Nostalgia…
For me, nostalgia is always an interesting
phenomenon, like the sudden influx of déjà vu and yet clear and tangible. My
memories, when I slip into them rather than merely draw upon them for some
piece of information, are akin to a waking dream. I can see myself where I was,
smell the smells around me, and even feel part of the emotions that I felt when
the memory was made. When I am overcome with the images and words of the past,
I call it nostalgia. It’s an intense experience, and can create feelings undulating
between extreme pain and extreme pleasure, depending on the memory.
I know that for many people memory is not like
this, and I am also aware of the limitations of all memory, how the brain edits
on the fly to exclude the unimportant bits. When I remember something
particularly happy – a moment of joy with friends, for instance – I know that
the circumstances surrounding it may not have been so happy. As a matter of
fact, when I think of such things, I often take a step back in my mind and
remember that overall timeframe of that memory was filled with misery. Perhaps
that heightens the emotion of the moment, and island of happiness in a sea of
trouble is all the more memorable.
Similarly, sometimes I have a rush of memory for
something very painful: an embarrassing moment, a moment of heartbreak or
doubt, or a failure. These moments may be surrounding by happiness, but shine
out darkly because of their bright background, intensifying the memory process
and the pain of recollection. I have to be careful letting myself be overcome
with such recollections, for even though the experience was in the past, the
way my memory works causes the all the emotions, the pain and disappointment
and embarrassment, to become very real in the present.
Like a flashback, Nostalgia is triggered by odd
thing. Smells and tastes that I associate with a time period or place, or more
often, music and books that take me back to the period where I first heard or
read them.
With that in mind, I thought I’d start a series
here, dubbed the nostalgia chronicles, of some particularly powerful memories
and what they mean to me. Most of these center around certain things like art,
games, and entertainment, since these are the things that usually trigger the
feelings, but more than few of them are just odd moments.
Nostalgia Chronicles, Part 1: Berserk
Berserk started its life as a manga (a type of
Japanese graphic novel) penned by Kentaro Miura, but my first experiences with
it were with its televised anime adaptation, and later experiences occurred
during several life eras with both the manga and repeat viewings of the anime.
I. Mid 2005
The young man who was rapidly becoming my best
friend (Matt Wellman, the man of infinite jest) moved into a house nearby me
with another friend of mine named Ryan (I was graduating from Fresno State and
still lived in North Fresno with my parents), which increased the frequency of
our hang-outs enormously. We were writing metal, drinking Moosehead, and
generally having a good time most nights. I walked into Matt’s bedroom one day
to see him watching a very imaginative, as well as horrific, anime on his
computer.
He let me see the final episode before we went out
for more beer (our main activity on a week night). The show made no sense to me
and seemed to take place in hell, but intrigued me, probably as a result. Later
on, he bought the anime on DVD, and I would come over and watch it with him,
sometimes along with Ryan and Gary (the other roommate, who would also become a
good chum of mine). In Fresno fashion it was usually hot and muggy inside the
house, with Ryan’s dog Jacka constantly panting as she lay on the floor. I
remember sitting in Ryan’s chair, feeling the sweat on the back of my calves
stick to the reclining pad. That was how we watched it, between parties and
music.
I remember first reading the graphic novels after
moving into my first apartment, which was a tenement by some standards. I found
myself sitting in a brown leather chair, given to me by my friend Darryl, who
had in turn claimed it from our mutual employer Patrick. It had several tears
on the back from moving, but I enjoyed it as a comfortable reading place, lit
by an old jade lamp that belonged to my grandparents. My roommate and I liked
to keep the apartment very cold, and remember how much I liked the slick, cool
leather on my skin after coming indoors from the heat of Fresno, which, if you
have never been there, is substantial and persists from March into early
November.
Our apartment was a smattering of things, with a
beat-up sectional couch (later replaced by a set of free furniture that looked
like it belonged in the waiting room of a dentist from the 1980s), my small
tube TV sat upon a tall stand Jabriel (my roommate) and I made literally out of
garbage we found on the back porch upon our move in. Draped black curtains hid
the contraptions, which was made out of a few wooden boxes and a large piece of
plywood, and also served to house our DVD collection. The dark brown carpet,
the color chosen as much to hide stains as show its age, I reckoned, always
felt a little stiff on the feet.
Even though the apartment was not the nicest, it was
ours, and it at least was not painfully small. My own bedroom was large enough
that I could put my leather chair in it, leaving the other chair (a funny pink
affair Jabriel and I had nabbed from the curb) in the living room. Once or
month a so a new English translation of Berserk would come out, and I would
head down to Winco and buy a can of “Green Dragon Energy Drink,” a bargain-bin caffeinated
beverage from Hong Kong (I think), park myself in my chair, and read the next
installment of Berserk, in all its gory glory.
II. Berserk: Violent Paragons.
Berserk is a strange fantasy story, taking place
in a world similar to medieval Europe, without magic (except for demons) or
guns (though there are cannons from time to time). The central characters are
Guts (Gatzu), and his best friend and nemesis, Griffith, who leads the band of
mercenaries that fill out the cast. The anime chronicles the rise and
subsequent fall of Griffith and his band of the hawk, from mercenary band to
exalted champions of the kingdom, to criminals as Griffith’s tragic flaw takes
effect.
