My life as a sailor
April 8, 2009 at 6:07 pm Sharp 2 comments
After Sarte, I’ve devoted my life to building small models of what it looks like to be lost at sea.
“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance,” he says. I decided, researching Mishima for parlé with a friend over his Fascism/Anti-Modernism paper, that my models then must include the sly recognition of this through conscious limits concerning the sailor’s death. Chance is still a factor yes, but the outcomes are limited by environment and dignity.
You see, Sartre? I made him a little waste land for him to cling to out of weakness to see if you are right. You see, Pound? My paradiso terrestre is beautiful in it’s limits. There is indeed a pale flare over marshes. My sailor cannot escape because there is only sea. His boat may capsize, or he could die of scurvy – there are only flakes of tobacco for nourishment. He may just die of loneliness. My knowledge of biology is small, but I’m mostly certain his potentials still move toward a singular outcome. Yes, the body languishes sooner or later, and since my world’s a faithless one, there shant be much a trade-off – unless he makes friends with the inanimate for survival. The Sea-Dog’s an interesting wild-card. Sometimes, when I gander view my models, I’m concerned that I haven’t provided enough opportunity for life though, i.e., a creative suicide to show just how strong my sailor is. My worst case scenario involves him taking up the dangerous habit of thinking, inevitably driving him mad.
What a terrible waste of an afternoon. It would better have been spent talking with the wraith I’ve locked in my closet. Why, he does tell the most delightful stories!
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: mishima, my life as a sailor, positively mad, pound, satre, wtf.
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1.
strych9 | April 8, 2009 at 8:07 pm
The Human Fish (Proteus anguinus), a rare, totally blind amphibian cave salamander found on the coasts of Slovenia, was declared by Darwin to be some kind of relic and evolutionary failure, because over millions of years, it had failed, entirely, to evolve.
One was once put in a jar of water for the sake of science, and fed nothing. It lasted for 12 years, instead of starving to death, and when they cut it open they discovered it had totally removed its digestive tract.
To quote Cat Kidd: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRyDnpdkpug
“it did the only thing it could do under the circumstances to stay alive,
which is something human beings might have in common with the little guy,
even with all the odds against us, we still give it a try.”
So I wonder, did the Proteus anguinus adapt to starvation by making its need to eat redundant out of weakness because it couldn’t fathom giving up its life in a small jar, or is Mishima even more of an evolutionary failure than Darwin thought of a blind, lower-invertebrate-eating salamander.
2.
Sharp | April 9, 2009 at 2:38 pm
I suppose the Mishima question depends on whether or not you view survival as our current evolutionary necessity, or the further development of our tertiary time-bending circuit (civilization). Survival and adaptation is easy for our species because of the advancement of tools and protocol. The majority of Westerners can live their entire lives without having their existence challenged by extraneous circumstance (beside looming conceptual monstrosities like nuclear Armageddon.)
Viktor Frankl, neurologist/psychologist/Jew/survivor of four concentration camps (a veritable Proteus Anguinus so far as adaptation and survival was concerned) developed an alternative technique to psychotherapy in the 1950’s called “logotherapy” designed to recognize and address what he termed: “noogenic neurosis” or simply nihilism. He observed in the concentration camps that those more likely to survive (a 1/24 chance statistically) were those imbued with the belief that their suffering had meaning, even if that meaning was to merely bare witness. Frankl diagnosed the collective neurosis of the 20th century to be an existential vacuum, the feeling that survival unto itself was meaningless, and felt that his duty as a therapist was to help his patients recognize the individual and unique meaning in their actions and suffering. He was fond of quoting Nietzsche: “Any man that has a why can survive any how.” Frankl’s father, mother, brother and wife died in the deathcamps, he was stripped down to bare existence, but survived not because he couldn’t fathom giving up his life in a jar – he make it clear that just laying down and dying crossed the mind’s of every inmate at some point – but because he saw meaning in shouldering the most extreme in human existence for an indeterminate time because he understood that in the face of all else he still had the freedom to accept his fate with dignity.
Mishima was a character that one author termed “Too strange to have meant anything.” I find him particularly fascinating because his fascination with anachronistic honour codes, and his perhaps morbid obsession with death, gave his own suicide a surprising meaning in his own isolated mythology. For decades, he viewed his life with all of its ups and downs as the build-up to his glorious death, which was his to orchestrate. One thing that can be pulled out of almost every one of Mishima’s novels is a scene where something beautiful is violently destroyed in its prime. Sure, there’s sadism in it, but there’s also a quixotic triumph of psycho-sexual release like Vivaldi’s big drum. Unlike many, Mishima’s suicide is difficult for me to see as quitting out of frustration, as say someone who was locked in a room for two weeks and offed themselves. In his death he fully gave himself to his anachronistic sense of honour, which for how he saw himself and how he lived could be seen as his life’s ultimate union with meaning as he sought it. Furthermore, his extremely violent public demise served to propagate his visage throughout the tertiary time-bending circuit.
I wonder if it comes down to just our will to survival in a Darwinian sense. Frankl made a short quip that I’m rather fond of: “Logos is deeper than logic.”