IV The Terror Underground
Jan. 8th, 2008 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porphyryFreud, Keats, and Giant Fighting Robots.
I first saw The Big 0 when it was being shown on cable at 2:30 in the morning. I would watch it while I was giving A. his bottle with the sound off (given the quality of the acting on the English dub I did not miss much), so I began interpreting the images without any meaning imposed on them by the dialogue. It was easy to see familiar ideas, though at first they seemed more like my own dreams. But after seeing it many times on DVD, it does, I think, finally yield a meaning far different than one might expect of its genre, and one which repays careful reading. It demands an interpretative book; but for what audience?
For those unfamiliar with the anime series The Big 0, let me ask for a moment’s forbearance of a descriptive digression before I turn to more serious matters. It belongs to a genre of Japanese television shows aimed at children in the earliest years of school. But its creators used this outward form to deal with more important moral and spiritual concerns, in part through allegory. To briefly describe the show in the most straightforward terms, it concerns a future civilization destroyed by a terrible cataclysm 40 years in its past. The last remnant of mankind lives in the ruins of New York City. No one has any memory from before the cataclysm, nor do records of that time in general survive. Yet the memories are not simply lost, but somehow held in abeyance. Sometimes someone will remember something, usually something of technical or scientific import, and that memory will make him rich and powerful. The resulting technology at society’s disposal is quite advanced, but it seems to be used even more than in the world we know to make the lives of the rich more pleasurable and to keep the poor workers in line. The government is a dictatorship exercised by the Paradigm Corporation and its owners the Rosewater family. The city is called Paradigm City—the name New York long forgotten. The main character of the show is Roger Smith, who was a police officer, but who recovered the memory of where to find and how to operate a gigantic combat robot buried deep under the city. He therefore quit his job protecting the Rosewater régime and now works as a negotiator in various business matters while using the power of the Big 0 robot (which he recalls is properly called a Megadeus or Great God) to fight various threats to the city (usually runaway technology produced by recovered memories) and debates how and whether to use the robot against the rule of the Paradigm Corporation. In point of fact there are many robots and androids in the city, some ancient and suffering from the same amnesia as the humans, others built with the aid of memories. Roger’s companion, his love interest, is an android called Dorothy-2. Her brain was originally built by a scientist (using his memories) to go into a Megadeus (Dorothy-1) being constructed by a private industrialist, but he diverted it to use in an android version of the industrialist’s daughter. Certain mysteries, for example, about how Roger’s memory could have been affected by an event 40 years ago when he appears to be in his late 20s, cannot be addressed here, but are, I believe, susceptible of explanation.
Hajime Yatate is listed in some sources as the Director or creator of The Big 0, but it develops that this name is one used by the Sunrise studio to cover what in actuality are group projects. I have read one not very informative interview on the web under this name. The principle auteur of The Big 0 was the head writer, Chiaki J. Konaka. According to a series of e-mails I exchanged with him, in writing the show he used a technique suggested by William S. Burroughs’s practice of ‘splicing.’ What Burroughs did was to write a section of text and then cut up the pages into fragments of different sizes and reassemble the sentences, phrases, and words into a random order, attempting to produce a new meaning in that way. Konaka used an analogous process in The Big 0, cutting up and reassembling a host of images from literature, history, and popular culture. It is obvious that many tropes used in the show were taken directly from Batman comic books and cartoons, others from The Wizard of Oz (to name only the most obvious examples). But they do not have the same meaning they had in their original contexts. Rather, Konaka stripped them of their meaning by disengaging them from their original context, and used them to create a new meaning by reassembling them to create a new context. Konaka also encourages the viewer to assign his own meaning to the random assemblage of symbols. He mentions that he came from a Christian home but abandoned religion himself and studied world religions, including Gnosticism, academically. He made no conscious use of myth in a systematic way, he says, rather, he incorporated any element of myth that happened to occur to him here and there just as he did material from comic books and films. He wanted to work without conscious intention, just as do the amnesiac inhabitants of Paradigm city. In short Konaka refuses to create his own meaning and invites the viewer to do so instead. It is a unique way of working. It calls for the critical method of deconstruction (this incidentally highlights how invalid deconstruction is for conventional texts in which the author does attempt to convey a very specific meaning of his own invention), in which meaning exists only with reference to the audience.
From what I have written about The Big 0 in the past, some might imagine I have a rather fanciful notion of the range of the references made in the show, of the variety of the sources that inform it, especially for a show whose genre is intended for six year olds. But really, I do not propose any sources in this essay that anyone would not be aware of who had taken an undergraduate degree in the humanities—not if he had been paying attention. Obviously I am incapable of imagining or recognizing any sources Konaka might have consulted that I myself know nothing about—for example I constantly misdoubt whether Buddhist philosophy might have an important role in The Big 0’s intellectual world since I would be unable to detect that. With that preface, I will turn to the analysis of one particular episode. Here the reading list is limited to two works: Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, and Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. The incredible part is the work of combining these in the synthesis I see in the show.
Katabasis I: Freud
The fourth episode of The Big 0 is called The Terror Underground. Roger is hired by the Paradigm Corporation newspaper to buy off a reporter (who has gone missing) by offering a large retirement package in exchange for his not attempting to publish the book he has been working on. Roger finds an apartment the reporter rented and discovers that he used it as a secret office to write the forbidden book, whose typescript is piled on the desks and tables. Roger leafs through the texts and reads aloud, “No one here is even interested in learning the truth. But I want to know! I want to learn what must be known!” Before he can give the papers any but the most cursory examination gasoline is poured under the apartment door and set ablaze. Escaping through the window to the roof of the building, Roger meets on the reporter, who indeed tried to kill him and in the process destroyed the very book in question. The reporter tells Roger that his former identity no longer exists, from now on he is to be called Schwarzwald. He is bizarrely covered in bandages, as though he were badly burned over his whole body, though in fact he seems quite able bodied—his eyes are partially covered with broken glass lenses held in place by the bandages. He denounces Roger as a ‘Paradigm dog,’ the first hint that, because of his discovery that was to be published in the book, Schwarzwald thinks he understands everything, while in fact he understands nothing.
The only clue that Roger gleaned from Schwarzwald’s manuscript was that it concerned a discovery made in the under-city, the vast system of sewers, subways and other tunnels underneath the metropolis. Though no one can remember why, everyone in Paradigm City knows not to venture into this realm, and even the Paradigm Corporation has no presence there. Roger is the only one to use even the upper levels of this labyrinth, transporting the Big 0 robot along the double subway tracks on a special train. He decides to search this underground for clues to the mystery of Schwarzwald. Acting as narrator, he tells us: “Dig up the truth. I have no choice.” Roger descends below the levels he is familiar with, and as he goes deeper discovers that the fabric and technology in the tunnels becomes more sophisticated—newer—as he goes deeper. “The further down I go, the newer the walls become. Items from a more recent era are buried deeper down.”
