Daily Archives: August 28, 2015

Here we are again

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I’m going to talk about Mushi-shi again, but don’t worry… you haven’t traveled back in time to yesterday because you are caught in a Groundhog Day loop. I am only going to use it as a jumping off point.

I just watched an episode of Mushi-shi that was all about a man who couldn’t understand why the smell of flowers at night always made him anxious, and who often felt like he had forgotten something extremely important. He also often felt like he had done things before, been at that exact moment of time before, even if that was impossible.

Turns out, he was the victim of a mushi that bends time into a loop[1]. Every time he reached the moment when he went into a cave that was the mushi’s lair, he went back to the beginning of the loop, way back into his childhood. Once Ginko told him this, he was able to remember not to go into the cave, and experienced the joy of truly new days.

But then his wife fell off a cliff and was gravely injured. He knew he could not get her to a doctor in time to save her life. So he took her through the cave with him, so that they both could live again. [2]

This episode really hit me where I live, because I have suffered from both deja vu and the deep and terrible feeling that I have forgotten something extremely important for my whole life.

Were I inclined towards mysticism, I would think that this means I have some sort of special relationship with time. Like I am caught in a time loop, or I have some kind of precognitive powers that only work in retrospect, or some such thing.

And truth be told, that’s exactly how it feels. When I get one of my intense rushes of deja vu, the sensation is overwhelming and extremely powerful. It really seems like, for a moment, I was suspended in time and that time was going to loop back on itself from that point forward.

It used to terrify me. Who wants to live the same time over again, like in Vonnegut’s Timequake? I suffered from the same fear that Mad King George III did in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, that time was going to start flowing backwards.

Luckily, I am over that now. Or at the very least, I have control over it, which is half a victory at least when it comes to battling a phobia.

Now this deja vu feeling was never a huge problem in my life. The attacks were extremely intense but infrequent. They stick out in my mind because they are the sort of full-mind transcendental experience that leads others to religion, and they probably contribute substantially to my feeling that I’m not really here and the world isn’t really real, but other than that, it’s never been a huge problem in my life.

But I wonder about it. What causes these highly unique and rather frightening mental events? I have read some theories about the causes of deja view, ranging from “harmless mental hiccup” to “sign you’re about to have a seizure”, and various brain regions have been fingered as the place where deja vu happens.

But I have yet to find a truly satisfactory answer, and I suspect that is because the answer I seek is not found in science, but in the depths of my mind. The truth is that any experience of transcendental intensity is going to be flagged in our minds as really, really important, and then we are left with the unenviable task of trying to make sense of it.

This is how religion works, by the way. Telling someone who has had a very intense transcendental feeling of connection to God that God does not exist is futile. They will laugh in your face. The experience is too important to have been caused by nothing. God must exist, otherwise where did that feeling come from?

And that conviction is far more powerful than reason. To them, you are standing under a blue sky trying to prove with science that the sky is green. It doesn’t matter what your facts, figures, and arguments say. You must be wrong. Compared to the personal experience of religion, all else is sophistry and trickery.

So I guess that means that my deja vu attacks are the closest I have come to a religious experience. Perhaps that is why they scared me so. Without any context for the experiences, there can be no meaning to them, and the human mind inherently resists the idea that emotionally intense experiences are meaningless.

Hence, all I could do with the experiences was fear them as we fear anything else we can’t explain. In the context of traditional science and reason, deja vu experiences are meaningless fluctuations in brain activity.

The closest I can come to explaining them is that it really feels like something build up in my mind that, if not expressed another way, will express itself as an attack of deja vu. Like an electric potential builds up, and then discharges all at once as the intense experience of deja vu.

That is a little better than meaning brain hiccup, but not by much. Perhaps one of the perils of a reason-bound mind is that you are simply incapable of processing intense experiences like the ones I have had via deja vu.

As for the feeling that I have forgotten something terribly important, that simply comes from experiencing my own forgetfulness time and time again. That’s not an irrational feeling. Often, it’s completely accurate.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. They never explain why, though. What does the mushi get out of bending time? Eh, whatever.↵
  2. Frustratingly, the story ends before we can find out if he saves his wife’s life this time through. For me, that was the whole point of going back : so that this time, he could keep her from falling off the cliff. But apparently, that was not the point according to the writer of the episode. Maybe I am being too Western about it.↵

Why I love Mushi-shi

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You know, I didn’t set out to become an otaku. But Netflix is turning me into one.

