On the Sublime III: Paradise Regained
Weialala leia, Wallala leialala~
“Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness?”
Baudelaire, Au Lecteur, Spleen de Paris.
“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry.
“All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another.”
Plotinus, Enneads, II.3.7; tr. MacKenna.
I. A Glimpse of Ararat
“For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start—
No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait:”
Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
Nox erat et terris animalia somnus habebat;1
a dream of a sublime Rome:
Awake at last I steered my meagre craft2
across the swelling sea.3 The crops of Crete
weren’t mine to till; the Dog had utterly
burnt them—a haunting spectre of ashy
mourning, earthscorched wheat.4
I searched instead for promised land—Arcadia!
Ahoy! Ahead! The mist abates.
Possessed, my rudder guides, a cove awaits:
A haunt of nymphs5—they lie in wait
on every side—anticipate
my craggy thoughts, and why I hesitate.
Dribbling across the brown sound
my ship advents to bank, then runs aground:6
the impact ripples, soaks the prow—
a bronze7 sludge; a viscous mound.
The Nereids recognise their quarry.
Savage sea-girls,8 rhythmic dancing
attar-wreaths around me, singing
synchronous symphonies, ululating—
past the sea’s smooth spaces9 hurling
themselves aboard, thrusting
in opiatic orgy, strumming
cithara cords and wielding
trembling timbrels,10 weaving
lyrics, rosy notes and peonies—drown
me in floral crowns and April smiles.11
One deigns to speak: eloquent Cymodocea.12
Be not afraid, oarsman! The lord of horses,
dreadful in wrath, awe-inspiring in mercy,
grants you god-like palms and poetic triumphs,
laurel by laurel!
Cybele begat us, not Dionysus:
once Trojan beaks—Ida’s brood—the Great Mother
blessed us with immortal life, to escape that
foul sylvan arson.
Come, the ocean lord commands: ascend lofty
Helicon that rises in mystic azure!
Climb these hallowed steps, for you must become a
priest of the Muses!
Relief washed over me; my feet imprinted
the seamud. By the waters I sat down and wept.13
I had avoided Attis’ fate, and that of Pentheus!
I had basked in Rachmaninoff’s radiant rays—
I had safely steered through Caïssa’s storms—
the time had come for a literary ascent—
the Great Work was near complete—
And so I climbed.
II. Helicon
Conduct, on the other hand, the soul
“Which the highest cultures have nourished”
To Fleet St. where
Dr. Johnson flourished;
Beside this thoroughfare
The sale of half-hose has
Long since superseded the cultivation
Of Pierian roses.
Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
I push through the prickles—Ent arms give way to a lonely clearing. Its murmuring stream summons me; I walk along its ochre edges.14 Running clean it fecund flows from a fountain of marble, twisted with ivy: it springs limpid spouts, flashing and shining. A shrine of the holy Hippocrene.
The lustrous gloss soon fades from my vision. Spinning, I see the twirling ladies, nine-number’d, in chorus arrang’d—the hollow now filled with their thronging gaze.15 A perfume of dancing myrrh wriggles through the air.16 The scents of garlands crown the breeze. They surround me; the grove transforms.
An array assembles, marble, tetraconch, like ruined Zvartnots. Great Corinthian columns pierce the firmament—a torture of stony sprouting bamboo. Ever-changing Helicon constructs altars capped with colossal statues, affixed with fonts of pure water. The statues shift, mutate, transpose—grey, then black; equipped with lute, then lyre; another earnestly catches your eye. Past the marble mannequins peeks Calliope, Muse-Queen. Her harangue explodes, henceforth:
“Of many turns and many knots, now speak—17
“Lunatic, Liar, Loki, Ulysses—18
“Fie on’t! Ah fie!19 Fool fly off this proud peak!