As he descends down a ladder to a very low level where the walls are made of gleaming stainless steel and lighted by an eerie distant light reflecting down the corridor, Roger is suddenly seized with panic. His reaction to this is incredulity, as he tells us: “I’m scared. Me! I’m actually scared. What’s triggering this irrational emotion? This is just some sort of physiological response. Reason should be able to suppress it.”
Roger faints and falls several feet to the floor beneath the ladder. He seems to lie paralyzed and has a hypnogogic vision of phantoms walking about him. Oddly, except for their obvious immaterial quality, they seem to be ordinary people going about their business on the street. The screen goes blank to indicate his unconsciousness. When he awakens, he is no longer in the tunnel, but staring up at a thick forest canopy, casting cooling shadows into a pleasant glade. As the camera pulls away from his point of view, we see that he is lying with his head in the lap of an attractive, conservatively dressed middle-aged woman. He says, “Ma!” But we soon see that this is part of his reverie as he awakens from his black-out. He is really lying on the stainless-steel floor, his head cradled in Dorothy’s lap. She had evidently followed him. She reacts to his utterance with some consternation and evident distaste: “Ma? Did you say mama, as in your mother?” We see here the confusion between the mother and the love object that is central to Freudian psychology. But Roger will not admit that any such confusion exists within himself. Rather than thanking Dorothy for coming to his aid, he reacts with hostility and yells at her: “That’s none of your business! That’s got nothing to do with you! Oh, what am I trying to say? What are you doing down here?” Roger begins with anger, then denies the obvious meaning of his thoughts (that he had made some sort of mental association between Dorothy and the fleeting memory of his mother), and admits his confusion as a sort of excuse, before changing the subject. This is a dramatization of repression. Roger will not admit that the feelings he learned to have for his mother could be the same ones that are turned into romantic love and desire—perhaps he also does not want to admit to himself that he feels them for a robot. Dorothy seems to understand that Roger is exhibiting a psychological condition that is only partially revealed to his consciousness or to outside observers: “I don’t understand the emotions you people have. But even my father [i.e. the scientist who designed her mechanical brain based on his own partially recovered memories] never obtained the knowledge of how I operate, and could never understand how I think.”
As they continue to explore the tunnels, Roger muses, “But if something frightens you, there are those who turn their eyes away, and there are those who try to see through the fear and conquer it.” He must be making some effort to understand his recent panic, and comparing himself with Schwarzwald and his passion to know, even at considerable cost (the loss of his family and position as he rejects his old identity, to say nothing of his physical injuries). He thinks perhaps he is talking about the mystery of Schwarzwald, but his words have more cogency in connection with his reaction to Dorothy. He thinks perhaps that he is one who tries to see through fear, but in reality he is, for at least the time being, turning his eyes away.
Eventually Roger and Dorothy come to a gigantic room, much larger, probably, than an indoor football amphitheater. It seems to have housed at one time the model of a city; not of New York as we know it, nor of Paradigm City as it exists in the show, but a generic city of the future, complete with monorail system, of the type popularized in the GM exhibit at the 1939 World’s fair; in one shot a faded poster reading “EXPO” can barely be discerned plastered to the wall. This too is in ruins since part of the wall and ceiling of the room on its far side have collapsed, evidently because a gigantic robot broke into the room by force some time in the past; it lays sprawled out over the model, also apparently ruined. The robot seems rough and unfinished compared to the other giant robots in Paradigm City, as if it is a body with skin peeled off in an anatomical drawing, revealing many of the working parts that are normally concealed under the armored skin of the Megadei.
When Roger sees this, he exclaims, “It’s a Megadeus! …Is that Big 0’s archetype?” Leaving aside the question of any explicit reference to Jung here (the original Japanese script would have to be examined to see if it uses the same word that is ordinarily used to translate ‘archetype’ into Japanese in the context of Jung’s work), it soon becomes apparent that Roger’s intuition is correct and that this robot was an experimental prototype used before the event 40 years ago as a test-bed for Megadeus technology.
Schwarzwald reveals himself standing atop the shoulder of the fallen robot, which is more than 100 feet tall. He engages in a speech to Roger, indulging in an infantile power fantasy, to the effect that he intends to rediscover the secrets of Megadeus technology (by research on this robot and, as is later revealed, on others he has found buried) and use it to destroy Paradigm City, of which he has an irrational hatred (he is unable to differentiate the city, with its millions of innocent inhabitants, from the tyrannical Paradigm Corporation, just as he is unable to imagine that Roger is anything other than a Paradigm agent; or to rationally consider the meaning of destroying the last remnant of human civilization). It seems also that his burns were incurred by his experiments trying to recover that technology. His exhibitionistic need to gloat over his fantastic plans to Roger satisfied, Schwarzwald again attempts to kill Roger by dousing him with gasoline and throwing a lit Zippo lighter at him. We may infer that he is reënacting his own accident which left him burned and scarred.
Schwarzwald’s murder attempt is in any case foiled by the action of the robots. The Megadeus archetype is not as inert as Schwarzwald believes. Dorothy had been distracted, lagging behind Roger and not talking. Evidently there was some kind of machine communication going on between Dorothy and the Archetype, triggered by their proximity (propagated wirelessly, no doubt). This soon accelerates and lights on the archetype’s chest begin to flash in a pattern that triggers a pre-programmed response in Dorothy. She now releases a vocal analog of digital code that appears to be a whine to human ears. This is evidently quite involuntary, comparable to turning on the tv with the remote control. This is one of the strongest emphases of Dorothy’s machine nature in the entire series. Whatever she communicates causes the archetype to be turned on, display panels all over its body flickering with light, and the thing’s whole frame begins rising to its feet. When Dorothy’s pre-programmed response is over, she screams in horror at the conscious realization of what she has done. This is perhaps a symbolic expression that people are driven to actions contrary to their conscious will by passions and secrets within themselves of which they have no conscious knowledge. Schwarzwald, however, has fallen from his perch on the archetype’s shoulder (crying out: “What is happening? How can this be?” in his usual lack of understanding) and it is he, rather than Roger, who catches fire, though this time it is quickly extinguished.
Roger and Dorothy soon realize that the archetype wants to make physical contact with Dorothy, to pick her up. They strongly misdoubt that this is for any good reason and run away into the maze of buildings behind them.
While they are fleeing for their lives Dorothy feels compelled to blurt out a sort of monolog. It is surely not directed to Roger who is understandably distracted. Rather it seems to be directed to herself, as if she is giving her thought greater authority by speaking it aloud: “No, it cannot be! That thing is no friend of mine! I have no idea where it came from! It has no relationship to me! That much I know is true: it cannot be. That thing should not be allowed to exist anywhere!”
