A letter to Heavy Metal has stayed with me, even though long lost. At the time Lou Stathis was editor and a guy wrote a cunning jibe which went something like,
'Unlike rock, baroque is characterized by a lack of stasis. HM would be better characterized by a lack of Stathis.'
This came to mind as stasis in the modern world seems never ending. Time is the ultimate experience and it seems to disappear day by day. The faster we move the less we experience it.
Could it be something to do with relative motion? All motion could be relative to another - so what we really need to do is get back to absolute reality: the experience of time.
In Spring Snow, Kiroaki's friend Honda is escorting Satoko away from an illicit moonlit liaison in a chauffeured Ford (it gets confusing!) one of the first in Japan. Honda is questioning her love affair, as she is now sworn to Prince Toinn.
"I've known supreme happiness, and I'm not greedy enough to want what I have to go on forever. Every dream ends. Wouldn't it be foolish, knowing that nothing lasts forever, to insist that one has a right to do something that does? I've nothing in common with these 'new women'. But..if eternity existed, it would be this moment. And perhaps you, Mr Honda, will come round to seeing it this way some day." (page 246)
On the trip she discovers some sand in her shoe (which could reveal her escapade)
Behind him he heard the sound - so faint that he thought he must be imagini g it at first - of Satoko pouring the sand from the shoe she had taken off. To Honda, it sounded like the most enchanting hourglass in the world. (page 248)
Time is often evoked by the sea with its endless sounds if surf on rocks. The advance if a wave is both positive and negative; it surges forward purposefully, then breaks into dissolution. Mishima applies this to their seemingly doomed love.
Everything that framed the two of them - the moonlit sky, the sparkling water, the breeze that blew across the sandy beach to rustle the pines at its edge - all these boded destruction. Just beyond the merest flicker of time there boomed a monstrous roar of negation. Its message was carried in the sound of the pines. (page 244)
Again dawn tinged the ocean. A redder glow lit the river mouth. Conan of Cimmerian leaned on his great sword upon the white beach, watching the Tigress swinging out on her last voyage. There was no light in his eyes that contemplated the glassy swells. Out of the rolling blue water all glory and wonder had gone. (Queen of the Black Coast)
The fact that power and dissolution are part of one process is bound up with the way we experience time (Mishima applies this to Satoko's climax on the seashore). Is it possible that in the modern world this experience is being hemmed-in?
To experience time freely is not only to be free, but to be free to rebel against hostile forces. Kiyoaki's salty grandmother delivers quite a speech when his I discretions are finally discovered.
"Getting the betrothed of the Imperial Prince pregnant! Now there's an achievement! How many of these simpering lads nowadays are capable of anything like that?.." She was speaking now in retaliation against all those others who surrounded her in old age, and whose treacherous power she could sense closing in to crush her. Her voice came echoing gaily out of another era, a violent era forgotten by this generation, in which fear of imprisonment and death held no one in check, an era in which the threat of both was part of the texture of everyday life. She belonged to a generation of women who thought nothing of washing their dinner plates in a river while corpses went floating past. (page 289)
It's the sense of negatives being part of the scenery; foul smells, foul deeds (see TofF2). There is more than a hint of REH in here! The hero is almost berserk at times and verging on revolutionary acts.
It was as if a pack of wolves went raging through the darkness of a sacred precinct. The malevolence fell short of realisation; it escaped the notice of Kiroaki himself: it was born and died in his eyes- but for an instant they flashed with the image of a savage destroyer. (page 277)
Of course, we know about Mishima's extremeism, but the opposite trend to that is to literally have no contrasts atall; to have a world where the only news that us acceptable has to be positive news.
In other words, where there is no slavery, no Confederacy, no historical rebellion. Yes, I'm talking about the USA today. It's become a litigious place, and news has become the authority. But that type of news is not a story; a story has a beginning, a middle and an end - the course of time.
The story of the civil war whereby things changed: where you could say a negative became a positive. Familiarity with the settings of Mark Twain.
Whatever one's view of it, the changes are information and constitute a story. Without the narrative all you have is a positive with zero information.
Also, in a sense news has replaced our experience of time with pure "information", " facts". Its an authoritarianism of the parallel reality where all is relative.
But time is the ultimate absolute, seen in the moon and the stars above. Authoritarianism -as Kemp says in "Collapse if Civilization"- is the way 'they' have of dispensing facts that control us.
The point of 'news,' is that the biggest news of all is ignored. That is pregnancy that takes a nine month gestation. A temporal event; speech and song and everything we are capable of bodily are temporal events.
News replaces stories with facts 'they' use to govern us. Stories can be myth - see prev on Medieval Prester John - and that us part if their enchantment. Anything that is temporal affects us psychically, and so the world becomes less factual.
A fact us something that seems very real - in the parallel universe of numbers and electromagnetism; the future of Musk and Hus exploding starships.
A DAY IN THE LIFE (meaningless news?)