You know what's on my mind? Bifurcation.
Bifurcation, the line between stability and instability, and the Lance of Longinus. You know, THAT Lance of Longinus (pictured below) in the way that I naturally imagine it: as it's seen in Neon Genesis Evangelion and End of Evangelion.
It's difficult to imagine a better visual symbol of bifurcation, than this Lance of Longinus. It makes one think of two closely entwined strands of a double-stranded cable or thread, holding together until some crucial point whereupon they part ways: reinforcing each other, until the moment they suddenly no longer reinforce each other.
That is the way of tight but rigid dualities between things: when the two poles come into conflict with one another, the results are usually drastic and extreme, as fire clashing with ice.
Asuka Langley is felled by the Lance of Longinus in End of Evangelion. She learns what it is to be saved by her mother; bare minutes later, she is poised between life and death, unable to move, barely able to whisper out her last defiant curse for her vanquishers. The Lance bifurcates suddenly in front of her face a second before it strikes her down, a cruel last touch. "Betcha didn't see that one coming…" As this is happening, all the other major plot strands left over from the end of the original series snap right before our eyes. We're on our own now, as lonely as Ikari Shinji waking up in Unit-01 just in time to find out what happened to Asuka.
It's difficult to deal with sudden partings…or sudden joinings. Neither process is apt to be neat and clean. Only geometrically perfect, impossible things are always sleek and neat and clean. Abstract things, like perfect lines and mathematically defined curves.
~Chara of Pnictogen
#neon-genesis-evangelion #end-of-evangelion #lance-of-longinus #asuka-langley #bifurcation










