Inspiral Games

I call these Inspiral Games because they add meaning upon meaning to a sign, layer upon layer, which at their best aspire to be ‘not a cyclical repetition, but an ascending spiral leading from earth to heaven,’ as Kirchberger (1927) describes the Mirror of Simple Souls, now known as the work of Christian mystic Margerite Porete, burnt at the stake in 1310. 

My baby daughter plays this game: she likes books even though she can’t yet read the words.  She likes to read a picture book from only the pictures, telling a whole parallel story which might, but usually does not resemble the original.  A second reading of the same story leads to another interpretation, with different details being highlighted.

Another related game from Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (1963) is to give multiple meanings to any list.  For example, a list of addresses of all-night chemists in Buenos Aires becomes: ‘Reconquista, something we did to the English.  Cordoba, a learned city.  Esmeralda, a gypsy girl hanged because she was in love with an archdeacon.  Sarmiento, he blew a fart and the wind carried it away.  Second version: Reconquista, a street of whores and Near Eastern restaurants.  Cordoba, wonderful sweetshops.  Esmeralda, a river in Colombia.  Sarmiento, he never missed school.  Third version…’ and so on.  As elsewhere in Cortazar’s novel, this game of interpretation serves as a metaphor for making (multiple) sense of the random elements which make up life.

Close reading of any text, for example through a Marxist, Freudian or feminist lens, highlights and uncovers pertinent details to support a particular interpretation, with the intention of making us think again, discovering a new revelation of things as they really stand.  Or so we think, for now.  

But this is why too-close re-interpretation or over-interpretation of anything, painting, poem or plot, can be entertaining and enlightening in that it focuses attention towards areas perhaps otherwise overlooked, elevating (sometimes comically) apparently insignificant elements to have an over-arching importance.

A picture such as Pablo Picasso’s Girl before a Mirror (1932) invites close reading and re-interpretation.  The painting, in the age-old tradition of portrayals of Vanity, of Picasso’s lover in the early nineteen thirties, Marie-Thérèse Walter, can carry the load of multiple psychological interpretations of its sun/moon - day/night - girl/reflection - youth/age symbolism.  A single author compares her with Narcissus, Ophelia, Queen Medb, Snow White and Alice all at once (Robinson, 1988), while another likens the image to uterus and shroud, in which ‘the oval enclosure of the mirror carries the wonder and terror of the ultimate’ (Rosenblum, 1976).  

The picture shows up on the wall of an otherwise Spartan apartment in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 Pierrot Le Fou, but following the Girl in a Mirror trope across its other very numerous incarnations in art (René Magritte’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, Charles Allan Gilbert’s All is Vanity), film (Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard), literature (Jean Paulhan’s Young Lady with Mirrors, Blaise Pascal’s Pensees) and elsewhere leads us to different game types of finding different expressions of the fixed idea of a girl in a mirror (played out well in Sabine Melchior-Bonnet’s The Mirror: A History), and away from our current game of finding multiple interpretations of a particular expression.  

Admittedly, some of these are more truly Inspiral Games than others, but as a proposition for a class of games it gives us a base to build on.