The Blackberry Walk

Admiration can become pathological. To admire is to see something great in another and want to emulate it in yourself. But taken to far, you will derail yourself. You’ll fall off your own track onto theirs, chugging behind them. It’s constricting being on another’s track. It isn’t going the direction that your soul deep down wants to travel causing all sorts of internal disturbances and frustrations. Traveling behind them on their line, all you see is their rear-end. You become blinded to all but their shit, to their dark side. What was once looking into eyes of bright admiration becomes staring into the dark anus of the inferiority complex. Tetsuo once admired Kaneda. Kaneda had helped him throughout his troubled childhood in school. But that admiration in time became pathological. Kaneda shone like the sun, and Tetsuo stared to long. Blind and lost, Tetsuo changed track, chugging along on Kaneda Rail instead of his own predetermined track of his soul. He now danced to Kaneda’s tunes rather than his own heart’s song. His inferiority complex grew, only ever seeing the dark in Kaneda, shadow projecting at every opportunity. Then, through his ‘transcendental awakening’, Tetsuo’s inferiority complex became a superiority complex, assuming the role of god in a desperate compensation of the psyche to regain control of itself. And, in a kind of ‘as above so below’ kind of way, the loveless city which has an inferiority complex of its own, seeing only power, not love, is destroyed, along with the Tetsuo we knew. What is rebirthed at the end is the real Tetsuo, uttering the words ‘I am Tetsuo’ – a moment of self-realisation, of recognising his own existence, of being himself instead of his complex possessed double, righting himself back onto his own railway. The inferiority complex is typified by the wishing for a saviour, for a messiah. Jung has argued that the Jews, who were under the control of the Romans despite seeing themselves as a chosen people, had a society-wide inferiority complex. They wished for a messiah to rescue them form this state, and he arose from the people in the form of Jesus. The Nazi’s in this respect were quite similar. Post-WW1, post Great Depression Germany was downtrodden and had a nation-wide inferiority complex. The war guilt of the Treaty of Versailles also hit their fledgling nation pretty hard. Only a messiah of the ancestral German spirit, who took the form of Adolf Hitler, could bring salvation to their fatherland. For Tetsuo, that messiah of salvation was Akira, just as he was for the city also. Interestingly, Tetsuo was also mistaken for the messiah Akira, finding his ‘divine powers’ via his superiority complex. Hitler did much the same. After being rejected as an artist, his inferiority became superiority and, via his wounds, he accessed the collective divine spark extant in all of man to embody the messianic role. Messiahs aren’t always good men. You’ve got your Jesuses and your Hitlers. But what is the case is that invigorate us. They connect with our sick souls or sick societies and energise us out of our shadow possessed stupour. The solution is not found in the darkness of the shadow, but in the lightness of the soul. What brought Tetsuo to self-realisation was not looking at his shadow; for what he saw in Kaneda was just an abyss to stare ever deeper into. Are you trying to defeat Bowser, or save Princess Peach? Defeat the darkness, or save the lightness? The messiah or guru is a projection of the soul, of the saviour, when you or a society is in need. But that’s your soul. That’s your princess living in the castle of your heart. Don’t project her away – save her and hold her dearly. Follow her, not someone else who professes the truth. That’s their self-knowledge – not yours. Tetsuo in his possessed state never had that self-reflective moment, never looked inside himself for his soul, never noticed that his damsel was in need of rescuing. He was forever looking with tunnel vision at Kaneda’s back, unable to see the vast expanse, the sheer beauty and greatness, which lay ahead of him. For only by getting himself back on track – on his track – will he see the morning sun on the horizon.