees and knows what he sees” (unlike his precursors), the Conceits of Light, presented in the final work Return of the Immortals understands and demonstrates, shows and performs the poetic trope of conceit in spatial terms.

“The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”

Isaiah ch. 9 vol. 2 cf. 269:10

Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. pg. xiii.

I have utilised the poem as published in Lionel Trilling + Harold Bloom ed., Victorian Prose and Poetry, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973. pg. 528-534. (A gift from Peter King) 3 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. pg. 106 4 I am grateful to Peter King for this insight, given via a telephone conversation 1st June 2006.

5 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. pg. 59.

6 Herman Hesse, ‘Treatise on the Steppenwolf’ in Steppenwolf, trans. Basil Creighton, Penguin Books, London, 1965. pg. 60.

7 J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, fourth edition, Penguin Books, London, 1999. pg. 890.

8 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. pg. 109.

9 Lionel Trilling + Harold Bloom ed., Victorian Prose and Poetry, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973. pg. 528.

10 Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, Continuum books, New York, 2002. pg. 45.

11 Ibid. pg. 41.author’s emphasis 12 Victor Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, Reaktion Books, London, 1997.

13 Estray means: a “potential victim who has strayed,” Lionel Trilling + Harold Bloom ed., Victorian Prose and Poetry, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973. Pg. 529.

14 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. pg. 110.

15 Ibid. pg 110.

16 Socrates: ‘And so in every way they would take the shadows of the artefacts for the unhidden?’

Glaucon: ‘Inevitably.’

Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth, Continuum books, New York, 2002. pg. 19.

17 ibid. pg. 21.

18 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. pg. 106.

19 ibid. pg. 111-112.

20 ibid. pg. 112.

21 Please refer to Book of Shadow Portraits, project documentation in the masters folio.

22 Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: a study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1971. pg. xiii.

23 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. pg. 103.

24 ibid. pg. 115.

25 I am referring here to the three guiding myths: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Aeschylus and Shelly’s Prometheus, and The Origin of Painting and Sculpture documented by Pliny the Elder. Please refer to the project books for example.

26 For more on this please refer to Chapter One: ‘The Shadow Stage’ in Victor Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, Reaktion Books, London, 1997. pg. 11-41.

27 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. pg. 70.

29 Trope, from Greek, means ‘turn’. J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, fourth edition, Penguin Books, London, 1999. pg. 948.

28 “ Essential to the monad is its dark background: everything is drawn out of it, and nothing goes out or comes in from the outside…Finally, the architectural ideal is a room in black marble, in which light enters only through orifices so well bent that nothing on the outside can be seen through them, yet they illuminate or colour the décor of a pure inside…The monad is a cell. It resembles a sacristy more than an atom: a room with neither doors nor windows, where all activity takes place on the inside.” Deleuze argues that the philosophy of Leibniz constitutes the grounding principles in Baroque architecture, art, philosophy and science from which he perceives, addresses and develops the persistent idea of the fold. He states that the “ideal fold is the Zweifalt, a fold that differentiates and is differentiated. When Heidegger calls upon the Zweifalt to be the differenitator of difference, he means above all that differentiation does not refer to a pregiven undifferentiated, but to a Difference that endlessly unfolds and folds over from each of its two sides, and that unfolds the one only by refolding the other, in a coextensive unveiling and veiling of Being, of presence and of withdrawal of being.” The façade of the tower, as a folding cubic modernist design, acts as a differentiator between two distinct interiors, interiors which endlessly interweave light and shadow across its difference threshold and carry, by way of these, the image and other of the viewer. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, translation by Tom Conley, The Athlone Press, London, 2001. pg. 27-30.

30 J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, fourth edition, Penguin Books, London, 1999. pg. 165.

31 ibid.

32 Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2003. pg. 93.

33 I use ‘truth’ figuratively here, and reference Plato’s Cave Allegory – particularly Heidegger’s The Essence of Truth, Aeschylus and Shelley’s Prometheus, and Sophocles Oedipus Trilogy.

34 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading, Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. pg. 69.

35 Emerson, cited ibid. pg. 202.

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