the mad man

So I have gone back to re-read Kenshin since hearing about the scandal two weeks ago. These days I read much slower than I used to, but I still love the Kenshin manga to bits. I also caught up with a friend lately and talked about Watsuki-sensei's fall from grace. We watched two of the three Kenshin real-life movies together so the grief was really shared. We concluded that no matter what happened, Kenshin will remain as the best manga for us, so the only question remains - how now can we ever share it with our children? or our children's children?

Lots of memories came flooding back as I went through the story once again. There were many things I have held dear, but there were more things which have been ingrained in me and became second nature, and only now I realised -they actually came from Kenshin!

i really hope to note down all the things I want to say about Kenshin and Saitou before the end of the year, but these days I read and write so much slower than before so I am not too sure whether this is too ambitious. T_T There were so much I wanted to talk about Kenshin and Saitou, but before that I thought I really should give Soujiro a mention.

There was a part when Soujiro felt very challenged by Kenshin's world view in the midst of their battle and said one of most agonising things -
Back at that time, you... you did not come to rescue me. 
If what you have been saying are the truth - why? why did you not come to rescue me back then?
Back then, no one came to my rescue. 
The only thing that saved me was Shishio-san's words, and a short sword that he gave me. 

To which Kenshin replied-
You kept on mentioning about "back then" and questioned why wasn't I there to rescue you.
I am not able to travel back in time and I simply cannot imagine what really happened at that time or place,
but if it is not all too late, is it okay if we start the reparation now?

I guess I can easily imagine this being the universal unspoken conversation that takes place at work...

the most memorable thing about Soujiro is not what he said and did as a character but what Watsuki-sensei said about him when his part of the story came to a conclusion. Despite painting him as the teenage heart throb and being ever so sympathetic about his traumatic childhood and the choices he made subsequently - Watsuki-sensei's view on the approach of life he took was clear---

No matter what external difficulties one encounters in one's family or the wider society, no matter how difficult and bitter your life has been, being a person, living in this world, the one single thing you cannot give up is thinking independently.

There you go. It was a lesson I held dear as a miserable clueless teenager vulnerable to falling into all kinds of toxic external expectations.
and now looking back 17 years later, it is as needed a lesson now as it was back then.

Just for that alone, Watsuki-sensei is still Watsuki-sensei.

Oh and this article from Mockingbird is very timely.
Love the art, hate the artist?

the swan song

News came yesterday that Nobuhiro Watsuki got arrested for child pornography possession. i was pretty shattered. Perhaps all the future generations from now on will dismiss Rurouni Kenshin as "the manga drawn by that paedophile" and it will not be valued anymore, which i think is absolutely tragic.

More tragic perhaps is that I couldn't help but imagine myself being called upon in the wee hours of the morning for an emergency assessment if Watsuki sensei attempts suicide in custody(they commonly do) and what I will end up saying to him---"Hello sensei, I am your shrink. i grew up reading your Rurouni Kenshin and it really shaped my life and brought me to where I am now. Sadly I can't think of anything that can fix you. All I can do is to keep you alive for prison no matter how much you want to die. In all honesty, your shit has nothing to do with me. I just don't want to end up going to the coroners for you when you get your easy way out. I will now ask Romeo the Phillipino nurse to sit with you for suicide watch. He's not much of a talker given his Japanese isn't great, but he's much bigger than you so don't even think about doing anything silly.  Hopefully after the weekend some other shrink will take over and you won't be my business any more. "

Now this is all rather defeating (and racist too), and perhaps affirms the point that mangas are mangas, and at the end of day they do nothing to make us mere mortals better people--readers or artist alike--but still I am grieving. I am getting old and weary not to say I have felt old and weary for years now. I see life as an ocean of suffering that knows no bounds and over time my pool of ideals continue to diminish, which makes the sudden shattering of another all the more heart wrenching.

