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.
Imagine a pond of still water. Above this pond tree boughs extend, covering the water with their shadow. As leaves and acorns fall into the pond they create ripples across the water surface. These ripples emanate out from the point of contact, slowly decreasing in amplitude until they reach the pond's edge. Some objects, like leaves, will float on the surface of the water, at least for a while, being affected by the ripples made by other falling objects and slowly being pushed out from their origin point towards the edges. There they will coalesce and slowly decompose into mush. If one wanted to find the eldest leaves, they would naturally search first in this mush, rather than the new fresh leaves floating in the middle of the pond. Over many years the trees covering the pond will grow and change the position of their boughs above the water. This in turn will change the place at which the ripples are emanating from as the leaves and acorns fall from new places.
I use this metaphor to represent our own world: the falling objects as people and events and the ripples as their consequences. As world changing events occur, their effects ripple across the globe. Sometimes they leave behind artefacts (leaves) and these artefacts will be affected also by world events and slowly move away from the centre. However in real life, unlike in the world of the pond, the ripples of effect can move at greatly differing speeds. They will also not travel in all directions at equal speeds and will travel faster along established routes. A good example is the spread of Christianity in the first millennium: emanating out from Jerusalem, the gospel spread along known trade routes in all directions. West across the Mediterranean carried by the Roman messengers, East across Arabia by the travelling caravans. North into the foothills of Armenia and South, carried by the long boat punters of the Nile. Of course Christ himself was somewhat of a "pebble", who personally was only able to travel in the very near vicinity to his emanation, even though his effects spread across the whole stop globe. He did leave behind artefacts, represented by our leaves, which slowly made their way away from the holy land to the farthest reaches of Christendom. The holy grail according to tradition ended up in Britain, just as the art of the covenant had (potentially) drifted all the way to Ethiopia in the centuries prior.
The same effect can be observed with more social changes such as shifts in pronunciation and accent. What, in England, we now call a rural accent, such as those found in the West country or East Anglia, retain characteristics such as rhoticity which used to be widespread across the whole country. Changes in accents generally started in Central London, and eventually spread out across the whole country except for these fathers reaches. In fact, many of these antiquated accent qualities are still present in English colonies such as America or South Africa.
It is said (by whom?) that the current of the world runs East to West, much like the passage of the sun, and this is reflected in my model. The main trunk of the tree has slowly been growing Westward for many many aeons. From Mesopotamia to Jerusalem, to Greece, Rome, France and Britain, then over the Atlantic to the USA. Even within America the last 100 years or so have seen power there move from the East coastal cities to the rusty Midwest and now over to the technocratic centres of California. Maybe sometime soon the tree is planning a new growth spurt, jumping the Pacific across to China. As the main thrust of the canopy shifts, the "centre" of the world changes, as the position of most falling objects shifts with it. But the echo of these strong associations still remain in these previous hot spots of the world: the world will always be watching whatever happens in the holy land with much keener eyes than other parts of the world, even if it isn't the primary axis in the modern day.
If the world is the surface of the pond, this naturally implies the existence of two other realms: the realm above from which the falling objects drop, and the realm below the surface where they end up. I've somewhat described the tree that must sit above the pond, which some may call by the name "Yggdrasil". In a platonic sense this would be the world of forms, or more broadly "heaven". When a duck looks up from the surface of the pond he would see the dense canopy of the tree above him and would be able to understand where the falling leaves come from. Whereas in reality the process is more opaque, it's not as obvious where the acorns fall from when you can't see the tree. But of course we can see the celestial bodies in the sky: for many ancients these bodies served this purpose as nodes from which powerful forces emanated. This is echoed in human psychology and modern religion. The foundational dichotomy between the Sun and the Moon: the two principal powers of the celestial sphere. Good and evil, night and day, man and woman. Then are the five planets visible to the naked eye, or as they were known in ancient times: the wandering stars. They represent the five forms of man and his temperaments, and their planets are the physical points from which the respective emotions (and personality-types) descended to Earth from. These were Mercury or Hermes, Venus or Aphrodite, Mars or Aries, Jupiter or Zeus, and Saturn or Kronos. And finally above the planets is the fixed sphere containing the uncountable, infinite stars. Stars an unknowable mystery of the inner workings of the universe, most civilizations have looked for meaning in the stars and found patterns and narratives from which they can mirror their own cultures in. It is commonly held that each star is the soul of a person, although the definition of soul is far from commonly agreed upon. The relationships between these several celestial spheres have also been measured: the zodiac stems from which sidereal constellation the sun currently sits within, which through some arcane principle manifests itself into a personality type on your birth. In a sense these celestial bodies drop acorns (souls) down onto the surface of the world like leaves on a pond, where they float for a while and send out ripples before sinking forever into the murk below...
Under the surface of the pond, however, is rather more difficult to interpret. Just as it is difficult to ascertain what is at the bottom of a pond in real life it is difficult to ascertain how to read this aspect of the metaphor. If we are indeed like acorns, then surely the subsurface realm must represent the hazy world of the "afterlife": a realm unknowable by its own conceit. But even if we cannot know it's true nature we can calculate some truths about it based on our observations from the surface. For one it must be affected by the falling objects: the ripples that occur on the surface are also present under it in the form of an expanding hemisphere after all. And depending on the waters depth and the bed's bottom-type, these ripples made bounce from the ponds bed back up to the surface creating mysterious ripples from another dimension which are hard to understand without taking into account water movements sub-surface. This complicates the system and introduces "invisible" forces of supernatural (or I guess in this case subnatural) machination.
The reason I like this metaphor is because I think it can be read on different levels: as a physical description of the way history operates and its relationship to time and space, but also as a vehicle to pull at more delicate threads like the "ancient artefacts of the outer lands" or the the proposed interaction between the natural and supernatural worlds. One could even introduce creatures to the model: fish, frogs and kingfishers; but I'll leave you to imagine their roles by yourself.