“Deceiver, you have pledged to sing with ease
“Lucretian strains, of thoughts the mind conceives;20
“Instead you emulate the bard of bees,21
“Who of Augustan Rome an image weaves,22
“Vergil, whose sense of beauty leads astray23
“Away, fool knave! Now flee these shades of leaves!”24
sic ait; aio sic:25
“Alive, imperfect, infinite, the word
at birth was cursed, tormented—Eden lost26—
prevented from perfection, its sacred
quest—Muse! Have I not prayed enough? Save me
from Erebus27, despair and Tartarus,
that lack and fraud of which I spake, and hate;
from sophist lures that trap, lusting to bind
the righteous and the good, to seize from them
empyreal28 ideas, the truth, and worse,
to choke the ripening of mental fruits29
that burst in jaw like thunder-claps30 that set
the sky ablaze31 in glorious
delight! Dispel the armies of the night.
Directness, stark transparency I seek32—
dove-like the word soars over waters’ face,
creating form and light and life, and yet
so quickly pivots, spins away, forsakes
our eyes—an apparition, ghost, remains,
a figure—hope in beauty endless crushed
by fallen grace.33 Incarnate, carious,34
the imaged word35, a mirror warped36 still gleams
with flashing beams of crystal hue that heart
and mind did incubate, reflecting all
the same, deformed but not deformed, sublime
design—
O Lord,
thou shalt not pluck me out!”
sic aio; ait sic:37
“Entreaty made, entreaty heard, allay
“Your fears! Though fate forbids reflections true,
“Such beauty comes in moulding uttered clay!38
“A painter paints a trunk of oldest yew,39
“Whose bowing branches nature resurrects;
“His genius begets the form anew.
“O Ængus of the birds40, our throng protects
“Alone the rufous makar, ollav, too,41
“Who Dante’s wretched magpies he rejects!”42
sic ait; laetatus sum.43
III. Pfuiteufel!44
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.
Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
Garland-yoked—she tugs my verdant hakes towards the marble mass. Calliope grips my occiput—slams my face—shatters stoup surface—pure vision!
de Burgh. Dubliner. Theotokos’ son. second Henry’s scion composes, engraves aesthetic gems.45 Bolingbroke defeated! Philosophaster?46 A see-through intaglio. The quill billowing dissolves, bursts white ashen clouds and gassy nebulas—translucent forms, pillowed caresses, the ghosts of shrouded ideas emerge—galactic skies in the murk at last soften, steal away my sight, with wings of tumult pivot me: in awe I see. For Burke what’s sublime is terror, astonishment, tremorous fantasy—the knowledge of death. The darkest dark obscures the senses; the lightest light blinds them. Sublimity IS vastness, but is NOT separate from beauty! Twins—mon sembable—mon frère!47 They are interlinked, interspersed, interwoven! The sublime extends beauty into a divine idea of beauty—ideas forever last, borne through brain.
What then is right that he describes? Scrawls he, “the terrible uncertainty of the thing described.” Unknown and infinity. Terrible without terror. Caspar David Friedrich. The Matterhorn, Everest: the climber grips to life—Marc-André Leclerc. But not in terror. YES: the Sublime overwhelms Reason—her godhead crushed—the guillotined cult! BUT it is not unreason. Nor is it obscurity, illusionary pain. It is a realisation of divinity. There are things so phenomenal that they have a numinous immortality. It is security in the knowledge of a higher realm. An emotion divorced from the base passions of mortality; an escape from mortality; an escape from ourselves. YES: “an irresistible force”! YES: “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain another”. It is elevation; it is kaleidoscopic vision; peering through a prism. It is a lightning rod that strikes from above—energises, possesses, as if gnostic emanations streaming from the One itself. The cult of Reason replaced by divine Sophia, holy Wisdom, and love. A cleansing moment of clarity.
The man’s thumb brushes up the worn, Miltonian pages of paradise. The looming ghost of time steady ticks. Forlorn the quill-man fears. The words evoke endless emotion. Timeless. His thoughts hold some truth, though obscured, “as when the sun new ris’n looks through the horizontal misty air shorn of its beams…”48 Sublimity is not terror. It overwhelms, but with the love which moves the sun and other stars.49
Spluttering, I am revived. Plunged again into starry introspection—on goes the Argonautica.
IV. Königsberg
Nothing, in brief, but maudlin confession,
Irresponse to human aggression,
Amid the precipitation, down-float
Of insubstantial manna,
Lifting the faint susurrus
Of his subjective hosannah.
Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
At Mauersee in mossy snow abandoned locks
sustain the sleeping Pregel. She girds Kneiphof—
the red-brick sepulchre.
