The Blackberry Walk

Watching the Jubilee Pageant a few days ago with friends over the long Jubilee weekend was terrifying. Once the first act of military marches had passed we were greeted with a second act of the decades of the queen’s life; each decade from the ‘50s onwards had a bus and a marching parade showing the clothing, fads, and sensibilities of the era. Despite being a little sad to hear commentary with the era’s B-list celebrities on the bus repeating “this is one of the best days of my life” and “I really am a child of the ‘80s”, it wasn’t offensive in so far as it merely fell a little flat. The ‘10s, it’s worth noting, barely had a bus or parade – the internet age really doesn’t have much shared culture to bond over (I was hoping for Minecraft Steve to make an appearance for the sake of the royal children, but was left disappointed.)

The third and final act was where the pageant went from bubbleless and flat to positively sour and perhaps poisonous. In celebration of the queen, the organisers sent out legions of demons. Chimeras of every stripe – human-animal hybrids, animal-animal hybrids, humanoid monsters, not-so-humanoid creatures of terror – walked down Pall Mall in honour of the queen. What’s worse is that these demons were meant to represent her subjects! Many came representing the constituent nations of the UK and the Commonwealth: is this how the Crown sees the queen’s subjects? Are we but these crazed chimeric beings without distinct identity? In a strange way, which the organisers certainly did not intend, we are – symbolism is most commonly unintentional, for the psyche can’t help but portray the patterns it sees.

Either way, the pageant has undoubtedly only confirmed the horrid suspicions of many Americans made mad on the Atlantean continent that the British monarch is the Antichrist; a suspicion we, like most of the world, imbibe whilst sleeping under the US’ cultural hypnotic hegemony.

What then is so horrific and terrifying about the chimera, and what does the chimera mean? The chimera, originally a figure from Greek mythology, is a Frankenstein of different animals seemingly sewn together – the kind of creature you’d expect to find in a clandestine Chinese laboratory. Being a creature of many foreign components, it is without identity; is a chimera which is one part lion, one part serpent, and one part goat a lion, a serpent, or a goat? It is it’s our inability to name it and categorise it into boxes we understand which invokes its fear and gravity. In a similar light, surrealism attempts to create these chimeras showing us the unknown, and prove to us that the identity of all things on this Earth is in every sense miraculous. The chimera, therefore, is a symbol of what is truly beyond the pale – outside of the boundary of what we call ‘sensible’ and ‘feasible’ – a beast without logos and without love: essentially a demon.

Let’s look at that last phrase a bit closer. Logos is the sensibility of the world, in the sense that a thing can have structure and make sense. For instance, the grammar and words I use make sense (hopefully) because they contain at root a logos of understanding inherent in the application of the English language. Similarly, a book has a certain form, possessing a spine and two covers which sandwich the pages within it; without this form, this logos, we couldn’t recognise the object as a book. The question then becomes where does the logos come from? Is it, as many a believer in scientism today would argue, a product of our mind which is in turn a combination of our biology and conditioning? For reasons which would lead me far astray from the point of this article, I’d argue not; rather I’d argue the order of the world comes from God through His love. And creatures which through their own pride cannot experience God’s love at all are demons. It’s no coincidence then that demons and Satan are often depicted as goat-headed, or goat-horned and tailed, for they are chimeras of sorts; beings who, through their inability to participate in God’s love, don’t possess an intelligible form.

The carnival has become a catch-all word for grand celebrations and parades, but finds its origins in the Catholic equivalent to Shrove Tuesday – a time for excess and extravagance. From the mediaeval era onwards, Carnival was a festival of gorging yourself on rich foods before lent, sexual debauchery, mask wearing, costume donning, and authority mocking, paralleling other festivals like Saturnalia for the Romans. Carnival was the day of the year where you could be carnal, and engage in all that is usually forbidden. Understandably, masks and costumes are necessary, since you are becoming a kind of monster, a chimera, letting the demons run rampant for just one day in a controlled way before you hunker down for the holy purity of Lent. As a festival of the Trickster, of inversion, Carnival is where for just a moment you can wallow in the profane in a kind of upside-down reality – a time where the usual order of the cosmos, the logos, can be ignored.

Carnivals exist in many forms across history. There was the great Roman holiday Saturnalia mentioned previously, where for just a few days slaves were equals to their masters, able to talk to them as equals, and drunken merriment ensued. In a similar vein was the mediaeval Feast of the Ass, a holy day wherein a donkey was led to the church altar, roles of power were reversed, and the liturgy was punctuated with braying. Such celebrations are seen today also in the post-Christian sphere, like Comicon. What is Comicon but a kind of masquerade of merriment, dressing up and becoming characters of fiction, and then spending all of your hard saved money before a kind of Lent of fiscal poverty? I’m not here to argue that Comicon has a Christian origin – far from it – merely that the carnival as a pattern permeates pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian spheres and it’s simply a pattern inherent to the world we inhabit.

'The Fight between Carnival and Lent' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Paprika is a brilliant film by Satoshi Kon which, if you haven’t already seen it, I heartily recommend. The film is about the production of a device called the DC Mini, which allows a therapist to enter a patient’s dream, facilitating advanced psychoanalysis. Unfortunately the device has some issues. Evil actors take control of the device, hooking up the dreams of individuals to one another, later birthing the dream world into the real world. However the psychotic mind of one individual hooked up into this Lain-styled Human Instrumentality creates an endless parade of madness – a seemingly endless carnival. We watch as reality gets subsumed by this never-ending carnival, with our protagonists fighting to bring back sanity, order, and reality: to restore logos to the throne.

