Sometimes I want to let go of all my hatreds, prejudices and biases and accept (even embrace) things as they are, but that would feel too much like a surrender of all principle. The latter sentiment is far stronger than the former, but I wonder what will happen if I give it another decade. Is that part of the maturation process? If my father were in his grave, he would be rolling in it. But I wonder if it's possible to accept things as they are (is, i.e. being) while also retaining great disdain for what-is. A great negation of the All, that's nihilism, isn't it? I'm not a nihilist, haven't been since I had an intellectual growth spurt that took me right out of the progressive-liberal-humanistic-atheistic mentality of my formative years (of which I am eternally thankful, for many people never progress (haha) beyond this point, indeed feel as if they don't have to), but lately I have grown tired, and I have begun to wonder if perhaps some kind of reconciliation isn't possible, if maybe it is right to think it all a waste while still retaining some notion of positive value, if not in what currently is, then in process, style, for lack of a better term: artistry.
These are hairy questions, not least because there is a long and substantive philosophical debate, stretching back to Plato, over questions concerning the distinction between art and technique, as well as the question of art's utility at all. Plato is hostile to art, sees in it a mere mimicry of true reality. Aristotle concurs, funnily enough, with Oscar Wilde, who says that while art may be useless, it is not its utility that makes it attractive. Fair enough, I err towards Aristotle in his appreciation of art as a vehicle for luxury and intellectual contemplation, but I lean towards Plato when it comes to his more censorious vision. Not all art, as Plato understood well enough, is good for contemplation. Indeed, he should have just taken the extra step and deemed those deity-anthropomorphizing poems he hated so much as non-art. Negate the whole thing. That's courage. That's decision. It's not the knack of the sophists, but it's not art either. It's nothing.
A lot of things, it seems, have a claim to nothing. I want to share a passage that's stuck with me from Yukio Mishima's greatest book (of the ones I've read anyway) about politics and art. The narrator Mizoguchi and his precocious, deformed friend/mentor Kashiwagi are taking a walk in a nature preserve with two girls and stumble upon the grave of a storied noblewoman. They stop to pray: 'There's something very shabby about a noble grave like this, isn't there?' said Kashiwagi. 'Political power and the power of wealth result in splendid graves. Really impressive graves, you know. Such creatures never had any imagination while they lived, and quite naturally their graves don't leave any room for imagination either. But noble people live only on the imagination of themselves and others, and so they leave graves like this which inevitably stir one's imagination. And this I find even more wretched. Such people, you see, are obliged even after they are dead to continue begging people to use their power of imagination.'
'You mean that nobility only exists in the power of imagination?'I said, merrily joining in the conversation. 'You often speak of reality. What do you consider to be the reality of nobility?'
'It's this!' said Kashiwagi, slapping the top of the moss-covered pillar. 'It's stone or bone - the inorganic residue that people leave after they are dead.'
'You're damned Buddhist in your views, aren't you?' I said.
'What's it got to do with Buddhism or any stuff like that?' said Kashiwagi. 'Nobility, culture, what people consider aesthetic - the reality of all those things is barren and inorganic. It isn't the Ryoan Temple that you see, but simply a pile of stones. Philosophy, art - it's all a lot of stones. The only really organic concern that people have is politics. It's a shame, isn't it? One can almost say that human beings are no more than self-defiling creatures.'
This is what Mishima really acted out when he went and staged an attempted coup at a Tokyo military base in 1970 before committing seppuku, and this is what a lot of people surprisingly fail to get. The term "right-wing nationalist" gets thrown around a lot, and it isn't hard to slap the label on someone like Mishima, who from his writings it is clear opposed westernization, modernization and retained an appreciation for the simplistic, parochial life. But consider the quote above. Have you ever heard a right-winger speak like that? If he really wished to restore imperial authority, why didn't he march into the imperial palace and proclaim the restoration of the empire? How do you reconcile his stated desire to restore power to the emperor with the views on nobility expressed above?
Mishima engaged in something like political action and as a result defiled himself. He knew this well enough, which is why he planned out his suicide in meticulous fashion, complete with the penning of some traditional death poems and apportioning out roles for assistance in his own beheading. He never intended to leave alive. His act was a statement. A play-drama. A statement of what, though? Politics? No. We know that the political, while seemingly the "only organic concern" of human beings, ends, as with everything else, in the shabby moss-covered headstone. Engaging in the political requires a feat of imagination. Aesthetics, then? Maybe. What people consider the aesthetic turns out to be nothing but dust, for if politics is downstream from culture, and culture is faulty aesthetics, then it all ends the same. But he did write books after all. That, manifestly, was useless in the positive sense as opposed to the negative. It allowed the cultivation of a certain vitality, a new aesthetics that can subordinate the political, strip the emperor of his clothes and reveal to us what it all really means: nothing. It is meaningless. The reality is that there is no reality.
Doubtless there are many who would disagree. Can the all-encompassing Political really be subsumed under something else, the (for lack of a better word) Aesthetic? What's so encompassing about it, anyway? The substantive and enduring may not be as such as it claims to be. If that is the case, where does that leave us? It is quite like trying to atemporalize the temporal, to not only throw out the baby with the bathwater but to keep the water from evaporating after it has been tossed, to gather them back up and toss them some more.
Mishima, more than anything else, was just a good Trotskyist, or perhaps an echo of the future Soviet marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who, while imprisoned in the prison-fortress of Ingolstadt during the Great War, had this to do and say: "After a lengthy discussion on literature, he would declare that all books should be burnt so that the soul of man could be truly liberated. One day a French captain found him building a grotesque cardboard monster holding a bomb, which he explained was the God of War and Destruction, Pierun. 'We will enter into the state of Chaos, and will only emerge from it with the total ruin of civlization,' [Tukhachevsky] solemnly told the astonished Frenchman as he prostrated himself before it.
He continues: 'The Jews brought us Christianity, and that is reason enough to loathe them,' he lectured on another occasion. 'And anyway, they belong to a low race. You cannot understand this, you Frenchmen for whom equality is a dogma. The Jew is a dog, son of a bitch, and he spreads his fleas throughout the world. It is he who has done more than any other to inoculate us to the plague of civilization, and who would like to give us his morality, the morality of money, of capital...The great socialists are Jews, and the socialist doctrine is a branch of universal Christianity...I loathe all socialists, Christians and Jews!'
And critically: 'Why should I care whether it is with the Red Banner or the Orthodox Cross that I conquer Constantinople?' he mused. He never tired of reading about or discussing the feats of Caesar and Napoleon, and was determined to be, in his own words, a general or a corpse by the age of thirty.
In the end, he became both a general and a corpse. Another shabby stone. It is just as well that a man who could say and feel these things would become Marshal of the Soviet Union, just as it's little surprise that someone like Mishima, who evidently sympathized with the spirit of the above quotations, would die for the emperor. It is permanent revolution for revolution's sake. It is, at heart, apolitical. Their nihilisms are a way out. It is the demolition of the political, without a care for its theoretical breadth, and its replacement with a quest for narrative and drama. By seeming to fully embrace what-is, they discover the means by which it can finally be negated. What an insight!
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