At half-past three the
grey man stutters out the door50—a ghost in
Teutonic streets. The river breaks its banks;
exceeds its limits—
the terror of the flood.
The depths become pure light in beauteous reason.
O you who fear the boundless, bind beauty no more!
The sublime and beautiful embrace an absolute eternity.
V. Kinkaku-ji; or, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion
“For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” — Saint Athanasius of Alexandria.
“His is beauty, the true beauty, for it is God; and that man becomes God, since God so wills. Heraclitus, then, rightly said, “Men are gods, and gods are men.” For the Word Himself is the manifest mystery: God in man, and man God” — Saint Clement of Alexandria.
One final statue remained: the centrepiece of the grove. A rippling torso. A glittering sabre. Hachimaki. Banzai!
In Yukio Mishima, we find the personification of the idea. He was the poet-priest of his own divinity. Sublime was his literature; sublime was his life—as he had crafted it. We must dive into an examination of his conception of the ideal, and, more specifically, beauty.
“according to Father, there was nothing on this earth so beautiful as the golden temple…”
In the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Mizoguchi, training as an acolyte of Zen Buddhism, fixates on the beauty of Kinkaku-ji. This golden temple in Kyoto, elevated to godhood by his father, pervades all aspects of Mizoguchi’s pysche, and dominates him: “thus the Golden Temple was apparent everywhere.”51 Mishima constructs this obsession with ceaseless sublimity:
“When I saw the surface of the distant fields glittering in the sun, I felt sure that this was the golden shadow cast by the invisible temple… I used to see the Golden Temple soaring up into the morning sky amidst the rays of the sun as it rose from the folds of those eastern hills… In so far as I could not actually set my eyes on the temple, it was like the sea… there always floated in the air a sort of presentiment of this sea: sometimes the wind would bring with it a smell of sea, sometimes in rough weather flocks of gulls would swoop down into the nearby fields to take refuge…”
For Mizoguchi, the temple’s beauty, even if he was unable to see it in person, was tangible and knowable, “never simply an idea.”52 As Lim Yunchan said, “we cannot see the ‘real’ things with our eyes”—yet, they remain ‘real’.53 And so, when confronted finally by the temple his god, Mizoguchi is shocked: “It was merely a small, dark, old, three-storied building… Could beauty, I wondered, be as unbeautiful a thing as this?”54 Rather than questioning his idea of the temple, Mizoguchi grants it overwhelming power: “It occurred to me that the Golden Temple might have adopted some disguise to hide its true beauty.”55 For the rest of the novel, Mizoguchi struggles with his impotence in response to such power, and in his rage, concludes that it must be destroyed. As he gazes at the burning building, in his eyes, the temple once more becomes merely an idea.
“From where I sat the Golden Temple itself was invisible. All that I could see was the eddying smoke and the great fire that rose into the sky. The flakes from the fire drifted between the trees and the Golden Temple’s sky seemed to be strewn with golden sand.”
Mizoguchi destroys the idea of Kinkaku-ji, preventing it from its previously continual apotheosis. Those flakes, those grains of golden sand, represent the intellectual afterglow of the temple in Mizoguchi’s mind. Curiously, the actual temple, until its modern-day reconstruction after Hayashi Yoken’s (Mishima’s model for Mizoguchi) real-life arson, was not golden.56 The gold leaf with which it had been adorned had, after centuries, flaked away, leaving a rather less impressive skeleton (see below, in 1885). Even so, its monks and adherents still prayed their prayers, and made their pilgrimages—they never stopped believing in the idea of the Golden Temple.
In another instance (included in Schrader’s Mishima), Mizoguchi and his clubfooted peer Kashiwagi debate their understanding of beauty in relation to the Zen koan ‘Nansen Kills the Cat’. Mizoguchi characterises beauty as impermanent and illusory, ‘like a decayed tooth’:57
“Beauty—yes, beauty is like a decayed tooth. It rubs against one’s tongue, it hangs there, hurting one, insisting on its own existence. Finally it gets that one cannot stand the pain and one goes to the dentist to have the tooth extracted. Then as one looks at the small, dirty, brown, blood-stained tooth lying in one’s hand, one’s thoughts are likely to be as follows: ‘Is this it? Is this all it was?’ That thing which caused me so much pain, which made me constantly fret about its existence, which was stubbornly rooted within me, is now merely a dead object. But is this thing really the same as that thing? If this originally belonged to my outer existence, why—through what sort of providence—did it become attached to my inner existence and succeed in causing me so much pain?”
