On earth, man is weighted down by gravity, his body encased in heavy muscle; he sweats; he runs; he strikes; even with difficulty, he leaps. At times nevertheless, I have unmistakably seen, amidst the darkness of fatigue, the first tinges of colour that herald what I have called the dawn of the flesh.
I’m very late to Yukio Mishima, the acclaimed 20th century author and poet once called “the Japanese Hemingway”. An idiosyncratic intellectual, gay sadomasochist and follower of Georges Bataille - he is something of a kindred spirit!
Most 21st century commentary on Mishima focuses on his nationalism, militarism and his graphic death - a snarky means to dismiss both his philosophical insights and artistic merit. This does a great disservice to a complex life which produced thought far above most contemporary writing.
Mishima’s 1968 essay “Sun and Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death” provides an autobiographical insight on the disconnect between intellect and body, which I think can articulate the harms of our current crisis.
I’m currently in my sixth lockdown, very much imprisoned within the the world of “words” - as opposed to the “sun and steel” which provided Mishima with the strength and resolve to live a life of glory.
When you are deprived of sensuality, of adequate exercise and of physical interaction - the modern solution is to try to connect via the “touchlessness” of the internet. However, our digital age is a kind of mass literature, an attempt to provide us with meaning through text and imagery, to satisfy our needs through intellectualisation.
To “be online” is to retreat into the mind and imagination.
This kind of in-ward meaning is precisely what Mishima sought to rebel against in Sun and Steel. As he writes:
Yet why must it be that men always seek out the depths, the abyss? Why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? Why was it not feasible for thought to change direction and climb vertically up, ever up, towards the surface?
As a student of Bataille, Mishima was seeking a life which reflected exalted heterogeneity. In Bataille’s philosophy the heterogeneous experience of the sacred was one in which you are beyond yourself, beyond your individuality, free of the neuroticism of a thinking being. In Erotism, Bataille describes this experience as:
[A] sort of rupture-in anguish [which] leaves us at the limit of tears: in such a case we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with an elusive beyond.
Mishima was an advocate for the exalted, which he could only but glimpse through beautiful words:
I had perceived dimly, too, that the only physical proof of the existence of consciousness was suffering. Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendour that lies hidden within strength.
Part of Mishima’s genius was to move beyond words despite the pleasure they gave him. For Mishima thoughts, feelings and words were only part of the story. The true path to the beyond was through the body. As he writes:
[B]y setting my fetish for reality and physical existence and my fetish for words on the same level, by making them an exact equation, I had already brought into sight the discovery I was to make later. From the moment I set the wordless body, full of physical beauty, in opposite to beautiful words that imitated physical beauty, thereby equating them as two things springing from one and the conceptual source, I had in effect, without realising it, already released myself from the spell of words.
Words fail. The life of the intellectual is hollow if his or her body is viewed as lesser or secondary. In these days of lockdown our bodies are destined to atrophy and to weaken, this is not merely a partial inconvenience but something that severely limits our ability to experience the sacred beyond the flickers of a computer screen. The solution is to turn to physicality. As Mishima writes:
Can the blue sky that we all see, the mysterious blue sky that is seen identically by all the breaker of the festival shrine, ever be given verbal expression? It was here, as I have already said, that my deepest doubts law; and conversely what I have found in muscles, through the intermediary of steel, was a burgeoning of this type of triumph of the non-specific, the triumph of knowing that one was the same as others.
Mishima was known for his body building, an extension of his homoerotic desires, but it is too simple to dismiss his goals as a purely personal kink. For Mishima, building the body was just as important as building the mind in order to experience life at the limit:
The steel faithfully taught me the correspondence between the spirit and the body: thus feeble emotions, it seemed to me corresponded to flaccid muscles, sentimentality to a sagging stomach, and a over impressionability to an oversensitive, white skin.
To build the body is also to prepare it for death. Rather than allow our physical selves to atrophy, to build muscle and vigor was to achieve within oneself the drama of tragedy. As he writes:
A powerful, tragic frame and sculpturesque muscles were indispensable in a romantically noble death. Any confrontation between weak, flabby flesh and death seemed to me absurdly inappropriate.
As we slowly become paler, fatter and weaker during these times of isolation - it’s important to understand what we have lost. Our suffering is not just a loss of physical beauty, but also a barrier to encounter a world beyond ourselves.
Not merely for our “health” it may be worth our spiritual wellbeing to stop overthinking, log off the internet and pick up some weights.