apology notice
i just now realised that i have been portraying my character incorrectly for a while, and i would like to formally apologise for letting you, the people of cohost, down.
i will do better in the future.
#serial experiments lain
Okay... Let's see. I guess that I'm confused again. Am I here, or am I there? I don't know... Over there, I'm everywhere, I know that... But here is connected to over there, is that right? But then, where is the real me after all is said and done? Oh, there is no real me, I guess that's it. I only exist inside those people aware of my existence. But what about this me that I can hear talking right here and now? It's me, isn't it? This me that I hear talking... Who is it? Who's me...
they call it serial experiments: lain because i'm Serially Experimenting with Layin Down
a thing you may know about me is that the first anime I ever saw was Serial Experiments: Lain, at an age too young to understand it, but at the perfect age to be subconsciously scarred by it. unlike almost everything else, I've never had a good chance to re-watch it, or to experience it alongside or through someone else (the way we consume so much media, the way we come to know so much media, the way media is mediated through to us). every few years there's a very niche reference, a very offhand joke, not unlike the one above, but it hardly even rises to the level of shitpost.
and so like many things rendered [WEIRD] or [INSCRUTABLE] depending on your choice of language, i find myself in waves over time battering against the shore of its meaning. Cryptic art begs to be unlocked by the thinking mind, right? Or, a more cartesian construction: "If all I have is a hammer, I exist." So often all I have is a mind, not a body or experience or referent, here, not memory but imagination, tumbling the facets and locks around until I think I've found something like meaning or intention or both.
serial experiments: lain must be cryptic, whether or not it is good, both because I could not understand it when I first saw it, and because you can tell these things from social constructions. You can tell, with surprisingly good approximation, how cryptic Ulysses is, and how good it is, from the social interactions around it (when it is referenced, and how, and of how it is spoken, and of how it makes other people feel), without ever crossing the threshold alongside plump Mulligan or his telegrams or his follies persisting. I think I have a good echolocation for this, but like echolocation, imagination only has a chance of success.
so: what is the likelihood that, with no memory of plot, character, dialogue, arc, authorship, mode, or theme, my own lived life mirrors an anime I have simultaneously seen and not seen? What is the capacity for construction or reconstruction? What parts of you, scarred young, restructure themselves around those scars because the scarring thing was known, which makes it safer than the great unknown? What thigmotaxis towards these events carries the thinking mind that is unconscious, un-knowing of its point of origin?
