Cast

"You listen to me. You have cast me for the villain in this little play of yours, and yourself for the heroine. And you know it, you damned little mischiefmaker!" -Creon, Antigone (1944)

Antigone, a Greek tragedy by Sophocles, was adopted by Jean Anouilh in 1944 Nazi-occupied France. About three years ago, in 2013, I studied this play in an English literature class. And, now, in 2016, I am using this play to discuss to what extent our lives are determined by the process of "casting".

It seems that, from meeting me in real life, you would expect me to write about science or engineering. Yet, here I am, talking (rather poorly) about literature, music, and sentiments that I don't think anyone would expect to be pronounced from my mouth. The very act of writing here is my defiance to your cast on me.

It seems like I am condemning you of casting me into a role I do not wish to be in. This is not true, I assure you. I never condemn specific people in my writing, only groups of people, because once people are grouped, they cease being human, and they lose the complexity and subtlety that humans possess. This is a story for another time though.

From the moment we were born, that we start to interact with the world around us, we were assigned a number, an identity of sorts. We are identified by our name, our parents, and gradually, more and more attributes are assigned to us: Where we go to school, what grades we get, what sports we like, what musical instrument do we play (especially for Asian children)... and the list goes on as years pass, as if we are posts sent on a journey across the world. Tag after tag specify where we have been and what we have done, as we travel along this route to nowhere known. This is, probably, what we call life. Or, in this context, how I imagine it to be.

But as more and more stamps are stuck onto this originally plain envelope, the area left on the envelope decreases, until the address of this envelope is covered up, no longer visible. Even worse, the cover of the envelope is so filled with these exotic and attractive stamps that no one remembers what is inside anymore.

Are we doomed to be cast into this mould so much that we forget what we originally are, or what we were supposed to be?

Well, "what we are supposed to be" is something worth thinking a bit about I suppose, since, if this is defined by others, we are following the definition of "casting" quite literally, so I should specify that the latter refers to a person's own ambitions, his own vision, unadulterated by anything external.

Then I would question whether this really exists. One of the most difficult essays I have ever written, as a child, is the one where every primary school teacher would assign to his students: Your dreams, your future, or something along those lines. When it comes to doing such a composition, my mind would go completely blank. There simply is nothing that I desired as a child, other than to spend my days peacefully, maybe sometimes play with my friends or read a book.

And if it follows from the fact that unadulterated dreams only formulate when one is innocent; that is, when one is a child, I have no such thing as a dream. Yet, I would not really call myself a soulless person (whether you would want to think of me as one is up to you, though).

I am sure most would think a person who has followed his "dreams" throughout his life truly is not confined by the "cast". I shall not pass any judgment right now as to whether this is a successful person, but shall merely remark on the fact that as I grew older, the longer I examine what others do, the less I think the possibility that a staunch follower of principles exists. Towards the end, we are all limited by ourselves as a human, and as one grows older, this confinement grows tougher, since no one would give an allowance to behaviours that would have been acceptable if dismissed as childishness.

What I just said could also be completely false. There are people who find describing their dreams really easy, who find following their passions really enjoyable, and are extremely successful at it. I have only to look right around me, and I would see many future engineers whose future would be brighter than I could possibly imagine. To those, I applaud, but also question: Have they not exactly put themselves into a cast?

As people observe these exceptional followers, their image of them would be exactly what I described: A shining epitome of success, a person who has figured out how to live a life worth living. Yet, what if one day they reach an obstacle that cannot be overcome? What if one day their success runs out? What would be left of these people?

What I have learned throughout my life of being often placed in an area of high expectations is that there are plenty of things and ideas that I could never even dream of ever conceiving, yet can come up like a flick of a switch to some. There was a long time that I held spite against these people, but now I think I am simply accustomed, or grew tired of hating.

Perhaps these are the people who have figured out the secret to eternal happiness, to stay in the cast forever without ever breaking character. This is who they are.

A century is but a tiny fraction of what has been in the universe as we know it, but to us humans it is a long time. To maintain a certain character over such a long time is a feat not to be dismissed easily. And with this I also refer to people who have managed to stay dislikeable or foolish throughout their lives. To not break character even once: that is what is remarkable.

I am sure that we all have first-hand experience in how a person can change over the years. We have but to look at the mirror. Extending this metaphorically, looking at the mirror of the past I suppose. Would it make no sense that we fix particular images on people? Surely that is a tragedy: To be recognized as being a character who never changes, to be the sidekick to the wonderful play known as life...

We cannot but accept this compromise though. The window we observe people with is severely limited, and I believe I have already addressed this previously. Would it make sense if we say that the method of survival in this society, in the age of information, is to present ourselves in such a light that the correct samples of our lives are filtered into the system of the pitiful windows? Are we merely juggling our brighter and darker sides so that we appear sane to others?

I do not believe in reincarnation, or afterlife, or any of that sort of thing. At the very least, if they happen to exist, I would not be there to feel it, and the me now would not be remembered as time goes on. If we get that out of our consideration, to live a life by modelling ourselves to the cast of others is quite a tragedy. Even in a comedy, to be a character who have a predetermined role would be a tragedy indeed.

Tragedy aside, this might be the easy way out. There is inertia to change in everything in this universe. Once the equilibrium has been reached, one is not likely to change. The force of change is so upsetting it could be the very driver for all chaos that has existed. In other words, we like being in a cast. A person who has been cast in a good way would make the effort to continue this image, and vice versa. This is at least true speaking from personal experience...

I would like to think that I hold little if any spite towards those who are the "shining epitome of success" among all of us, the "heroes" of this society, the pillars of human brilliance: It is an immature thing to do isn't it? However, to this day, I still think of what their "true" selves are. If they have a darker side, I congratulate them on their success in fooling everyone they meet. If they know not what incompetence is, I still congratulate them, for they have played their part in the grand theatre of life flawlessly. Whether this will mean anything in the future, in ten years, in hundreds, thousands of years, I am not sure. What I am sure is that we are all trapped on this stage, strutting and fretting our hours on the stage. Some, like Antigone, may try to break through, but in the end, she is still a character, and her image will be whatever is viewed through the tiny window of everyone's eyes.

---

OP/ED Insert Song Discussion 15: Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 23, by Frederic Chopin

"Give up trying to write something sophisticated[...] Forget the prescriptive ideas of "the novel" and "literature", and set down your feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in a way that you like" - Haruki Murakami, The birth of my Kitchen Table Fiction

This is the 100th post on this blog. Feels strange, after all these years, that I would keep on writing and writing.

I really do not know how to describe the posts on this blog recently, other than them being passages of self-reflection, albeit admittedly incomplete and not completely all-encompassing, something like looking at one's reflection on an old cracked mirror, or some kind of foggy glass. In the absence of distractions, I dream up ideas and theses based on perhaps some of my observations and experiences, and once I get in front of the computer, I expand on these points as I write. It has become a way to clear up my thoughts, as well as a so-called hobby of mine, to, in a few tens of hundreds of words, not much, sit down and talk to you, the reader, whoever you may be. I am a story teller of some sort, but I do not tell the story of fictional characters, or of real people. I tell the story of my thoughts, how this little man ventures through the cavity of my mind, digging up random pieces of thinking. Some may be akin to gold, shiny and worth thousands of words, while some may be plain rock, easily dismissed in a few sentences. 

The important thing here, though, is that these things I say here are truly what I think. All kinds of embellishments you see in any other pieces of work I do, those that force me to feign a sense of professionalism would not be found here. These are my honest thoughts, put in a way using words that I find appropriate.

This brings me to wonder whether I have been too honest. After all, I would not want you to fully know what I am thinking, all the time, which would mean nothing productive for both parties. For instance, I tend to avoid overly sentimental ruminations of my past, since I don't have much of one to begin with (the past I know is severely biased with the vision of a child). I am afraid that all that would result when I talk about my past, how I came to stop trusting easily, would result in incoherent ramblings that I would be forced to throw away, since they would make no sense at all to anyone, not even myself. I would write to several paragraphs, and just could not continue, for I run out of reasonable things to talk about. This is a rather bad feeling: The feeling when one kills an idea. It is as if I killed a living creature, and that surely does not feel nice.

Therefore, for this rather special occasion, I would like to write about my favourite classical piece, as well as, through the beautiful melodies of Chopin, reflect slightly on my so-called past [breaking the cast a bit here]. 

Shigatsu version:

Non-weeb version:

Admittedly, this is quite the cliched situation: A person knowing little about classical music getting to know this piece through a TV show. I love shows about music, or more appropriately, musicians I suppose. I am no good at visual arts, and had limited access to "literature" except for the purpose of learning English writing through them (my interest in creative writing was unfortunately killed by, ironically, schoolwork on creative writing), until I came across the wonderful teachers in the IB. My only outlet to the arts was through music. Even though I limited myself to an instrumentalist approach (learning only the "three pieces" for exams), They nonetheless were pieces of music by esteemed musicians, and are (somehow) alive with emotions. Shows about people who devote themselves to this form of art, then, is my only way of attempting to understand what an artist is, why they exist, and what they strive for. 

