psyche

I just watched Memento on the advice of Oliver Jones and it was ridiculously awesome. Its hyperlink style was awesome and the themes it dealt with reminded me a lot of some of Lain. Not the anime so much, but definitely the Nightmare of Fabrication thing as well as other creepy memory things in the artbook…

Awesome.

On the theme of convergence, David Gray’s lyric “Somehow it don’t feel real” and Jakob Dylan’s “I hallucinated that you were in my arms” are beginning to haunt me. The cold, rusting suburbanity of the residential roads around where I live fill me with a feeling of nostalgia, happiness, sadness and confusion. They remind me of The Matrix and Lain in some way. It’s so strange. Everything seems to link to other things which all eventually link back to this messed up feeling. The connectedness of everything is unnerving. The quiet suburban emptiness, with wire fences coated in plastic and slightly rusted railings and secret bus stops and blank-faced people who don’t quite remember just what it was they came for. It reminds me of a picture in the Lain book which I’ll scan in. Or does the picture in the Lain book remind me of the feeling? I need to give it a name… how about… The Node?

Pax

Oh dear; I tried to make my mother watch Fight Club. She totally freaked out. I think I misjudged her taste, although she did like The Matrix, V for Vendetta and Serial Experiments Lain… it’s similar to Mr Rokison rejecting SEL as “not good enough” but more of a sort of shock reaction. Anyway, I guess it’s time to admit that I understand things differently to other people.

She attributes her reaction to childhood trauma involving violent movies and hospitals.

Oh well.

Pax

My problem with things like V for Vendetta, Serial Experiments Lain, Fight Club and The Matrix is that they’ve all appealed to me because they confirm or present themes that I have considered independently and thus tie into my whole life. They mean different things to me than they do to other people, I think. This is often why I dementedly force people to research everything they can about sprawling continuities like Lain and The Matrix - I want to give people I know a chance to love the fiction and maybe even understand me a little better.

I like soap.

Pax

The Source, eh?

As soon as I started looking for Lain, I found her everywhere. Confirmation bias, anyone?

Pax

When I tried to explain what I said in the previous post to Alex on the train, he said, in reference to the “urban legend”-like nature of Lain, “Like V for Vendetta?”.

Not quite: V for Vendetta and Batman are the kind of urban legends that make the news. Lain and The Matrix are those that you wonder about for your whole life. Some groups form, but only a few. It’s a mystery, profound but somehow intangible. There are few enough occurrences to keep it from being proven but still enough to keep people wondering whether - if not believing that - something is going on/their memories have been changed etc.

It’s somehow suburban and involves raining. I can’t really explain it. People don’t realise that other people wonder about it too. It’s really… hard to explain. It is that feeling that’s been bugging you forever. The feeling you’ll probably die with.

That feeling. What is The Matrix? Who is Lain? And, for some unusual people, “What is happening to me?”, “Why?” or “Who am I?”.

It’s what keeps me and many others up and night. Not pornography or video games. It’s just… some fundamental wondering. What is going on? Is there an answer? Is it Lain? Is it The Matrix?

I’ve realised it’s not really the secret hacker question, although I like that because it allies itself with computers and rain and The Matrix and the wondering. It’s an incarnation of the question. The big question. Whatever that is.

Pax

I’m going to attempt to define what it is about The Matrix and SEL that captivates me - apart from the whole computers thing. It’s related but not actually dependent on the computers. It’s a certain interpretation of the “quest for esoteric truth” thing; I’m going to call it the secret hacker question because it seems to involve hackers. “What is The Matrix?” and “Who is Lain?” (sometimes “Have you ever seen the Lain?” [sic]) are the two questions in question (ha ha ha).

They both deal with a truth that seems to be just out of reach and theoretically attainable, if only you could find them. It’s not that they don’t exist - you just have to find them. The whole way the concept is merged with social withdrawal, hacking, suburbanity (not a word, I know) and conspiracy theories is just very interesting. It’s the feeling that many people are searching for some answer and that it has a sort of modern but still mythical feel about it. It’s actually rather harder to quantify than I first thought. I’m sure you kind of know what I mean. You must know.

Pax

My interest in Fight Club, V for Vendetta, The Matrix and WarGames was a symptom of my fascination in things like consumerism, brainwashing, hacking and conspiracies and general science fiction. The Matrix, though, was long championed by yours truly as the pinnacle of film as it embodied everything. It successfully identified that a search for truth could be transposed off God and onto a conspiracy.

