Mishima's Children
Roman McCleod, Mass Shootings, and the Sailor who Fell From Grace with the Sea
Before
I read Yukio Mishima’s Sea of Fertility novels in my twenties, during a series of failures and lifequakes. A dangerous game. Immediately I found myself reminded of Hemingway, who I’d liked but felt was too immense, too important to my culture to see very clearly. Ernest’s every word was projected onto the screens of a cinema full of authors and writers and people bearing the task of adding their voice to culture’s polyphonic song, let’s call it. Mishima, instead, came from Japan, which had the additional benefit of being where anime was from.
And I liked anime more than I liked Hemingway.
Together
“...identifying myself with words and setting reality…on the other side.”
—Yukio Mishima, trans. John Bester1
I have always been online, absent the very early years I can’t truly remember. I relate online-ness to something analogous Mishima perseverates about: identity through language. He, at least in his expression, believed he was first a mind borne of a connection to language, and only second a physical presence in the world. A very contemporary, extremely-online take, for someone who lived only about a year into the birth of what would eventually become our internet (depending on how you count these things).
Online experience (video essay culture notwithstanding) centers language, in a vacuum devoid of bodily sensation. The auditory is an afterthought, and the other three senses are completely absent. Mishima’s own conception of his development into a physical being, which inverts so much, now feels incomplete. He confronted only the impossibility of ecstatic experience through the mediation of language. But his conclusions required the collapse of the same experience, through bloody self-destruction if they could not consume the world. This appears to me to be a pinnacle of logos, thought foolishly forced onto the wildness of the physical space of life.
Alone
People are sick with thoughts, with words.
Humans have been slowly dying of this sickness, constricted in their delusions, poisoned by their ideas, and when the pace of digital technology’s intoxication grinds against the glaciers of this originally fraudulent technology, they reach for more technology to accelerate. Spasms of pointless, meaningless violence.
Our society, the more it fails to recognize previous social technologies and attempts to use isolating ones in its place, will experience more and more of this violence.
We used religion in combination with language, art, music. We used oral storytelling in its collaboration with culture. We baked social technologies into every institution, God-king to polis. Mishima, over and over, demands to understand the Togetherness of these original social technologies as they are confronted with new ones. For him, this was interpreted as ideas spreading from The West, from Europe, America. Capitalism. Individualism.
“Noboru and mother—mother and man—man and sea—sea and Noboru…”
—Mishima, trans. John Bester
Watered-down authors of weak, paling inconsequence whose only real comprehension of Mishima’s efforts is the crystalline moment of his own suicide. The work itself is complex, baffling, at times idiot. Instead of it, they read naively from the popular media that their only choice is erasure, violence, an absolute. A border beyond which nothing can wrest away their “freedom.”
This logic is an absurdist caricature. One might imagine Mishima writing: “Living is death; only when a man dies is he truly alive.” Such pendulous bullshit is of course qualitatively worse than but not logically less present in his work. The poison of human language does not concern itself with coherence. Imbibing it, intoxicated with it, we can acclimatize to any distortions we fancy, as its personalized meaning-making may always yield an individualistic, hermeneutic truth to one but not to the many. The world of this internet is utterly syphilitic with such work.
“Resentment” and its other Cain-influenced stories: can you identify when honest criticism between peers is motivated by this, or by desire to help each other succeed and improve? If you can’t, it’s the case that you can always put this lens in front of a criticism. If others can’t, you can also endlessly put the lens in front of their comprehension of others’ motivation. This is especially useful when anyone “punches up,” since now you have identified a motivation for the resentment, and whoever you need to convince has all the intellectual grounds they need to agree with your analysis.
So, with the reality of that dynamic, what can we do? Well, we can agree that knowing what is motivating someone else’s heart is fundamentally impossible, and so we must elect to do something else.
“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 the words themselves will be corroded, too.”
The Sailor
In Mishima’s masterpiece The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea, we confront the corrosion of reality. From just the title we imagine drowning. A genius of craft in this way, Mishima produces a story in a sentence, and writes a novel in which the story is and is not delivered. It all depends on what you believe about the reality that was being corroded.
Without an ecstatic counterforce, a music outside the labyrinth of logos, people very often overdose on their nihilistic calculations that our words represent.
Mishima’s grim portrait of adulthood through the keyhole of the child Noboru’s experience demands that we either accept his judgement, or be subject to its withering gaze. In his construction the boundaries are always stark. He is masterful, a bully of the intellect, whose craft has now been refined into a billion-dollar industry.