Most of the pieces I played were dull though. It is not that I could not see the elegant patterns carved through the clever arrangement of cadences and chords, and also not because of the fact that I could not play them technically. To me, they were pieces composed for the entertainment of people hundreds of years ago, who lived thousands of miles away from me. Why should I care about that? No matter how much I observed the passion of Chiaki from Nodame Cantabile, I fundamentally did not understand why he would care so much, how he would be so devoted to these meaningless progressions of sound. It made no sense to me. And as I went into secondary school, and tried to divert myself away from Western to Chinese music, I grew to realize how many people are actually passionate about music. Their passion was oppressive, and no matter how much I tried to understand them, they seemed like residents of an alternate world, where music is spoken as a language. I started to avoid them, quitting the orchestra, ceasing to practice much at all for my own lessons. I am not a musician, and was never meant to be, because I simply do not understand.

This was until I came across Bach's Chaconne (BWV 1004) just a few years ago. It struck me as a difficult piece at first, and that intrigued me. Upon listening, I had this connection that I had never experienced before. Perhaps it happened before without me noticing, in one of the many orchestral pieces I had played as a child: one of those were bound to be pretty communicative and dazzling, but my fear of music and all that was associated with it just pushed this feeling deep into my subconsciousness. As a result, this feeling was almost nostalgic, somehow like the retelling of my memories throughout the years. I had never had any major tragedies happen to me in my life, as I look back. All that happened were trivial happenstances that were nothing but overdramaticized by my hypersensitive emotional drive. Yet I had this overwhelming sense of loneliness that loomed over me over the years without me realizing its existence at all. I did not realize that people I can call friends and trust to this degree that I am used to today exist. It was simply natural for me to have me myself as my own companion, and I never opened my heart to anyone, never telling the truth when someone asked me how I feel. The powerful progression of chords that starts the Chaconne almost spoke for me, screaming out this welled up sense of loneliness that has existed for a whole decade, since I came to my senses.

Coming across Chopin's Ballade, then, is extremely nostalgic. The stern yet liberal start of the piece seems disconnected from the rest of the piece, but was somehow like a preamble to all that unfolds later. It tells me to sit down, and make myself comfortable, for he is about to tell a story, a story of a man who never spoke once. His words may be repetitive and telling of the effects of being closed in for millennia, but through the claustrophobia there are sparkling moments of joy, of passion, of anger, of something you would not see ever if you only ever observed his face.

Perhaps the fact that this piece immediately connected with me is precisely because of this story like nature. I feel like if I were to tell a story, I would not use my voice, for it sounds rather funny at times, something I cannot control. This is not what I intend to convey. This is not why I write. I write because there are things that cannot be expressed by my clumsy speech. And even then my words are quite dull and repetitive at times (I try to entertain myself with some variations of vocabulary, but alas I do not read enough to be fluent in elegant prose).

[This section felt really weird to write. We will be back to the normal programme next time...]

Vertigo

[A sugar sweet nightmare.]

The concert hall was darker than he thought. Darker than he was used to at least. The only prominent sources of light were the flickering pupils of the audience. Countless small but intently gazing eyeballs, waiting for something to float into their field of vision. The musicians on the stage were still as statues, their black trousers and dresses blending well into the pitch black backdrop. It is the kind of blackness you would expect in a funeral, a black and white one: except that the all vestiges of the pure white is gone, leaving us with nothing but hopeless darkness.

And in the corner it was her, also black, but a different kind.

It was not his first time to step on the creaking wooden stage. Yet, every time he went close to the edge of collapsing from the claustrophobia, the dazzling floodlights would inundate the stage with light so bright he would forget his existence. From there, he would automatically walk onto the pedestal. Almost like a robot programmed with fluid movements, he would raise his hands, and wave it about for a bit. Before he knew it, the piece would have ended, and he would be drowned in applause. He would still be dazed a bit, since he just went through a loss of consciousness, but he would eventually wake up, and forget all about this ordeal.

But this time was different. He could sense it. The anesthetic lights did not work. He was still trembling. Why is that? He felt a severe chill, as if he was still walking on the streets, which would be deserted by now, with everyone already seated in the concert hall. The irony creeps up to him, forcing him to the brink: He knew he was no conductor after all. He was never meant to be one.

And in the corner it was her, drawing all the light in. She was pitch black, like an endless abyss.

What am I waiting for? he asked himself. This was one question he could not answer at all. His legs were glued to the ground. Or rather, the command to move was not issued yet from the computer. Yet the gazes of the audience, one that completely pierces his mask of confidence and courage are relentless. They want to be sated, and they want it now.

Thus, he walked, like a toddler who just learnt how to. Each step felt manual and unnatural, like overcoming a mountain. By the time he reached the centre, he had already scaled the greatest heights known to man. Sweat beaded from his head uncontrollably, and for some reason, tears emerged from his eyes, completely against his will. Why was he crying? Indeed, no one would know.

He desperately opened his scores, to the right page. But there was no right page. His vision, blurred by the flood of sweat and tears, told him so. He flipped and flipped, but there was no page that seemed remotely familiar.

She was there, throughout the process, as he blacked out. Her silence was just as black.

As if the world isn't black enough already.

---

They were alone, on the tower. The tower was none other than the T. Tower, perhaps the highest in the world, but perhaps not. It does not matter.

The sky was filled with clouds. Not the sort that would ensue thunderstorms and violent downpour though. It could be described as silver, but it would be more appropriate to say they were white. Not the kind of white that is characteristic of snow, but one that is dull, boring and indeed incites a feeling of dread and unrest.

And on the top of the tower, in a restaurant where no one really goes to anymore due to it being too expensive, there they were. Him, and her.

She was clearly speaking, but he could not hear anything for some reason. Not that he was deaf or anything. He could only hear the clouds, moving at a surprisingly fast speed, like those in a timelapse video. It seemed like she was reprimanding him, for his incompetence, for his cowardice, and more and more. But he had not heard her voice in such a long time, that he forgot how to perceive any sound coming from her.

She was beautiful, stunningly beautiful as he knew her. But on that day, on that irritating white morning, he could not see her face. The only thing he saw was her vague figure (still beautiful), and the stark shadows cast upon the pure white background. The shadows of steel, that composes this metallic terrace. They were neither cold, nor warm. They were neutral, absolutely apathetic of this absurd encounter between the couple.

And, as still as a picture, he sat there. At the table. With her, who was merely a shell of the person he had known.

I always wondered whether pairing the words "couple" (or anything to that effect) and "alone" is wrong. Those two were sitting alone. Doesn't that sound strange to you? More so, when it was "him" and "her", right?

"They freeze in their positions as the lights begin to go down slowly. We begin to hear music from the last movement of Mozart’s Dissonant Quartet. Paulina and Roberto are covered from view by a giant mirror which descends, forcing the audience to look at themselves. For a few minutes, the Mozart Quartet is heard, while the spectators watch themselves in the mirror. Selected moving spots flicker over the audience, picking out two or three at a time, up and down rows." - Death and the Maiden, 2.1

---

OP Discussion 14: Sengoku Nadeko's themes, Renai Circulation (Bakemonogatari) and Mousou Express (Otorimonogatari)

"Now, now, really... Why did things have to end up this way?"

No one saw how Sengoku Nadeko would evolve to this aberration, a true monster that is fueled by nothing but jealousy and hatred. No one saw even how such intense and malicious emotions would be able to exist in such an innocent looking and "cute" middle school girl, as testified by almost everyone in the show.

The story of Nadeko is simple. Ever since childhood, from a visit to the Araragis, she fell for Araragi Koyomi, much like many others in the show, to his kindness and rather charismatic demeanor. There is no dramatic moment of realization, or some kind of love at first sight, and there honestly needs no such thing for love to bloom. However, due to the age difference, Koyomi has always treated Nadeko more as a younger sister. Much like Hanekawa, Nadeko has kept her love to Koyomi buried in herself, allowing it to ferment and rot.

In Bakemonogatari, Nadeko was cursed by her classmates for her rejection of a classmate's confession, and was disturbed by the Snake Constrictor. Being meek and shy, she didn't want to trouble anyone, and in particular Koyomi, leading her to try reading up on the curse and solving the problem on her own, by slaughtering the white snakes that inhabit the North White Snake shrine, to no avail. As the problem worsened, she had to call Koyomi, who valiantly battled with the snake in front of the North White Snake shrine. Once again, Nadeko witnessed the altruism displayed by her target of admiration.

