Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
Over the last several years I've grown to see Stoicism and Christianity as the primary opposing philosophical forces within myself, both of which I have found deep practical and spiritual solace in. But I have never been able to mesh both systems against each other into a cohesion, they exist as two beasts locked in an endless duel for precedence, each one overpowering the other at various points in my life only to be beaten back into stalemate by the other at the next crisis. I live as a Stoic at work, but a Christian at home.
But in the new year my way of life changed drastically, my previous separation between "work" and "home" no longer exists. And due to my chosen vocation I have been facing original and unique physical, mental, and moral hardships several times a week. And I quickly found that it's no longer tenable to hold such a conflict within my mind any longer, and any continued avoidance of the problem will become a developmental hindrance. I crave integrity.
Integrity has the same Latin root as the word "integer", meaning a whole number. Something with integrity holds itself together as a singular, unbreaking object. It is full, complete, whole, pure. And to test something's integrity you have to bash it around a bit. Test its weaknesses, crack it along its faults. And when we are pushed to the extremes of our capabilities we truly discover the integrity within us:
"And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being forty days tempted of the devil." -Luke 4:1
And throughout the temptation the Lord was tested, probed and pushed by Satan, but in the end this only made Jesus stronger, his spirit was so whole and pure that it held no faultline down which to strike, like a perfect sphere that is strong from every and any angle of attack. But unlike the Lord, as the devil has tested me over these last few months I have been made painfully aware of the existence of my own cracks and fractures, and once he finds a fault he'll strike it over and over until you break. The only solution was to turn the strength of those two brawling beasts of discord from mutual war instead to the defence of the perimeter.
And so on to the much-postponed reconciliation: as always the answer lay in front of me. With all good revelations you already knew the solution, and for me that solution was encapsulated within the term "Britishness" and our inflexible upper labiums.
The (in?)famous "stiff-upper-lip" of the British seems to be a trait that only we congratulate ourselves for. The American calls it boring, the Frenchman calls it inhuman and the German calls it foolish. And it certainly sounds like a stoic sentiment. The term came into parlance during the reign of Victoria and the flowering of neo-classicism in the upper class. British schooling was made to be more stoic and Spartan, with schoolboys taught discipline and tenacity under oppressive conditions, a teaching style only recently going out of fashion in this country.
But I believe it is also a deeply Christian notion. As in the aforementioned Temptation, Jesus put himself out into the wilderness to test the integrity of his newly discovered identity after his Baptism. To ignore the pain, hunger and fear he must have felt sounds very much like a stoic act, but this is God we speak of. And he again displays this in the calming of the storm upon the raging deep of the sea of Galilee:
"And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep. And his disciples came to him, and awoke him, saying, Lord, save us: we perish. And he saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith? Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm" -Matthew 8:12
He knew that he was safe because he knew that he was righteous, and he knew that he was righteous because he knew his soul was perfect and complete. And Jesus was of course fully man, if also fully God: so I am certain he was able to feel fear, uncertainty and even panic: but he steeled his body against them, not through an idiotic bravado but through deep internal security. Those base emotions should be tools to propel yourself forward, not to hold yourself back. Because no one needs to fear the devil when they know they have the protection of God. In the words of Luther through one of my favourite hymns:
"And though this world, with devils filled should threaten to undo us,
we will not fear, for God has willed his truth to triumph through us.
The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him; his rage we can endure.
For lo! his doom is sure; one little word shall fell him."
-A Mighty Fortress is our God, Martin Luther (1529)
And if you think Luther is too German to be used as an example in a post about Britishness, try this much more British song out for size instead.
