Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
I am writing to you from a service station along the M40 at half past eight on a cold and dark November evening. The Eclipse and I (Eclipse is my car) are tucked away in the far corner of the car park in the shadow of the mass of vegetation which burgeons against the perimeter fence. Across from me I can see the stop's petrol station. A slow but steady stream of cars pass through, each taking her fill and gliding on into the dark. I can see the tender sitting at the till, her face resting on her arm; and a tall dark man taking a long time to choose what packet of crisps he wants from the snack aisle. The torturingly bright white lights of the petrol station's forecourt create an umbrella of daylight under the canopy, leaving the world outside its beams in an ever darker abyss. The dull rumbling of the M40 is all that I can hear; the comforting glass of Eclipse's windows keeping any of the fine details from my ears. It's a cold night, 4C by Eclipse's account, but the residual heat of her engine keeps the car's cabin at a comfortable temperature. There might be a frost tonight.
There's something alluring about places like here. Teenagers have fouled the word by years of unserious use, but these are "liminal spaces" in the true sense of the word; they are places on the way to somewhere else. Locations designed to be visited by no one but travellers passing through. There is nobody at the Southbound Warwick Service Station that wants to be here, but yet there are dozens of us all congregating here nonetheless. Its but a way-station enroute to somewhere else serving a purely utilitarian role in the refreshment and replenishment of provisions for vehicles and their quarry. There's a romance about such places, ugly as they often are; an allure that pulls in the wanderer, the fool and the scholar alike. Train stations are similarly liminal in nature, as are airport terminals and sea ports. All these places attract men of discontent. Train autists, drug traffickers, poets. To sit and watch the wayfarers come and go from such a place is to deny it its purpose after all. Me sitting here in this car park for more than ten minutes is in itself a rebellion against the desire and purpose of it all. A rarity in a world that wants to capture your attention and trap you within its mental labyrinth for as long as possible to suck as much blood from you as it can. While most places demand your attention, this one demands you leave.
They say this time of year is special. On the night of Hallowe'en the veil between our world and the others grows thin. As a child I believed it was because the saints had all travelled down to Rome in preparation for the great feast on All Saints' Day, distracting them from their tireless work of defending the gates between worlds. I don't believe this has an inch of theological backing, but it is not a childish thought I have discarded wholesale. We know that angels do have their wards. They watch over certain towns, families or individuals as patron saints in special service from God on high. The landscape is scarred with the activities of such beings is you know where to look and who to ask. We know angels guard gateways: St Peter is the chief example of course. And a saint's feast day must be something akin to their birthday party, where feasts are held in their honour: and nobody wants to work on their birthday. This leaves the world open to a slow leaking in of the older forces, the ones which used to rule over these lands in the not so distant past. From the graveyards crawl the unfaithful dead, from the woods emerge the jealous sprites, and from the sewers the regrets of the living manifest solid. All here to remind us that "we too shall die", and that each of our lives is but a blip on the enormity of eternity.
In Japan they interestingly have a very similar belief. Before the Meiji Restoration the month of October had two names depending on where you were. In the majority of Japan the month was called "Kannazuki" (神無月), "the month without kami". This was because during October it is believed the kami of every shrine process from their home to the senior Shinto shrine of Japan at Izumo in Shimane Prefecture for a great feast, only returning when the first frost lands. Thus within Shimane Prefecture the month was instead called "Kamiarizuki" (神有月), "the month with the kami".
I for one believe in the existence of a natural law, the one truth which can be unveiled purely through a perfect interpretation of the world and its machinations. Like an Aristotelian or a Scientist the darkness can be scraped away to reveal what is true underneath. But I also believe that on occasion these truths can be intuited in a top down manner through divine inspiration. The Bible for instance contains the books of Jewish and then Christian revelation that have been determined to be in the closest alignment to reality by centuries of earthly scholars. Rather than a wholly divine manuscript (like the Quran claims to be), these are texts by humans about God, and thus even they are tinged by the original sin. Great works of fiction likewise describe truths gained through the inspiration of "the Muses". All of this is to say that true orthodoxy in belief can only be derived from ones own reason, by matching the divine mysteries from above with the hard observations from below. When a coincidence in mythology occurs as noted above I find it is almost guaranteed to contain some truth as a mutually independent revelation.
However, the mystery of Hallowe'en can hardly be explained just by the absence of the saints. There is a gnostic interpretation to this explanation that leaves a bitter taste. Rather than a good versus an evil, I would say the truth lies more in the dichotomy between order and chaos. Hallowe'en in its exuberance for evil and performative revelry in the macabre seems too cartoonishly "evil" to really be "scary". A night under we were truly in danger of evil forces would not be the one we decide to send out our children to wander the streets. No, the theatrical nature of the whole thing points to something altogether more complex which I haven't yet figured out. Such a solution would have to incorporate the truths we can see from such taboo breaking. The liminality of such a time which makes us flip the rules upside-down in a Saturnalian daze. One which gives us a reason to take a holiday at the service station before the first frost hits.