These statements are generally interesting because they are not true. The archetype is an ancient test-bed for Megadeus technology. Dorothy has the brain of a Megadeus. They obviously use the same operating system and are so intimately linked that their mere proximity triggers an automatic download of software or data-files between them, and one that overrides Dorothy’s self-conscious control. From this it is obvious that the most intimate connections exist between them. But the possibility of acknowledging this connection is so terrible that she must vocally deny its obvious truth, must convince herself that things are the opposite of how they really are. Her conclusion is that the source of her anxiety must not only be destroyed, but not even allowed to exist to start with: be completely eradicated. If this robot is the test-bed for Megdeus technology, then it is also the precursor of Dorothy’s own existence. If it did not exist, she could not either. The denial of the obvious truth about one’s self, with the subsequent projection of hostility against external objects linked to that truth is technically known as a reaction-formation. The textbook example is a someone who refuses, because of ingrained religious conviction or some other reason, to acknowledge the existence of homosexual desire within himself and turns the suppressed desire into hostility directed against open homosexuals. It is the acting out of a conflict between two unconscious portions of the mind: the id which feels desire and the ego-ideal whose purpose is to control emotion and desire.
Now we are beginning to be able to see a little more clearly. The Big 0 robot (summoned by remote control) arrives to rescue Roger and Dorothy. They quickly board it and Roger, acting as its pilot, fights and destroys the archetype. During this encounter Dorothy collapses, whimpering in the corner of the control room, murmuring over and over to herself, “It can’t be!” Roger tries to reassure her, telling her, “Remember you don’t have to fear!” He then addresses the archetype with the taunt, “You’re no God, that’s for sure.” After a protracted battle between the robots, Roger administers the coup de grace to the Archetype, but not before making finally hortatory addresses to both Dorothy and Big 0 itself (it is not clear in the context of the show to what extent the Archetype or Big 0 is meant to be able to perceive and comprehend Roger’s statements to them), “Dorothy! Take a good look! That thing is a monster that has nothing to do with you. Big O! I’m telling you he’s no friend of yours either, so don’t you hold back.” This accepts Dorothy’s denial and extends it, representing even that there is no connection at all between the Big 0 robot and its own Archetype.
So what is this thing, this Archetype, the truth of whose connection to Dorothy and Big 0 must be so strenuously denied?
Now, although it is not essential to the argument, it has often struck me that in anime, the robotic can stands as a symbol for the psychic (bearing in mind that that word properly means: related to the soul). While a much broader discussion would be required to take that as a general point (and it is certainly not meant as a universal rule), it seems possible to demonstrate that in The Big 0 some of the functions of some of the robots are meant to analogize the functions of the unconscious mind, to portray in the form of a drama what goes on inside man. Roger is the pilot of Big 0. He physically enters into a cock-pit and initiates and controls all of the robot’s actions by means of various digital and analog interfaces. On the very few occasions a Megadeus is seen to act on its own it always remarkable; the characters clearly think it ought to be impossible and are amazed when it happens. On the other hand a Megadeus has some sort of will because each time a pilot takes his seat he is judged and the terms of the judgment are shown on an internal computer monitor. If he is found ‘Not Guilty’ he is allowed to take control of the robot, but if he is judged ‘Guilty’ he is instead destroyed (the one time this actually happens in the show, the Megadeus in question also runs wild and destroys itself). Be that as it may, Roger enters into Big 0 as the ‘ghost in the machine,’ that is, like the ‘soul’ inhabiting and controlling the human body, an outside ruling and animating principle that inserts itself into otherwise inert matter. Although it does not occur in The Big 0 , that very phrase is sometimes used in anime to describe the relationship of a pilot to a large military robot. If we take Roger and Big 0 as part of a model for human existence, then Big 0 is the physical body, while Roger is the soul or self-consciousness (psyche in Greek), the ego in Freudian terms.
During the fight between the giant robots, it becomes apparent that, if Big 0 and Dorothy are anthropomorphic, the Archetype is decidedly simian in character. It has long arms and short legs and leaps like a monkey. In a later episode Roger, mystically transported to another world where the life he knows exists only as fictions, reads a comic book based on this particular fight, and in its artwork the archetype is even more ape-like, possessing fur as a covering over part of its body. For what it is worth, A., my four year old son, without prompting or hesitation, immediately called it the ‘monkey-robot’ the first time he saw it. The Archetype has no pilot, so following our reading of Roger as pilot, it is a creature without self-awareness, an animal (leaving aside any more complicated understanding of self-awareness in primates, let us take this premise for what it is a, a common-place truism used merely as a referent). As an ape it has only the instincts of an animal, to consume and eliminate, to kill and to procreate. Human beings, of course have these same instincts, but they are neither fully controlled by nor perfectly coörndinated with the mind; indeed the often present consciousness with desires that it neither understands nor wants. This is what Freud describes as the id. Incidentally the symbolization of these desires and impulses as an ape goes back before the development of Freudian psychology, as we can see in Klimt’s Hostile Powers from the Beethoven Frieze.
The simian mind is in some sense the archetype of the human because the animal mind still exists within us (just as more primitive structures of the brain identical to animals still carry out many autonomic functions), and our consciousness and free-will (illusionary or not) are laid over that foundation. The Archetype is, indeed, no God, as Roger tells it. But if God is the ultimate projection of the activity of the ego ideal, this personification of the id is rather the opposite. And as St. Paul and Porphyry both tell us, the fallen nature indeed thinks of itself as God because it does not know the truth, and it seemingly has more power over people’s lives than the higher part of human personality (or at least it is more noticeable). If Roger is the ego, the Archetype stands for the id.
We have already seen that Dorothy exhibits the neurotic symptom of a reaction-formation. She wishes to deny that the consciousness of which she is a part has any connection to the id. The rôle of Freud’s ego-ideal (consciousness’ vision of itself as perfect), to protect consciousness from uncontrolled and dangerous desires. Whatever in the self fails to measure up to this model is frequently rejected and repressed; in fact, that is the elementary basis of the mechanism of repression which allows the psychic energy associated with the instincts to be diverted to more civilized pursuits. The curiously inverted stratigraphy Roger encountered encounter in his descent through the under-city, finding newer ruins buried under older, is no doubt a symbol for repression. What is buried deepest is not newer, but truer: the ultimate, if repressed, truth of the animal basis of the vaunted human mind is found lurking at the bottom. Throughout this episode Dorothy works to keep secret the fact that the id and its desires are part of the human mind, and convinces Roger (the ego) of this. She, then, stand for the ego ideal.