Even such beauty as Kinkaku-ji, that causes men to go mad, is, in reality, just a heap of wooden sticks and floorboards. Through ‘some sort of providence’ it becomes ‘attached’ to our inner existence.
If Kashiwagi is Mizoguchi’s ‘devil’, who abhors idealism, then Tsurukawa, another fellow acolyte at the temple, is Mizoguchi’s ‘angel’. Tsurukawa, for Mizoguchi, inhabited a “world… overflowing with bright feelings and good intentions.”58 Tsurukawa, however, dies in a car accident, run over by a truck. After his friend’s death, Mizoguchi maintains the idea of Tsurukawa, but ponders how he conceived of such an idea.
Tsurukawa was, I would suggest, the idealistic opposite of the temple, for his “cheerful looks and carefree body, […] were the source of the favorable impression that he made on others.”59 The idea was generated in post-conception, rather than preconception. Tsurukawa’s death in an accident reinforces Mizoguchi’s nihilism, since “the clear form of a person like Tsurukawa who emitted brightness by the mere fact of his existence, of a person who could be reached by both hands and eyes, who could in fact be called life for life’s sake, might, now that this person was dead, serve as the clearest possible metaphor to describe unclear formlessness.”60
Later, however, Mizoguchi discovers that Tsurukawa committed suicide over a tragic love affair—making Tsurukawa the ultimate idealist—crushing Mizoguchi’s idealistic assumption that Tsurukawa’s ‘pure death’ in an accident had therefore not veiled the boy in nihilistic tragedy, being merely a “swift chemical action”.61 It becomes clear that the death of this ‘ideal’ individual, in the person of Tsurukawa, prefigures the total death of Mizoguchi’s idealism by the end of the novel.
So how does this all connect to the sublime? In the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and in Mizoguchi himself, we see that the human mind has the potential to transform phenomena into things that they are not; or, perhaps, transform phenomena into things that (they) truly are. That ‘thing’ is transferred from our ‘external existence’ into our ‘internal existence.’ Where does this transformation come from? I would suggest a potential source. Divine madness—θεία μανία (theia mania)—the sublime.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates argues that there exists a constructive madness, given by the gods—not all madness is necessarily evil. There exists four types of this mania:62
“μαντικὴν μὲν ἐπίπνοιαν Ἀπόλλωνος θέντες” (mantiken men epipnoian Apollonos thentes)—prophecy, inspired by Apollo.
“Διονύσου δὲ τελεστικήν” (Dionusou de telestiken)—mystic/initiatory [madness, inspired] by Dionysus.
“Μουσῶν δ᾽ αὖ ποιητικήν” (Mouson d’ au poietiken)—poetic [madness, inspired] by the Muses.
“τετάρτην δὲ ἀφροδίτης καὶ Ἔρωτος, ἐρωτικὴν μανίαν ἐφήσαμέν τε ἀρίστην εἶναι” (tetarten de aphrodites kai Erotos, erotiken manian ephesamen te aristen einai)—the fourth, [inspired] by Aphrodite and Eros, erotic madness, which we said was best.
Is this the ‘trance-like state’ of sublimity? Is this what underlies the transcendental genius of Yunchan Lim, Marc-André Leclerc or Yukio Mishima himself? Near enough. Perhaps Plato categorises unnecessarily. What I take from this understanding of divine madness is twofold: that sublimity is transcendent; and, that there (necessarily, perhaps) exists a gap between the ideal and the real, that requires filling in. For each person, this is a subjective experience—but that does not make it any less real—and could manifest in music, chess (though not in my case), and literature, among the other fine arts.
