Last week I had new glasses made. You rest your chin on the machine and the optometrist clicks lenses in and out, asking: better with one, or with two? Usually there is an answer. One. No — two. One again. But every so often a moment comes when it is neither. Both sharp, or both wrong. The optometrist doesn’t flinch. Without a word she moves to the next lens. The machine, it seems, keeps a blank among its answers. Someone knew, in advance, that there would be eyes that fall on neither side, and left that cell empty for them.
On the bus home I thought about that blank. For the better part of two months I have been swapping lenses in front of the people of Evangelion. I looked through Freud, through Jung, through Yi Je-ma’s eight admonitions. Some came into focus at the first lens, some at the last. And in front of one person the machine spun without catching. A person no lens would bring into focus. She wears glasses, as it happens.
Mari Makinami Illustrious. Three films in a row open with her humming. Over the sky of a half-dead planet, an old pop song on her lips, she fights. For a long time I took the machine to be failing. Then, on the bus, another thought arrived. What if the focus refuses to settle not because of her eyes? What if — like the blank in the optometrist’s machine — someone left that cell empty on purpose?
The Gallows on a Monday — Freud
There is a short paper Freud wrote late in life. More than twenty years after his thick book on jokes, he picked humour up again. The example he gives goes like this. On a Monday morning, a criminal being led out to the gallows remarks:
Well, the week's beginning nicely.
Freud did not call that line a defence. He called it a victory — a refusal to pay the suffering the world was billing, the ego’s insistence that it cannot be touched. His phrase for it was the triumph of narcissism. And he located the voice in an unexpected place. The super-ego, usually the scold, for once becomes the adult who soothes a frightened child, and says:
It is nothing but a game for children—just worth making a jest about!
The world that looks so dangerous is child’s play. Mari’s humming could illustrate that paper. A planet nearly wiped clean, close combat with monsters, a falling machine — and inside it she sings a pop song half a century old. The Monday gallows, running for three films. But the account has one premise. Somewhere there must be a frightened ego. Someone has to be huddled inside for the song to be a comfort. The films never show it. We never once see Mari afraid.
At first I read this as a failure of observation — the core was there, and the camera simply never turned toward it. But think of the others and the silence turns strange. Shinji’s fear sits at the centre of the frame for three whole films. Asuka’s raw pride, Gendo’s hardened grief — the camera digs at them without mercy. Only with Mari does it decline to look inside. Which suggests this is less a failure to show than a decision not to draw. It is not that the frightened ego is hidden; it was never drawn in. The gallows humour belongs to a man under sentence, and Mari is the one person on whom this story passes no sentence. The exploding collar that Shinji and Asuka and Kaworu all wore at the neck — she alone never wore it once. The lens is not spinning loose. It is reporting, precisely, that no ego was drawn here to be comforted.
The One Who Comes Before the Saviour — Jung
She uses an assumed name. Her real one is spoken only in the last film, briefly, and by someone else. She left her body’s age somewhere along the way, and the story never explains it. She crosses from one camp to the other and settles in neither. She hands out nicknames to everyone she meets — puppy boy, princess — and handles hierarchy like a toy.
Jung, shown that list, would have pulled out an old file. The trickster. Reading that figure loitering at the edges of mythologies, he laid it over Mercurius of the alchemists:
his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, his powers as a shape-shifter, his dual nature, half animal, half divine
One who enjoys the sly joke, changes shape, is half beast and half god; who upends orders as they harden and makes the seated powers ridiculous. So far the fit is clean. But the strangest seat Jung gave this clown is another one:
He is a forerunner of the saviour
One who comes before the saviour. If, at the end of a trickster myth, a saviour is hinted at, Jung wrote, it means a calamity has happened and been consciously understood. We know who, at the end of these films, actually comes for the boy. Only, Jung’s trickster carries a condition. He is unconsciousness itself — breaking without knowing, suffering without knowing, a mind not yet ripe. Mari is the opposite. She is very nearly the only person in this story who knows too much. Gendo’s plan, Rei’s origin, where she herself is going.
And yet this inversion is the clue. A trickster who moves without knowing is a fragment of a psyche — someone’s unconscious sprung loose on its own. A trickster who knows everything and arrives exactly on cue is not a fragment of a psyche but an instrument someone has set in place. The unconscious comes without knowing; an instrument comes knowing. She wears the trickster’s clothes, but the body inside them is not the unconscious. Here the lens slips off the character and touches the hand above her. What moves Mari is not Mari’s unconscious but the intent of the one who wrote her. The forerunner of the saviour was not drawn up from any depth of the psyche. Anno brought her in from outside the story.
The Hand That Takes No Seat — Yi Je-ma
Yi Je-ma divided the places where people touch into eight cells. Four where I incline to deceive, and four where another inclines to deceive me. Where strength gathers people around a person, the hand slides toward taking; where skill is flaunted, attack comes back. For two months the grid worked well. Gendo sat in the cell of clutching what was lost, Misato in the cell of holding against the pull, Kaworu in the cell of going alone and accomplishing. Eleven people took eleven seats, and all eight cells lit, none left over.
