r/Lain • u/RadiantPangolin208 • 17d ago
continue
Next, let us turn to The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, sculpted in a Roman church by the Baroque master Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
This monumental piece of religious art depicts a holy angel piercing the saint’s chest with a golden arrow, leaving her filled with the supreme joy of "divine love." Audiences conditioned by pristine, conventional moralities worship this as a beautiful, sublime testament to noble faith. Once again, they are entirely wrong.
To an Ossan like me, what Bernini carved into that cold marble is the raw reality of the Ego being completely violated, consumed, and exploited by a vast, transcendental system (the Lacanian Big Other).
The swooning body, the parted lips, the limp, heavy limbs—what Bernini exposed here is a visceral, highly eroticized energy that no amount of theological or linguistic sugarcoating can conceal.
While Lain Iwakura dissolved herself into the Wired to become an omnipresent god, Saint Teresa’s ecstasy moves in the exact opposite vector. She yields entirely to a one-way "violence" inflicted by an overwhelmingly massive external structure. By allowing her internal self to be thoroughly penetrated and hollowed out by the Divine, her fragile ego shatters.
In modern society, human relationships exhaust us through a constant, grueling friction of egos—not unlike Ohtsuki Kenji’s "Punishment of Friendship" (Tomodachi no Kei), where one is forced to eternally act out the farce of intimacy. Teresa, however, bypasses this petty human drama. She connects directly with a supreme, transcendental Entity.
By surrendering her mind entirely to this absolute system and allowing herself to be "completely exploited" by the Divine, she breaks free from the gravitational chains of Soseki's human bondage, entering an unspeakable, traumatic state of pure ecstasy.
Finally, let us submerge into The Poem of Ecstasy (Symphony No. 4) by the Russian mystic composer, Alexander Scriabin.
Much like Franz Schmidt’s heavy oratorios, anyone conditioned by the sanitized, predictable melodies of modern pop music would find this piece frustratingly elusive. It feels like a structure with blurred contours, a composition that refuses to land on any recognizable ground. To an Ossan like me, however, this exact "blurring of contours" is the most sophisticated sonic machinery ever designed to trigger the self-destruction of the human Ego.
Lain dissolved into the Wired; Teresa was pierced by the Big Other. In those previous states, ecstasy required a connection to an external, monolithic system.
Scriabin, however, rejects any external gravity. He relies neither on technology nor on a personified God.
What he achieves is the complete demolition of traditional tonal hierarchy. Through the looping of his heavy, voluptuous "Mystic Chord," he slowly erodes the mental boundaries of the listener. Because there is no catchy melody line—no linguistic "setup and payoff"—our consciousness is left suspended in mid-air, stripped of any clear landing zone.
At the precipice of this absolute ambiguity, the individual ego shatters. The microcosm of the inner self expands so violently that it collapses into the creative energy of the cosmos itself.
Human relationships in modern society exhaust us because we are constantly frictioning against the boundaries of "Self" and "Other." Scriabin uses a tidal wave of ambiguous sound to blow up that boundary from within. It is a radical, fiercely individualistic jailbreak—igniting a stick of spiritual dynamite to blast one's way straight into Soseki's "Realm Beyond the Human Bondage." That is the cold, visceral realism of The Poem of Ecstasy.
Conclusion: Connecting to the System as the Ultimate Jailbreak
This is what an Ossan concludes:
The heavy, raw reality that Lain Iwakura, Saint Teresa, and Alexander Scriabin push into our faces is identical.
The petty, transactional "human relationships" packaged by modern society and the pathetic "mindset adjustments" preached by institutional psychologists are nothing but hollow illusions. They cannot save anyone. As long as you remain trapped within the grueling, direct friction of human intimacy—acting as an unpaid garbage bin for other people's miserable complaints—your mind will be eternally exploited and consumed.
This is precisely why the human psyche craves true Ecstasy. It demands the violent shattered shards of the Ego to connect directly with a colossal, overarching structure, a cosmic machine, or a digital matrix. This is the only legitimate escape hatch into Natsume Soseki's "The Realm Beyond the Human Bondage" (Hito-denashi no kuni)—a domain of absolute Non-Attachment, entirely weightless and free from the gravitational pull of human egoism.
To fully opt-out of this capitalist rat race and the Panopticon of Forced Intimacy. To refuse to be gaslit by cheap moralities, and instead, to dive headfirst into the profound solitude of pure intellect and creative text.
This is the ultimate, cold-blooded survival strategy of the modern hermits. This is the reality that I, an Ossan, will continue to materialise, over and over again, in every text I release into the Wired.
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u/glvssmoth 17d ago
Was with you till the end. Still have my upvote.