The practice of writing is tedious and clumsy. It is the ill expenditure of rudiment appendages and cognitive faculties which have been honed over eons of sex and death to better service the gut and loins of a rather peculiar beast of prey. To what end do we leverage such inheritance by this ill manner of employment if not merely in service to its associated carnal appetites? if even in jaundiced service of such appetites? It is a mistake here to presume even in so morbid an activity as writing that we transcend such; just as it would be a mistake to attribute any human proclivity as intrinsically other than desirous. Instead might we more appropriately suppose it an abstraction of such appetites, confounding the pursuit of satiation as well as the very experience of desire, even to the point of total dissociation of libidinal wont.

Nevertheless is there nothing of life in the practice of writing save for its impending decay. It is a compulsion toward undeath inflicted upon an organism which has become the mere vector of a notional apparatus, one fundamentally disinterested in the organism’s perpetuation as such, one which indeed anticipates and insists upon obsequious acquiescence to a wretched demise. As such is writing no way of life so much as protracted suicide (all the more pitiful for its protraction) and the very product of its undertaking, a sprawling suicide note.

A book ought to long for pen, ink and writing-desk: but as a rule, pen, ink and writing-desk long for a book. That is why books are nowadays of so little account.

• Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human

Yukio Mishima was a writer I discovered by happenstance late in my formative years, firstly on a whim in renting the strange and mesmerizing 1985 biopic, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, and then shortly thereafter discovering Sun & Steel in my local used bookstore. Coming up from such provocative books as Fight Club and Albert Camus’ The Rebel (and no less his better-know work, The Stranger) into the wide world of transgressive philosophical, literary, and cinematic tendencies–as well as having had a nearly lifelong fascination with the Samurai, in particular, and martial arts more generally–I was primed and ready to receive the raw personal testament of such a provocative figure rather gleefully. I would not however come to broach a more intimate investigation of Mishima’s chief pronouncements until at long last having become thoroughly acquainted with the sanctity of iron (specifically, large masses of iron hoisted by means of a steel bar, though having had some prior acquaintance with hoisting myself such-ways), and only in the culmination of a life by then already half spent varyingly immersed in martial society.

It was through Mishima’s work that I was given to consider the intrinsically yet subtly destructive nature of language in general and of the printed word in particular. Yet therein was the juxtaposition of action, at once a thrashing against as well as itself the very character of destruction. For Mishima, words and action oppose one another seemingly only in the manner of their differing approaches to death. In words, one lives one’s life or, more accurately, takes one’s respite from life as a ghastly avatar through what is already cold and dead–or rather, undead in a full reversal of Socrates’ own notion of a “living death”–almost rehearsing a circumstance of immanent or impending bodily death in the commission of text to the page. Little more does the written word tolerate of the body than to sit still, restricting one’s limbs to only the most subtle of movements, constraining one’s gaze to only the nearest and narrowest vantage. Indeed is a preoccupation with words undertaken uniquely at the expense of that quantum of activity ultimately punctuated in death, insisting instead upon an excess of undeath, perhaps even wagering what quantum of life be necessarily forgone toward this insistence.

Yet, to act is always to court death, to a degree and of a sort perhaps correlating with the extent to which an act can be considered an aspect of action (as opposed to inaction), while to refrain from action or from any need to act, to withdraw from any semblance of life lived, prolongs some grotesque certainty of death (consignment to the process of dying) won not by willful hazard so much as neglect; the latter case regarded ever more-so by the findings of empirical rigor as by long-held philistine prejudice.

But body and spirit have never blended. They had never come to resemble each other. Never had I discovered in physical action anything resembling the chilling, terrifying satisfaction afforded by intellectual adventure. Nor had I ever experienced by intellectual adventure the selfless heat, the hot darkness of physical action.

