Heraclitus and Inception

Look at this:
24. "A man in the night kindles a light for himself when his sight is extinguished; living he touches the dead when asleep, when awake he touches the sleeper." -Heraclitus

First, clearly Heidegger is correct to worry that these passages are apparently translated by people who don't understand them.

Second, my book indicates that the word translated as "kindle" is actually the same word as the word translated as "touch." So what the man in darkness does to the light is the same thing as what the sleeping man does to the dead, and, in turn, what the waking man does to the sleeper.

So death "illuminates" the world for the sleeper, and sleep "illuminates" the world for the dead.

So say you want to make a movie about a man who is in denial -- a movie about facing facts. Well, the waking man will find the truths he needs to learn through his dreams. These are the "deeper" truths... the deeper the dream, the deeper the truth. In Inception, the truth he needs to face is the truth about himself/the world that the fact of his wife's death is showing him and this is (superficially) a incidental part of the film. But if Heraclitus is correct, it is qua sleeper that the truth he has to confront is a truth to be learned through thinking about death.

This was a really excellent film, from my perspective, in that these somewhat baroque layers actually did pull me away from myself deeply enough to access something that felt, well, real, in a way that films ordinarily do not do for me. I could feel how intensely alive these people were, how viscerally alive, as they went deeper and deeper, and time got more and more condensed for them as they were swallowed up inside an exploding expansion of a single moment of vulgar everyday time. Each moment spent in this very ancient abandoned city felt stolen, as a result, precious and, perhaps above all, fleeting; isn't this a simulation of the "authentic" experience of time? What would happen each moment if we only paid attention? The essential relationship between death and time -- that fact that in a way the film takes advantage of a "vulgar" conception of time to then be able to replicate cinematically the way that moments _are not moments at all_ but that each requires a death, that each is a death (mortal/vanishing into Time's enormous nought), that _you, being in the moment, will die_.

I mean it cheats itself because _she_ is the one who is dead, so the truth DiCaprio is supposed to learn is not the one that is all around him, the one that we are meant to learn about time or about being alive or whatever through experiencing the structure of the film. There is a pretense that the film's content is separate from its form that is not removed even after we are meant to suspect he is dreaming, which doesn't remove what, on my interpretation, would have to be a mere pretense or denial on his part that his problem with death is a problem about someone else's death. Or maybe it _is_ threatened by that final shot. Maybe we could say he is still "dreaming" only _because_ he _hasn't_ yet realized it is _him_ who is dying at every moment. Dreaming because he hasn't realized that the uncanniness of his time experience is not something separate from the "vulgar" time of waking life; thus, dreaming because he does not know that he is awake (e.g. "people fail to notice what they do when awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep" -Heraclitus 1), that this "dream" in the film is the reality of each moment of waking life.

Christopher Nolan evidently reads some philosophy (The Prestige is based on a common thought experiment in person ontology, The Joker's little pranks are riffs on Trolley Cases), and so I wouldn't put it past him to know something about all of this Heidegger/Nietzsche/Heraclitus. Even if he doesn't, that isn't the point.

I'm not convinced I even understand what Heraclitus is saying in order to then be projecting his or Heidegger's concepts onto the film. But I have found a starting point for understanding the film in Heraclitus/Heidegger, and I thought that it was worth mentioning.

"Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star." - Thoreau