The flip-flop plot has Kiyoaki finally getting frisky with Satoko in an antechamber. Up to that moment, the highly wrought descriptions of surging shoots and plunging waterfalls had set the tone to come. It's a sort of mixture of elegance and animal passion.
The strength of that syndrome is often freely evoked by the high-spirited antics of the workhorses.
The horses, with their powerful, smooth-muscled bodies, suddenly reared back or kicking their hooves against the boards, struck Kiyoaki as having a pulsating life appropriate to the New Year... The high-strung beasts glared sidelong at their tormentors with bloodshot eyes. This delighted the children even more since these baleful looks were proof that the horses regarded them as adults.(page 76)
Kiyoaki, despite his dreamy lapses into an almost Byronic stupor, has a lot of affinity with the nervous beasts. In order to segue his long-delayed meeting with Satoko, who has become enmeshed in court-intrigue, he pigeonholes the Arakuya's tiny charge d'affaire Tadeshima.
From time to time, Tadeshina whispered somethinf to herself which Kiyoaki heard only in snatches: "This us why I tried to stop her...this is why I said not to do it." She was evidently muttering about having opposed Satoko's writing of that final letter.
He maintained his silence, with increasing confidence that he held the winning hand. A wild animal seemed to be gradually if invisibly rearing its head within him. (page 186)
The likeness of wildness to human conduct is apparent throughout the book. There is also a crudity that is somewhat reminiscent of American Indian tales. For example, when Kiyoaki arranges a tryst between his tutor Iinuma and Mine in the 'sacred' library.
And when Iinuma had thus defiled what was so precious to him, Kiyoaki would be as delighted as if he had taken a piece if raw meat and rolled it up.in a sacred Shinto pendant. In legendary times, the savage god Susano, the brother of the Sun Goddess, had found satisfaction in the same way. (page 105)
Ever since Freud, we (the west) have been accustomed to think of sex as a psychological burden. In the ancient and medieval landscape, it is much more a case of simply being part of the cosmic fecundity of everything from the stars to the planets to a sprig of parsley on a plate (Milton's Paradise Lost is a cosmic sex yarn among other things).
This in turn implies that fertility and the dirt of the fields are one thing. Fertility is tantamount to robust health -being in the mood for love - and robustness is found in the fields, where the presence of dirt invigorates the body's immune defences.
The frolicking gayness of people young and old is itself a sign of health (see Cider With Rosie prev). Strength and health in the field is to do with line - the shapes that things adopt in free-form.motion of surging growth. It is the expression of time, the flexing of tensile stress to achieve a unified form.
This entire area is basically bypassed by a factual world where facts exist as pure information.
It's as if we live in a vast hospital where resistant microbes flourish in the established colonies, rather than in free-form spirit and joie-de-vivre pursuits
What is the proof that a life of spirit in nature is more healthy? The point is that living things are composed of zestful lines in time, so that is a good definition of health.
These lines are comprised of surging fertility which naturally declines through a process of decay and ultimate regeneration. This entire cyclical process that exists in time experiences time as its basic modus operandus.
The west has essentially bypassed that fertile area for Einstein's spacetime continuum, or a type of mathematical construct of stasis that attracts the ego of acolytes (to number).
The question is existential: do we exist as information or as temporal beings with frolicsome ways? We only exist as information to the ego - the ego of acolytes of the mirror of illusions (number or electromagnetism).
Mishima's descriptions often take-in the presence of both creation and destruction in the same process (of living and dying, of dirt and cleanliness). The process of vibrant time is a very eastern viewpoint, here cumulus clouds.
One moment their brilliant white shapes dominated the sky, and the next, they dissolved into something trivial, an enervated banality. Yet their dissolution was a kind if liberation. For as he watched, their scattered remnants gradually reformed and as they did so, they cast strange shadows over the garden as if an army were marshalling its forces in the sky above. Its might first overshadowed the beach and the vegetable field, and then, moving up toward the house, it overran the southern border of the garden. The vivid colors of the leaves and flowers that covered the garden slope, laid out in imitation of Sugakuin Palace, glowed like a mosaic in the dazzling sunlight - maples, sakakis, tea shrubs, dwarf cedars, daphnes, azaleas, camellias, pines, box trees, Chinese black pines, and all the others- and then suddenly it was all in shadow; even the cicada's song was hushed, as though in mourning. (page 217)
The shadowy presence of death is also a key feature in Howard's writing.
Vines curled up the walls of the palace, and even as Kull mused upon the ease with which they might be climbed, a segment of shadow detached itself from the darkness below the window and a bare, brown arm curved up over the wall. Kull's great sword hissed halfway from the sheath; then the king halted. Upon the muscular forearm gleamed the dragon armlet shown him by Ka-nu the night before.(The Shadow Kingdom, King Kull page 29)