• from F-104, epilogue to Sun & Steel, by Yukio Mishima

What Mishima sought by what would become his final treatise (Sun & Steel) and subsequently by the elaborate drama of his suicide was the harmony of pen and sword, or bun bu ichi (ぶんぶ-: Pen and Sword in Accord, alternatively). Apart from the obvious inference of Nietzsche’s concept of the free death, or, to die at the right time, in Mishima’s ultimate end and intent, his thought and effort seem to reflect the practically universal dilemma of mind and body, manifest in his locating the mind within realm of language, and the body within that of agency–the body as action in the world, and the mind as inextricably mediated reflection upon but not of the world–each reconciled only by bringing the two in accord at the very dimension in which they are most at odds: the manner of death, as defined perhaps in the manner of life by which death is attained.

Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.

• from Runaway Horses, by Yukio Mishima

Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.

• from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche

A preoccupation with words, as we have exhaustively insinuated, contains an ironic tendency of producing a body often enough unworthy or else all-too-worthy of those words. Consider for instance what fleshly bounty is typically gained in poring over, let alone scrawling thousands of upon thousands of pages detailing the exploits of heroes: a soft belly? a pallid face? a flaccid grip? And hardly exempt might we find any similarly blinkered, marginally ascetic verbosity of scholarship or critique. Indeed might the philosopher and, still more, the poet be given to even worse sorts of morbidity than the escapist, collapsing perpetually unto death by the weight of their subject-matter and the sickening strain of its conveyance (or worse, the failure thereof), certainly to whatever degree they prove earnest in their efforts.

For Mishima, words had borne an unrivaled preeminence in his upbringing, his highest good, but in a veritably Nietzschean turn, words had finally come to devalue themselves. Words sung so sanguinely of beauty and heroism, as much of its anguish, had rendered the singer unbearably less than heroic or beautiful in his own eyes, and consequently none the more worthy of his own anguish. They had compelled him toward a death so unlike the worthier one he would instead ultimately embrace: one born of a Dionysian preeminence; one to prove his words themselves unworthy, though in their detritus had germinated the seeds of its intensely urgent compulsion to hazard the dignity of death met with “clenched teeth and flashing eyes.”

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2wb16f

In short, Mishima was compelled to alter the course of his life almost entirely by the lucid assessment thereof, almost purely as a matter of artistic proclivity, considering such lucidity as uniquely an affordance of literary aptitude. He sought thereby to “devise an artists’ scheme” and take the manner of his life well in hand and, hence, the manner of his death. He would sate the causticity of words upon a brimming substrate of action.

I am reminded here of Marx’s well-known thesis: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” In Mishima we find the aesthetic stoking of this sentiment to infernal consequence for the individual and hardly displaced from the political impetus Marx bore forth–however wholly displaced its particularities. While many of his contemporaries and those otherwise troubled by his legacy in the intervening years would cite Mishima’s case as a cautionary tale against such idealistic intensity, I’m left to wonder at the lack of humility before so provocative a spectacle. Yet might this recoil befit so monstrous a non-apotheosis–and into what other than the very form of Acéphale–given to what extent such censure might be born of an all-too-common sort of mooring: the utter failure to meaningfully grapple with death’s oblivion.

Alas, do you preach patience with the earthly? It is the earthly that has too much patience with you, blasphemers!

• from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche

… on the prejudices of philosophers

I … do not believe a ‘drive to knowledge’ to be the father of philosophy, but that another drive has, here as elsewhere, only employed knowledge (and false knowledge!) as a tool.

• from Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche

Marx’s famous thesis asserting that the point of philosophy is to change rather than to merely interpret the world may not have been scrawled with more than its most obvious inference in mind (philosophy’s purposeful utilization), but it takes on immensely more meaning when considered in the light of Nietzsche’s adjacent elaborations on the prejudices of philosophers, among which he asserts that a philosophy what “begins to believe in itself … always creates a world in its own image,” that “it cannot do otherwise.” His assertion throughout is that philosophy manifests out of all manner of tyrannical drives or their common “will to power” by virtue of philosophy’s world creating predisposition which can never be so impersonal as often pretended–that this delusion or posturing is itself an expression of this world-generative proclivity. This considerably dialectical turn should seem familiar to any acquainted with Žižek’s similarly deployed brand of Lacanian dialectics regarding what he terms ultra-politics, wherein the most politically assertive position is to pretend a transcendence thereof; likewise does a philosophical pretense of jurisprudence or a general posture of disinterestedness in the matters upon which one seeks to elucidate with authority, stand as the very bid for authority irrespective of whatever substance one’s philosophizing might bring to bear. Here we see innumerable ideological priors unwittingly mobilized to carve the terrain under our very feet and succeeding variably wheresoever they elude scrutiny. (or else in the rare cases that they successfully contend with such scrutiny)

