The Ouroboros

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The shadow man made a deal with Iblis to become a rattlesnake and chasing his tail forever thus gaining immortality, in the end, he became an Ouroboros, which is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail which is often interpreted as a symbol for eternal cyclic renewal or a cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

 

Echoing the theme, the background music is based on the enigmatic Canon 1 a 2 from J. S. Bach’s “Musical Offering” also known as “crab canon”, which is an arrangement of two musical lines that are complementary and backward, similar to a palindrome. It originally referred to a kind of canon in which one line is played backward. The manuscript shows a single score, whose beginning joins with the end. This space is topologically equivalent to a bundle of the line segment over the circle, known as a Möbius strip. The simultaneous performance of the deeply related forward and backward paths give the appearance to two voices, whose symmetry determines a reversible evolution. A musical universe is built and then is “unplayed” back into silence.