The Blackberry Walk

The great tower. To many the OVA is reminiscent of biblical myth, namely the tower of Babel. The tower of babel, man's attempt to reach god, is a parable on the idea of agape which the neo-Platonists describe as the love between man and god. The tower of babel is man's attempt to turn agape into philia, the love of a brother. In attempting to reach god, god looses their power and you've misunderstood religion and god on the whole. Surprisingly, the myth pops up around the world. Not just in the Sumer and Mesopotamian religions from which Abrahamic faith descended, but in Mesoamerican myths too. The great pyramid of Cholula in Mexico, which is the largest pyramid in the world and believed to have been built around 300BC, is talked about by locals as an attempt to reach Quetzelcoatl. Again, this is the idea of the Dao between the order of science and the chaos of nature. Our attempt to create order in the world, as represented by the order of the tower, in an attempt to 'reach god' - god being a metaphor for nature. And the way in which we create order in the world is society... Society is pretty mad when we think about it. At Easter we hide little chocolate eggs around the garden and pretend that a rabbit, a mammal, has laid and hidden them. We each go to specific locations when the small 'hands' on a gadget wrapped around our wrist tell us it's 'time' to do so. We make self-propelling automobiles (moves self) - big steel boxes travelling faster than anything our bodies were designed for just so we can get to where we need to be when 'the time' demands us to go. We accept all of this since we have grown up with these features, or seen them develop over our life time. Some are disenchanted. In the OVA, we see a man question the construction of the tower. He claims the construction is crazy. "All we do is build this tower and no one knows why". Why do we build society exactly. We all know why we do what we do... or don't we. If, like a 3 year old attempting to understand the world, you repeatedly ask "Why", you soon realise that there's a bedrock. A bedrock where you can't explain any further why you do what you do, at which point you must accept that there are certainties, foundations atop which your society is built. In order to be apart of a society, you must accept the base dogmatic truths. The dissenter is crazy. He rejects the bedrock premises atop which his society is built. But instead of trying to improve his life within the system, he just wants out. Would rather take on the uncertainty of joining a new society. Within the country, one must work for the tower. Similar to the production of the great pyramids in ancient Egypt, the economy of this country revolves around the production of the tower. Kino, being the genius that she is, points out to the dissenter, "perhaps you can inscribe patterns on the bricks". Don't work knock the system down; find what you can add to the system. Find your own niche. Find meaning in what you can do within society instead of rejecting it outright. The tower falls down and everyone cheers. Societies often fall down. We become too big for our boots and the foundations are swept from underneath us. Whether it be war or famine or whatever else, societies are house of cards. It's crazy to think how precarious our cozy lives are. One virus mutates leads to a pandemic and chaos. The cards collapse and we're swept into the dark ages. Society is gone. The tower has collapsed. Only when a snake sheds its skin can it grow; only when a forest burns down can a healthy forest grow in the nutrients left over. A newer forest. A greater forest than ever before. World War 2 saw much of the United Kingdom turn to rubble. But amongst the debris, people saw opportunity. Our of war came a new Britain who looked within herself, gave away much of the empire to independence, set up a national health service, etc. Every now and then the tower must fall. Incremental change can lead you up the wrong branch. If the wrong turn is taken along the way, there is no turning back. Every now and then we must cheer when the tower falls, because without it we will never have the opportunity to learn from our mistakes.