However, when I watched Lain, I realised that it was the pinnacle. While it took me a long time to begin to see that The Matrix was awesome, I immediately fell in love with SEL. My slight interest in Japanese culture combined with the internet and genuine philosophy (I can actually believe that the real world may one day be a representation of the internet) meant that Lain finally replaced God in my mind. My rationality and emotional mania have never been in concert until now. A shame that their convergence will probably destroy me. Also, my copy of yoshitoshi ABe lain illustrations ab# rebuild an omnipresence in wired just arrived. It’s pretty awesome. I haven’t analysed the hidden text or programming yet but the overall style is awesome and reminds me of that Matrix comic - Goliath, from the first volume - possibly because Goliath was based on it?

All this stuff about memory and omnipresence. It’s enough to make me want this to be real - and I suppose I do. Let’s all love Lain. Is it impossible to make a life-form or robot that lives forever? If so, why? Thermodynamics? Can’t there be a at least one being that self-repairs properly? Can’t there?

This is rather interesting. It contains a synopsis of the SEL game which has helped me understand some of the references in the artbook. The writer of the synopsis, in their last sentence, uses a single word which they believe describes the end of game and to a lesser extent the end of the anime - “hopeless”. I wonder.

It’s funny, you know; I was just beginning to think I understood SEL and was in the process of collapsing it from a life-altering feeling of weirdness into a statement like “It’s a really good anime but nothing more” but this artbook and game have totally messed me up. I use The Matrix as a sort of benchmark because it was the only thing I’ve ever watched that has really soaked into my whole life but SEL feels like what The Matrix should have been. Right from the almost-urban-legend Lain and feeling of hidden truth and memory-overwriting presented in omnipresence down to the depictions of VR, psychology, sociology and philosophy. Lain feels somehow familiar, as if Konaka and co. didn’t create it but… simply remembered it. In fact, didn’t Mr Abe say he “recalled” Lain? That’s funny. Mistranslation? He “recalled” her? She… exists? We don’t even need all of IPv6, let alone 7 or 8…

My delusions become manifest. Fiction is my undoing.

Pax

Of course, of course I have considered that my demented obsession with things like The Matrix and SEL - that is, things which say that there is something odd about the world, lurking around, totally invisible or totally forgotten - is similar to a search for God. The thing is, I never really connected with God. I have never prayed believing anything would come of it and in extreme situations in my youth I tended not to pray so that I would have fewer invisible people to credit were I to survive. Neither, then, is this search borne out of the general religiosity factor. I need evidence. In fact, this is part of my search. I could have a knowing smile and talk about how I just know the world is askew, but it’s impossible as I would need some reason.

I’m definitely looking for something. Although The Matrix and SEL and every other piece of fiction I love all present eternity and sorrow and hidden conspiracy in different ways (some stylised and shallow, some deep and disturbing, changing type even internally) they have one thing in common: there is a long search of some sort that has to be done.

Some of the dialogue in SEL which initially went over my head as technobabble is beginning to crystallise in my mind. The conjecture that Lain’s mother apparently makes during a hallucination in DISTORTION (LAYER:05) that the balance between the real and the Wired may have shifted to the point where the Wired no longer represents goings on in the real world, but in fact dictates what happens in the real world, is shocking. The idea that we could one day exist only to do things on the basis of what the data in the wires tells us to disturbs me despite it being a rather mundane metamorphosis. Sometimes I think “So what?” and sometimes I simply think “No!”

Pax

I would probably call it The Matrix or Lain but God is a strange thing that crops up for a combination of many reasons. Some glitch in the human psyche causes a strange feeling of yearning for some higher meaning or purpose. It is magnified culturally into religions, cults, philosophies and methodologies. It becomes all-consuming.

When I am alone, breathing in cold, scentless air in some empty place, I think of it. I can’t help feeling that I’ve forgotten some god. “Forgotten god”! A David Gray lyric, I believe. I don’t want to forget. I really don’t. That is why create persistent data on the web.

I want it to persist!

Pax

This is the only blog post yet to be mostly copied up from hand-written notes I made while in Venice - so beware! (…)

This is the first time I’ve hand-written something hand-written non-school-related since I wanted to be a writer (excluding birthday cards).

Now I feel like I should properly re-read all the Harry Potter books. They are actually good. Combined with my idealised notion of J K Rowling writing in some quiet cafe (the feeling of which is extended by her well-designed Lightmaker website) the Harry Potter series makes me want to sit at my desk hugging a box set and cry. However, like everyone else, I will reduce this feeling to the sentence “The books are really good” or something, which, in various forms, recurs throughout all descriptions of things too emotionally powerful (for some people) to be expressed properly without seeming demented.