In literature, this composition’s focus, we find the always-extant issue: words are imperfect, being unable to express what truly is—“Poetry is therefore the strange labour of converting impression into expression.”63 In this conversion, as with translating a text from one language to another, something is lost; and yet, just like a translation, something new, something just as real, is created. A text is a forgery of an idea—but that text in itself forges a new idea. Indeed, with each new interpretation of the text, a new idea again emerges. No audience is the same; no text is the same for every audience.
To be sure, composition often takes on a life of its own. Divine madness—the sublime state—sees to this very well. Nevertheless, such effusive flows generally yield to the eternal dam of editing. The chaos of divine mania naturally creates both wheat and chaff, to be separated accordingly. At times, however, madness can be all-consuming. Genius often exists on the edge—bounded by life and by death—and such sublime madness can cause the climber, as with Marc-André Leclerc, to stumble and fall. Mizoguchi certainly fell—into madness—into delusion—into schizophrenia. The torturous beauty of Kinkaku-ji annihilated him. Kinkaku-ji is both a geometric frame of wood, sticks, floorboards and peeling gold leaf, and also the most divine, most worshipful Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
Mishima wished to unify life and literature; in the process, he, too, destroyed himself. He sought apotheosis. In the classical tradition, such an apotheosis came from the divine quality of one’s poetry. As priest of the Muses, the poet sings in divine rhythms; channels the inspiration of the gods. The greatest arch-priests of verse are declared immortal, on account of, and along with, their poetry. Horace is Musarum sacerdos, whose fame will grow as long as Roman priests and Vestal Virgins still climb the steps of the Capitoline. Propertius, rather, becomes immortal through his verse alone, in a sacred tradition harking back to the deified Callimachus and Philitas of Cos: his poetry will outlast the pyramids.
In the modern tradition, we see this continued: Hart Crane is a priestly poet, becoming legend, praying a prayer of pariah and invoking that great bridge god of Brooklyn, through whom he has the capacity to condense eternity in unfractioned idiom. And what about Wallace Stevens who makes a constant sacrament of praise? Or even Ezra Pound with his Night Litany (and divine Cantos)? Poetry is worship and praise. Thus Schlegel: “Life is writing. The sole purpose of mankind is to engrave the thoughts of divinity onto the tablets of nature.”
What, then, can we call poetics except the worship of the divine word itself? Or perhaps, is it rather the contemplation of that conversion of the divine word into the imperfect word—writing—prevented from perfection, cursed and tormented by the broken mirror of expression? Is there any way to resolve this cursèd quandary—that the divine word can only be made flesh imperfectly in writing, that is, becoming the mortal, imperfect, transient word? Our first solution comes with Kinkaku-ji—though the idea is imperfectly represented in one instance, in another instance it becomes something else, and that other thing is just as authentic as the original. A second, not dissimilar, solution, comes in examining the poetics of Stéphane Mallarmé.
Mallarmé was one of the leading poets in the French school of Symbolism, alongside Paul Verlaine (and influenced by Charles Baudelaire), developing an early Modernist movement that sought, in essence, “to depict not the thing but the effect it produces.”64 In doing so, according to adherent Jean Moréas’ Symbolist Manifesto, symbolist poetry “seeks to clothe the Idea with a sensory form which, nevertheless, should not exist as an end-in-itself but as a form which, though serving at all times to express the Idea, must remain subjective.”65 The somewhat similar English-equivalent Imagist movement, pioneered by Ezra Pound, H. D., and others, expressed the idea through concise, direct images, and “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”66
Such approaches, in accepting hand-in-hand the subjectivity of experience and thus the insufficiency of literary realism in representing those experiences—targeting such movements as Émile Zola’s Naturalism—offer a useful, and beautiful, solution. As Mallarmé himself writes, “to name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the delight of the poem, which consists in the pleasure of guessing little by little; to suggest, that is the dream.”67 It is the suggestiveness of literature, that ever-constant sublimity of expression, that grants us access to the divine realm. Somehow, in suggestion, the poet makes more real the idea that could not be previously expressed.
The symbol (or image, or poem) describes the indescribable: it defeats that awful feeling of not being able to find one’s words—which we all experience at one point or another—and replaces that stutter of the overflowing mind with a singular expression of truth. Literature’s power just as much brings the sublime down to earth as brings earth to heaven. At last the imperfect word has some semblance of the divine.
