Headlessgod.com » Death/Suicide

The Intestines

admin — Thu, 14 May 2009 06:25:14 +0000

“What is so ghastly about exposed intestines? Why, when we see the insides of a human being, do we have to cover our eyes in terror? Why are a man’s intestines ugly? Is it not exactly the same in quality as a youthful, glossy skin? [...] Why does there seem to be something inhuman about regarding human beings like roses and refusing to make any distinction between the insides of their bodies and the outside? If only human beings could reverse their spirits and their bodies, could gracefully turn them inside out like rose petals and expose them to the spring breeze and to the sun…”

– Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Insensitive people

admin — Thu, 14 May 2009 05:52:39 +0000

“Insensitive people are only upset when they actually see blood. Yet, by the time that blood has been shed, the tragedy is already completed.”

– Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Purity

admin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:17:45 +0000

“Purity, a concept that recalled flowers, the piquant mint taste of a mouthwash, a child clinging to its mother’s gentle breast, was something that joined all these directly to the concept of blood, the concept of swords cutting down through the shoulder to spray the air with blood. And to the concept of seppuku. The moment that a samurai “fell like the cherry blossoms, his blood-smeared corpse became at once like fragrant cherry blossoms. The concept of purity, then, could alter to the contrary with arbitrary swiftness. And so purity was the stuff of poetry.”

- Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

The Restoration

admin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:14:41 +0000

“…we, never seeking power and giving no thought to personal advancement, go forth to certain death to become the foundation stones for the Restoration.”

- Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

The law

admin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:06:08 +0000

“The law is an accumulation of tireless attempts to block a man’s desire to change life into an instant of poetry. Certainly it would not be right to let everybody exchange his life for a line of poetry written in a splash of blood. But the mass of men, lacking valor, pass away their lives without ever feeling the least touch of such a desire. The law, therefore, of its very nature is aimed at a tiny minority of mankind.”

- Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

The white peaks of manhood.

admin — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:00:20 +0000

“Isao had never felt that he might want to be a woman. He had never wished for anything else but to be a man, live in a manly way, die a manly death. To be thus a man was to give constant proof of one’s manliness–to be more a man today than yesterday, more a man tomorrow than today. To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak.

But to be a woman? It seemed to mean being a woman at the beginning and being a woman forever.”

- Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

Muscle as art and light…

admin — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:30:42 +0000

“Muscles, I found, were strength as well as form, and each complex of muscles was slightly responsible for the direction in which its own strength was exerted, much as though they were rays of light given the form of flesh.

Nothing could have accorded better with the definition of a work of art that I had long cherished than this concept of form enfolding strength, coupled with the idea that a work should be organic, radiating rays of light in all directions.

The muscles that I thus created were at one and the same time simple existence and works of art; they even, paradoxically, possessed a certain abstract nature. their one fatal flaw was that they were too closely involved with the life process, which decreed that they should decline and perish with the decline of life itself.”

- Yukio Mishima,Sun and Steel

The Splendor of Pain

admin — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:28:57 +0000

“Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendor that lies hidden within strength.”

- Yukio Mishima,Sun and Steel

Consciousness within the flesh…

admin — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:26:40 +0000

“Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened.”

- Yukio Mishima,Sun and Steel

Cult of the Hero – A Mighty Nihilism

admin — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:25:59 +0000

“Facile cynicism, invariably, is related to feeble muscles or obesity, while the cult of the hero and a mighty nihilism are always are always related to a mighty body and well-tempered muscles. For the cult of the hero is, ultimately, the basic principle of the body, and in the long run is intimately involved with the contrast between the robustness of the body and the destruction that is death.”

- Yukio Mishima,Sun and Steel