In the Second Season (Otorimonogatari arc), the situation seemed similar: A snake aberration, who called himself Kuchinawa-san, appeared to Nadeko as illusions, shocking her every now and then. She initially turned to Koyomi for help again, but this time the snake talked, as a voice in her head. The snake did not understand how she could stay meek when people cursed her behind her back, pushed unwanted tasks to her, and used her for their sake. Using guilt as well for an argument (reminding her of the killing of his brethren), he asked her to find his vessel, and in return would grant some wishes she had. She would then slowly be enticed by the snake to do his bidding, gradually assimilating her personality[1], though still staying meek in her monologues and most of the time in the exterior. Unable to resist the possibility to charm Koyomi with this wish, she eventually would break into his house, where the vessel was hidden, and swallow it, becoming a "god", who rampaged and seriously injured Koyomi and his resident vampire companion, Oshino Shinobu, intending to kill all who denied her love.

All throughout the story, we see Nadeko, whether in Koyomi's point of view in Bakemonogatari, or in first person in Otorimonogatari, as a victim. She was cursed by her classmates, held hostage by an aberration to do his bidding, and seduced by the snake to transform into a cold blooded killer. But the twist comes when Kuchinawa told Nadeko that he never approached her, nor was he able to before her retrieval of his vessel. Everything was made up by Nadeko, and her actions in Otori were entirely an excuse to become god and sate her jealousy and bloodlust, as she learnt how to do so when she researched about the curse in Bake. 

At this point we are confronted with two possibilities: To trust Kuchinawa here, or to trust Nadeko here. We could trust Nadeko, since in her perspective (as we see it in the first episodes), Kuchinawa is a sly and manipulative voice of evil, who wishes to abuse Nadeko to rise to godhood. Yet, there is no denying that Nadeko's hatred and ill-will has such ferocity, witnessed through one of the most violent scenes in the second season. Moreover, throughout the buildup, while Nadeko was still normal, and looked innocent, a lot of characters demonstrated hostility, questioning her integrity and accusing her of pretending to be cute to buy sympathy, which was quite uncalled for. Nadeko, being shy, could not respond.

"Silence, huh?". They demonstrated no pity, wildly contrasting with Koyomi's attitude.

Were they prescient? It turned out that they even underestimated the wrath that Nadeko could demonstrate, or the degree of malevolence, the intent of murder that existed in her. Indeed, when it comes to deducing what a person was thinking, or what motivated a person when he/she commits an atrocity, truth is often elusive. Only he/she knows what he/she was thinking. Even this fact could be disputed, as Nadeko referred to the past events, the whole narrative to the viewers, as a "delusion", merely the unconscious deluding her to insanity. While it does take time for malevolent thoughts to roll up into physical actions, the process could be well hidden, even to the perpetrator himself.

A running theme in the series is the fact that aberrations are in fact human. Or, put another way, humans are the source of aberrations, or that humans are in fact monsters ourselves. In each human there exists the propensity for evil, but we are quick to blame and make excuses, sometimes to the point of deluding ourselves. Is this not the case when Mersault murdered the Arab in cold blood in L'Etranger? Neither Nadeko nor Kuchinawa were reliable narrators, so there was no reason to trust both totally. Even if Kuchinawa was a god (without a vessel), he was an aberration, who could only gain power through people's belief and, in this case, malice that was already present in Nadeko. Meanwhile, it was not a surprise that Nadeko housed such anger that could overturn the world. After all, all that was fictional was the fact that these emotions were materialized. They were as real as it could get, in any human you would find on the streets.

Another thing that could be brought under discussion is destiny. In both OPs, Nadeko refers to destiny:

"Dear god, thank you.

Even if it is just destiny playing a prank on me

I'm glad that I could meet him" - Renai

"Excuses, reasons,

They are all such pain.

It's destiny, so it can't be helped" -Mousou

The whole story revolving around gods, the setting of the shrine, and the supernatural motif of the whole series also point towards the theme of uncontrollable powers, a laid out path for which everything eventually would fall towards. Could Nadeko have prevented this? After all, in the in media res segment at the beginning of Otori, Nadeko lamented how things had to turn out like this, and in her phone conversation with Hitagi Senjougahara, Koyomi's girlfriend, despite her intent to murder, Nadeko still asked whether, if this tragedy had not ever happened, would Hitagi be willing to befriend her. It seemed that Nadeko didn't will this ending totally.

It is often said that one's personality determines one's fate. I used to find this statement quite strange, since personality is something I believe one could change, and will do over time as one grows, and fate is by definition something akin to destiny: Unchangeable and determined. However, now I start to wonder whether it is the other way round, that personality is something that could not be changed, and that it is a manifestation of fate itself. Nadeko, as a shy girl, was bound to attract jealousy and animosity towards her, pushing her to believe that no one is to be trusted. Unable to express herself, she would be misunderstood frequently, and could only use her cuteness to communicate, and eventually to get what she wanted, to maintain her image, and even to extort. It was not that Nadeko was evil when she was born, it was just that she had no choice but to walk the path of delusions and trickery, to the point that she tricked herself to believe that she was just an innocent girl when she could not stop until she got what she wanted, violently.

The world around Nadeko was not a pleasant one either. Except for Koyomi, almost everyone was hostile to her throughout the series. It was reflected in the start of Mousou, the characteristic laughs. At first listen, those laughs did send a great chill down my spine, along with the echoing "ぜんぶ... (everything)". I wondered how such an innocent character could utter such shocking words,

"If the world can't be the way I want,
Then I have no need of it anymore.
I only want one thing:
Everything, everything, everything, everything..." -Mousou

Compare this with the soft and fluffy tune of Renai, it seemed that Nadeko's character almost turned 180 degrees from the start to now.

"Every long journey begins with one little step!
With a stern determination that is set in stone
Build a pile of garbage up to become Yamato Nadeshiko[2]?" -Renai

From the optimistic girl who wanted to change herself to meet Koyomi's standards, to the one who would abandon the world on a whim to consume everything, we see a huge contrast. However, as per the discussion above, do we really have two different people here? All that Nadeko cared about, from the beginning, was Koyomi. No where did she mention anything else, but to get the sight of Koyomi on her.

"Don't take your eyes off me,
Never and ever" -Renai

Could this be called love? We saw in Bake what the epitome of love was, through the revered star-gazing scene in Ep. 12. Nisio Isin seems to want to say that this is not love, but obsession. Through Tsukihi Araragi's questioning, we saw that Nadeko's love was more like obsession with a TV star, or a comic hero, rather than love with a person. She wanted more to possess him than to accompany him. 

Noting that otori (囮) means "decoy", signifying Nadeko's false persona throughout the arc, we return to Nadeko's query: Why did things turn out this way? Who is at fault? Who set out this decoy to fool us about the ending? I would say that everyone was: Nadeko, obviously, for her inability to control her obsession and malicious intents; Kuchinawa, for deluding and abusing this; Her classmates and Koyomi's friends, for being hostile and pushing Nadeko to the brink; and even Koyomi himself, for patronizing Nadeko as a little sister, not treating her maturely. In the end, no one is a hero, and everyone was to blame. Everyone had selfish desires, and this whole fluffy and cute persona of Nadeko was all but a lie constructed throughout all these exchanges. This is why Nadeko is a great character, with the two OPs accompanying the story of her very well.

I got into the Monogatari series because of Renai Circulation, since I thought it was quite cute. I got much more from it, and I was really "glad I could meet" Nadeko.

Credits to AzureDark, http://destination-of-fate.tumblr.com/ for translations and references

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[1]: Highly recommended. The range of tones that could be delivered by Kana Hanazawa (VA of Nadeko) is amazingly demonstrated here.
[2]: 大和撫子, the model of an idealized Japanese woman

Perfection and the Society

"But still, Hanekawa is right..."
"So right that it is scary and makes you cringe."

[Time for Monogatari again! Nekomonogatari Black spoilers (If you are not interested in the plot, skip the second to fourth paragraph)]

Hanekawa Tsubasa, the class representative of Araragi Koyomi's class in Naoetsu Private High School. Despite coming from an abusive family, she is an overachiever in academics, physically well endowed, yet with a kind demeanor and humble personality. In other words, nothing short of perfect. Or is she?

One must imagine how much stress she would need to lead such a grueling existence without a word of complaint.  As one tries to improve himself, and gets rid of some flaws, the bars raise as expectations of him increase, and any flaws left on him stand out more so than ever. For some, Any sane person would need a facet for release of stress accumulated from the mundane and unwavering world that punishes anyone for imperfection. For some it would be friends, and for some, family, lover. Sad to say for our heroine, none of these are readily available, and it is this fact which attracted the aberration onto her, the sawarineko (the meddling cat).

As mentioned in the series, the sawarineko is in fact a weak aberration, nothing that should cause much trouble before being dismissed. Yet, continuous effort by the aberration expert Oshino Meme has failed, and it required Araragi to sacrifice his own body to finally damage the aberration. Yet, at the end it was still not dealt with, and continues to exist in a dormant state.

What caused such an abnormal behaviour? As mentioned, it is not the fact that the aberration itself is strong. It was actually because of the fact that Hanekawa herself refuses to let the aberration be exorcised.

