"Down into the sea, deeper and deeper, sank Pinocchio" (Collodi, 1883)
This is my edit from the final scuba training dive with Aquaventurers in preparation for filming in Itoshima. I was fascinated by the bubbles floating up into the light, and the figure seen through the surface of the water. I had a few calm moments swimming through the water, but more often I was fighting a feeling of growing panic. This was induced whenever I remembered that I was getting deeper down in the water. I was scared that my drysuit would fill with air and pull me up to the surface too quickly. To calm my heart rate I had to calm my breathing down. The rhythmic sound of the regulator is reassuring, but the air supply is limited and cannot be gulped.
Pinocchio jumps into the ocean looking for Gepetto. At this point in the story he has been turned in a donkey. The fish nibble away at his donkey ears and legs, until Pinocchio is a heap of salt-bleached wood, ready to be returned to the shore.
Somehow in the depths of the sea, and having shuffled off the donkey features, Pinocchio has a flash of inspiration that will help him rescue his father Gepetto from Monstro, the shark. When he finally makes it back to shore he will be transformed with the blessing of the Blue Fairy. He will have evolved from the marionette - a gullible, lying, wooden idiot - into a human boy.
Thus he is cleansed by a 'sea-co-system'. His escape route via Monstro mimics the trajectory of human evolution - from the Sacchorytus, a 'bag like sea creature with a large mouth [that] apparently had no anus and moved by wriggling' 540 millenia ago. (Russell, The Independent, January 2017)
In 'Earth Diver: Shrine Edition' (2021) Shinichi Nakazawa puts forward the idea that neurological intelligence - the sapiens of Homo Sapiens - emerged in the neolithic mind. A mind became capable of creating analogies and thus stories, once it noticed the floaters behinds its eyelids, taking these for significant flashes from a greater power. These floaters are noticed in the darkness of caves, and in turn caves became sacred sites in Japan. Investigating this reverence for the dark Nakawa's project involves 'diving' into sacred places earth, sometimes literally into a deep cave whose entrance is obscured by shrubbery.
For instance, Nakazawa focusses on sacred sites in Tsushima island, a stepping stone between Kyushu and South Korea. This liminal island is the birthplace of Tendō, a priest whose story is one of the founding mytholgies of the Hachiman Buddhist sect.
Nakazawa connects Tendo to the figure of Poseidon, 'a 'vague' paternal deity'. This paternal figure is contrasted with a more powerful maternal deity embodied as a sea eel or snake that casts its child-gods onto the beach. And I want to connect this leap from dark depths with the Pinocchio story. Mimei Ogawa's 'Boy from Sea Umi No Shonen (1958) is like Lampwick, Pinocchio's mischievous companion tempting him on to forbidden places as the boy stands on the back of a turtle and is carried by the crest of wave and down to an underwater kingdom; or like the white goat standing on the crest of the wave that washes Pinocchio ashore.
Jordan Peterson's take on Pinocchio draws on Jungian psychology. When Pinocchio rescues Gepetto, Peterson says of the Disney version, the father has reached the end of his food supplies and his wits. He is stuck, and Pinocchio 'discovers' the power of fire, an unlikely dry match in a whale's belly, to create smoke to tickle the whale, who in turn, sneezes the two characters out into the sea whose currents carry them back to shore.
In reality a Pinocchio-boy emerging rapidly from the deep would needs a Hyperbaric Chamber to rid himself of excess Nitrogen. But Pinocchio is made of wood, or more precisely, driftwood.
He is washed up on the shore like the dead seal's hip that I found on Ainsdale beach. But he doesn't need insurance for treatment for the bends. He doesn't need Air Evac to oxygenate him. Pinocchio surges from a deep dark space in the whale through the magic and license of the imagination. Nakazawa refers to fluid or liquid intelligence that facilitates analogy and myth. He sets it in contrast to animal instinct but at the same says its root is a shared gene of 'animal intelligence' (such as when cats go to a 'sacred place' when they are preparing to die or to give birth).
In the version of Pinocchio by Lyngo theatre I saw at Waterside Theare, Sale on 13th May 2023, books are transformed into treasure chests, birds, avatars, insects. They leak water, and become caskets reflecting gold discs coins and they are shredded into snow and blossom. The set looks like a bookshop window lit by a feint blue frame of light. And from the obscurity within this window frame, these images reach out to the audience and activate associations in the minds of audience members, young and old. This performance was somewhat lacking 'character' in the sense that the only solid manifestation of Pinocchio was one of those cheap miniature mannekins, a wobbly artshop figure. And towards the end of this version energetic material ideas are abandoned as the actor rattled this mannekin more casually, winding up with the bare bones of the story. Perhaps the audience were falling asleep. Perhaps they had been hypnotised by the ritual of telling. Perhaps as the story reduces to bare facts he knows they lose their grip on the details, entering the blank spaces of sleep.
References
'The Adventures of Pinocchio' (1883) by Carlo Collodi (Lorenzini) cited in waybackmachine 19/7/2018
https://web.archive.org/web/20180719141430/http://www.classicreader.com/book/129/34/ [Accessed 31/5/23]
Nakazawa, S (2021) Aasu Daiba Jinjahen・アースダイバ神社編 'Earth Diver: Shrine Edition' ：Kodansha, Tokyo.
Peterson, J. Youtube Site. Jordan B Peterson. 'The Psychology of Pinocchio EP 254'. May 2022 [Accessed 31/5/23])
Russell, S. 'Humanity evolved from wriggling sea creatures with large mouth and no anus' in Independent online. 20/1/2017.
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