Having discarded Longinus’ aesthetic praecepts during my unlucky tryst with chess (having brilliant ideas; inspiring emotion; being technically masterful) in favour of a broader approach accepting the subjectivity of each person’s experience of the sublime, I would suggest that these two new concepts—the subjectivity of the idea itself (e.g. of the Golden Temple) and the opportunity of suggestiveness in expressing that idea—come closer to a more truthful representation of the sublime than that simplistic list of qualifications. Longinus, after all, discussed the sublime through literature specifically, so in a necessarily more restricted way.
Yet, of course, literature is perhaps the most obvious arena for the sublime: it is the blankest canvas of all. Indeed, all sublime literature provides universal nourishment to its reader, regardless of the contextual specifics of the text. The universal principle—the idea—the divine spark—runs through all great literature. Longinus understood this; note his treatment of Sappho 31: “Is it not wonderful how she summons at the same time, soul, body, hearing, tongue, sight, skin, all as though they had wondered off apart from herself? She feels contradictory sensations, freezes, burns, raves, reasons, so that she displays not a single emotion, but a whole congeries of emotions. Lovers show all such symptoms…”68 Sappho arranges her verses masterfully, singing a universal song for the lovers.
“Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that words will be corroded too… In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away — of their corrosive function — just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid.”
Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel, p. 8.
For Mishima, however, the sublimity of literature was insufficient. My proposed solutions that seek to fill in the gap between the real and the ideal would never have been enough. He had to seek, instead, a poetic apotheosis for himself, and simultaneously be the poet-priest of his own divinity. For him, it was impossible to unite life and literature, action and art, real and ideal—each side corroded the other, creating again and again that unwanted imperfection. He conceived of one solution.
Kimitake Hiraoka, as he was first called, died at 45. His life was composition, and performance. He was not satisfied with the separation of body and soul, and wished to unify them. Action and art had to be one. A sublime writer, he filled his text with rich metaphors and vivid descriptions, enlightened by a divinity of vocabulary, sometimes obscure even for the native Japanese reader.
Yukio Mishima was not satisfied with experience alone. While he composed, he performed. He resolved that the only way to unify body and soul was to have one final performance, one final ritual—death:
“Never in physical action had I discovered the chilling satisfaction of words.
Never in words had I experienced the hot darkness of action.
Somewhere, there must be a higher principle that reconciles art and action.
That principle, it occurred to me, was death.”
Was Mishima just an egotist, convinced that this was the grandest of all his performances? Or was he a self-destructive madman, eager for death? Or was he a genius, the only man who ever truly unified art and life, mind and body, fact and fiction? Perhaps all of the above, but one thing can be certain—the idea of Yukio Mishima remains. After many have been long forgotten, the man who made life literature, and literature life, will be remembered for both.
Yet, another question will always remain—was it worth it? Is it truly necessary to make experience and performance utterly indistinguishable? The man, the boy, the baby, that was initially Kimitake Hiraoka, is utterly consumed in the idea that is Yukio Mishima. He is now immortal, certainly, but at the cost of his biography, nay, his humanity. And yet, tragically, for any discerning reader of Mishima’s works, this was clearly his aim, the result of a lethal, all-consuming self-hatred. But he did, undoubtedly, in his final moments, as he himself described of flying in a jet in the upper atmosphere, enter the trance-state of sublimity:
“My mind was at ease.
My thought process, lively.
No movement, no sound, no memories,
…
No more body or spirit, pen or sword, male or female,
…
Here was the moment I had always been seeking.”
For Mishima, death and heaven were the same thing. His quest for sublimity was a quest for death. Does being closer to death make something more sublime? Not usually, but perhaps this is the exception. No single act in literary history simultaneously baffles and intrigues as much as Mishima’s seppuku on 25th November 1970. Yukio Mishima, living life as art, performed his final flourish—poetry written with a splash of blood—and raised himself into legend: a sublime apotheosis.
“The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.”
Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses.