The take home message is then clear: There exist nothing known as perfection. Much as Gen Urobuchi took the world of magical girls and exposed the dark realities behind, Nisio Isin took Hanekawa and mercilessly tore her apart, pointing out that there is no such thing as a perfect person. The more convincing the facade of perfection, the more harmful it is to the person behind the mask, and when the mask falls off, even something as trivial as the sawarineko is able to run rampant.

What even is perfection in the first place? Perfection is the absence of flaws. But with respect to what do we define flaws? When buying a house, I would prefer it to be convenient, near the city centre but potentially up high to muffle noise. To me, this is perfection: A quiet place for me to be alone. To someone who likes nature, however, this would contain the flaw that it is in the city. To a person who likes to party, this house would have the drawback of not being able to accommodate his hobby. In some respects, talking about perfection in a person is also similar, when we are talking about the prospect of romance. Someone that appeals to one may not appeal to another.

Yet, the perfection talked about here is different. It is the quality of being able to appeal to almost everyone. Almost everyone would agree that Hanekawa is attractive in some respects, or at least a very respectable person. In other words, we are not talking about perfection with respect to an individual, but to the society. Yes, indeed, society is the key here.

Society must have been a thing that came to be when humans decided that surviving alone is less effective than surviving as a group. While individuals have contradicting objectives, each one decides to sacrifice some of its utility for "public" utility, so as to maximize the overall gain of the human species. But, as I have explained in previous posts, I believe that towards the end, humans are individuals. To deny the fulfilling of individual wills means to live in an untruthful way. Inevitably, no one in the modern society is truly living an honest life. At least this is what I think.

To put it in another way, society, formed by a large group of humans, is hardly human at all. What public utility means is abstract and mechanical (The analogy of the members of a society as "nuts and bolts" in a "machine" seems quite prescient then). Viewing from the Marxist perspective, we also see that the objectives of a society aligns more with those in power and with great wealth than those otherwise. The Capitalist society thus exists to serve the needs of fewer people than expected. Nietzsche again puts it quite well with his aphorisms:

"Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule."

Now, doesn't the notion to "strive for perfection" seem ridiculous? To pursue perfection means to appeal to this machine, which at the end may or may not give any reward to the hard labour put in to perfect oneself. Society, composing of millions of people, who think in millions of different ways, is a mathematical function that has an unimaginably large amount of variables. Purely thinking in terms of risk and reward, this is definitely an unworthy and potentially damaging investment.

Another important point to mention about society is its literal inhumanity, manifested with the complete lack of emotions and sentiments. The very existence of the society is founded upon the rational realization of maximized public utility. To maintain a society with emotions would be quite self-destructive indeed. Though I may not fully agree and honestly do not care, many can attest to this fact when democratic voting turnouts favour the irrational and emotional choice. Many are furious about this fact, but let us not forget that humans are at the end driven by emotions. Those who denounce this premise, I am sorry to say, are rather inhuman in my eyes.

What this entails, then, is a massive strain that is placed on the individual who wishes to be perfect. A human cannot choose whether it is human. The fact that we exist means we are trying to be human. It is no surprise that such an individual as Hanekawa would choose to adopt the aberration rather than to banish it, for it is the only way to release the intense frustration of the loss of individuality, or should I say humanity. It is also why Meme would have no sympathy for this epitome of perfection, for she, to him, is hardly human at all as she stands, and have we not enough humans to sympathize over than to sympathize a robotic persona?

Finally, as much as I have criticized the notion of a society, I would not declare myself to be against the idea of the current establishment, pertaining to the structure of the society in a general sense. Of course, it would be great to attain the zenith of individualism, but as the world currently stands, I think it is better if we just lied to ourselves and live a convenient life. After all, a century isn't that long, and it is not that I, a lazy, unmotivated and rather dull person, could do anything about humanity anyway.

At least this is what I think.

---

ED Discussion 13: Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises) ED, Hikoukigumo [1]

"Longing to be in the sky,
Speeding through the sky,
A whole life, A vapour trail."

For one that claims to watch anime, my knowledge and experience of the Ghibli canon is embarrassingly narrow. What I watch is always decided on a whim after finishing a particular series, and Ghibli films seem to always fall behind schedule. In any case, I decided to start to remedy this with Kaze Tachinu, a narrative of the life of Jiro Horikoshi, a famous aviation engineer in early 20th century Japan (with fictional additions).

The profession of engineers, much like that of a scientist, is romanticized a lot. One would imagine the genius kid, whose brain literally is filled with endless ideas and can instantly figure out any practical problem, figuring out some extremely subtle detail in a massive project run by engineering giants such as NASA and saves the world of an originally inevitable crisis with seconds to spare. That or endless tinkering and experimenting with every mechanism and device around him. After all, human thinking tends towards simplification and generalizations, so such images are convenient ways out of talking about technical professions whose job descriptions are not often clear.

Of course, in reality, engineers are not perfect machines that output world-saving ideas. Much of engineering work (of course, my thinking is biased towards electronic/software engineering but I suppose other fields are similar) is meeting with clients, squashing bugs, testing and building minor increments that produce barely noticeable improvements in performances. Moreover, of course there are some (read: quite a good bit of) romanticizing in Miyazaki's film, but he does show, even if briefly, a glimpse into a real engineering workplace, and shows the struggles of Horikoshi as he spends years chasing after his dream of designing and building a revolutionary aircraft.

The film was accused by some as defending Imperial Japan, since Horikoshi's aircraft design eventually went into war effort of the axis in WWII. Indeed, this is slightly reminiscent of Der Untergang, which does portray Hitler in a sympathetic light in his final days. The fact that Japan took part in the war as an attacker was only briefly mentioned towards the end, when the war was lost. In the film, Horikoshi repeatedly lamented how Japan is weak, and demonstrated quite a bit of patriotism. In my opinion, I did not feel that the Imperial government is glorified. Rather, the suffering as a result of the war effort was portrayed quite vividly, as Japan, closing itself off to the world, lags behind in technology, much demonstrated by the frustration of Horikoshi. I felt, as I watched the film, that Miyazaki is obviously critical of the notion of war and conflict, and choosing this setting and telling the story in the point of view of an engineer with a clear ambition such as Horikoshi amplifies this theme.

When I watch any show/film, in addition to paying attention to the plot and characters, I also especially like to feel the atmosphere and ambiance of the film. Most of my first impressions and interpretations come from this method. Ghibli films, as I have heard, are particularly rich in background and atmosphere crafting. This film is no exception to this observation. Set in the 20th century, as globalization only really started several decades ago, Japan feels like a mixture of modernity and tradition, civilization and backwardness. Horikoshi is a rather unique individual, and he is made even more special in this setting as one of the pioneers of aeronautical science in Japan. His ambition is rather ill placed in a milieu such as 20th century Japan, as Japan struggles to follow the footsteps of giants like Germany. These confusing and dark times make the purity of Horikoshi's dreams shine even brighter.

I suppose this film is quite apt as Miyazaki's last film before his retirement. In a sense the film is quite biographic, describing an artisan who wishes to add to the world's beauty through his creations. It is certainly an inspiration to old and young alike, to kindle or rekindle the passion of creativity. I saw in this film, however, the fatefulness of Horikoshi's life, as he is swept along in the flow of time, enduring the tumultuous waves of conflict. Yet, to not be drowned in despair, and relentlessly, bit by bit, construct the landscape he has dreamt of in his entire life takes a special kind of talent. Despite destined to vanish like a thin vapour trail, at least he lived true to himself and his wishes.

---

[1]: Also listen to the cover by Goose House (Group that sang Hikaru Nara, Shigatsu OP)

Instrumentalism

"If the world can’t be the way I want,
Then I have no use for it anymore.
I only want one thing:
Everything [...]" - Sengoku Nadeko on love

Apparently, the word "instrumentalism" can be used to represent a whole school of thought in the philosophy of science, where science is treated as a means rather than an end to our understanding of reality. Theories are weighed more on their usefulness as tools that relate the cause and effects we observe in the physical world, but not necessarily their illumination on realities that are inaccessible to us. However, I am no profound philosopher, and will therefore simply muse on the attitude of being instrumentalist in learning, and as a general world view in this post.

"Instrumentalist" is one of the words I heard very often from my English/Theory of Knowledge teacher back in secondary school. As I entered the IB, and also simultaneously when I dabbled in the field of Olympiad physics, my view on education and seeking of knowledge changed quite radically. Simply put, I had no idea what the true purpose of learning was until then. Well, that is not entirely true, since the purpose of learning for me is to do well in exams so I could be spared of my guilt. So that is, I suppose, a purpose.

However, that is definitely a purpose that would be considered "instrumentalist" by my English teacher. On the surface, having an instrumentalist point of view, especially on the task of learning, is less, shall I say, "correct" and "noble" than the other side of the coin: To learn for the sake of curiosity, and for the betterment of one's understanding of the world. Yet, as we, as students, progress through the standard journey of schooling, exams become actually more and more important, and having an instrumentalist goal would seem even more justified than ever. Perhaps the obvious answer to the conflict between these views would be a balance between both, and that is what I strive to be nowadays that I have seen the genuinely attractive side of learning. Then, the problem may be to find where the balance point is, or rather, true to the spirit of this blog, whether it is fundamentally a valid approach to learning.