Yet just as this tyrannical proclivity or, indeed, potential is not cause for agony so much as intrigue as implied in even Nietzsche’s most scathing assessments, so is it likewise in Marx’s essentially prescriptive chastisement of philosophy’s impoverished sense of this innate quality, albeit expressed without such sharp vicissitude as his conceptual counterpart in this matter. In either case is the intent (of philosophy) here stated outright that it might be taken well in hand, rather than treated as a fragile plant to be nourished for its own sake, which is rather always the sake of its caretaker’s all-too-beautiful, similarly fragile soul, and instead cultivated for its life-advancing properties, even when injurious to some ill-equipped interim form of life. (and are we not worse for wear to deny philosophy’s fearsome capacities their due?)

And so might we find in this so-called love of wisdom no passive admiration, no romantic infatuation, no loss of self into that of another so much as the rearing of a child, which cannot but betray a definite interestedness in not only the multiplication of one’s own person alongside that of one’s chosen partner (indeed as one’s chosen)--no less also to inflict one’s caprice as much upon the child as the world upon which it is thrust. Yet we find here a sort of inaction at play and reflecting as such the impetus behind Marx’s particular chastisement despite the impossibility of a philosophy preserving its author’s neutrality as an aspiring or real agent of history. It could thus be said that the philosopher here surrenders to some perhaps narrow drive at the expense of any totality of drives, almost to the very extent in which this condition remains singularly unassailable within the philosopher–the extent to which it persists undetected and uninterrogated.

Indeed, just as the rearing of a child might suffice for its own sake to command one’s shrinking from the world and any will to distinction therein (nuclear domestication), so too does a philosophy most often seem to command this of the philosopher. Here it is arguable that this nigh-subservience ultimately proves a disservice to a philosophy as to a child which requires of its caretaker no mere caretaker, but more likely a world-wary exemplar. As previously asserted, the magnitude of its task will find no clear reflection in so much dutiful surrender as often all-too-conveniently pretended of the thoroughly domesticated and, indeed, domesticating paternal animal.

What is to be had of a philosophy that is housebroken--or indeed simply broken, as a beast-of-burden no less as in the multitude of ways a person might be similarly stultified as consequence of its own domestication--and to such an extent that it can only but hound vermin having long since lost all capacity, but perhaps by command, to stalk more fruitful game? Simple delight? A stimulating pass-time? A utility toward some preconceived, some ill-conceived end? What change might we suppose such frivolity to inflict upon those who entertain it, to no lesser extent upon the world they inhabit but to deprive it the very heights of this capacity (for change) in favor of the inertia such capacity stands to disrupt, in favor of an inertia which can only but disrupt any advancement to be had of life which wants but little else.

It is no small thing for a writer and philosopher to scrutinize the matter of that practice--grossly, as a general phenomenon--and it is with little less in the way of humility that the enterprise be undertaken by the very practice under scrutiny. Indeed, no mere defenestration of the idea or the written word could ever suffice to this task any more than either to elude any need of it. Instead might they be made to disappear into their opposite of bodily action, or else to be weighed accordingly in capacity for such eclipse. There is something singularly ambitious here, and no less so its implication of that ambition as singularly salient in philosophy itself, as its sole object: to make of the word a distinct animation of flesh toward its most inscrutable desire; by mere utterance or else extensive consideration, to make its desire infinitely less inscrutable.

This is our wager, but no greater a wager to lose should it prove than to wage nothing at all.