The narrative is a symbolically powerful one. It’s a story well known to all, of a people driven insane and driven off a cliff like lemmings. One of the first that comes to mind is the Nazis; in their parade of pomp, they led a cosplay carnival, a Roman romp, fascinated by their own fictions, rejecting reality. Unfortunately though, their endless carnival was a military march across Europe.

What Paprika teaches us is that the dreams which we take for granted as personal can in fact be collective; for much like how an individual can have a dream, so can a society. However, a society’s dream can easily be corrupted into something heinous, much like the corrupted dream of nationalism in the First World War, and the far more twisted corrupted pagan dream of National Socialism in the second. The Germans aren’t the only dreamers, however; the American Dream is another fallen dream which has left many in the US and, through their cultural virus, the world poor and disillusioned. The question becomes, what kind of dream are we dreaming today? Are we having healthy sweet dreams, or are we having a psychotic nightmare with an endless carnival of inversion, chimeras, and demons?

As a kind of mid-point summary, let’s review what we’ve covered. Every now and then, to have a carnival, wherein the logos is inverted and we’re allowed to break taboos, is alright – perhaps even healthy. The never-ending carnival, as seen in Paprika, however, is a mass psychosis and harmful: it is a parade never ceasing; a conga line without completion. That being said, let’s return to our first, healthy, example of the carnival: the occasional carnival. In our everyday lives this is best seen in works of parody, parody being the act of mocking something typically grave and serious through sardonic imitation. Another word used and misused a lot today is ‘irony’, which takes on a similar meaning; “I wasn’t being serious, I only said ‘yeet’ ironically,” and the like. Again, it’s a kind of mocking imitation of taboos and norms, aiming to overturn, invert, and deconstruct – a kind of iconoclasm.

But what we’re dealing with here is not, like we were discussing with regards to Carnival, an inversion of divine law – rap culture could hardly be further from it – but rather it’s a deconstruction of man-made rituals and traditions. Saying ‘yeet’ was originally done in sincerity, done ritually as part of a tradition; I know that sounds pompous and incredibly stupid, but if you look at it for a moment it makes sense. In so far as we shake hands as a kind of ritual greeting, and say please and thank you as rituals with regards to favours and good deeds, some say ‘yeet’ as a kind of ritual also: it signifies that you’re in the in-group. When to use certain rituals and knowing how a ritual is performed is determined by tradition, which can be seen as a container across time of rituals. Rituals and traditions are not necessarily good or bad; to figure out if a ritual should be venerated like an icon, or iconoclastically torn up should depend on how well it maps to revealed logos, to Truth, but today it is more often than not compared to some sort of shadow or mirage of logos.

To look at parody, a great case study for this anime blog is the isekai genre. Isekai was once usually done in sincerity, with titles like Sword Art creating the ‘rituals’ of isekai such as ‘die in the game, die in real life’, and other titles creating other tropes like ‘truck-kun’. The formation of tropes into a kind of nexus of ideas is what created the literary and artistic tradition of isekai. Then there are the isekai parodies like Konosuba, and the myriad of copycats like ‘I was reincarnated as an onsen’ nonsense. But they’re more than non-sense: they’re anti-sense. They’re trying to invert the sense of the isekai tradition, pull its trousers down, and mock it. Parody is good and important; nothing could be worse than the isekai genre taking itself so seriously its elevated a high art status beyond what it deserves, only to discover that the emperor has no clothes. Parody is the court jester, reminding the king he isn’t divine; parody is the Trickster who inverts; parody is the carnival.

Parody can go too far, however. Once a genre becomes saturated with unoriginal parody, much like isekai, all there is to be seen is the dry carcass of once beloved shows like Sword Art being pecked at by pitiful vultures. Isekai as a genre has tried its best to stay alive, with titles like Re: Zero which have attempted to reinvent the tradition with darker more psychological themes (rituals), however never again will a Sword Art style isekai greet our screens.

The reign of parody, of the jester over the king, is the never-ending carnival – without the king’s authority to cease the carnival, the jester, the Trickster, will only keep dancing, trampling upon ever-more taboos, wrecking ever-more rituals. Tradition, that force which holds communities together and connects strangers to one another, is broken by the never-ending carnival, burning down the forest with their unwieldy firey dances. The never-ending carnival is truly a call from the abyss towards anarchy and nihilism: the call to bring down all that is great and beautiful in the world.

To return to the Jubilee Pageant, thankfully the carnival was not a never-ending one, but the pageant was certainly a carnival rather than a royal parade befitting of the queen. The celebration of the Jubilee is a celebration of the queen and of her continued reign – it is a celebration of order – and to celebrate the queen’s reign with the regalia of chaos and madness is a kind of madness in of itself – an inversion of how a jubilee should be celebrated. The parade should never have been a parody.

But is it a reflection of the times – does right mean left and left mean right? Do we live in an age of chimeras? Are our traditions in step with logos, and what is True? I’ll leave the answer to that up to you, dear reader, for the answer is beyond me. The symbolism of the chimera is everywhere, but does that mean we are mad, dancing in lockstep in the never-ending carnival? Do the dancers in the parade in Paprika even realise they’re dancing?

To end, here’s a picture of the Jubilee lasagna me and my friends made – a true chimera – made with home-made pasta dyed blue by food colouring, sprinkled with a Union Jack of coloured bread crumbs. There’s something offensive about dying pasta blue; something deeply iconoclastic, ritual-breaking, taboo, and profane. In the end, it didn’t taste so nice, so we received our comeuppance.