The disadvantages of the instrumentalist view, of course, is the usual: Forgetting almost everything after a major test, only limiting oneself to the knowledge mandated by a syllabus that is more designed to administer tests easily than to truly impart meaningful knowledge at times. The motivation to learn thus is entirely driven by competition, or ego, to prove that one is worthy. This is probably more than common in the case of Chinese education before the fall of Qing in the 20th century. Bar a select few, most study to do well in the exam in order to gain a good position in the government (學而優則仕).

To defend this attitude might be a more subtle case to consider. Is there anything fundamentally wrong with motivating learning with ego? Whether one desires to be the case or not, ego comprises a large part of our mind. Without a sense of self-worth one would be on the brink of absurdity. Moreover, how one absorbs knowledge, at the end, is entirely up to his/her own volition. No one can force someone to adopt a certain mode of learning effectually. Thus, while there may be difference in competence between people with different end goals in learning, there should be no judgment on who is right (as with most issues discussed in this blog).

Then comes the problem of examinations. To do well in an examination is the holy grail of instrumentalism as applied to education. There is something so enchanting about numerical indications of one's ability to do well in an exam, in a particular time and in a particular setting, in a particular condition and a particular state of mind, that it is enough to cause paranoia and even breakdown of sanity in some extreme cases. Yet, the concept of examinations is so ingrained in modern education that I struggle to imagine an efficient system of education where exams do not exist.

It thus seem that this discussion is leading to the general attitude of instrumentalism in life. To remove instrumentalism is to remove purpose, effectively, since the search of purpose is difficult, and instrumentalism offers an easy way out to keep one driven. To put more concretely, the decisions one make in life mostly only impacts one's own life, and hence by simple logic, the reasoning leading to such decisions must only depend on consideration of oneself, not anyone else. Therefore, if we say that to be instrumentalist is to switch the goal of an action from one "true" and "noble" goal to another that is perhaps less so, some actions that are considered instrumentalist may not be so to the person performing such actions, since in the viewpoint of the actor, such "noble" goals may not be a purpose at all: they are not something that they desire at all. Can we then say that instrumentalism is a force of good that drives people to inadvertently perform good actions by providing to individual needs?

In a world intricately linked by cause and effect, this would seem to be very much the case. Much like a world contained in a video game, by setting correct rewards for certain actions, they are performed naturally by forces akin to those described in free market economics. Where there is a demand of "good", there is a supply of such "good" provided the "consumer" is willing and able to pay the reward. There are two problems to such a world though: One rather philosophical and lofty, and one rather concrete and immediate.

To base a world on instrumentalist and purely rational economic thought is to strip all so-called "beauty" from the world. This is true to wildly different degrees in different people, but one purpose of life for most is the seeking of truth and beauty ("Beauty is truth, and truth beauty") There would be little proponent to drive the creation of music, art, or knowledge. In the case of knowledge, examining in a more (socially) instrumentalist point of view, one might barely push forward its boundary in one's lifetime, yet the knowledge may be used future generations in a very beneficial way. There is little motivation for one to engage in research (especially with the oversaturation of academics nowadays) because of its often small material reward that may not even manifest in the short life of a human, which is why governments often have to pay some irrationally large amount of money into research and development (but even governments, made inevitably of mortal humans, face this problem). These are all things that are desired by humans, but are inevitably doomed to be undermotivated for an instrumental society.

The second reason builds on what I have said. It is exemplified by the quote I opened this post with. If one adopts a purely instrumental mindset, there is no reason one would care about this world's benefit at all if one's observable reality is so limited. To make decisions solely based on one's own selfish benefit is actually the most rational thing to do, and all other paths that might sacrifice (minor) benefits for an individual for (sometimes major) benefits of  are simply irrational and basically the wrong approach according to instrumentalists. Obviously, one can argue from shallow moral theories that this is wrong, but even from a point of view above that of moral judgments, I personally would not want you to do things that harm your surroundings, because your surroundings rather inadvertently involves me. Therefore there is a strong (or even absolutely correct) justification for everyone to pursue instrumentalism, yet a strong motivation for everyone to prevent others from doing so at the same time. This may be reminiscent of the prisoner's dilemma.

At the end of the day, we need instrumentalism to motivate us to do anything really, because the human mind is very prone to being attracted by shallow and short term rewards, and this is sometimes the only thing that appear on our mind that we cannot comprehend the true reason why something is done and are fixated on the instrumentalist reason. To adopt the instrumentalist motivation in doing something may affect the eventual outcome, but at least the action that may be considered "good" is actually done. I suppose the least that we can do is to embrace this weakness of human mind and stop living on a hypocritical high ground where all actions must be noble. This is perhaps the most common form of hypocrisy used by people (instrumentally) to sell their actions as noble and lure people into believing their intentions. I have nothing against being instrumental, as long as one is upfront with it.

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ED Discussion 12: The Garden of Words ED, Rain [1]

"I don't have the strength anymore
To hold onto a sky welled up with tears.
If you would stay unchanging, hurting me in the corner of my heart
I won't need you anymore"

I have always disliked rain. It is not that I do not recognize its importance in the water cycle and how it maintains a constant water supply for living things, but that in the horribly limited scope of my daily life, it is an inconvenience, possibly drenching me and forcing me to take an umbrella, as well as darkening the skies that would otherwise be a nice warm azure colour (my favourite colour I suppose).

The analogy of rain to love, as in another of Shinkai Makoto's wonderful films Kotonoha no Niwa, is then immediately apparent. As Shinkai himself puts it, love is "uncontrollable and unstoppable", and at worst destructive to the perfectly constructed fine skies of rationality. In a civilized society, where everyone is assigned work that depends on one's sanity and rationality to complete timely, and people who lost this ability would be rendered useless or outcasts even, an emotion as strong as love seems out of place, at least for me.

Kotonoha no Niwa takes place in Tokyo, one of the most metropolitan places in the world. For me, the very first image that comes to mind when Tokyo is mentioned would be its advanced technology, bustling streets, wonderful ensemble of modernized colours blending into each other, creating a feast for the eyes: perhaps why it is my favourite city I have ever visited. Yet, this film is not about the prosperous and metropolitan city, not about the success story of the modern paradise. Most of the interactions between the main characters take place in Shinjuku Gyoen, a place of nature, quite different or even out of place in the heart of Shinjuku.

This other-worldliness extends, of course, to our main characters: Akitsuki Takao, a 15 year old student that is not that much of a student but more of a self-taught shoe apprentice, and skips school every time rain falls to visit the gardens; and Yukino Yukari, a 27 year old teacher of Takao's school, bullied into escaping from her job by upperclassmen.

In a sense, it could be said that it is the strangeness of the couple, their alienation from the expectations of their characters that has brought them together. It is almost as if their strangeness complement each other. Despite being a middle school student, Takao has clear goals, and is mature in his pursuit of dreams. Yet, when faced with the real world, reflected through his meeting with Yukino, it still presents an unfathomable sense of mystery, a primordial sense of fear of the vast world of adulthood. On the other hand, despite being a teacher, Yukino realizes she has plenty to learn, and through Takao's optimism found a way out other than escapism.

Recent events have brought me to ponder upon the meaning behind the flow of time and aging. As I turned 20, I felt this extremely overwhelming sense of uncertainty about the real world. Hitherto, my life goal only consists of examinations, homework, fulfilling the expectation of others, doing stuff in a prescribed manner so as to earn compliments. It is as if the "walls of absurdity" suddenly closed in to me. Under these circumstances, while I am not even sure who I am without these meaningless metrics to inflate my own ego, who am I to touch upon mature emotions such as affection?

Rewatching this film did give me some reassurance that the feeling of alienation is rather commonplace (and, of course, offers consolation to unrequited feelings). In contrast to my viewing near February, when all I could think of was my obsession, I started to notice that the film brings out a theme beyond love and longing, but one of genuine loneliness and absurdity. Shinkai mentions in an exposition of the themes of this movie the concept of love as "lonely sadness" (孤悲). Much as one longs for reciprocation in love, one desires a sense of "nostalgia" for order and familiarity in this cold and unresponsive world, but unfortunately, these wishes are often left unsatisfied.

Whenever I feel that my emotions left among plenty of tear-soaked tissues from the cold and cruel February are coming back to haunt me, this song is one of the few I put on repeat. There is something really soothing about Motohiro Hata's performance, almost bringing me into the shelter of the pavilion in the Shinjuku Gyoen. There will be no one waiting for me there, nor will there be anyone "staying with me" in the faint rolls of thunder, and the thick mist of perpetual rain from the raining season obscures all that I consider beautiful, the clockwork-like metropolitan of Tokyo. However, is this uncertainty not a beauty in itself, a chance for me to see myself in a view that is clearer than ever?

