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Reading List, May 2022

  • 2 min read

Updated: Jul 30, 2022

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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 → Kāruṇyam (कारुण्यं): Compassion, mercy. Presiding deity: Yama. Colour: grey, Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow, Bībhatsam (बीभत्सं): Disgust, aversion. Presiding deity: Shiva. Colour: blue

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Archetype → Caregiver

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Sadness is a rainbow; Low blues to brown dreary places and champagne-pink melancholia; From frantic orange distress and kind yellow glows of compassion, to the positively mossy green wet states of drunk-sad and everyday miserableness; The beige slow death of grief; Anguish cutting red and pointedly-purple brief displeasures; Grays—somber and dour—towering over the unmoving black waters of clinical depression.


The Rasa theory from eastern performance arts studies is one of our most useful storytelling tools. It’s a great viewpoint into human emotions and their enormous breadth. Among the Rasa theory’s nine elemental emotions, or aesthetic flavours, one of the most poetic rasas is karunā—a rasa embodying a range of emotional states from empathy to sorrow. Although not exactly a pleasurable emotion, karunā is an aesthetic flavour that has a curious ability to create beauty through vulnerability. This month’s story portrays the breadth and diversity of this emotion and the kind of beauty that it inspires. We’ve brought light undertones of two other rasas to add more dimension to the story; Adbūtha (wonder) voted most popular by our subscribers and bhībhatsa (apprehension).


We used the caregiver archetype from Jungian psychology to construct Siri’s character and explored some of its shadows like guilt and feelings of inadequacy. parallel to its strengths like the immense capacity to nurture and care.


In the reading list below, you’ll find stories, art and incidents that inspired us; from Joe Abeywickrema’s award-winning performance as ‘Wannihami’ capturing a father’s long-drawn sorrow, to the psychological disease ‘Munchausen by proxy syndrome’—where a caregiver fearing loneliness imposes nonexistent sickness on an otherwise healthy dependent.


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.

-


ree

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.

-


ree

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.


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