Epilogue. Aedes Iovis Optimi Maximi Capitolini; or, The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus; or, Mons Capitolinus; or, eternity…
The steps of the Golden Temple transformed into smooth, white marble. My mind charged with the hot madness of sublimity. Jovian thunder flowed electric in my thoughts. As I weaved through its crystalline pylons, the indestructible Capitoline reflected my image. I reached the inner chamber; faced the king of kings. At once Calliope returned to me, with all her sisters, clothed in Vestal Virgin’s garb. I was dressed in the vestments of the triumphator—tunica palmata, toga picta, and laurel crown. In my right hand she placed
“a rod, a shoot of sturdy laurel, a marvellous thing, and breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things that were aforetime; and they bade me sing of the race of the blessed gods that are eternally, but ever to sing of themselves both first and last.”69
A rapturous ecstasy expanded into the smallest spaces of my soul, bubbled in my bones (a miraculous marrow!), and drained me of all doubt and fear. Glasslike beams of the eternal sun streamed across my vision. The overwhelming light, fashioned into the form of a great white eagle, clasped my body with its glimmering gold claws and raised me up into the mystic azure.
“He gave man speech, and speech created thought,
Which is the measure of the universe.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, II.IV.72.
Aeneid 3.147: “It was night and on earth sleep held the living world.” In this dream, Aeneas is compelled by the Penates, the household gods, to leave Crete, their temporary rest, and advance to Italy.
Propertius 3.9.4.
Aen. 3.157.
Aen. 3.141-2; Revelations 18:8.
I echo in the cove the poetic cave, or antrum, in Latin, which is often the haunt of the poet (often as a lover), the Muses, or perhaps nymphs. Think Aen.1.166; Horace, Carmina 1.5.3; 3.4.40; Propertius 2.30.25-6; 3.13.33-4.
Consider T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 174-5. Advent has certain religious connotations.
Recall the bronze prows that were turned into nymphs by Cybele: Aen.10.223. Continue doing so.
Hart Crane, The Bridge: Cutty Sark, 60-61.
Euripides, Bacchae, 1093-5; Catullus 64.88—this I think is a liberal translation by Cornish.
Catullus, 63.8-9.
Hart Crane, The Bridge: Cutty Sark, 46: “ATLANTIS ROSE drums wreathe the rose…” Consider associations of these flowers. April? TWL!
(Footnote for the entire section here due to formatting reasons) It is Cymodocea who leads the troop of nymphs that assist Aeneas: Aen.10.225. The speech is in Sapphic stanzas, based on Algernon Charles Swinburne’s hendecasyllables with stress on syllables one, five, and ten. The final line of a stanza comprises five syllables with stress on syllables one and four. ‘laurel by laurel’ = Swinburne, Sapphics, stanza 8. The ‘foul sylvan arson’, here, is in reference to the Aeneid, wherein the Trojan ships, set alight by the Rutulians, are transformed by Cybele into nymphs, since they were built from wood from Mount Ida, her holy mountain, near Troy. Aen.10.223ff. ‘mystic azure’, see Paradise Lost 1.297. Mount Helicon: the home of the Muses. The climb up the stairs I model on Horace, Carmina 3.30.9, as well as the standard ‘poet as priest’ trope in elegy, and Greco-Roman poetry more generally (Callimachus, Theocritus, Propertius, etc.).
TWL 182.
Pound, Ts’ai Chi’h (found in below Imagist anthology).
Des Imagistes, an anthology: F. S. Flint, IV.2-3. The throng is a particularly classical reference.
Ibid., IV.11-13; I also think of Lucretius’ description of dust particles (almost Brownian motion) in De Rerum Natura II.113-140.
Turns: Odyssey 1.1. Knots: Loki, the trickster god of knots.
For turns, see Odyssey 1.1; Loki was the god of knots; the Lunatic, Liar, … formula is from Lewis’ trilemma.
Hamlet 1.2.135 (unweeded garden).
Charlotte Bronte, Gilbert—“words give faint echo of thoughts that the mind conceives.” (Found by accident)
Vergil composed the Georgics.
James Joyce, Ulysses, 186.
Ulysses, 196, on Shakespeare, in echo of Wilde.
The poetic grove, but consider Whitman.
“Thus she said; thus I say:”
Milton; consider also Nothing Gold Can Stay by Frost; gold and green, as in my Konya notes, are lovely colours to juxtapose.