I have expected the Kenshin story to end somewhat badly, but not like this. The first few chapters of the new Hokkaido arc were bland to say the least. maybe I would have coped with Watsuki-sensei going down in mediocrity, and accept that he will eventually ruin his once upon a time brilliant imaginary world by being too weighed down by his need to please an audience and earn a living when his creativity dried up. but, no, nothing dramatic and scandalous like this.

I guess I am also scared that our modern times have become so infantile in its division of good and bad, and so fixated on shaming, that Kenshin will get discarded like a baby along with the bathwater. If this becomes the case, the values from the beautiful story which shaped my life and provided me with such comfort during my loveless adolescent years will be one day doubted and dismissed even by myself. I fear that if I do not record some of these down, one day their emotional weight within me will also puff away without a trace...

i remember for many years even after my adolescence, despite my avoidance of the ever renewing phone technology, I would go to great length to set up Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu as my ringtone on every single new phone i acquire, just so during the years of miserable and frightening work calls, there was something comforting I could hold onto.

i remember despite my lack of alcohol dehydrogenase I would still reach for a drink or two when I remember Master Hiko's words - you watch the cherry blossoms in spring, you gaze the starry night sky in summer, you admire the full moon in autumn, and you greet the first snow in winter. Such sceneries! how can your sake not be tasty when your are in the midst of them! If you still dislike your alcohol, there must be something really wrong with you.
the context of nearby death and suffering in which he said it, just makes you ponder his words again and again.

i am touched when I look back to Kenshin and Master Hiko's final battle, many years later as a shrink, and be amazed all the more at its masterful development -- that this tells nothing but an old old story of the tragic Oedipal drama -- but told with such fineness, warmth and goodness from one's heart that the inherent elements of tragedy were not lost, but it so convincingly turned it around with atonement, acceptance and individuation. The son has killed his father, but the father was also rescued by the son, without his conscious knowledge. The father tells the son to value his own life and follow his own instincts in critical moments- they intend good and not harm!--and that was when the son's own journey of change truly began.



this is getting long... i will grieve some more and write part II bit later in the week... T_T

In the web

It has been a while since I wrote anything. In the meantime another one of my very disturbed patients did some high lethality self damage, and I happened to be the lucky one who saw her last. I sank into a frightening depression in the midst of yet another blame game and could find motivation for hardly anything. But then, sertraline did some wonders (and I highly recommend) and I survived the misery of work without taking too many mental health days, and said no to some job offers, and planned an overseas wedding and honeymoon itinerary and booked all the hotels during this awful period of time.

So, maybe looking back, it wasn't so bad at all, but it took immense effort to maintain that level of psychosocial functioning, with daily doubts whether i will manage to pull through the home stretch of my training, or flee the shrinkage as a wreck, knowing I will never have the guts to return. Perhaps the fact that i worked in the same post for the last 6 months as when I did as a first year and remembering things to be much more under control back then made it all the more defeating, or maybe, the realisation that control of the uncontrollable is but a delusion but your fellow clinicians use such defence day in and day out so their narcissistic selves don't disintegrate and they can continue doing the good work of saving the world... further added a sense of helplessness.

Or maybe, just when I was at a more tender age and know less of the world. I could comfortably adopt a more black and white view and a clear line could be set between the normal and the pathological, that could keep my psyche at bay from the mad and the bad and the sad that I see everyday. Maybe paying some proper attention to the male psychotic patients and their long suffering, very supportive but invariably transgressive mothers just made everything not so simply neurochemical. Or maybe the gradual realisation that my own mother was prominently Cluster B who did not tick all the criteria boxes only because she was bound by her cultural norms, and contained by a dependent endorsing husband, made me feel as if walking on the edge of a cliff--a slip of the foot at any minute could send me tumbling down into some pervasive pathology of my own.

so, here i am, frightened of my near misses, intermittently losing sight of the various forces that steadied my wobbly gait all these years, divine or otherwise. maybe there is yet hope, that I can untangle some more deep seated anxiety and hysteria, before moving forward, hopefully less of a wreck than before.