You see, Netflix Canada has lots of anime on it. And at the beginning, my sole interest was cultural literacy. I wanted to maybe watch some of the anime series that the young furries talk about where I hang out. It would be nice to have something to talk about when they are going on about Phineas and Pherb. I had this whole scenario in my mind where I would ask people if they had seen whatever animes series I had just finished watching and a bunch of people would say “Of course! I love that show!” and then we would talk about it and I would feel a tad less irrelevant.

But no matter what I watched, it was something nobody seemed to know or care about. Even if it was one I had heard them mention. Nobody, thus far, has taken the bait.

This means that either kids these days just aren’t into anime (that’s what their PARENTS are into) or they are into anime but don’t wish to encourage an old phart like me to come stomping around their playground.

I would have had the same reaction to someone my parents’ age if they had tried to talk to me about video games. It’s not that I wanted to be rude or hurtful. It’s just that I would have wanted to avoid a conversation where I would end up having to explain a lot of things and which would involve them getting their old person fingerprints all over my hip, now, young person thing, thus making it less cool via association.

But that doesn’t matter any more, because I watch anime shows because they are interesting now. I watched enough of them for Netflix to start recommending them to me, and that exposed me to more of them, and if the description sounded interesting, I would give it a shot.

That’s how I found Mushi-shi, and so far, it’s my favorite.

The basic premise is that there are millions of creatures, called mushi, who exist in our world but are unseen by most people. They affect our world in ways both big and small, and exist between their dimension and our own.

The episodes follow the adventures of Ginko, a mushi-shi, or mushi master. He wanders pre-Edo Japan, and wherever he goes, there are people who need his help to deal with a mushi related problem.

What I love most about the show is its mood. It has a quiet, deep, respectful mood to it that I find very addictive and soothing. It has a deep reverence for nature and the natural world, and the stories are always about problems, not enemies.

And the stories always take the general form of the exact kind of ghost stories I love, where the supernatural element is a way of literalizing something deep and dark and psychological. A story about a harsh father and his timid daughter might have her literally starting to disappear. A mother can’t get over the loss of her son and one day he shows up again, seemingly alive and well and the same age as when he died. But there’s something a little… off… about him.

Other episodes are more like mysteries. Why is this strange thing happening? An episode I watched recently was about a woman who could seemingly predict when it would rain. Truth was, it rained wherever she went, and so she couldn’t stay in any one place for too long or it would be flooded out.

So she wandered from one drought-stricken place to another. Not the worst gig in the world. At least you are making people happy wherever you go. But the inability to stay in any one place for more than a few days would really wear you down.

Whatever the plot, it is always fascinating, moving, and enjoyable. The story is not always a happy one but the tragedies are as beautiful as the triumphs, and the whole thing has this feeling of spiritual healing that I can’t get enough of.

Plus, it’s set in Japan, a country I find fascinating. There are things about them I greatly admire. It seems like a culture where there is a lot more potential respect going around than our jackass culture. Shinto is a religion I can at least understand because I have never felt the Holy Spirit, but I have felt deep awe and a feeling of harmony in nature.

Not a lot, of course. I’m pretty indoorsy. But I have felt it.

And I believe in a form of living in harmony with nature. For me, it has a lot more to living in harmony with human nature than taking the day off for sakura, but the principle is more or less the same.

After all, Mother Nature made humanity with drives and needs (a lot of them, actually), just like She made birds with the drive to migrate and salmon with the urge to go upstream to spawn. We seek what they tell us to find just like any other animal.

We only get in trouble when we try to deal with these drives by ignoring, punishing, or isolating them. We should be concentrating instead on how people can fulfill those needs without hurting others or bringing society down.

Anyhow, so yeah, I am becoming an otaku. I am even getting the urge to learn Japanese, and I never would have seen that coming. It’s not like it’s a practical language around these parts. I would be better off learning Mandarin or Punjabi.

But maybe it’s a cumulative thing. Once you hear enough of the language, you get the urge to learn it. Most of the shows I watch are dubbed, but Mushi-shi is subtitled only, so I have been hearing a lot of spoken Japanese lately.

Next thing you know, I will be wanting to make a pilgrimage to Japan, even though I know damned well it’s nothing like the version of it in my mind.

Let’s hope I snap out of it by then.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.