---

[1]: I actually think the original performance of Rain by Senri Oe (or at least the version on YouTube) is not very in sync with the tone that I think the movie is trying to convey (It's actually pretty funny). Motohiro Hata's cover, though, is a much better candidate, and brilliantly concludes the film.

Delusions

"These delusions are running wild.
Hopping on an express train,
I am coming to see you."

I would like to talk about two kinds of magic today. Unfortunately, there is nothing charming, attractive or surprising about the phenomena discussed below. They are but semi-interesting discoveries of the mechanism of the mind, some kind of trick that the brain plays on itself if you will. 

1. Desire, Obsession and Possession

What do you want?

That was quite a demanding question, and one would normally infer a rather hostile tone from reading this sentence. Indeed, this is what a stereotypical protagonist would exclaim, in desperation to overcome evil. As I have discussed in the previous posts, wishing largely stems from greed. Desires and wants, being one step further, seems to undeniably have intricate links with selfishness. And, true to the usage of the word, when one is unable to control his desires, he is considered an evil or insane person.

I feel like I have to interject here with the thought that a person being evil does not necessitate hatred towards the person, since it is the natural predisposition of someone, and that cannot be helped. Nietzsche remarked on the fact that actions done based on love are "beyond good and evil", but as I often observe, all aspects of the human mind is, in fact, beyond what a shallow distinction of morality can cover, but I digress.

Despite the complexity of the brain, one can only have a limited amount of thoughts. The mind, at any instant, or even over a period of time, is unfortunately finite (giving rise to such fantasies as instrumentality). It follows that there is a finite amount of desires one can have. Surely, in a semi-socialist society, where individual desires are often suppressed, it is not detrimental to obsess over a wide range of things? Yet we see people running wild with desires all over the world: Money, power, affection, carnal desires to say the least. Why are we so irrational about desires, and are so willing to destroy our rationality (or, towards an extreme, sanity) over it?

What happens when the finite amount of desires a person has gets fulfilled? Of course, quantitatively, once some desires are sated, the person concerned would be in a position that is better off than previously. Does this mean that his desires will hitherto be diminished? This is often (counter-intuitively) proven false, as one seeks more after one desire is sated, tying back to the fact that wishes are never fulfilled in the most perfect means. In fact, it is often the case that the more one gets satisfied, the more he desires, as seen from the fact that the rich are often the most greedy, the higher-ups the most power-hungry.

This is the first delusion that our minds play constantly: The delusion of satisfaction. From the fact that the rate of generation of desires is proportional to the satisfaction of desires, we can deduce an exponential growth of needs as a person lives and strives to satisfy himself, rather like an uncontrolled nuclear reaction. The way out here, then, seems to be to not start this reaction at all, to have no desire for satisfaction. Indeed this is why resistance to temptations is a fundamental axiom to many moral doctrines.

But I am not here to preach moral standards. To be honest, I am quite against these kinds of so-called moral doctrines that strangle human nature. I am here to highlight this observation, to examine it rationally, and perhaps to offer some solace to people who have their desires unfulfilled constantly. Autonomy lies central in the beauty of human nature (if there is any such beauty in this rather imperfect construct anyway). At the end, if this leads to the self-destruction of mankind, at least we can say that we stayed true as humans towards the end.

2. Knowledge and the omniscient

"But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground." - The Great Gatsby

With the advent of computers, much has been done over the recent years on technology surrounding "computer vision"; that is, to mimic the ability of human sight and perceive the light that is emitted or reflected by the physical world, making interpretations about them. The power in computer vision is your usual augmentation capabilities that technology offers. Regardless of medium, we employ vision to perceive and to learn, to gain knowledge. Computer vision gained traction precisely because of the ability to deploy the power of computing to gain and process even more information around us.

Yet, is there a time when we do not want to learn, or gain information? For a computer, maybe it would be the point where its storage cannot handle the amount of information fed into its system. This is why selectivity and efficiency are important themes in computer vision: To reject extraneous and uninformative noise. However, for a human, the rate of loss of information, simply by prioritization of the brain and selective forgetting of unwanted information, we do not seem to have a limiting bound to information that we cannot store, for practical purposes.

A lot of deities in various religions are crafted in the face of humans: They have a similar image to humans, except that they also have boundless capabilities, one of which is omniscience. They do not need to learn, for they already know everything, and are perceiving everything at every possible angle. Both their storage and perception capabilities are infinite. The question now is whether we can internalize these capabilities as humans, who are still prone to emotions.

When I read The Great Gatsby back during the IB, and whenever I came across this inanimate pair of eyes of Dr Eckleburg on the billboard, I would think about how he would have felt if those really were his eyes. To see a world full of greed, hatred, jealousy and discrimination, the relentlessly Capitalist and deluded world of The Great Gatsby, where money and status are the only things that define a person, is something I was doubtful if anyone could bear to see. Does one really need to look into the mind of Daisy as she cries over the mere sight of the colourful clothes, and, without a trace of remorse, draws away from Gatsby after she crashed his car into a person? No matter how dark fictional stories are made to be, it is impossible to even begin to trace the multi-dimensional darkness of a willfully evil or helplessly ignorant human (which exists everywhere, at any time).

Curiosity may be a good thing that drives us to better ourselves by learning about the world, but a lot of this world is so unworthy of learning that I deem an uncontrolled sense of curiosity the second delusion people play on themselves. Just like desire for material objects, unbounded desire for knowledge may very well be the downfall of one's mental faculty.

While I believe that "ignorance is bliss" is a phrase that is invented to deceive people to stop questioning about the antics of the evil, I am rather sick of seeing people with unbounded optimism and idealism to this world fall to their own failure to recognize the fact that some side of humanity is better off left untouched and unexplored. Unlike computers, we are fallible to emotions. And the moment we sacrifice emotions to learn, we fall into insanity, never to return again. Yet, this is what growing up means: To start off with a clean slate, then gradually darkening it with revelations of how self-destructive and cruel humans can be.

Some parts of the human, by nature, are irrational, because it is better off being so.

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OP Discussion 11: Nisemonogatari "Karen Bee" OP, Marshmallow Justice Slightly NSFW (Don't be such a baby)

"This is my fate! I’m telling you!
I can’t leave things the way they are!
If I were to give a reason,
It’s because I’m a hero, an ally of justice!"

 

Nisemonogatari is another easy 10/10 for me (though it does ramp up the "fan-service" by quite a bit compared to the first season).

Truth and fiction are themes that are often explored in philosophy and literature alike, as it is imperative that actions and thoughts are appropriate to the well being, of an individual and the society. However, as I have mentioned in previous posts, there are many instances where fictitious statements, accounts or even causes are more informative and valuable than totally truthful ones. Nisemonogatari (A portmanteau of 偽物 (that which is fake) and 物語 (story)) explores the boundary between reality and falsity, and examines the all too common stigma around the quality of falsehood around three (or possibly more) main characters, representing different manifestations of the theme.

The character featured in this OP is Karen Araragi, one of the "Fire Sisters" of Koyomi Araragi, the protagonist. It would seem that she fills the niche position of the energetic character in a typical anime series, with a strong affinity to sports, a cheerful demeanor and an often playful attitude. What defines her though, and the "Fire Sisters" in fact, is her relentless and "scorching" passion for justice. Unable to suppress the desire to right the wrong, she confronts everyone she deems destructive to the justice of the society, and actively hunt them down to teach them a lesson, not giving up until the evils are defeated.

Where does the lie come in in this very stereotypical story of a hero, then? Well, if we examine her actions we see that all she does is enact justice on others' problems. Being born into a rather peaceful family, the sisters of Araragi have never been subjected to hardship, as far as the series is concerned. In the process of "helping others solve their problems", is it not true that Karen is simply acting on her own volition and sating her own desire to act as the hero? In the series, it is seen that Karen's actions brought Koyomi into heaps of trouble simply because of her relentlessness in pursuing Kaiki (more on him later) for his curse on Nadeko and her schoolmates. Can her delivery of some contrived sense of justice balance out the people she hurt in the process? These are the questions that the series asks as the Karen Bee arc progresses, eroding the sympathy of Karen in favour of the initially antagonistic and dislikable Kaiki.

However, all is not lost for Karen, as the series turns back into Kaiki surprisingly complimenting Karen during his rather anticlimactic confrontation with Koyomi and Senjougahara. Two things are mentioned: That there can be no true justice unless one is facing his/her own problems with conviction, and that there can be no justice if one has no strength. Lacking both qualities, Karen, unfortunately, is a fake hero. Despite this, having a desire for justice was a start, as Kaiki remarks, and that the blame should not be on her for causing the ruckus surrounding Koyomi, at least not on her penchant for fighting evil. To fight the evil, one must first desire to do so. And even though Karen does a bad job at the fighting itself, and has no clear conviction, her courage is to be acknowledged.