Back to my pet topic...

There was a scene at the end of la la land when Emma Stone fantasized about an alternative life where things worked out perfectly with Ryan Gosling. i was dubious whether that scene was about a longing for lost love at all, in fact--wasn't it a bit mean that she did not even think for one second about his failed attempt at cooking a roast with her storming out of the flat etc and try in her mind at least to make that part perfect too? so end of the day, it was only a fantasy about her need for being perfectly treated. I guess she ended up becoming a famous star so she was allowed to be a bit more narcissistic than the average population... Gosh I am harsh... XD

Despite all that, it was a touching scene that viscerally moved many, including myself. Speaking from my shrinkage I can only say our infantile fantasies of being perfectly loved have its universality and permanence, and as adults we don't just grow out of them. if we don't accept and give them expression but think we are so much better than all these and try to annihilate them somehow, they probably get all the stronger and seep out in other more unpleasant ways than the appreciation of a somewhat regressed movie ending.

In relation to infantile fantasies, there has been some very heated debates in the chinese psychology circles lately about filial piety, but one common point of agreement that got mentioned again and again---
If you are in denial of the problems between you and your parents, and repressed your anger about their lack of love and failed attempt at care, your negative feelings don't dissipate into the ether but are bond to seep out in one way or another in the other parts of your relationship realm, and most commonly, your own children will end up take the direct blows and suffer...

i think i will come back my pet topic of all times - the parable of the unforgiving servant. over the years I've been wondering more and more that maybe our modern minds are no longer equipped to process this story properly. We tend to oscillate between the following two extremes that would completely fail the point：
1. given how much we value self-efficacy in this day and age, how many of us are really ready to accept the complete cancelling of our debts without generating a sense of rage at the helpless position we are made to be in？or maybe we think a truly merciful Almighty would have done this much more tactfully without hurting our feelings: how about planting a sack of gold outside the palace on the street corner so we can accidentally pick it up and be thankful of our good luck and our capacity at the end of the day to pay it all back？or surely the big boss can hire us into some palace position and pay us extremely well so we could pay back that massive debt with ease. Now that would be really merciful, and more often than not, a lot of us are indeed deluded that whatever privileged heavenly work we did or continued to do, surely will be enough to earn us back to grace.

2. we are in complete denial of our debts, pretend we are innocent as a dove, and are more or less imbeciles when it comes to responsibilities and deny our own roles in any of these, as clearly, if we never meant them, none of these entail any grave consequences. Going one step further, when our feelings about the important figures in our lives get too complex and ambivalent, we would be quick to be in denial of their debts too. Surely they are innocent as doves, and imbeciles too. and grave consequences of their actions just simply don't exist. This actually mimicks forgiveness, and we often end up calling it forgiveness, as this is probably the best we could do with human efforts.

I think for the modern mind, it is extremely difficult to ever take the position of--
I don't deny I was responsible and I have accumulated such debts, but I also accepts the helpless position and acknowledge that I do not have the self-efficacy to ever pay it back.
And that goes to any of my fellow servants on the street.
But having said that, that unforgiving servant, from that many thousand years ago, ran into as much problem with this as we do, hence the somewhat explosive unexplainable behaviour that manifested.

Now because it is all so difficult, we compulsively fake it. We think we can make the call to deny another person's debts to have existed in the first place, or, we jump into declarations of forgiveness all too quickly. We pretend our mind has ultimate control over our feelings and fool ourselves into thinking that if we tell ourselves and others long and hard enough that we have forgiven from a logical and reasoned perspective, we have indeed forgiven from the depth of our hearts, while more likely, we just repressed it, and then sooner or later, someone else suffers. And then, more denial, and more faking it till we make it, and also the quickness to jump and condemn anyone who hasn't used denial as a defence mechanism like we did.

But we are never going to make it---
...and really, at the end of the day, aren't all these also claiming to be able to pay back debts when you couldn't, and aren't all these throat grabbing of your fellow servants too?