"I've not seen Naked Lunch or eXistenZ as yet, but I *do* like a lot of mind-screw anime. I'm a fan of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and of Serial Experimetns Lain...Ghost in the Shell to a degree... My guy discovered a really cool one that dealt with the nature of souls and memories on a fansub download site - Kaiba - It's not liscensed in the West yet. In fact, I’m such a geek - if you ever see me on here talking about the Internet as “The Wired,” I’m referencing Serial Experiments Lain.
That's probably one reason why I like ambiguity – all the anime I watch. Another reason is that I don’t want to write just for one audience (well, I am already in that I’m writing fantasy, and that’s a specific fanbase), but as far as worldviews and values, I want to be accessible to a lot of people – (i.e. While some of my own views are going to leak into my work, I don’t want to offend my non-religious/not-into-spirituality friends). Mostly, it’s just the way I think life is. It seems that no matter what “evidence” anyone has for something – whatever their experiences, not everyone is going to believe them.
I had a dream that is a perfect illustration for this not long ago. In my dream, I gained a sudden ability to talk to animals. I had dogs and birds going “Hey, yo!” to me. I could even talk to *meat* to a degree, which made it even weirder. In the dream, I had the distinct impression that this sudden ability was proof of the existence of God. The problem was, when I tried to tell anyone in the dream, I was labeled as lying and/or crazy. Then I realized that the “evidence was for me, personally, not for anyone else.” – When I woke up, I couldn’t talk to animals, but I felt like this dream echoed life, as in “The things I see as evidence for the things I believe in are evidence only for me.”
I’ve been cultivating the ambiguity thing for a while now. In the last novel I wrote (yet, without an interested literary agent, *sigh*) there were four main characters. Two of them were human. The other two mains were their companions, animal-like spiritual guides. The two human characters came from a town where almost everyone had these kind of guardians – and only people who believed in them could see them. “Non-believers” were unaware of them. All the same, the guardians themselves enjoyed telling their charges that they might, indeed, be delusions, products of the humans’ imaginations. And – that’s pretty much what the entire novel was about. "
