Saturday 22 May 2004

Pic of the day: Another scene where Yuuri is crying in the rain, or the rain cries along with him. I'm not nearly as pretty, but I too can do my crying in the rain. And hail too! Beat that, magic boy! (Photo from anime Kyou Kara Maou.) The choice of pictures reflect my hope that you will have read yesterday's entry before this one.

Hard rain

It started, ironically, with my ironic entry about Norwegian agricultural policy. (Lately there has been more than a week lead time on my entries.) I decided to play through the last episode of the anime Boys Be..., as it has some really striking rural scenery from Hokkaido, which is eerily similar to Scandinavia (this similarity was even mentioned in the anime). It is also a wonderful anime in its own right, portraying with rare realism the vulnerable soul of young people for the first time trying to find out what is friendship and what is romance. For the tentative main character, this understanding does not really dawn until the last episode, I think. For the viewer, it is not clear even then ... but I think the message is that a girl can like a boy without wanting to bond with him in a relationship. Always useful to know.

So I watched the episode again (I've seen the whole series before and wrote a glowing praise in these pages). I got my screenshot. But there was still something missing when the anime was over. It took me a few moments to realize what it was: I was not daydreaming.

***

I've been daydreaming as far back as I can remember. Not very intensely and visually, compared to what I have later learned others do. In me it takes the form of telling myself a story. (This incidentally makes it very hard to do it while others are talking, such as a teacher. This may have contributed much to the decent grades I got in school.) When I have encountered something that impresses me, intellectually or emotionally, my daydream / story making module goes into overdrive. Or that is how it used to be. This time, nothing. It was kinda shocking. Like the story about the guy who had lived most of his life near the railroad, and then after he moved, the first night he woke up with a start: What was that?! It was the silence of the night train not passing. And this was how I felt. A startling silence.

Making up stuff is what I do. Like weeds grow, stars shine, wind blows and darkness conceals. It is what I am. I like to call it "create" and take it as proof that I am at least created in the Creator's image, if not directly related. Actually I've been aware for quite some time that my creation is not exactly on the same level, it is more like a kid playing with those little plastic "Lego" bricks that are made to stick together. If I were given an empty spacetime and a heap of energy and told to create a new universe without using the ready-made concepts I've grown up with, I would no doubt fail miserably. My creating is more like copying and re-combining, kinda like when people photoshop a picture to add mustaches to their mother-in-law. Well, a bit more advanced than that, but closer to it than to the divine "Fiat Lux!"

But even with its limits, to create is what I do. It may not be what I do for a living, but it is what I live for. I thought back and realized that perhaps I had not actually created anything since the time when I made those backgrounds for my CoH characters, and then boasted about it in my journal. Could it be? Had God had enough of me being puffed up by my creativity, and decided to revoke it? Or was I simply shedding it, like all the other parts of my soul that I have left behind on my path through life? I had thought it would be the one thing left, the core of my being, but was that so certain? It could even be that my brain was starting to fail me. After all, people on the south coast of Norway are more prone to Alzheimer's than the average, and I'm not exactly young anymore. Without a brain, there is precious little you can do...

***

Profoundly shaken, I put on my shoes and went out in the sunny afternoon. I walked the way I know the best, my mind barely aware of the world. This was to change. After a few minutes, sun became shadow. And in the shadow, I prayed silently. A couple minutes more, and the shadow became rain. And in the rain, I cried. "God" I pleaded, "this cannot happen to me. But if it does, please, don't let me live on without the spirit of creation. I cannot bear to live, now or forever, without being able to create. Please, Lord of mercy! Give me oblivion rather than that, let me be as if I never were!" And the rain fell harder, became cold as ice and mixed with hail, and the hail stung my skin painfully wherever it hit. And I welcomed the pain, somehow hoping that pain might qualify me for mercy.

And then I realized. There was no voice speaking to my soul, there was no quiet beating of angels' wings. Only the icy cold rain running down my cheeks along with my tears. And I knew. Suddenly I knew with my heart what my brain must have known for a long time. Millions of beings suffer at any one time, from fish and fetuses to statesmen and healers. And God watches it all impartially. Jesus says that not even a sparrow falls to earth without the Heavenly Father being there. But the sparrows still fall, and the cats eat them alive, and God does not lift a finger to stop it. Not until the time is over for life in this universe. Until then, God watches our suffering as "he" watches our joy. God does not suffer, and does not enjoy, even though "he" experiences all our sensations.

And in the downpour of rain and hail I realized how utterly alien God is, how far from our concepts of a person. I can no more understand God than a blade of grass can understand me, indeed the difference is if anything greater than between me and a lifeless stone. And yet ... And yet, I took comfort. Because I knew it was worth it. That was God's decision, that life was worth it, when all was weighed in. The pain and the numbness and the loss and the loneliness ... it was worth it, just to be alive for a brief time, to be part of the enormous tapestry of life. And I agreed with him wholeheartedly. And a small smile came to my face, unexpected, and I walked on. And the hail and the rain stopped and brightness spread slowly across the sky.

I am just some guy. The rain does not fall to mingle with my tears, the hail does not lash me to reflect the pain of my soul. Such things happen in anime, not in real life. It was just a coincidence, just like the times before when such things have happened. (Quite a few coincidences have happened over the years, but I'm not complaining!) God hasn't singled me out for his attention, surely: I am just one of billions of life-forms that come into existence, live, and fade away. But it's OK. Yes, it is OK now.

***

Actually, there in the rain, there was a line from a song that came to me, but I could not remember anymore than that line. "When you are hit by hard rain ..." It was from the song "Boy" by the Alfee, and I happened to have heard it repeatedly because it was the intro song to the anime Figure 17 (Tsubasa & Hikaru). I still had the AC Fansubs translation (translated by Chirlind), so I went back and looked it up when I came home.

Boy, in the tears that are shedding,
the past melts away.
Break down the wall in front of you
to reach your future!
In the changing times,
reach for your never changing dream;
even when you have been hit by hard rain,
don't run from reality...
to stay as who you are.

Don't run from reality, huh? I never intended to. Unlike some Eastern thinkers, I don't believe life and the world are illusions. The illusion is that they are permanent. No, we are all sentenced to death; but living is voluntary. Consider me a volunteer, then. To stay as who I am.