The hint of melancholy in "Black Vest" (prev) has something of the feel of a stately pavan. The stop-start beats and the preacherly words. If you compare it with this 14th century virelai from.Lescurel I think you could see a connection.
GRACIEUSETTE
in those days, music was ritualistic verse narrative that was part of the fabric of courtly etiquette. The social fabric has its melancholy side, in that in time it will come to an end.
This is also contained in Liza Minnelli's "Life's a cabaret, old chum". The double-side of life was one of Mishima's principle themes, the connection between death and the erotic (Queen of the Black Coast).
The double-side has to have a psychic strength that is sorely lacking in modernity. There was the speech by Kiyoaki's grandmother on the grand old days when women washed linen on the riverbank as corpses floated on by.
Primitive realities comprise life and death and hence the ancient imagination invests psyche in scenes of natural power. The unthinking rhythms of the stars and planets evoke verse.
In Mishima's The Sea of Fertility (on the moon), Honda is the central character who imagines that Kiyoaki is reborn three times in each of the three subsequent books. In other words, it could be his pure imagination.
But if the universe is a psychic place, it is invested with imagination so that Man's fancies are more likely to be more realistic. Mishima is up against 200 years of Western advance, and this is his imaginative riposte.
Modern life advances away from primitive realities of dissolution, which carry both sadness and strength. Instead, we are overwhelmingly positive, even as the planetary debt of being outside natural cycles escalates unbelievably under the corona crisis!
Socially too, the positive side of things is ever over-emphasized (see HB156), when it is actually the differences between people that secure a psychic affinity of strength (see P11 Outremer).
This reminds me of a CC Beck quote on the use of stereotypes, that it's easier to say "cat" than "a furry animal with whiskers". Or, similarly, " The thing that was a bit furry but not slimy was on top of the thing that was slimy and wriggly but not that furry" (a cat killing a grass snake).
While waiting on The Temple of Dawn (book 3), the DVD of New Mutants happened to arrive and here is a most un-modern scene of ranquer amongst the differing races of the teens that develops into strong connections that bridge life and death.
It starts with Danielle Moonstar's reciting of the Cheyenne belief that there are warring factors within each soul; the good such as compassion, the bad such as fear and self-destruction.
It continues with a group meeting under Dr Reyes, and Rahn's recollection of her fear as a were child with an unbridled animal lust.
These two hit it off in a cunning sequence of lesbian scenes, but meanwhile the most unbridled of all, Illyana Rasputin, is calling Danielle the pet Pocahontas of the pack. A tussle ensues, and the dark childe is a bestial mane of fury, halted only by Reyes' autocratic devices.
Differences stoke fire and ire, and strengthen the ripostes of seeming adversaries. Life is a mini-war that kindles a grudging affinity of adversarial positions. Almost a type of ritual conflict as in Siena (the annual bareback race).
We live and die and that is the ultimate case of differences that are real. Modern societies are scared of living in reality and instead invent a seeming positive that merely replaces the negative side - death and adversity - with a type of zero information (see prev.)
Zero information and infinite planetary debt are their legacy; the acolytes of advance within the mirror of illusions (electromagnetism and numerical compulsion); the Black Sun of Noto.