In becoming real, one must first pretend, and in the process of pretending, is it not true that one gains more insight and legitimacy than the real? This is what Kaiki leaves us with as a lesson, and that we shall examine later.

The OP itself is a very good reflection of what is to be expected of Karen's character: Passionate, energetic and always ready to fight. It continues on with the theme of representing personalities with animals, with the bee being featured here. I suppose there are some resemblance to the character concerned: Hot-blooded and unrelenting, but quite easy to dismiss if not in a group. As usual for Monogatari OP's, it is filled with abstract patterns and play on colour that I find remotely similar to a pondering person's thoughts, and that seemed oddly calming for me. Anyway, I have to say that as I listened to this repeatedly over the past few weeks, some of the energy of Karen rubbed off on me, and motivated me to go on. Even though I may just be a normal student with a regrettable lack passion or skills, just pretending to be one that can solve some problems could be enough for now. 

I would have to say that in terms of characters, the Monogatari series has produced some of the most meaningful and interesting development and traits I have ever seen. While a lot of the elements of the story are quite absurd and fantastical, the themes it explores hits deep into reality. It is precisely these characters, presented by straddling paradoxically between reality and fiction, that exposes reality and the human nature the best.

(credits to /r/animethemes and kafka-fuura for translation)

Dreams

"A dream... I am seeing a dream.
A dream I see every day. The endless dream..."

The closest humans could reach to the world of fantasy, the nearest a mere mortal can experience the world beyond the limits of physics, a theater of supreme surrealism... How could one not remember the extremely romantic, yet ever so evanescent notion of a dream?

A dream could take on two common meanings: Either the plunge into a world of imagination of extreme realness when a person is sleeping, or the state for which a person very much desires to be in, some kind of achievement or change to the world supposedly (perhaps the word aspirations would be a good synonym). Despite the fundamental difference between these two types of dreams, one being rather uncontrollable and one quite the opposite, there are overlaps between these kinds of "dreams". In any case, a dream is irrational, for it violates the bounds of physical laws, which are quite well modeled by theories and laws derived from reason. A person literally substitutes his own mind for the real world (subconsciously) in a dream. It follows that once a person gives up the notion of reason, or regard for physical existence, he could end up in a state not much different from being in a dream.

I have remarked on the fact that I seemed to have drifted into a state of mind not far from "being in a dream" recently, most likely because of my preoccupation with emotions. While a person tasked with tasks requiring rational thinking (evidently, such as students) are "daydreaming" would quite surely be considered to be in a non-optimal state, to say the least, I found that this concerned me no more. This is strange, for I have always been quite aware of what people think of my work (sadly a major proponent for me to work). To exist in a dreamy state liberated me from the tethers of expectations and fear. Though this dream stems from something quite frustrating and melancholic, the feeling of longing, it nonetheless carries an abstract beauty within its mist, free from the sharp edges of reality.

To be able to dream means to be able to create an entirely fictional context (though based on fragments of reality). I suppose we can also call this creating a whole universe, for it is not much of a difference between an egocentric view of the world, which is not entirely unsubstantiated if you consider the fact that every one is the dead centre of his/her own observable universe. If sleeping suspends the consciousness of a person, dreaming moves this consciousness to a new plane. This whole process, even more remarkably, occurs under the covers of subconsciousness, and is not a form of expression: what one dreams only concerns oneself. Sleeping may seem to be a blunder in evolution, a necessity because of the inability for a body to function continuously, but the act of dreaming seems to grant a meaning to the act of sleeping, of slipping the conscious self into a plane where no external influence is present. It is probably the closest a person comes to playing god.

I feared the notion of dreaming when I was a child, mostly because of the frequent nightmares I had. For the week or so following the occurrence of a nightmare, I would try to stay awake as late as possible, to prevent myself from plunging into the abyss I was in during the dream, or being killed by the monsters present the day before. Nightmares did not decrease as I grow up, though now, obviously I have learnt to shake them off since I know they are not real. Yet, just as there are no villains without heroes, there is a certain beauty in nightmares, being the manifestations of negative emotions in real life. It is in these bad dreams that I truly see what I fear, and why I fear it. The IB exams seemed not quite scary when you ask me when I am fully awake, since I know I have already taken numerous exams before, and have prepared amply and satisfactorily to my standards, up to what I can possibly do. Yet, my nightmares are mostly based on going to the exams late, missing an important event etc. In other words, there is no denial in the world of dreams. All the subconscious desires and fears are fully reflected in this film staged in the plane of dreams. This brutal and uncontrollable honesty is perhaps why dreams possess beauty.

Dreaming is also a hallmark of humanity. Not only are robots almost invariably incapable of emotions, one that forms random arrangements of its memory every once in a while is not too helpful of an attribute. Though a lot of effort has been spent on on intelligence that can emulate and interact with humans past the uncanny valley, imitating the functions of a human brain, I do not suppose dreaming is a goal that would be pursued or prioritized any time soon.

Yet, dreaming has been a large part of my life, and should be for a lot of people, or at least should have taken quite a bit of their time. Even though it might not contribute to anything concrete in reality, it could be regarded as a rest for the emotional faculties of the mind, an emotional counterpart for the physical rest that sleeping grants perhaps. Most importantly, dreaming allows one to face his emotions and fears upfront, and, even after the details or traces of the dreams disappear, the motivation it grants does not fade.

I have been in the state where my emotions take over my reason for so long that I have started to find this rather romantic.

"Yesterday, I had a dream,

A dream of long ago.

Within the dream, the two of us
were still thirteen...

standing on the vast field blanketed in snow 

as far as eyes could see.

In the distance, the lights shimmering in houses
were set sparsely, far and wide.

All that was left upon the newly fallen snow 

were our footprints.

Just like that,

we wished without hesitation, that one day...

The two of us would be able

to see the cherry blossoms together again"

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ED Discussion 10: Welcome to the NHK ED, Modokashii Sekai no Ue de

"Though this world is tiny, why is it too big for my hands?
Though this world is endless, why is it too small for my hands?
Hey, in this irritating morning light, I want to laugh with you together."



For most of my time, I suppose my world, just akin to Satou Tatsuhiro's in Welcome to the NHK, is confined by the four walls of my room. In the current age, everything can be done and expressed through the Internet (including my thoughts here), and as a result a person as lazy as I am can treat this 10 metres squared space as my world.

Being quite the shut-in, I have been engaged in a positive feedback loop that always increases my fear of the external and the unknown. Introversion has accentuated my thoughts of self-loathing and has thus increased my insecurity about talking with others, closing myself off, which leads to even less contact with the outer world, leading to even more inability to and fear of conversing with others.

Of course, it is easy to blame the external world for this, like Satou blaming "the conspiracy by the NHK", and Yamazaki blaming the opposite gender. After all, it is natural to fear and antagonize the unknown, the unfamiliar and that which is different or alien. Watching the pair (especially Satou) living a life of delusions is rather comedic, but, just like the protagonist, the "realization" when the mirage of self-worth pops is immediately followed by serious self-deprecation. In the confines of loneliness, it is difficult for the mind not to wander. Thus, like a schizophrenic, the emotions of a person that barely moves at all can range from extreme to extreme in the course of barely a day.

Yet, this ED is very calm. So calm in fact that it is quite unfitting to the madness displayed in the journeys into Satou's mind in the show. The reason I chose this song as today's discussion is the strange feeling of familiarity that it gave me recently, one that creeps at me and gave me a surprise at how much it manages to convey. [1] Why, indeed, that when we can travel to places almost instantly compared to people from centuries ago, when the world is shrunk to within two days' travelling, that I feel only comfortable in these four suffocating walls? Why, when there is so much to explore, so many people to talk to in this world, do I feel that it is often inaccessible and quite uninteresting and boring? These two lines almost perfectly sums up my thoughts when the "realization" hits.

These paragraphs do seem quite depressing, but I do want to use this opportunity to trace out what I think my inadequacy is. There quite some instances where I feel that I am an insufficient person, not deserving of the nice friends and wonderful environment that I reside and learn in. And indeed many a times I have been told that I should travel and explore what is unknown, and I would ponder upon my apparent anomaly. Yet, this insufficiency in my character has been such a great obstacle to overcome that, being a lazy person, I have not the will to attempt to do so. There is nothing too special in this ED, and the tone is strangely calm and light for such sombre psychological topics this anime discusses, but it manages to create this unsettling feeling that has stuck with me in the past few days.

[1]: This song technically comes from the voice of Misaki Nakahara, the girl who tries to get Satou out of his "hikkikomori ways" but it was revealed that she has problems of loneliness akin to Satou, so I guess her thoughts are still quite apt.

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Bonus Music: So Ra No Wo To OP, Hikari no Senritsu

(I meant to discuss this OP at length in the main section for a few posts already because of its stunning visuals and music, but every time I start I find myself lost for words and unable to continue. So here it is.)