What was most compelling to me was not the plot,
though that was sound, but the characters. In Japanese fashion, the characters
involved are not complex, flawed, and redeemable characters that achieve growth
as the story goes on, which would be more typical of a western story. Instead,
they are paragons; not paragons of virtue, but paragons of their immutable
selves, virtuous or viscous. The progress of the story is about the fulfilling
of nature, and this informs the central conflict, which is between destiny and
will, and the relation between the two.
Guts is a paragon of
who he is: the berserker; the struggler; the man who rebels against destiny;
the man who cares nothing for life; the man who pursues his own will, even if
he does not understand what it is. Guts was born literally from a corpse, his
mother hanging dead from a tree, and so signifies an exclusion from the laws of
destiny. He alone can act outside of destiny and be free-willed, for he is already
dead. He values his life little, preferring battle and slaughter to pleasure,
constantly risking his life for outcomes which seem to be meaningless to
others. It is, as they cannot understand, the fulfillment of his nature.
Griffith is a paragon
of the opposite: the planner; the schemer; the man whose will is destiny
itself; the man with ambition. For him, all means serve his ends. He sacrifices
his soldiers, his fortunes, and even sells his own body in prostitution to fund
his desperate dream. Ultimately, Guts is his only equal, which means they must become enemies.
He seems
blessed by destiny in a way that guts is not. He achieved victory on the
battlefield over and over, often with the use of Guts, who he forces into
service after a showdown – a showdown in which Guts would not submit, even at
the expense of his body. Somehow though, Guts and Griffith become friends, as
Guts rises to second in command of the Band of the Hawk, Griffith’s army.
Together, Guts and Griffith raise their army to
the level of regular soldiers in the kingdom of Midland, and Griffith is even
raised to the peerage, becoming a noble and gaining an opportunity to marry
into wealth and power. Griffith destroys his opponents in the nobility as well,
even using Guts as a brutal assassin, an event that has a profound emotional
impact on Guts as he is forced to kill the young son of the target. Indeed, it
seems as if all of Griffith’s wild ambitions, seeming to be driven by destiny
itself, are coming to fruition, and Griffith will marry the princess and
inherit the crown.
The story turns when Guts overhears a conversation
in which Griffith describes the Band of the Hawk as “not truly his friends,”
because none of them have their own dreams. Guts, hearing this, decides he has
fulfilled what he said he would for Griffith, seeing an end to the war, and
decides to leave, despite the protests of his other friends in the army. This
realization causes Guts to want to leave his friends, leading to another duel between Guts and Griffith, who wishes to keep Guts for his
own purposes. Unlike their first meeting, Griffith cannot overcome the skill
and strength of Guts. Guts cuts Griffith’s sword in half, ending the duel, and
walks away, without ever turning to look back.
This moment encapsulates the conflict, held at bay
through most of the first story arc, between will and destiny. Griffith, having
been defeated, suffers a mental break; his unwavering belief in himself and his
destiny is shattered through the actions of Guts, who, ironically, opposes Guts
in order to achieve what he viewed as true equality and friendship. This also
sets up Guts’s role through the rest of the manga, which is as an opponent of
destiny, the sole actor capable of destroying it. Griffith, in anguish, visits
the princess and sleeps with her (in the manga it is closer to rape). He is
caught and spends much of the rest of the arc being slowly tortured as a
prisoner of the king. His destiny has, in effect, been destroyed by Guts’s free
action.
This is ended with Guts’s return and heroic rescue
of the broken Griffith, who on the escape journey attempts suicide and
unknowingly fulfills the contracts of his destiny with the Godhand, a cabal of
demonic gods who take Guts and the remaining members of the Band of the Hawk as
sacrifices for Griffith’s ascendancy to their ranks. Griffith does this
willingly, and his friends are devoured by demons. Only Guts has the power to
resist and survive, and in final horror, Griffith rapes Caska, a woman Guts has
fallen in love with, in front of the eyes of his friend turned nemesis. Guts
cuts off his own arm in attempt to free himself and intervene, and is in turn
saved again by deus ex machina in the form of the skull knight, a mysterious
immortal being who represents rebellion against destiny.
The first story arc draws to a close in one of the
most brutal ways possible. Guts and Caska are left with “the brand,” a bleeding
wound which will draw demons to them as long as they live, and so Guts must
begin his own quest, to destroy his friend and overcome destiny, represented in
the very brand that tortures him.
III. Final Thoughts
These themes had a big effect on me as a 21 year
old, and even today they have significant meaning as I feel like most of the
periods of my life have been defined by struggle. When I first started
watching, I was struggling to find the next step of my academic career as a
musician with substantial hearing loss. I read the manga in my first apartment,
struggling to meet rent and progress through graduate school. I watched the
series again when I lived in Las Vegas, struggling to finish my first
screenplay and arrange the next phase of my life. The idea of suffering
through, and overcoming, struggle was a close experience to my heart.
I also admired the characters within it. Guts was
cold, single minded, and unrelenting when wielding his sword in the present. I
felt like that a lot of the time, and still do: obsessive, driving, lost in the
sound of my strings as I played or my keys as I type this very sentence. I had
no plans; I just did and did and did, day after day, and built myself a life
out of it. When that life was swept away, I found I, like Guts, had very little
to carry away with me.
Very few other examples of manga or anime pack
quite as much punch as Berserk, both in artistic effect and storytelling. Very
few evoke as much nostalgia, though I’m sure there will be other examples to
come. The best quote I can remember is this, which has stuck with me for quite
a long time:
Man takes up the sword to shield the small wound
in his heart sustained in some far off time beyond memory.
Man wields the sword so he can die happy in some
far of time beyond perception.