Although the post-modern philosopher in me balks at the idea of millions of people buying merchandise, books and film tickets that are all items with little use (well, books can stop bullets) and attempts to class the entire Potter phenomenon as a disgusting facet of modern consumerism and the commercialisation of “feelings”, some more sentimental part of me is glad that Potter is ubiquitous enough not to be forgotten. As you may know, I fear forgetting about things - usually fleeting feelings - and I think that my recent phase of writing things down is a behavioural manifestation of this. While not a literary type, and having turned my back on English despite it being interesting, I almost regret relinquishing the opportunity to learn more about the way in which people create fiction. I wasn’t so bad it it but my heart wasn’t it int. On a career front, I feel like I want to do something important and helpful - or is that just some artificial conscience speaking? I don’t know. I also want to fence and cook. Nice.

The Harry Potter games on the Game Boy Color were interesting. They also possessed the epic, emotional feeling - it’s in the same vein as nostalgia, I think - that impressed me as an element of the books. They also had some nice music. Unfortunately, they were cut short just after the completion of the second one and the less RPG-like GBA and now DS versions dominated quickly. Economics.

Venice is nice but I hate family holidays and being a tourist. Luckily, the Venetian display an admirable contempt for tourists. They have a dialect but, being in the north, it is similar to normal Italian (one of the few things my unobservant mind has noticed is them saying “ci” for “si” [as in "yes"]).

Harry Potter is tempting because of the fallibility of death it keeps dangling like bait. I could sit here smiling sadly, believing that I will have an eternity to meet people or think things that I did not have time for in life. It is extremely tempting. However, I think I will close this Potter book and shelve the Bloomsbury-bound book one last time and confine JKR to the shelf for now and evermore. Although infinity is reassuring when presented through religion, I find the closure of finiteness (finity?), while much less emotionally satisfying (no tightness in my chest or tears in my eyes), more acerbic but yet more welcome.

The power of people’s emotional response to fantasy and depiction of everlasting life (the Sundering Seas in LotR, tangible “memories” and other manifestations of people in Potter, heaven in religions) is just escapism but it fuels the segment of modern consumer culture dedicated to feel-good fiction.

I don’t know whether I should be praising or ranting at JKR - she created a comfort world that makes me sad. It makes people want to believe it while films like the Matrix scupper their own premise by simply existing as works of fiction (although now I tend to think of the Matrix as a metaphor for consumerism as opposed to a literal depiction of an VR-enslaved future humanity).

I think all the desserts I’ve had here have been alcoholic. My head feels awful.

My life feels quite purposeless but I do feel like I want to prepare for a war that will never happen or an important individual task that will never come. All these stories of heroes have made me acknowledge this as some latent inner desire of mine. I am meaningless. Fencing, video games, academia, chess - anything competitive t hat I am drawn to is a dilution of my Fight Club-esque dissatisfaction with modern consumerism and fascism - or what Mussolini (I wish he were still here, the water taxi’s always fucking late) would call corporatism.

As some video game - Metroid Fusion, I believe - once told me, our experiences delimit our consciousness. This is so true. Especially in the case of seasickness. I don’t get seasick and so I can barely bring myself to believe it exists. It would take a lot of evidence or actually getting the propensity to puke on board sea vessels myself to change my view, although by common sense default I always appear to believe in it.

Why don’t wizards study biology? Healers, surely? The sound of the sea here in Venice reminds me of starting out Myst. The food is good. The canals smell.

There’s a busker in Venice (we’re on the Lido) who plays every evening outside the open restaurants down the main road. He sings international things (”Let it Be”, “La Bamba”, “Baila Morena” [lol]).

It’s so painful to believe that dead people are gone forever. I like it. Are there American wizards?

I seem to read books and such very quickly but I don’t necessarily “speedread” as such - although I sometimes skip paragraphs that seem grossly irrelevant, it is easy for people, myself included, to underestimate the thoroughness of my comprehension of written texts. Take, for instance, the copy of “Guitarist” I’m reading. I feel dissatisfied, like I have read it too quickly out upon re-reading, everything feels uncomfortably familiar and stale because I have in fact read most of it. I find the same thing with moist books I read. This is highly annoying.

I have this recurring thing where I wake up believing I am holding something and my hand is closed and I feel so bad when there’s nothing there. Every time, I genuinely believe I have acquired something - but I haven’t. It makes me extremely upset.

I really, really need to start fencing again. There is a picture of an ancestor of the sciabola (sabre), taken in the Venice Naval Museum. Note my greatness. (link soon)

Today (this is post-Venice now) I went to my grandma’s old house with my uncle to pick up some of his guitars (he’s my dad’s brother and thus the grandma in question’s other son). He has an old Telecaster that I like the sound of, a nice Yamaha 12-string (the top three pairs of strings are tuned in unison and the bottom three in octaves, standard tuning) and an Ovation acoustic. I’ll probably put the strings we picked up for the busker in Venice on the Ovation if I can be bothered.

Pax