My 'Musey-Room'

When Dr. Sexson originally told us to construct our own 'musey rooms', I was a tad confused. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do: construct something from the mental palaces I made for the lists of items I memorized? Create a system like Giordano Bruno or Guilio Camillo that could encompass the universe? A rat maze or a model which I could say reflected something greater? The more I thought about it, the more I knew I wanted to draw something incredibly complex and detailed. When I was young, I loved the "Where's Waldo" books and examined each picture intently looking for the famous 'striped one'. The pictures drawn by Martin Handford were intricately detailed. There were wars, beach scenes, giants having tea parties, everything. In fact, when I was a kid my friends and I would draw our own pictures of 'Where's 'Zwaldo'. You see, we were convinced we could get sued if the owners of Waldo found about it. Later, when I was bored during the summers I would draw massive battle scenes where stick figures were being chased by monsters. I thought my 'musey room' would be in a similar vane.

After purchasing the necessary materials, I decided I wanted to have Saturn and Apollo fighting in the center. I don't know when or why this dawned on me, but they were the first things I drew and everything just sort of came after that. The poster was originally supposed to be a series of circles within circles getting increasing complex as they emanated from the center. However, I soon realized that this was too much of an undertaking for the time allotted. Eventually I went out and bought two paper-back "Where's Waldo" books from Barnes & Noble (they are pretty cheap). I cut them up and placed them around the third circle.

I will now detail what I think my 'musey room' does. The inner most circle is an eye. It is the 'third eye' or the spiritual pineal gland behind our forehead. I thought this was a great choice for the psychedelic phantasmagoria to come. The next circle contains Saturn and Apollo fighting. The sun god holds the heavenly star in his hand and the moon is above Saturn--this is clearly a binary, day/night, light/dark, good/evil, freedom/totalitarianism, summer/winter. The tree around the eye represents the Mother. If I was a better artist I might have drawn her branches reaching to the edges of the poster. Again, we can take the war in the middle as a great mythological battle: Osiris/Seth, Jesus/Satan, Krishna/King of Magadha. This battle is often repeated in modern pop culture as well.

The third circle contains 12 of the Olympians, representing the archetypes. Inside these images many others can be stored, as Camillo did in his theater. For example, a pen could be held by Hermes because he is the god of communication. The rabbit would be with Demeter because she is a fertility goddess. The sea shell would fall into Poseidon's briny depths. A bird would be with Zeus because he is a sky god. A rock is trickier and could go into several areas simply because it is such a static image. I would almost place it somewhere with the Mother in the center. The four other characters in this section are characters I drew in my childhood. They still echo in my modern life. The top is Piggy, resilient good. The right is Rooster, evil for the sake of it. Teddy is on the bottom, conflicted evil. And Heroic Man is to the right, evil which thinks its doing good. I chose their placement arbitrarily. Lining this circle is Ouroboros, the ancient symbol for eternity. I know this outer circle turned into a bit of an oval, but it ended up looking like an egg, another fertility symbol, or even the outline of a brain. This middle area is eternity. It never changes. The ring around it with the amazing drawings by Handford are the chaos of existence. It is squiggly, alive, like figures on a Hindu temple or the creepy-crawlies doing under an overturned a rock. The outside repeats the same patterns over and over again as dictated by the inside. This can be used as a metaphor for one person's mind or the collective mind. I wish I could say there was a method to my madness. Often ideas which I didn't think would have much significance when I drew them became a metaphor for something greater. This whole poster seemed to fall out of my subconscious.