"Sound of the sky, echo high and transcend all sorrows.

Everything reflected in your eyes are part of reality.

Even tears have no chance of holding you here.

From the cascading radiance, call forth the morrow."

Probability and Determinism

[Some probably (heh) uninformed ramblings about probability and its philosophy]

"I knew it all along
that words were nothing but lies
Easily forgotten
Uncertain and vague."

In the most basic sense, there are two extremes to statements: Truths and falsities. Most of what we hear every day lies somewhere in between, whether it is fully truthful, a partial truth, or straight up lies. Of course, some truths are not very meaningful, while some fictional accounts are quite illuminating and reflects even greater truths than simple statements can ever hope to achieve.

Probabilistic statements, dictated by the axioms of probability and measure, however, seem to exist on another level above this spectrum of truth. While it is mathematically true, it is not illuminating to most who are going to make a decision based on the measures. Moreover, since observation, a human action, is regrettably restrictive and finite, there is no objective testament to the truthfulness of probabilistic statements. We say that the probability of getting heads from a fair coin is 0.5, yet to make a decision we only flip it once, and once flipped, the outcome is fixed. There is no more uncertainty, and so the probabilistic statement we made is no longer relevant and useful at all. This stems from the fact that we are only concerned about one of the infinite flips that could be conducted. This is impractical at best, and frustrating at worst to decision makers guessing the conditions of reality (randomly distributed) and making judgments based on such conditions, since the statement may skew judgment, but by no means prohibits any possibilities, no matter how small its probability is, from happening. No matter how advanced the underlying science and sophisticated the mathematics are, luck cannot be outsmarted.

Yet, are we actually talking about luck? Sometimes, probability seems to me as a shortcut out of complexities that we fail to fully comprehend and control. Examples of such uses are plentiful: Modelling noise in communication channels, motion of gas particles in a room, forecasting weather etc. In classical physics, every particle can technically be tracked to infinite resolution, provided we know the particle's state at a certain time. In other words, the world is deterministic according to classical physics. It makes no sense to say that the state of a system is randomly distributed when its evolution stems from deterministic phenomena. Thus, probabilistic statements made on these cases are not even technically truthful, but may be rather informative and has been held to be quite accurate. Yet again, human observations are quite finite, so we are not concerned with possibilities that are so small that they are not expected to happen at sensible time scales.

And then, there is this oddity called quantum physics, stating that the world is fundamentally probabilistic. This took the world by surprise in the 20th century, because we no longer know exactly what a measurement is. What is so special about the act of measurement, or the action at the infinitesimal time frame we call the "present", that transforms future events, randomly distributed, to history, definite and theoretically infinitely resolvable and tractable? There are plenty of theories on this, but I shall not go too deep into this. The result, however, is that probabilistic statements have yet again taken the throne of theoretical truthfulness.

Despite the efforts to reconcile quantum physics with macroscopic theories such as general relativity, it still remains as a theory for subatomic particles, and at best predicts behaviours of molecules. We know that our size is too large that there can be little to no influence of quantum physics on our daily lives. Can we then still say that the world, and, more precisely, the human society, is (practically) deterministic? In a reductionist point of view, societies are but interactions of minds, which in turn is the electrical impulses of our brains. Assuming that this is still quite a macroscopic phenomenon, it seems strange that we would have to resort to guesswork to predict what the future of our society will be, barring influences from nature. This is quite reminiscent of the problem of "modelling" complicated classical systems, except that treating each person as a particle is in itself an oversimplification, making this problem even more unattainable.

Even as we abstract from the microscopic world, in this society of every growing size, we meet strange faces almost every day. Having the necessity to interact with the outside world, a model of human behaviour must, to some extent, exists within every person. Rather as we cannot start to fully grasp the complexity of natural systems consisting of far too many variables, we take chances in all our endeavours with other humans, complex structures of little neurons which fire multitudes of signals every second in a way we still have yet to be able to fully understand.

Could probability be considered as an excuse to ignorance then? I would have to say that I am very guilty of using this excuse, evident from the frequent use of words such as "perhaps" and "possibly" in my speech. Yet, at the same time, theories such as hypothesis testing seems to inform us that probabilistic statements are not only different from absolute truths, but exist at a higher plane, and contains much more information. Once we are ordered to make a decision, we reduce a probabilistic statement to an absolute one, effectively throwing away the richer spectrum that is offered by the former. And, p-value testing, a human and rather arbitrary standard, may result in a spurious result, and as a result create a falsity out of truth, so to speak.

The study of probability also made me go back into thinking about something I have put down for quite a while: determinism. I believed that since nothing macroscopic is inherently probabilistic (since we, living in the macroscopic world, are way too large for any quantum effects to matter), there is only one way things will turn out. Are theories objecting determinism simply excusing ignorance with chance then? Moreover, if the world is non-deterministic, then it must be that the human mind is something very special, since it is the only agent capable of altering the path of the universe, bearing in mind that determinism and free-will revolve around highly anthropocentric matters. I found this quite difficult to accept, since I believe that the mind can be viewed in a reductionist perspective. Evidently, the argument between determinism and free will boils down to the nature of probability itself, if I were to hold the premise of the non-uniqueness of the human mind.

Many have abhorred the use of probability in scientific discourse, such as the famous Albert Einstein himself. Yet, probability, initially thought as the mathematics of gamblers and opportunists, have made into the hall of applied mathematics, and is used widely in physics and engineering. Could this be the answer to the struggle of humans with the inherent complexity and uncertainty of nature, and of the future that lies before them? It seems quite an escapist answer to such a profound but essential question, but until we are able to finally unlock the power to model every single particle in the universe, this theory will suffice.

Perhaps.

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ED Discussion 9: Kill la Kill ED, Gomenne, Iikoja Irarenai

"Sorry… I’m nothing like the honor student you pictured
Two of my shirt buttons aren’t buttoned
Like a path through a back alley, the unknown is a sweet temptation
Tonight, I’ll let you in on my secret that I haven’t told anyone"
  

I am bad with words.

This means that my character is often quite opaque. A lot of people around me have remarked on this fact, or perhaps simply do not bother to interact with me at all because of how cold I look. This is, I surmise, one of the reasons why I rather involuntarily put on another more presentable face in front of others to maintain the possibility some form of conversation and hence companionship (the other reason being that there is no way someone would accept my full personality I keep to myself).

Indeed, sometimes assuming multiple identities is not voluntary, but rather determined by the traits and fate of the character himself. Consider Ryuuko Matoi from Kill la Kill, a rather strange show to start with. Typically the role of this heroic protagonist, starting with nothing but bravery, fighting against some insurmountable edifice for a simple moral cause would star a male character. Yet, we see Ryuuko assuming this role instead, with even greater and exaggerated forcefulness than expected. Same goes for Kiryuuin Satsuki. Disregarding the obvious excuse for fan service, the choice of female characters could be said to be feminist.

However, is this their true identity? After the whole crisis caused by Ragyo, they return to their normal lives. And by normal lives, I mean very typical, perhaps slightly tomboyish schoolgirl characters, those of which to be expected from typical SoL series. It is at this point that I was reminded that Honouji Academy is, after all, a high school. It is therefore fate and milieu that have transformed the faces of the sisters, from typical students to iron-clad warriors fighting for truth and power.

Hence, to the first episodes of this show, this ED seems out of place. We are talking about war here, matter of life and death, scaling of unreachable heights and tales of heroic strife. The ED instead portrays Ryuuko as a normal high school delinquent, walking along the streets of an ordinary town, gazing at a wedding dress and having a crepe like normal teenage girls do. So normal that it was unnerving at first. The painfully ordinary setting around Ryuuko makes her stand out like a sore thumb. Yet, to think of Ryuuko as simply some incessantly fueled gladiator is a wild oversimplification. This is where the character of Ryuuko really shines: To be able to adopt an apparent persona, the fearless warrior in the show, but deep down is but a typical student, perhaps tired from what others' are constantly expecting of her. This is where she really becomes a character.

As I have established earlier, many may think that since I have some slightly better exam results, I am a workaholic, and that I am fully devoted to studies and is a staple good student. Yet, deep down I know this is not true, that I am nothing like the honour student you imagined I am. I only happen to be good at exams. As a result, I have built this false mirage of success that has fooled many, and sometimes fools myself as well. As time progresses, I have found myself to be a rather lazy, unorganized, irrational, emotionally intoxicated person. When will I finally be able to find someone I can hold dearly, who would be willing to understand my deepest feelings that have never been heard?

Credit to /r/AnimeThemes

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Bonus Music: Byousoku 5 Centimeter (Post-)ED, "End Theme" a.k.a.  想い出は遠くの日々

"But Tohno was always looking far beyond me. Far beyond me, towards something in the distance.

I'm sure I would not be able to give Tohno what he truly desires. But still... despite that... Tomorrow, the day after, and even beyond that... I know I will still be hopelessly in love with him.

While thinking solely of Tohno, I cried myself to sleep."