The practice of writing is tedious and clumsy. It is the ill expenditure of rudiment appendages and cognitive faculties which have been honed over eons of sex and death to better service the gut and loins of a rather peculiar beast of prey. To what end do we leverage such inheritance by this ill manner of employment if not merely in service to its associated carnal appetites? if even in jaundiced service of such appetites? It is a mistake here to presume even in so morbid an activity as writing that we transcend such; just as it would be a mistake to attribute any human proclivity as intrinsically other than desirous. Instead might we more appropriately suppose it an abstraction of such appetites, confounding the pursuit of satiation as well as the very experience of desire, even to the point of total dissociation of libidinal wont.

Nevertheless is there nothing of life in the practice of writing save for its impending decay. It is a compulsion toward undeath inflicted upon an organism which has become the mere vector of a notional apparatus, one fundamentally disinterested in the organism’s perpetuation as such, one which indeed anticipates and insists upon obsequious acquiescence to a wretched demise. As such is writing no way of life so much as protracted suicide (all the more pitiful for its protraction) and the very product of its undertaking, a sprawling suicide note.

A book ought to long for pen, ink and writing-desk: but as a rule, pen, ink and writing-desk long for a book. That is why books are nowadays of so little account.

• Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human

Yukio Mishima was a writer I discovered by happenstance late in my formative years, firstly on a whim in renting the strange and mesmerizing 1985 biopic, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, and then shortly thereafter discovering Sun & Steel in my local used bookstore. Coming up from such provocative books as Fight Club and Albert Camus’ The Rebel (and no less his better-know work, The Stranger) into the wide world of transgressive philosophical, literary, and cinematic tendencies–as well as having had a nearly lifelong fascination with the Samurai, in particular, and martial arts more generally–I was primed and ready to receive the raw personal testament of such a provocative figure rather gleefully. I would not however come to broach a more intimate investigation of Mishima’s chief pronouncements until at long last having become thoroughly acquainted with the sanctity of iron (specifically, large masses of iron hoisted by means of a steel bar, though having had some prior acquaintance with hoisting myself such-ways), and only in the culmination of a life by then already half spent varyingly immersed in martial society.

It was through Mishima’s work that I was given to consider the intrinsically yet subtly destructive nature of language in general and of the printed word in particular. Yet therein was the juxtaposition of action, at once a thrashing against as well as itself the very character of destruction. For Mishima, words and action oppose one another seemingly only in the manner of their differing approaches to death. In words, one lives one’s life or, more accurately, takes one’s respite from life as a ghastly avatar through what is already cold and dead–or rather, undead in a full reversal of Socrates’ own notion of a “living death”–almost rehearsing a circumstance of immanent or impending bodily death in the commission of text to the page. Little more does the written word tolerate of the body than to sit still, restricting one’s limbs to only the most subtle of movements, constraining one’s gaze to only the nearest and narrowest vantage. Indeed is a preoccupation with words undertaken uniquely at the expense of that quantum of activity ultimately punctuated in death, insisting instead upon an excess of undeath, perhaps even wagering what quantum of life be necessarily forgone toward this insistence.

Yet, to act is always to court death, to a degree and of a sort perhaps correlating with the extent to which an act can be considered an aspect of action (as opposed to inaction), while to refrain from action or from any need to act, to withdraw from any semblance of life lived, prolongs some grotesque certainty of death (consignment to the process of dying) won not by willful hazard so much as neglect; the latter case regarded ever more-so by the findings of empirical rigor as by long-held philistine prejudice.

But body and spirit have never blended. They had never come to resemble each other. Never had I discovered in physical action anything resembling the chilling, terrifying satisfaction afforded by intellectual adventure. Nor had I ever experienced by intellectual adventure the selfless heat, the hot darkness of physical action.