One might look at Dorothy in a different way. Dorothy has the brain of a Megadeus, or, more specifically, the core memory necessary for the operation of such a giant robot’s on-board computers. It would not take much imagination, therefore, to describe Dorothy, in contrast to Roger as soul, or psyche, or ego, as a mind or nous. In the Ancient Greek Neoplatonic psychology that Freud’s is derived from, nous is the third and highest part of the self above the body and soul (at the risk of oversimplifying matters). It is not the conscious mind as we know it, but is a part of the human composite of which the self-consciousness is completely unaware. It is a spark of the divine light of the One, the greatest God beyond all existence who is neither truly one nor truly a God, but which is so far removed from human experience that it cannot be described in language. It is this spark of divinity which is the true human being, and which will return to God once the body is stripped away by death, and once the trivial memories of consciousness are washed away by Lethe the river of forgetfulness in the underworld.
This is perhaps coming closer to the deeper meaning of the City of Amnesia, but it is going further from the scope of our original investigation, leaving Freud behind for Plotinus, so these speculations will have to be left for another occasion.
Katabasis II: Keats
In the first episode of The Big 0 Roger was hired to pay the ransom to the kidnappers of R. Dorothy-2, the android with the brain of a Megadeus that had been created by an engineer named Waynewright (whom Dorothy calls father) as the ‘daughter’ of the industrialist Soldano (exactly what this relationship means we never know, but in the earlier—or at least other—world Roger visits during a later mystical katabasis Dorothy is a human being and the biological daughter of Waynewright). At one point Soldano is murdered by the kidnappers, and it is with his dying words that we learn he considers Dorothy his true daughter (earlier he had rejected her). The very last thing he does, however, is to address Roger as ‘Nightingale.’
The name of this bird must inevitably recall Keats’ Ode. In that poem the narrator undergoes a mystical vision. He joins the Nightingale in its bucolic idyll, a place in the dark forest far removed from the physical world that is foreign to the bird. Following Sokrates on his last journey as far as he can, he feels himself at one and the same time as though he had drunk from the river Lethe, whose water brings forgetfulness of earth to the dead (and, in the Neoplatonic theology that Keats follows, thereby allows the sensation of true divine reality), as well as partaken of the inspiration of poetry that Hesiod received from the Muses at the Hippocrene spring. But because the speaker of the poem is still alive—still trapped in a body—he cannot break through to participate in the divine inspiration he feels all around him and inevitably crashes back down to earth.
In case anyone hasn’t read the poem, it is much more important to read that than this nugatory essay, so here it is in full (as an aid to memory to those who have read it):
Ode to a Nightingale
MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 5
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 10
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South! 15
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 20
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 25
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 30
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night, 35
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 40
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 45
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 50
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 55
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. 60
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 65
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 70
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades 75
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep? 80
Recall that in The Terror Underground when Roger falls from the ladder after he is inexplicably seized with fear, he enters into the first of his otherworldly visions. He begins by seeing ghostly crowds walking along phantom sidewalks. This same vision often signals for Roger the beginning of what we may call a katabasis. This term originally described the journey to the underworld by Odysseus, when, after a ceremony of ritual magic, feeding blood to the ghosts to give them the semblance of life, he enquired about his future from the shade of Tiresias. It is often used by scholars to refer to any kind of mystical vision that is not a heavenly jounrey; as a literary theme it culminates in Dante’s tour through hell in the Inferno. The word aptly describes Roger’s visions. In later episodes he will see the crowd of phantoms pressing around him again and will eventually enter their world entirely, losing his identity and finding the world rearranged in a different configuration more real and palpable than the one he had known. Indeed, he will there see that his former life is in that world the subject of children’s comic books (as mentioned above, he read the episode of Big 0’s fight with the Archetype Megadeus), whether they are the truth or lies that seem like the truth (the Muses of the Hippocrene could tell both).
It is this constant sensing of a world all around more real than his own that he cannot quite see, his brief irruption into that world only to be rudely ejected back into the more mundane reality of his own existence where true reality seems only a dream, that makes Roger a Nightingale.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; (41-5)
It is an old folk-belief that the dying can see through the veil and perceive things kept secret from mortal life, and it must have been from such a vision that Soldano was able to say what Roger is. Although in the end Roger is also revealed to be much more than that.
But to return to the matter at hand, as Roger awakes from his vision after falling from the ladder in the subway, he sees himself in a locus amoenus, a dark forest glade, cradled in the lap of his mother (as we saw above, an Oedipal confusion of his mother and lover). I would suggest that this is the, “melodious plot / Of beechen green, and shadows numberless” (8-9) that is the natural habitat of Keats’ Nightingale. As the pleasant place of Classical poetry, the vision is a symbol of the ideal world (of heaven, let us call it, since we must have a suggestive, if conventional, way of speaking about matters that cannot be expressed in human language) that is so far removed from our everyday reality that it can only be shown in symbols: it is not a glade, but is like a glade in being more filled with light and therefore more pleasant than the dark forest around it. Roger finds himself there in the lap of his ideal love, the mixture of pious maternal love and the delirium of desire. As Plato informs us in the Symposium, it is love that leads upward to the vision of the Good, the knowledge of higher truths and a higher form of existence than we can know through the physical senses, because it is love, a child of both worlds, that mediates between this world and that. So in the moment of Roger’s vision, physical love is bound inextricably together with pure heavenly love: desire and piety helping each other up the ladder. He awakens on earth in the lap of his lover, but, one supposes, if he had slipped free of the mortal coil of his body, he could just as well have awakened in heaven to the divine love of God.
I cannot help but think that the self-chosen new identity of the reporter as Schwarzwald is a reference to the dim woodland glade of the Nightingale. The meaning of the term is rather clumsily indicted to the viewers (6 year olds, remember) when he tells Roger his new name and Roger reacts by questioningly translating it to himself: “Black Forest?” (perhaps the clumsiness is only in the acting of the English-language cast). If so, it is because Schwarzwald longs for the beatific vision of the Nightingale, not because he has achieved it. Schwarzwald wants enlightenment, but he cannot separate it from temporal power. He wants to replace the tyranny of Paradigm City (though one suspects he would, in the short term, be a far more dangerous master than Alex Rosewater if he succeeded: a Jan van Leyden or a Savonarola), but he does not act to build anything new but only to destroy. For him enlightenment is the object of a passion, so he has no hope of achieving it. Though in some sense well-meaning (the Megadei eventually accept him as a pilot and therefore as ‘Not Guilty’), he is so blind that he cannot tell the innocent from the damned. It is as though he repeated Odin’s bargain for knowledge, but traded both of his eyes as the price (but the treatment of that theme can be left for another time).
The Terror Underground stitches together psychological science and metaphysics, reminding us that Freud’s psychology is rooted in Plato’s philosophy. The salvation of enlightenment of one is the mature, well personality of the other. They are both bound together by love as the instrument that shapes our ends. This episode establishes the nature of man and foreshadows much of what is to come: the warfare of the physical against the spiritual and the final deus ex machina in which God resolves what nature cannot.
