Grab hold and don’t let go. While this transience passes. While the soul-switches flip on. What creative expression means. At least to me. If I attest this through the people and things that move me most—I can maintain why I need to actuate what I may myself give.
While I have time in this space of certainty that finds moments between faith-purgatory. For the future self that hurts to remember at a given moment that eventual timelessness is the temporal destination.
i: Evangelion [3.0+1.0 and everything leading to the bye]
I won’t detail-discourse on Evangelion cause it’s too mainstayed and easy to tap into as among the beloved I.P.s of pop culture, and you have simply to start even typing “Evangelion” on the internet and you’ll see. I’ll reflect its meaning toward my will to reconcile an emotional-existential lived experience. So even if you aren’t into this—let alone the later subjects—the aim is reflecting this back to why what I’ve given audience to has given back to my own will to give. I’m making sense.
I address these fictitious teenagers, and by-this-point narratively actual adults trapped in their teenager bodies. They of who their witnesses—prose synonym for audience—have been with them for the extended amount of time that covers both the characters and/or creators’ narratives in relation to the work. [The director between making the preceding film and this final 3.0+1.0 underwent another depressive episode and took time off to make a Godzilla movie.] As well the time we spend outside of direct engagement with said work but retaining the resonance.
I’ve witnessed and/or experienced alongside them—those created or those who created—their amounts of suffering and pathos, through transcendence-bound iterations, decades-worth of narrative whether experienced since in-real-time-release or binged.
And out of that benefit of enduring pain, what would otherwise be trivial images of . . . just life – or the idyllic portrait of it emerge.
And the suggestion of quiet. Of tender melancholy in the aftermath of all the destruction and loss.
Maybe because we can’t seem to appreciate nice things until the opportunities are ripped away, leaving us in scenarios where we wish for nothing more than dear death descending. A defining tragedy of human consciousness may very well be that we don’t want what we get to have to be enough. Which is why the worse things get, the more basic we lower the bar on experiencing what would register as a beautiful life. You can apply this to as cold a concept as filing your taxes or as existential as your physiological life and the limbs attached to it. And so a rainbow above wreckage, an umbrella under the rain, fishing regardless if you catch, lying in a tree’s shade; all this blossoms a what-if. That of renewed—or redeemed—beauty; more precisely our ability and willingness to find hold of it. Because the portals to these moments have always come and gone.
The essence of these experiences—we hold them for granted until they’re taken away and offered back in glimpses.
The thing is loss—and time lost—could nurture retroactive catharsis. There can be beauty in the aftermath quiet.
This thing’s not coming out for a while and it’d be weird in any other I.P. case to write about the narrative merit of a work that hasn’t been seen yet, but Evangelion gets away with it because its resonance transcends any single whole entry in its canon. It’s also the only pop culture fiction I.P. that can at parts lack such plot coherence yet paradoxically epitomize the full experiential scope of human longing, loss, and from it all what lastingly lingers.
Because of it, I know more now that there’s catharsis to be found in aloneness. Not an aloneness manufactured by appropriating hipsters or self-inflicted by self-hating narcissists. It’s one you don’t ask for. Cause if you were handed a choice between aloneness and “happiness”, you know which one you’d go for. I know. But because for whatever reason I can’t quite grasp whatever “happiness” is manufactured to be, I need to live with the other thing. Though I’ve come to know there’s beauty and possibly catharsis somewhere over here. Through the stretches of loss and the byes.
OPEN DOOM CRESCENDO 