• from F-104, epilogue to Sun & Steel, by Yukio Mishima

What Mishima sought by what would become his final treatise (Sun & Steel) and subsequently by the elaborate drama of his suicide was the harmony of pen and sword, or bun bu ichi (ぶんぶ-: Pen and Sword in Accord, alternatively). Apart from the obvious inference of Nietzsche’s concept of the free death, or, to die at the right time, in Mishima’s ultimate end and intent, his thought and effort seem to reflect the practically universal dilemma of mind and body, manifest in his locating the mind within realm of language, and the body within that of agency–the body as action in the world, and the mind as inextricably mediated reflection upon but not of the world–each reconciled only by bringing the two in accord at the very dimension in which they are most at odds: the manner of death, as defined perhaps in the manner of life by which death is attained.

Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.

• from Runaway Horses, by Yukio Mishima

Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.

• from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche

A preoccupation with words, as we have exhaustively insinuated, contains an ironic tendency of producing a body often enough unworthy or else all-too-worthy of those words. Consider for instance what fleshly bounty is typically gained in poring over, let alone scrawling thousands of upon thousands of pages detailing the exploits of heroes: a soft belly? a pallid face? a flaccid grip? And hardly exempt might we find any similarly blinkered, marginally ascetic verbosity of scholarship or critique. Indeed might the philosopher and, still more, the poet be given to even worse sorts of morbidity than the escapist, collapsing perpetually unto death by the weight of their subject-matter and the sickening strain of its conveyance (or worse, the failure thereof), certainly to whatever degree they prove earnest in their efforts.

For Mishima, words had borne an unrivaled preeminence in his upbringing, his highest good, but in a veritably Nietzschean turn, words had finally come to devalue themselves. Words sung so sanguinely of beauty and heroism, as much of its anguish, had rendered the singer unbearably less than heroic or beautiful in his own eyes, and consequently none the more worthy of his own anguish. They had compelled him toward a death so unlike the worthier one he would instead ultimately embrace: one born of a Dionysian preeminence; one to prove his words themselves unworthy, though in their detritus had germinated the seeds of its intensely urgent compulsion to hazard the dignity of death met with “clenched teeth and flashing eyes.”

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2wb16f

In short, Mishima was compelled to alter the course of his life almost entirely by the lucid assessment thereof, almost purely as a matter of artistic proclivity, considering such lucidity as uniquely an affordance of literary aptitude. He sought thereby to “devise an artists’ scheme” and take the manner of his life well in hand and, hence, the manner of his death. He would sate the causticity of words upon a brimming substrate of action.

I am reminded here of Marx’s well-known thesis: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” In Mishima we find the aesthetic stoking of this sentiment to infernal consequence for the individual and hardly displaced from the political impetus Marx bore forth–however wholly displaced its particularities. While many of his contemporaries and those otherwise troubled by his legacy in the intervening years would cite Mishima’s case as a cautionary tale against such idealistic intensity, I’m left to wonder at the lack of humility before so provocative a spectacle. Yet might this recoil befit so monstrous a non-apotheosis–and into what other than the very form of Acéphale–given to what extent such censure might be born of an all-too-common sort of mooring: the utter failure to meaningfully grapple with death’s oblivion.

Alas, do you preach patience with the earthly? It is the earthly that has too much patience with you, blasphemers!

• from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche

… on the prejudices of philosophers

I … do not believe a ‘drive to knowledge’ to be the father of philosophy, but that another drive has, here as elsewhere, only employed knowledge (and false knowledge!) as a tool.

• from Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche

Marx’s famous thesis asserting that the point of philosophy is to change rather than to merely interpret the world may not have been scrawled with more than its most obvious inference in mind (philosophy’s purposeful utilization), but it takes on immensely more meaning when considered in the light of Nietzsche’s adjacent elaborations on the prejudices of philosophers, among which he asserts that a philosophy what “begins to believe in itself … always creates a world in its own image,” that “it cannot do otherwise.” His assertion throughout is that philosophy manifests out of all manner of tyrannical drives or their common “will to power” by virtue of philosophy’s world creating predisposition which can never be so impersonal as often pretended–that this delusion or posturing is itself an expression of this world-generative proclivity. This considerably dialectical turn should seem familiar to any acquainted with Žižek’s similarly deployed brand of Lacanian dialectics regarding what he terms ultra-politics, wherein the most politically assertive position is to pretend a transcendence thereof; likewise does a philosophical pretense of jurisprudence or a general posture of disinterestedness in the matters upon which one seeks to elucidate with authority, stand as the very bid for authority irrespective of whatever substance one’s philosophizing might bring to bear. Here we see innumerable ideological priors unwittingly mobilized to carve the terrain under our very feet and succeeding variably wheresoever they elude scrutiny. (or else in the rare cases that they successfully contend with such scrutiny)