Here is the episode on YouTube. The videos altogether are about 23 minutes long:
Part I
Part II
Part III
I first saw The Big 0 when it was being shown on cable at 2:30 in the morning. I would watch it while I was giving A. his bottle with the sound off (given the quality of the acting on the English dub I did not miss much), so I began interpreting the images without any meaning imposed on them by the dialogue. It was easy to see familiar ideas, though at first they seemed more like my own dreams. But after seeing it many times on DVD, it does, I think, finally yield a meaning far different than one might expect of its genre, and one which repays careful reading. It demands an interpretative book; but for what audience?
For those unfamiliar with the anime series The Big 0, let me ask for a moment’s forbearance of a descriptive digression before I turn to more serious matters. It belongs to a genre of Japanese television shows aimed at children in the earliest years of school. But its creators used this outward form to deal with more important moral and spiritual concerns, in part through allegory. To briefly describe the show in the most straightforward terms, it concerns a future civilization destroyed by a terrible cataclysm 40 years in its past. The last remnant of mankind lives in the ruins of New York City. No one has any memory from before the cataclysm, nor do records of that time in general survive. Yet the memories are not simply lost, but somehow held in abeyance. Sometimes someone will remember something, usually something of technical or scientific import, and that memory will make him rich and powerful. The resulting technology at society’s disposal is quite advanced, but it seems to be used even more than in the world we know to make the lives of the rich more pleasurable and to keep the poor workers in line. The government is a dictatorship exercised by the Paradigm Corporation and its owners the Rosewater family. The city is called Paradigm City—the name New York long forgotten. The main character of the show is Roger Smith, who was a police officer, but who recovered the memory of where to find and how to operate a gigantic combat robot buried deep under the city. He therefore quit his job protecting the Rosewater régime and now works as a negotiator in various business matters while using the power of the Big 0 robot (which he recalls is properly called a Megadeus or Great God) to fight various threats to the city (usually runaway technology produced by recovered memories) and debates how and whether to use the robot against the rule of the Paradigm Corporation. In point of fact there are many robots and androids in the city, some ancient and suffering from the same amnesia as the humans, others built with the aid of memories. Roger’s companion, his love interest, is an android called Dorothy-2. Her brain was originally built by a scientist (using his memories) to go into a Megadeus (Dorothy-1) being constructed by a private industrialist, but he diverted it to use in an android version of the industrialist’s daughter. Certain mysteries, for example, about how Roger’s memory could have been affected by an event 40 years ago when he appears to be in his late 20s, cannot be addressed here, but are, I believe, susceptible of explanation.
Hajime Yatate is listed in some sources as the Director or creator of The Big 0, but it develops that this name is one used by the Sunrise studio to cover what in actuality are group projects. I have read one not very informative interview on the web under this name. The principle auteur of The Big 0 was the head writer, Chiaki J. Konaka. According to a series of e-mails I exchanged with him, in writing the show he used a technique suggested by William S. Burroughs’s practice of ‘splicing.’ What Burroughs did was to write a section of text and then cut up the pages into fragments of different sizes and reassemble the sentences, phrases, and words into a random order, attempting to produce a new meaning in that way. Konaka used an analogous process in The Big 0, cutting up and reassembling a host of images from literature, history, and popular culture. It is obvious that many tropes used in the show were taken directly from Batman comic books and cartoons, others from The Wizard of Oz (to name only the most obvious examples). But they do not have the same meaning they had in their original contexts. Rather, Konaka stripped them of their meaning by disengaging them from their original context, and used them to create a new meaning by reassembling them to create a new context. Konaka also encourages the viewer to assign his own meaning to the random assemblage of symbols. He mentions that he came from a Christian home but abandoned religion himself and studied world religions, including Gnosticism, academically. He made no conscious use of myth in a systematic way, he says, rather, he incorporated any element of myth that happened to occur to him here and there just as he did material from comic books and films. He wanted to work without conscious intention, just as do the amnesiac inhabitants of Paradigm city. In short Konaka refuses to create his own meaning and invites the viewer to do so instead. It is a unique way of working. It calls for the critical method of deconstruction (this incidentally highlights how invalid deconstruction is for conventional texts in which the author does attempt to convey a very specific meaning of his own invention), in which meaning exists only with reference to the audience.
From what I have written about The Big 0 in the past, some might imagine I have a rather fanciful notion of the range of the references made in the show, of the variety of the sources that inform it, especially for a show whose genre is intended for six year olds. But really, I do not propose any sources in this essay that anyone would not be aware of who had taken an undergraduate degree in the humanities—not if he had been paying attention. Obviously I am incapable of imagining or recognizing any sources Konaka might have consulted that I myself know nothing about—for example I constantly misdoubt whether Buddhist philosophy might have an important role in The Big 0’s intellectual world since I would be unable to detect that. With that preface, I will turn to the analysis of one particular episode. Here the reading list is limited to two works: Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, and Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. The incredible part is the work of combining these in the synthesis I see in the show.
The fourth episode of The Big 0 is called The Terror Underground. Roger is hired by the Paradigm Corporation newspaper to buy off a reporter (who has gone missing) by offering a large retirement package in exchange for his not attempting to publish the book he has been working on. Roger finds an apartment the reporter rented and discovers that he used it as a secret office to write the forbidden book, whose typescript is piled on the desks and tables. Roger leafs through the texts and reads aloud, “No one here is even interested in learning the truth. But I want to know! I want to learn what must be known!” Before he can give the papers any but the most cursory examination gasoline is poured under the apartment door and set ablaze. Escaping through the window to the roof of the building, Roger meets on the reporter, who indeed tried to kill him and in the process destroyed the very book in question. The reporter tells Roger that his former identity no longer exists, from now on he is to be called Schwarzwald. He is bizarrely covered in bandages, as though he were badly burned over his whole body, though in fact he seems quite able bodied—his eyes are partially covered with broken glass lenses held in place by the bandages. He denounces Roger as a ‘Paradigm dog,’ the first hint that, because of his discovery that was to be published in the book, Schwarzwald thinks he understands everything, while in fact he understands nothing.
The only clue that Roger gleaned from Schwarzwald’s manuscript was that it concerned a discovery made in the under-city, the vast system of sewers, subways and other tunnels underneath the metropolis. Though no one can remember why, everyone in Paradigm City knows not to venture into this realm, and even the Paradigm Corporation has no presence there. Roger is the only one to use even the upper levels of this labyrinth, transporting the Big 0 robot along the double subway tracks on a special train. He decides to search this underground for clues to the mystery of Schwarzwald. Acting as narrator, he tells us: “Dig up the truth. I have no choice.” Roger descends below the levels he is familiar with, and as he goes deeper discovers that the fabric and technology in the tunnels becomes more sophisticated—newer—as he goes deeper. “The further down I go, the newer the walls become. Items from a more recent era are buried deeper down.”