The Sea
Roman McLeod was a “Manosphere,” or “Red-Pilled,” or “MGTOW” author who became a mass shooter in December of 2021. He killed his own ingroup, members of the Denver tattooing community with whom he’d worked and socialized. He also wrote a million-word-strong work of autofiction about wanting to do this. It may be hard to track down, and I have no strong draw to read it. I am interested in the fact that he wrote it, what it says about him in conjunction with the other murderers in this paradigm of Profilicity, and how their actions draw a distinction between them and their patriarch.
Some of us do not possess the temper or ill fate to become a McLeod or a Mishima. We see their “achievements” in light of a different kind of truth, still in opposition to a culture of infantilization and criminality - by turns constraining and overstimulating. Paradoxical. Full of retiree YA authors and preteen war veterans, this world. Full of places to admire or loathe the present as it appears to us to resemble or distort the past.
I’m drawn to anyone who, like me, is disquieted by the shoddiness of life. I know, though, that the next McLeod, the next active shooter, presumes to see himself (inevitably himself) clearly defined opposing someone like myself, who simply hovers at the doorway of the purifying violence they conceive is our way forward. From some essential weakness, holding back.
It’s simply true that refraining from violence, or from speaking, or from choosing at all, can be cowardly. I see my own cowardice and its fruits, the doors now closed to me. I can also mythologize my past and imagine what my life should have been, had I grasped more clearly our predicament. But there is also a desire in the narrativizing mind to see every renunciation as cowardice. We are tuned to pain over pleasure, and action over inaction, and so a decision to refrain from action can always be made into endorsement (the same way that “white silence” becomes “violence” in the snappiness of identity politics discourse).
Oh well. Sometimes it’s simply not the right time to ritually disembowel yourself for the sake of the emperor.
The Boundary
The aesthetic response to the well-defined border — is it learned, or is it innate? What can I cede to the “other side?”
I’m talking about the borders between earth and concrete, or earth and stone, most explicitly. Walls as frames for the world.
But what’s even going on in the initial question, aren’t there all kind of border-related postulates crowding into the cognitive space? I have heard often, from many mouths, that one “side” is really good at defining itself, and keeps tidy categories of what’s in and what’s out, cultural-political-ideologically speaking. And another of these “sides” is constantly working out new categories, or redefining, or reimagining what’s in and what’s out. Burning its energy on infighting. Because, that’s the side that doesn’t care about borders, that doesn’t find aesthetic pleasure in borders, that’s the reason they are constantly reassessing borders.
Really?
The cultural problems dogging us here in this essay gain mass the closer they come to their own borders, spaces of disquiet where disconnected hearts struggle against, with their deserved recognition. Men, powerful but unchosen. Women chosen but unsatisfied. Attention, which is the border between the biologic reality of people and their culture. All the kids are saying that “the Left” wants political power, and “the Right” wants cultural power. And all the kids are trying to identify which is downstream of which. Implying there is no border between them. A river’s borders are after all not distributed crosswise like locks or something, but are its banks.
Strong // Good // Weak // Hard
Tautologies demand better definitions. Who, precisely, is in these categories, and when? (The answer may surprise you!)
Weakness indistinguishable from patience; the bias of existence, which obscures the not-being-done. The essay not written, behind this one, but compared to which this reads as a poor imitation. Perhaps you are thinking of it, now, wishing to live in that “alternate reality” where the better essay you might be imagining is confronting your eyes. Or, that you yourself have written it!
The strange confusion between these categories is, in fact, a central method of our problem.
Leveling
So. What about women?
This is the place I grimly tread, conceptually. Monstrous thoughts, from all who came before, press in. In such Stygian gloom, I reach for a large enough lens to grasp (Hobbes always comes to mind). But even better, for this purpose, we might turn to Paglia. Here’s something from Sexual Personae, which we might say hopes to achieve at absolute minimum the broadness of view our current subject requires.
“Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.”
Poor freshly-acne’d boys goggling at the fecundity of their objects of desire. I still recall the hypnotic level of detail I applied to my side-eyed observations of new breasts in my middle school classes. It feels sickening to be stuck on the banalities of adolescence, which must mean there’s psychoanalytically useful work to do there.