Seat Mari in it and the coordinates will not read. There is no scene of her deceiving anyone, and none of her being deceived. She does not take, does not flaunt, does not hide and pocket. At first I took this for the grid’s limit — so there are people the eight cells cannot hold. But go back to what the grid actually measures and the story changes. These eight cells do not measure what a person is. They measure the momentum of the instant when one formed being meets another and hardens against it. Yi Je-ma wrote what it is for a person to stand in four characters: 我身立局 — my body hardens and stands as one formed configuration, a 局, guk. The eight cells light up only between configurations that have hardened and taken their stand.
Mari does not harden and stand. Or, more precisely: she is not one of the things that harden — she is what moves the hardened things. Not a piece on the board but the hand that sets the board again. A hand takes no seat in any cell. If the grid returns a blank in front of her, it is not because the grid is broken but because she was never the kind of thing the grid measures. This is not to say she has no inside — that is not mine to rule on. But that this story never set her up as a configuration, and used her instead as the device that moves configurations: that much the films do say. The thinness that gives her no past and no interior, that lets her drift on a pair of glasses and a hummed tune, is not an oversight. It is a function.
Yi Je-ma, writing this grid down in his 格致藁, Gyeokchigo, nailed one sentence to its preface first.
形理之取象只是臆見 其象有八 非眞謂伏羲易象如此也
Taking these images from form and principle is only my own conjecture; the images number eight, and I do not mean that Fuxi’s images of the Changes were truly so. He never said the eight cells were the whole of the world. The man who built the grid opened its outside first. So here, two authors’ opened outsides coincide. Yi Je-ma left, in his preface, a place beyond the eight cells; Anno set a figure down in that open place. One wrote that the grid is not the whole of the world; the other made a hand that sits in no cell, and sent it into the story. The machine returning a blank in front of Mari is not malfunctioning. It is pointing, exactly, at the seat the two of them left empty.
What she did from outside the grid remains. In the third film, forcing Shinji’s entry plug out and stopping an Impact. At the very end, taking that collar off his neck. Things no one inside the eight cells managed to do. A piece inside a cell cannot move another piece. To move the board, you have to be off it.
Master Wherever You Stand — Buddhism
The lenses so far have all looked for an inside. An ego to be comforted, an unripe unconscious, a configuration hardening into its stand. There is one way I know of reading a person without presupposing an inside. Linji said the Buddha-dharma has no place for effort — that it is nothing but the ordinary and uneventful. Put on your clothes, eat your rice, lie down when tired. And then he joined this to it.
隨處作主 立處皆眞 境來回換不得
Wherever you go, be the master, and wherever you stand is true; no circumstance that comes can trade it away. Mari behaves as if at home everywhere — in either camp, on the lunar base, on a sea where the world has turned over, on a street where Evangelions no longer exist. To have no configuration to defend is also to have none that can be taken. If she is not a person going about in search of something lost, then perhaps the grid never had anything in her to measure. If she was not born into the story but placed in it, there is no reason she should start from lack. The place where every other lens spun loose, this old record of sayings names without lack, without once asking after an inside. To be master wherever you stand may be the far end of a long practice — or it may simply be the property of a hand whose work is the moving of seats. In this story, she is closer to the latter.
The Woman Who Came for Him
The last scene is shot in live action, at a railway station. Shinji, grown, sits on a bench, the collar still at his throat. A hand from behind takes it off. I came for you, she says. The two of them take the stairs at a run, hand in hand.
For that hand to come, one seat had to be empty first — the seat beside Shinji, which in the old series belonged to Asuka. In these new films Asuka never joins him; she grows up beside another man. I wrote about that Asuka once. In the old series she and Shinji were melancholia — two hardened people who could not let each other go, and broke together. The new films dissolved that hardening not by killing the first love, and not by embalming her, but by letting her live and drift out of reach. Only, the one who performs that dissolution is no one on screen. It is the audience, seeing its own twenties off. The films excuse the character from the labour of letting go, and hand that labour to whoever is watching.
For that excusal to work, someone has to clear Asuka’s seat from the outside. The hand that did it is Mari. Seen from Asuka’s side, a first love that lived and receded; seen from Mari’s side, the hand that emptied the first love’s seat. One motion, watched from its two sides. And since no piece on a board can clear its own square, the hand had to come from off the board. That is why Mari sits in none of the eight cells. Anno tied this story into a knot it could not untie from within — excused its people from the untying — and built, separately, one hand to cut the knot from outside, and sent it in. A hand seated in a cell cannot cut the knot. To cut it, you have to be outside the cells.
So the question — from which of the eight cells did that hand come? — was never a question without an answer. It was a question aimed at the wrong place. The blank was never in Mari’s eyes. Like the blank in the optometrist’s machine, it sat in a cell someone had emptied in advance: the outside Yi Je-ma left open in his preface, the hand Anno placed in that outside. Coming for him was what that hand was made, from the beginning, to do.
Like the day you walk out in new glasses, a story I have stared at for two months is strange for a moment, and very clear. All eight cells filled, and still one cell stood empty — and that blank was not a hole in the story, but the seat of the hand that closes it from outside.