As he descends down a ladder to a very low level where the walls are made of gleaming stainless steel and lighted by an eerie distant light reflecting down the corridor, Roger is suddenly seized with panic. His reaction to this is incredulity, as he tells us: “I’m scared. Me! I’m actually scared. What’s triggering this irrational emotion? This is just some sort of physiological response. Reason should be able to suppress it.”
Roger faints and falls several feet to the floor beneath the ladder. He seems to lie paralyzed and has a hypnogogic vision of phantoms walking about him. Oddly, except for their obvious immaterial quality, they seem to be ordinary people going about their business on the street. The screen goes blank to indicate his unconsciousness. When he awakens, he is no longer in the tunnel, but staring up at a thick forest canopy, casting cooling shadows into a pleasant glade. As the camera pulls away from his point of view, we see that he is lying with his head in the lap of an attractive, conservatively dressed middle-aged woman. He says, “Ma!” But we soon see that this is part of his reverie as he awakens from his black-out. He is really lying on the stainless-steel floor, his head cradled in Dorothy’s lap. She had evidently followed him. She reacts to his utterance with some consternation and evident distaste: “Ma? Did you say mama, as in your mother?” We see here the confusion between the mother and the love object that is central to Freudian psychology. But Roger will not admit that any such confusion exists within himself. Rather than thanking Dorothy for coming to his aid, he reacts with hostility and yells at her: “That’s none of your business! That’s got nothing to do with you! Oh, what am I trying to say? What are you doing down here?” Roger begins with anger, then denies the obvious meaning of his thoughts (that he had made some sort of mental association between Dorothy and the fleeting memory of his mother), and admits his confusion as a sort of excuse, before changing the subject. This is a dramatization of repression. Roger will not admit that the feelings he learned to have for his mother could be the same ones that are turned into romantic love and desire—perhaps he also does not want to admit to himself that he feels them for a robot. Dorothy seems to understand that Roger is exhibiting a psychological condition that is only partially revealed to his consciousness or to outside observers: “I don’t understand the emotions you people have. But even my father [i.e. the scientist who designed her mechanical brain based on his own partially recovered memories] never obtained the knowledge of how I operate, and could never understand how I think.”
As they continue to explore the tunnels, Roger muses, “But if something frightens you, there are those who turn their eyes away, and there are those who try to see through the fear and conquer it.” He must be making some effort to understand his recent panic, and comparing himself with Schwarzwald and his passion to know, even at considerable cost (the loss of his family and position as he rejects his old identity, to say nothing of his physical injuries). He thinks perhaps he is talking about the mystery of Schwarzwald, but his words have more cogency in connection with his reaction to Dorothy. He thinks perhaps that he is one who tries to see through fear, but in reality he is, for at least the time being, turning his eyes away.
Eventually Roger and Dorothy come to a gigantic room, much larger, probably, than an indoor football amphitheater. It seems to have housed at one time the model of a city; not of New York as we know it, nor of Paradigm City as it exists in the show, but a generic city of the future, complete with monorail system, of the type popularized in the GM exhibit at the 1939 World’s fair; in one shot a faded poster reading “EXPO” can barely be discerned plastered to the wall. This too is in ruins since part of the wall and ceiling of the room on its far side have collapsed, evidently because a gigantic robot broke into the room by force some time in the past; it lays sprawled out over the model, also apparently ruined. The robot seems rough and unfinished compared to the other giant robots in Paradigm City, as if it is a body with skin peeled off in an anatomical drawing, revealing many of the working parts that are normally concealed under the armored skin of the Megadei.
When Roger sees this, he exclaims, “It’s a Megadeus! …Is that Big 0’s archetype?” Leaving aside the question of any explicit reference to Jung here (the original Japanese script would have to be examined to see if it uses the same word that is ordinarily used to translate ‘archetype’ into Japanese in the context of Jung’s work), it soon becomes apparent that Roger’s intuition is correct and that this robot was an experimental prototype used before the event 40 years ago as a test-bed for Megadeus technology.
Schwarzwald reveals himself standing atop the shoulder of the fallen robot, which is more than 100 feet tall. He engages in a speech to Roger, indulging in an infantile power fantasy, to the effect that he intends to rediscover the secrets of Megadeus technology (by research on this robot and, as is later revealed, on others he has found buried) and use it to destroy Paradigm City, of which he has an irrational hatred (he is unable to differentiate the city, with its millions of innocent inhabitants, from the tyrannical Paradigm Corporation, just as he is unable to imagine that Roger is anything other than a Paradigm agent; or to rationally consider the meaning of destroying the last remnant of human civilization). It seems also that his burns were incurred by his experiments trying to recover that technology. His exhibitionistic need to gloat over his fantastic plans to Roger satisfied, Schwarzwald again attempts to kill Roger by dousing him with gasoline and throwing a lit Zippo lighter at him. We may infer that he is reënacting his own accident which left him burned and scarred.
Schwarzwald’s murder attempt is in any case foiled by the action of the robots. The Megadeus archetype is not as inert as Schwarzwald believes. Dorothy had been distracted, lagging behind Roger and not talking. Evidently there was some kind of machine communication going on between Dorothy and the Archetype, triggered by their proximity (propagated wirelessly, no doubt). This soon accelerates and lights on the archetype’s chest begin to flash in a pattern that triggers a pre-programmed response in Dorothy. She now releases a vocal analog of digital code that appears to be a whine to human ears. This is evidently quite involuntary, comparable to turning on the tv with the remote control. This is one of the strongest emphases of Dorothy’s machine nature in the entire series. Whatever she communicates causes the archetype to be turned on, display panels all over its body flickering with light, and the thing’s whole frame begins rising to its feet. When Dorothy’s pre-programmed response is over, she screams in horror at the conscious realization of what she has done. This is perhaps a symbolic expression that people are driven to actions contrary to their conscious will by passions and secrets within themselves of which they have no conscious knowledge. Schwarzwald, however, has fallen from his perch on the archetype’s shoulder (crying out: “What is happening? How can this be?” in his usual lack of understanding) and it is he, rather than Roger, who catches fire, though this time it is quickly extinguished.
Roger and Dorothy soon realize that the archetype wants to make physical contact with Dorothy, to pick her up. They strongly misdoubt that this is for any good reason and run away into the maze of buildings behind them.
While they are fleeing for their lives Dorothy feels compelled to blurt out a sort of monolog. It is surely not directed to Roger who is understandably distracted. Rather it seems to be directed to herself, as if she is giving her thought greater authority by speaking it aloud: “No, it cannot be! That thing is no friend of mine! I have no idea where it came from! It has no relationship to me! That much I know is true: it cannot be. That thing should not be allowed to exist anywhere!”