Curiously Pound uses Erebus in his first Canto (I was unaware): 1.29.
PL 1.117.
Think also PL 5.324.
A type of firework in Lord of the Rings—I wasn’t sure if this would be recognised, so was initially going to just have ‘fireworks’, but I noticed the extent of the thunder motif in The Waste Land, section 5, so put it back in.
Winehouse, A.: Tears Dry On Their Own (2006).
“Thinking of D. H. Lawrence’s declaration that the ‘essence of poetry … is a stark directness, without a shadow of a lie’, Eliot confessed that in his own work, he had ‘long aimed’ at a ‘poetry so transparent that we see not the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry’ (CP, IV pp. 847-8).” from A. J. Nickerson, T. S. Eliot and the Point of Intersection, The Cambridge Quarterly, Volume 47, Issue 4, December 2018, pp. 343-359.
Here think Genesis’ holy spirit, Milton’s, too, and Hart Crane’s seagull over the chained bay waters Liberty.
Eliot’s incarnate word, from Harold Bloom’s introduction to The Complete Poems of Hart Crane: Centennial Edition, xxx. See also Voyages IV, 17. For ‘carious’, see also The Waste Land, V, 339.
Ibid., but Hart Crane’s imaged word, also referenced, xxiii, and Voyages 6.29.
I discovered after composing this that Shelley had considered the symbolism of the mirror in poetry: “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” (A Defence of Poetry) I suppose mine is a slightly different treatment.
On the above: TWL III, 307-311. Can the sublime be truly experienced by the ascetic, who exists without passions? The passion I feel when listening to music, reading great works of literature, etc., IS passion, but it is NOT base. Of course, one could say the ascetic only lives without base passions, rather than all passions, base or otherwise. Note Crane’s response to these lines in The Bridge: The Tunnel, 136-8 (Bloom discusses in his introduction, as above): “Kiss of our agony Thou gatherest, O Hand of Fire, gatherest—”
Job 10:9; Genesis 2:7.
Van Gogh, Trunk of an Old Yew Tree (1888).
W. B. Yeats: The Old Age Of Queen Maeve; The Song of Wandering Aengus. AE: a homage to George William Russell. Also Ulysses, ch.9 at some point.
Ulysses, 177; makar is the approximate Scottish version of the Irish ollamh. I render ollamh as ‘ollav’, as in Joyce.
Dante’s magpies, Purgatorio 1.11.
Psalm 122; the one-hundred and twenty-first psalm of the LORD in the saint Jerome’s Vulgate. If the reader has a single strand of spiritual fibre in his body, I would recommend listening to Parry’s I Was Glad from the coronation.
Ulysses, 178.
Hart Crane, To Shakespeare 2-3.
Ulysses, 178.
TWL I.76; Baudelaire Au Lecteur, Fleurs du Mal.
PL 1.594-6.
Dante, Paradiso, 33.145.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (tr. Morris), 4. Below quotation also p. 4.
Temple, 20.
Recall OTSI.
Temple, 23.
Ibid.
I cannot confirm the exact datings here. Potentially could have been re-gold-leaf’d by the 1940s.
Temple, 136.
Temple, 121
Ibid.
Temple, 122
Temple, 121
Phaedrus, 265b.
Wallace Fowlie, Mallarmé, 29.
Letter to Henri Cazalis from Mallarmé. Conway Morris, Roderick “The Elusive Symbolist movement” – International Herald Tribune, 17 March 2007. (from the Symbolism wikipedia page if interested)
https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MoreasManifesto.php
Pound (1918). “A Retrospect”. Reprinted in Kolocotroni et al. (1998), p. 374. Note René Taupin: “between the image of the Imagist and the ‘symbol’ of the Symbolists[,] there is a difference only of precision.” (Taupin, René (1929). L’Influence du symbolism francais sur la poesie Americaine (de 1910 a 1920). Paris: Champion. Translation (1985) by William Pratt and Anne Rich. New York: AMS.) (These again from the Symbolism wikipedia page)
Edward Hirsch (2017), The Essential Poets Glossary, Mariner Books. Page 314. (again wiki)
Longinus, On the Sublime, 10.3.
Hesiod, Theogony, 30-35. tr. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (Perseus).