When we get individuated by the sieve of nature, by that damnable selection, we are reduced, in some sense, to lonely ashamed beasts with too much gray matter and too little wisdom of discernment. And when we long for the full-scale apocalypse of cathartic masculine violence, individually-effacing, fascist at its most literal— we are very directly mourning the group identity of which we’ve built so much of our selves. But nature does not care. She has to propagate, ruthlessly, at all costs. She can not find Mishima’s undifferentiated annihilation, as it would literally mean the end of the universe.
She must know you, tragically, specifically, in every flaw and desperation, or the whole project fails.
We have in this immediate instance the most fundamental moment of divisionlessness between humans, that through some act they can become as one, and that in this moment it becomes obvious that something is going on that’s far more weird, and magical, than can be comprehensible by mean creatures such as us.
Entire political enterprises have been erected (sigh, I know, I know) to muddy and confuse the magic of this existence. The depths that otherwise formidable intellects sink to try and comprehend their models in the face of a world like ours, even so far as to say “women aren’t people;” the production of endless pages, minutes, legalistic reams of content to enforce an idea upon a world that can’t be made ideal; these are the works of sad, weak, pathetic, minuscule children pissing furiously into the wind.
Basically During, though in at least one sense after After
I have strong thoughts about prescriptive versus descriptive philosophy, and its connection to obsessions about physiology, and the physical, and moving between psyche, physis, techne. Wyrding physis through the techne of psyche is both our Tradition and our Divine Path.
That’s a mouthful, but it can be less floridly rephrased as, we build the future by aligning reality to our thoughts. It just sounds more impressive with all the Greek scattered in.
Mishima thought so, too. From Sun & Steel:
“…the body and the mind… instantly create their own small universe, their own “false order,” whenever, at one particular time, they are taken control of, by one particular idea.
The strenuous difference is that he subsumed every ideal into the physical, without exception. I am deferring the ideal that was once a shadow of this physical world, returning it to its central place as logos, but so we can define our self-creation as updating streams of habit becoming deeper even as we can identify more clearly our qualia.
“…a large stream may be deflected by digging a small channel.”
The emotions we access boil down to an experience of what the reality of this world does to us, through us, even when we are something like an automaton, or sleeping, or in “flow.”
So it appears Mishima and Roman have internally dissonant urges: to harness the capricious whim of creative energy, shakti, and force the discarnate engine of new life and destiny to follow their will. They want the unbounded creative power to bring forth newness, but to do so according to a timetable. To bind with all Apollonian language the wildness of this generation. Such is all fascist ideology: unable to reconcile its own dissonance, to sit quietly with the boundaries blurred, in the not-knowing. Granting to the universe of idea as well as form that we are but foam, scattered waves, caught in the net of eternity.
Sorry if you don’t like that so hard you have to murder people about it.
After
Finally, the question we need to answer remains: was Roman the sailor, or was he the sea?
In order to get our hands round such a freighted idea, let’s think about a terrible thing instead of an unwieldy one. Roman was a Nihilist, confronted with a universe purpose-built for giving such a person every reason to commit horrifying acts of unthinkable cruelty. Roman’s world was made small, Nihilistic, by the very “tradness” espoused by his social milieu. Of course an impoverished, provincial reading of God with its wheels spinning in the mud of “Gnon” or “Demiurge” or “Based Jesus of the Prosperity Gospel” would be gobbled up by Nihilism. Not the proper-noun version, but its real world locus. Wherever, for example, Jordan Peterson’s literal nervous system might be found and no matter whether he thinks he is “righteous,” or “Christlike.” His Nihilism, like Mishima’s, is inside the actual matter of which he is composed.
Why can any of us think on it, and resist, then? Because the force we are confronting also has another outlet, and some of its deepest proponents have found another path — horrifying, nonetheless, but essentially more noble. They are Theological fascists, and you’ve already met one. This whole article is, after all, an examination of one. The unrepentant seafoam of incandescent brilliance, idiotically dashing itself against the rock of its own explanation of reality and being broken by it. Forcing God to reveal Himself, not by pointless murder and trauma and profile-curation, but the only way man knows how — suicide. A negation of self, which is by definition a negation of God, but at least which forces Apokalypsis: the revelation that resolves the tension of life. That reveals whether or not there is anything “It All Means.”
This poison can run in only two directions. And either way, in the end it is diluted into mana by the sea.
All quotes, unless specified, are from Mishima and translated by John Bester and John Nathan