These statements are generally interesting because they are not true. The archetype is an ancient test-bed for Megadeus technology. Dorothy has the brain of a Megadeus. They obviously use the same operating system and are so intimately linked that their mere proximity triggers an automatic download of software or data-files between them, and one that overrides Dorothy’s self-conscious control. From this it is obvious that the most intimate connections exist between them. But the possibility of acknowledging this connection is so terrible that she must vocally deny its obvious truth, must convince herself that things are the opposite of how they really are. Her conclusion is that the source of her anxiety must not only be destroyed, but not even allowed to exist to start with: be completely eradicated. If this robot is the test-bed for Megdeus technology, then it is also the precursor of Dorothy’s own existence. If it did not exist, she could not either. The denial of the obvious truth about one’s self, with the subsequent projection of hostility against external objects linked to that truth is technically known as a reaction-formation. The textbook example is a someone who refuses, because of ingrained religious conviction or some other reason, to acknowledge the existence of homosexual desire within himself and turns the suppressed desire into hostility directed against open homosexuals. It is the acting out of a conflict between two unconscious portions of the mind: the id which feels desire and the ego-ideal whose purpose is to control emotion and desire.
Now we are beginning to be able to see a little more clearly. The Big 0 robot (summoned by remote control) arrives to rescue Roger and Dorothy. They quickly board it and Roger, acting as its pilot, fights and destroys the archetype. During this encounter Dorothy collapses, whimpering in the corner of the control room, murmuring over and over to herself, “It can’t be!” Roger tries to reassure her, telling her, “Remember you don’t have to fear!” He then addresses the archetype with the taunt, “You’re no God, that’s for sure.” After a protracted battle between the robots, Roger administers the coup de grace to the Archetype, but not before making finally hortatory addresses to both Dorothy and Big 0 itself (it is not clear in the context of the show to what extent the Archetype or Big 0 is meant to be able to perceive and comprehend Roger’s statements to them), “Dorothy! Take a good look! That thing is a monster that has nothing to do with you. Big O! I’m telling you he’s no friend of yours either, so don’t you hold back.” This accepts Dorothy’s denial and extends it, representing even that there is no connection at all between the Big 0 robot and its own Archetype.
So what is this thing, this Archetype, the truth of whose connection to Dorothy and Big 0 must be so strenuously denied?
Now, although it is not essential to the argument, it has often struck me that in anime, the robotic can stands as a symbol for the psychic (bearing in mind that that word properly means: related to the soul). While a much broader discussion would be required to take that as a general point (and it is certainly not meant as a universal rule), it seems possible to demonstrate that in The Big 0 some of the functions of some of the robots are meant to analogize the functions of the unconscious mind, to portray in the form of a drama what goes on inside man. Roger is the pilot of Big 0. He physically enters into a cock-pit and initiates and controls all of the robot’s actions by means of various digital and analog interfaces. On the very few occasions a Megadeus is seen to act on its own it always remarkable; the characters clearly think it ought to be impossible and are amazed when it happens. On the other hand a Megadeus has some sort of will because each time a pilot takes his seat he is judged and the terms of the judgment are shown on an internal computer monitor. If he is found ‘Not Guilty’ he is allowed to take control of the robot, but if he is judged ‘Guilty’ he is instead destroyed (the one time this actually happens in the show, the Megadeus in question also runs wild and destroys itself). Be that as it may, Roger enters into Big 0 as the ‘ghost in the machine,’ that is, like the ‘soul’ inhabiting and controlling the human body, an outside ruling and animating principle that inserts itself into otherwise inert matter. Although it does not occur in The Big 0 , that very phrase is sometimes used in anime to describe the relationship of a pilot to a large military robot. If we take Roger and Big 0 as part of a model for human existence, then Big 0 is the physical body, while Roger is the soul or self-consciousness (psyche in Greek), the ego in Freudian terms.
During the fight between the giant robots, it becomes apparent that, if Big 0 and Dorothy are anthropomorphic, the Archetype is decidedly simian in character. It has long arms and short legs and leaps like a monkey. In a later episode Roger, mystically transported to another world where the life he knows exists only as fictions, reads a comic book based on this particular fight, and in its artwork the archetype is even more ape-like, possessing fur as a covering over part of its body. For what it is worth, A., my four year old son, without prompting or hesitation, immediately called it the ‘monkey-robot’ the first time he saw it. The Archetype has no pilot, so following our reading of Roger as pilot, it is a creature without self-awareness, an animal (leaving aside any more complicated understanding of self-awareness in primates, let us take this premise for what it is a, a common-place truism used merely as a referent). As an ape it has only the instincts of an animal, to consume and eliminate, to kill and to procreate. Human beings, of course have these same instincts, but they are neither fully controlled by nor perfectly coörndinated with the mind; indeed the often present consciousness with desires that it neither understands nor wants. This is what Freud describes as the id. Incidentally the symbolization of these desires and impulses as an ape goes back before the development of Freudian psychology, as we can see in Klimt’s Hostile Powers from the Beethoven Frieze.
The simian mind is in some sense the archetype of the human because the animal mind still exists within us (just as more primitive structures of the brain identical to animals still carry out many autonomic functions), and our consciousness and free-will (illusionary or not) are laid over that foundation. The Archetype is, indeed, no God, as Roger tells it. But if God is the ultimate projection of the activity of the ego ideal, this personification of the id is rather the opposite. And as St. Paul and Porphyry both tell us, the fallen nature indeed thinks of itself as God because it does not know the truth, and it seemingly has more power over people’s lives than the higher part of human personality (or at least it is more noticeable). If Roger is the ego, the Archetype stands for the id.
We have already seen that Dorothy exhibits the neurotic symptom of a reaction-formation. She wishes to deny that the consciousness of which she is a part has any connection to the id. The rôle of Freud’s ego-ideal (consciousness’ vision of itself as perfect), to protect consciousness from uncontrolled and dangerous desires. Whatever in the self fails to measure up to this model is frequently rejected and repressed; in fact, that is the elementary basis of the mechanism of repression which allows the psychic energy associated with the instincts to be diverted to more civilized pursuits. The curiously inverted stratigraphy Roger encountered encounter in his descent through the under-city, finding newer ruins buried under older, is no doubt a symbol for repression. What is buried deepest is not newer, but truer: the ultimate, if repressed, truth of the animal basis of the vaunted human mind is found lurking at the bottom. Throughout this episode Dorothy works to keep secret the fact that the id and its desires are part of the human mind, and convinces Roger (the ego) of this. She, then, stand for the ego ideal.
