what is that word judaism has for the connective tisse that needs to exist to perceive god? tzimtzum. this is what i wrote this same month in 2021 when i was listening to a rabbi explain kabbalah:
A finite world created by the infinite would shatter that world. So we need to figure out a way to contain the infinite world. A zip drive. The whole thing’s still there but zipped down. Infinite light, if it were totally revealed, there would be total destruction. God tried that and it didn’t work, before creating this one. Like a ray of light… only when it’s left the sun can it be an independent entity.
last night i was restless for Something Else. i couldn't muster up the desire to read any of the 100+ unread books i own. i kept turning to other devices. maybe the thing i want is a book i have on my kindle. maybe the thing i want is on a tablet. maybe the thing i want is a video game emulated on a handheld console. different containers. different messengers.
i keep thinking of xenosaga and the opening sequence which strikes me as evangelion-like (i was also rewatching evangelion for the first time this month in 2021). the monolith, the emerging. is god in space; is space god? what i'm looking for in science fiction is the same thing i'm looking for everywhere else (but especially in science fiction): god. the very words science fiction seem like god to me. science plus imagination. math and physics plus playfulness.
but then i try to get into the game xenosaga itself and it's just 'big eye girl runs girlishly, also there is a girlish robot. sexy girl, girlish sexy girls.' if you actually find anime girls sexy, is it always a relief when they show up, as opposed to this bait and switch feeling i get from them? are they like this reassuring entity saying "it's okay if you look for god and find only attraction to a girl-child" or "it's okay if you pretend you're looking for god but you're really looking for sex"?
90s anime is perfect rarified culture, colorful esoterica, and suspended adolescence. i think anime and particularly anime girls are decontextualized and repurposed aesthetically so often because they represent, probably not intentionally, something beyond what they are. the plot of an anime rarely meets the promise of the emotions its images evoke -
(that is why it is inherently female, the promise of the female experience, the promise of beauty and of what power that beauty grants to be a thin beautiful girl with long legs most girls are trans, trans-ness as the unfulfilled promise of impossible images lacuna is a female name, the void is inherently female)
anyway i did find something of an answer: play xenogears, the game that came before xenosaga. it seems this one is all about god and takes heavy inspiration from evangelion.
media, anime in particular, is tzimtzum. i rarely get what i want from it but it does have a tendancy to lead me to the thoughts i want to think.