Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima

Excerpts
Sun and Steel
by Yukio Mishima

If my self was a dwelling, then my body resembled an orchard that surrounded it. I could either cultivate that orchard to its capacity or leave it for the weeds to run rot in.

Little by little, the orchard began to bear fruit, and thoughts of the body came to occupy a large part of my consciousness.

I began to feel uncertain about the night in which I had placed such trust during the war, and to suspect that I might have belonged with the sun worshippers all along.

…the relationship of muscles to steel was one of interdependence: very similar, in fact, to the relationship between ourselves and the world.

It is true enough that when I lifted a certain weight of steel, I was able to believe in my own strength.

I was enveloped in a sense of power as transparent as light.

When I experienced that pure sense of strength, I had a presentiment that here at last was the future focus of my thought.

…accomplices in the crime of imagination.

…logos designed to bring order to the chaos of the world of concrete objects…

…an electric current that flows in reverse…

…the point of contact…at which the absolute value of consciousness and the absolute value of the body fitted exactly into each other.

My only interest lay in following consciousness through to it’s extreme limits, so as to discover at what point it was converted into unconscious power.

…the glory, the pride, and the shyness reflected in the moment of victory…

The sculptor, in his arrogance, has sought to capture life only at its supreme moment.

…pain, suffering, and the continuing consciousness that is proof of life.

Yet my dreams became, as some stage, my muscles.

For I had begun to believe that it was the muscles-powerful, statically so well organized and so silent-that were the true source of the clarity of my consciousness.

…a sun full of the fierce dark flames of feeling…

Somewhere within me, I was beginning to plan a union of art and life, of style and the ethos of action.

More than anything, I detested defeat. Can there be any worse defeat than when one is corroded and seared from within by the acid secretions of sensibility until finally one loses one’s outline, dissolves, liquefies…

…a living balance that was constantly being destroyed and brought back to life again.

…to blend in one individual the two most contradictory desires in humanity…

Victory where the mind is concerned comes from the balance that is achieved in the face of ever-imminent destruction.

…the desire of the ancient Greeks to live “beautifully and die “beautifully”.

…the transformation of the world was an urgent necessity for me; it nourished me from day to day; it was something without which I could not have lived. The idea of the changing world was as much a necessity as sleep and three meals a day.

Nothing was lacking; every piece of the mosaic was in place. I had absolutely no need of any others, and thus no need of words. The world I was in was made up of conceptual elements that were as pure as angels; all foreign elements had been temporarily swept aside, and I overflowed with the infinite joy of being one with the world, a joy akin to that produced by cold water on skin warmed by the summer sun.

That “something different” was muscle.

…one needs to afford proof of one’s muscles with one’s own eyes, and seeing is the antithesis of existing.

The subtle contradiction between self-awareness and existence began to trouble me.

If only one can direct the eye of self-awareness so intently towards the interior and the self that self-awareness forgets the outer forms of existence, then one can “exist”…

…the apple sacrifices existence for the sake of seeing.

…I could see my own muscles in the mirror. Yet seeing alone was not enough to bring me into contact with the basic roots of my sense of existence…

Thus the muscles start working in accordance with the demands of self-awareness; but in order to make the action exist unequivocally, a hypothetical enemy outside the muscles is necessary, and for the hypothetical enemy to make certain of it’s existence it must deal a blow to the realm of the senses fierce enough to silence the querulous complaints of self-awareness.

Here lies the mysterious significance of an early death, which the Greeks envied as a sign of the love of the gods.

Two different voices constantly call to us. One comes from within, the other from without. The one from without is one’s daily duty. If the part of the mind that responded to duty corresponded exactly with the voice from within, then one would indeed be supremely happy.

My solace lay more than anywhere - indeed lay soley – in the small rebirths that occurred immediately after exercise.

…I was gradually seeking to rediscover the unsullied fortress of words…

…a return to the poem without pain, a return to my private Golden Age.

…despite the ambiguity of their sense and content, they were filled with a glory not of this world…

…a hero must be both a ban on originality and a true faithfulness to a classical model;
unlike the words of a genius, the words of a hero must be selected as the most impressive and noble from among ready-made concepts. And at the same time they, more than any other words, constitute a splendid language of the flesh.

I was surely, somewhere, guilty of a contradiction in rejecting my own uniqueness while affirming the uniqueness of my life…

Those who died, however, were fortunately secure within a fixed identity, an identity established beyond all doubt – the tragic identity.

…what I have called the dawn of the flesh – that rosy vertigo that descends on one after grueling use of the body and intense fatigue…

I first realized that the use of strength and the ensuing fatigue, the sweat and the blood, could reveal to my eyes that scared, ever-swaying blue sky…and could confer the glorious sense of being the same as others…I should step beyond the realm of individuality into which I have been driven by words and awaken to the meaning of the group.

Only through the group, I realized – through sharing the suffering of the group – could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of the individuality was necessary.

It was the flame of the flesh, flickering up faintly beneath the biting breeze – a flame, one might almost say, of nobility. The sense of surrendering one’s body to a cause gave new life to the muscles.

Opposites carried to extremes come to resemble each other…

I am one who has always been interested only in the edges of the body and the spirit, the outlying regions of the body and the outlying regions of the spirit.

But body and spirit had 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 in intellectual adventure the selfless heat, the hot darkness of physical action.

Somewhere, I told myself, there must be a higher principle that manages to bring the two together and reconcile them.

The alchemy of my body would begin.

Solitary, spermatozoon-like, I was installed within.

Everything was quiet, majestic, and the surface of the blue sky was flecked with the semen-white of clouds.

I experienced an “awakening” as though another layer had been torn rudely off my wakefulness, leaving my spirit pure….

Glory was surely a name given to just such a light-inorganic, superhuman, naked, full of perilous cosmic rays.

The inner world and the outer world had invaded each other, had become completely interchangeable.

Anything that comes into our minds even for the briefest of moments, exists. Even though it may not exist at this actual moment, it has existed somewhere in the past, or will exist at some time in the future.

The flesh should glow with the pervading prescience of the spirit; the spirit should glow with the overflowing prescience of the body.

Why, still, should the lust for ascension
Seem, in itself, so close to madness?

I am drawn higher and higher, more unstable,
Closer and closer to the sun’s effulgence.

Or do I then
Belong, after all, to the earth?