One might look at Dorothy in a different way. Dorothy has the brain of a Megadeus, or, more specifically, the core memory necessary for the operation of such a giant robot’s on-board computers. It would not take much imagination, therefore, to describe Dorothy, in contrast to Roger as soul, or psyche, or ego, as a mind or nous. In the Ancient Greek Neoplatonic psychology that Freud’s is derived from, nous is the third and highest part of the self above the body and soul (at the risk of oversimplifying matters). It is not the conscious mind as we know it, but is a part of the human composite of which the self-consciousness is completely unaware. It is a spark of the divine light of the One, the greatest God beyond all existence who is neither truly one nor truly a God, but which is so far removed from human experience that it cannot be described in language. It is this spark of divinity which is the true human being, and which will return to God once the body is stripped away by death, and once the trivial memories of consciousness are washed away by Lethe the river of forgetfulness in the underworld.
This is perhaps coming closer to the deeper meaning of the City of Amnesia, but it is going further from the scope of our original investigation, leaving Freud behind for Plotinus, so these speculations will have to be left for another occasion.
In the first episode of The Big 0 Roger was hired to pay the ransom to the kidnappers of R. Dorothy-2, the android with the brain of a Megadeus that had been created by an engineer named Waynewright (whom Dorothy calls father) as the ‘daughter’ of the industrialist Soldano (exactly what this relationship means we never know, but in the earlier—or at least other—world Roger visits during a later mystical katabasis Dorothy is a human being and the biological daughter of Waynewright). At one point Soldano is murdered by the kidnappers, and it is with his dying words that we learn he considers Dorothy his true daughter (earlier he had rejected her). The very last thing he does, however, is to address Roger as ‘Nightingale.’
The name of this bird must inevitably recall Keats’ Ode. In that poem the narrator undergoes a mystical vision. He joins the Nightingale in its bucolic idyll, a place in the dark forest far removed from the physical world that is foreign to the bird. Following Sokrates on his last journey as far as he can, he feels himself at one and the same time as though he had drunk from the river Lethe, whose water brings forgetfulness of earth to the dead (and, in the Neoplatonic theology that Keats follows, thereby allows the sensation of true divine reality), as well as partaken of the inspiration of poetry that Hesiod received from the Muses at the Hippocrene spring. But because the speaker of the poem is still alive—still trapped in a body—he cannot break through to participate in the divine inspiration he feels all around him and inevitably crashes back down to earth.
In case anyone hasn’t read the poem, it is much more important to read that than this nugatory essay, so here it is in full (as an aid to memory to those who have read it):
Ode to a Nightingale
MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 5
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 10
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South! 15
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 20
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 25
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 30
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night, 35
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 40
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 45
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 50
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 55
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. 60
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 65
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 70
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades 75
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep? 80
Recall that in The Terror Underground when Roger falls from the ladder after he is inexplicably seized with fear, he enters into the first of his otherworldly visions. He begins by seeing ghostly crowds walking along phantom sidewalks. This same vision often signals for Roger the beginning of what we may call a katabasis. This term originally described the journey to the underworld by Odysseus, when, after a ceremony of ritual magic, feeding blood to the ghosts to give them the semblance of life, he enquired about his future from the shade of Tiresias. It is often used by scholars to refer to any kind of mystical vision that is not a heavenly jounrey; as a literary theme it culminates in Dante’s tour through hell in the Inferno. The word aptly describes Roger’s visions. In later episodes he will see the crowd of phantoms pressing around him again and will eventually enter their world entirely, losing his identity and finding the world rearranged in a different configuration more real and palpable than the one he had known. Indeed, he will there see that his former life is in that world the subject of children’s comic books (as mentioned above, he read the episode of Big 0’s fight with the Archetype Megadeus), whether they are the truth or lies that seem like the truth (the Muses of the Hippocrene could tell both).
It is this constant sensing of a world all around more real than his own that he cannot quite see, his brief irruption into that world only to be rudely ejected back into the more mundane reality of his own existence where true reality seems only a dream, that makes Roger a Nightingale.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; (41-5)
It is an old folk-belief that the dying can see through the veil and perceive things kept secret from mortal life, and it must have been from such a vision that Soldano was able to say what Roger is. Although in the end Roger is also revealed to be much more than that.
But to return to the matter at hand, as Roger awakes from his vision after falling from the ladder in the subway, he sees himself in a locus amoenus, a dark forest glade, cradled in the lap of his mother (as we saw above, an Oedipal confusion of his mother and lover). I would suggest that this is the, “melodious plot / Of beechen green, and shadows numberless” (8-9) that is the natural habitat of Keats’ Nightingale. As the pleasant place of Classical poetry, the vision is a symbol of the ideal world (of heaven, let us call it, since we must have a suggestive, if conventional, way of speaking about matters that cannot be expressed in human language) that is so far removed from our everyday reality that it can only be shown in symbols: it is not a glade, but is like a glade in being more filled with light and therefore more pleasant than the dark forest around it. Roger finds himself there in the lap of his ideal love, the mixture of pious maternal love and the delirium of desire. As Plato informs us in the Symposium, it is love that leads upward to the vision of the Good, the knowledge of higher truths and a higher form of existence than we can know through the physical senses, because it is love, a child of both worlds, that mediates between this world and that. So in the moment of Roger’s vision, physical love is bound inextricably together with pure heavenly love: desire and piety helping each other up the ladder. He awakens on earth in the lap of his lover, but, one supposes, if he had slipped free of the mortal coil of his body, he could just as well have awakened in heaven to the divine love of God.
I cannot help but think that the self-chosen new identity of the reporter as Schwarzwald is a reference to the dim woodland glade of the Nightingale. The meaning of the term is rather clumsily indicted to the viewers (6 year olds, remember) when he tells Roger his new name and Roger reacts by questioningly translating it to himself: “Black Forest?” (perhaps the clumsiness is only in the acting of the English-language cast). If so, it is because Schwarzwald longs for the beatific vision of the Nightingale, not because he has achieved it. Schwarzwald wants enlightenment, but he cannot separate it from temporal power. He wants to replace the tyranny of Paradigm City (though one suspects he would, in the short term, be a far more dangerous master than Alex Rosewater if he succeeded: a Jan van Leyden or a Savonarola), but he does not act to build anything new but only to destroy. For him enlightenment is the object of a passion, so he has no hope of achieving it. Though in some sense well-meaning (the Megadei eventually accept him as a pilot and therefore as ‘Not Guilty’), he is so blind that he cannot tell the innocent from the damned. It is as though he repeated Odin’s bargain for knowledge, but traded both of his eyes as the price (but the treatment of that theme can be left for another time).
The Terror Underground stitches together psychological science and metaphysics, reminding us that Freud’s psychology is rooted in Plato’s philosophy. The salvation of enlightenment of one is the mature, well personality of the other. They are both bound together by love as the instrument that shapes our ends. This episode establishes the nature of man and foreshadows much of what is to come: the warfare of the physical against the spiritual and the final deus ex machina in which God resolves what nature cannot.
Here is the episode on YouTube. The videos altogether are about 23 minutes long:
Part I
Part II
Part III