Yet just as this tyrannical proclivity or, indeed, potential is not cause for agony so much as intrigue as implied in even Nietzsche’s most scathing assessments, so is it likewise in Marx’s essentially prescriptive chastisement of philosophy’s impoverished sense of this innate quality, albeit expressed without such sharp vicissitude as his conceptual counterpart in this matter. In either case is the intent (of philosophy) here stated outright that it might be taken well in hand, rather than treated as a fragile plant to be nourished for its own sake, which is rather always the sake of its caretaker’s all-too-beautiful, similarly fragile soul, and instead cultivated for its life-advancing properties, even when injurious to some ill-equipped interim form of life. (and are we not worse for wear to deny philosophy’s fearsome capacities their due?)

And so might we find in this so-called love of wisdom no passive admiration, no romantic infatuation, no loss of self into that of another so much as the rearing of a child, which cannot but betray a definite interestedness in not only the multiplication of one’s own person alongside that of one’s chosen partner (indeed as one’s chosen)--no less also to inflict one’s caprice as much upon the child as the world upon which it is thrust. Yet we find here a sort of inaction at play and reflecting as such the impetus behind Marx’s particular chastisement despite the impossibility of a philosophy preserving its author’s neutrality as an aspiring or real agent of history. It could thus be said that the philosopher here surrenders to some perhaps narrow drive at the expense of any totality of drives, almost to the very extent in which this condition remains singularly unassailable within the philosopher–the extent to which it persists undetected and uninterrogated.

Indeed, just as the rearing of a child might suffice for its own sake to command one’s shrinking from the world and any will to distinction therein (nuclear domestication), so too does a philosophy most often seem to command this of the philosopher. Here it is arguable that this nigh-subservience ultimately proves a disservice to a philosophy as to a child which requires of its caretaker no mere caretaker, but more likely a world-wary exemplar. As previously asserted, the magnitude of its task will find no clear reflection in so much dutiful surrender as often all-too-conveniently pretended of the thoroughly domesticated and, indeed, domesticating paternal animal.

What is to be had of a philosophy that is housebroken--or indeed simply broken, as a beast-of-burden no less as in the multitude of ways a person might be similarly stultified as consequence of its own domestication--and to such an extent that it can only but hound vermin having long since lost all capacity, but perhaps by command, to stalk more fruitful game? Simple delight? A stimulating pass-time? A utility toward some preconceived, some ill-conceived end? What change might we suppose such frivolity to inflict upon those who entertain it, to no lesser extent upon the world they inhabit but to deprive it the very heights of this capacity (for change) in favor of the inertia such capacity stands to disrupt, in favor of an inertia which can only but disrupt any advancement to be had of life which wants but little else.

It is no small thing for a writer and philosopher to scrutinize the matter of that practice--grossly, as a general phenomenon--and it is with little less in the way of humility that the enterprise be undertaken by the very practice under scrutiny. Indeed, no mere defenestration of the idea or the written word could ever suffice to this task any more than either to elude any need of it. Instead might they be made to disappear into their opposite of bodily action, or else to be weighed accordingly in capacity for such eclipse. There is something singularly ambitious here, and no less so its implication of that ambition as singularly salient in philosophy itself, as its sole object: to make of the word a distinct animation of flesh toward its most inscrutable desire; by mere utterance or else extensive consideration, to make its desire infinitely less inscrutable.

This is our wager, but no greater a wager to lose should it prove than to wage nothing at all.