![]() The sun becomes associated not just with the surface features of beautiful tanned skin, but with thanatological transcendence: “A sun full of the fierce dark flames of feeling, a sun of death that would never burn the skin yet gave forth a still stranger glow.”ĭeath ultimately becomes the sole principle linking the fundamental incommensurability of body and mind, the dualism with which he begins the book. The better acquainted he becomes with the pain and exertion involved in his physical pursuits, the more his thoughts on the body take on a tragic, morbid turn. ![]() In his words, “Why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? it seemed excessively illogical to me that men should not discover depths of a kind in the ‘surface,’ that vital borderline that endorses our separateness and our form, dividing our exterior from our interior.” Making his own body beautiful, then, was necessary to being able to think and write faithfully on matters of the surface.Īs Mishima develops this journey further, his ideas morph along with his bodily experiences. Beginning with his 10-year engagement with weight lifting, Mishima describes how his pursuit of “swelling muscles encased in sunlit skin” came to exemplify an intellectual fixation on the surface of sensory experience, as opposed to the nocturnal abstractions of a solitary thinker. Mishima then goes on to describe the exact manner in which he pursued this ideal body. This very antagonism, Mishima writes, is what propelled him not only to write novels, but to pursue his own bodily transformation, “to seek a kind of platonic ideal that would make it possible to put the flesh and words on the same footing.” If his body is an orchard, words are exemplified by termites, corrosively eating away at the wood, and more broadly, at the very substance of reality itself. I first became seriously aware of this possibility while reading novelist Yukio Mishima’s autobiographical essay “Sun and Steel.” Mishima begins by creating a distinct opposition between the world of language and that of the body. ![]() What relationship might they have beyond the simple boost of productivity one might accord the other? Is there a form of literary aesthetics of the body? I therefore wonder if there is something more than transactional in the symbiotic relationship between body and language. Some of my most fertile ideas rise from the state of breathless wonder I experience after a long bike ride, a state in which I feel each particle of my body welded to the energized aura of the words I produce. This craving for exercise, when satisfied, is indeed a dependable antidote for the worst of writer’s block. Nothing could save me but a long moonlight jog, a set of push-ups, a rave - iron, sweat, breathless heart-pumping. The frustration, I realize, comes from within my body. It’s a distinctive feeling - caustic, jittery, restless - seemingly without origin, not directed toward any particular external problem. Sometimes when I sit down to write, a biting frustration courses through me.
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