“This place is a dream.
Only a sleeper considers it real.”
- Rumi

Mawaru Penguindrum is an interesting spectacle.  Every week, we get less than thirty minutes of symbol saturation, followed by hours upon hours of buzzing speculation.  The apples!  The penguins!  The kaleidoscopic phallus-jet-coaster!  Where is the hidden key?  What does it all mean?

It’s fun to puzzle over, absolutely.  But as the analysis draws closer and ever more fine-grained with each episode, we run headlong into a problem called Cartesian anxiety.

I can explain it like this: Because Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” is the foundation of the West’s attitude towards perception, there’s a lot of pressure for us to master the world with our minds.  In other words, we’re trained to believe that everything we see is fundamentally rational, and that the universe can be rendered in logical terms if we just think hard enough.  We can “know” things.

And sure, when it comes to rocket science or fixing a toaster, that’s perfect.  Even most stories hinge on our ability to “figure out” what’s going on.  But if you’re faced with a work like Penguindrum, trying to logic it out in real time–  as if this is A Study in Scarlet and you’re Sherlock–  is just going to drive you crazy.  We have to open ourselves to a different mode of viewing, because this is not merely a mystery.  It is a Mystery.

Right about here is where we give Descartes the finger.

In the latest episode, we see Himari descend into the underworld and retrieve the story of herself from the Akashic Records.  Why?  Why now?  And who’s that sexy guy with the pink hair?  These questions don’t matter.  Even if they’re eventually answered in the narrative (and given the director’s reputation, they may or may not), they still won’t matter, because what counts is what you bring to the experience.

Really–  just your beautiful self, and no one else.  This is the cornerstone of mystical thought, both in the west and in Japan: That “the truth” is not an object, but a subjective experience, limited only by how far you cultivate yourself to experience it.

Am I applying mysticism to anime?  Absolutely.  Why not?  This seems to merit it.

This is a pretty hard thing to do, to let go of the puzzle-solving mind and just experience an anime as it unravels.  It isn’t the same thing as “just turn off your brain,” which is an ideology I very much disagree with.

But think of it like this: You’re already in the middle.  Even when you wallow in reason by obsessing over religious meanings, psychological profiles and historical correspondences, or when you bring your puzzle pieces to the fandom to see what everyone else thinks, you’re participating in Mawaru Penguindrum’s rhythm and process.  You–  we–  are now walking the path of Mystery, from now until the show ends.  We simply have to recognize it.

To put it yet another way: No answer this show comes up with could possibly live up to the first time we said, “What the hell is going on?”

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