Reflections on Martial Arts and Writing
What did Mishima say?
“Beauty is something that burns when you touch it?”
There is something absolutely fantastic about Mishima’s aesthetic philosophy. It is founded on such a sensory baseness that is so barbaric, that is in touch with a primordial flamelike attraction. It makes perfect sense that it was arrived at by a frail young man, who took up bodybuilding, tired of his own physical weakness.
What did Mishima mean? By understanding what he meant is more or less understanding how he lived.
Mishima very much was a great blend of everything an actor could dream of, with all the eloquence of the script writer. He wrote the script of his life, and acted out his intensions. What is so endearing about him is the notion that is his actions reflected the beauty of his work, and the beauty of his work reflected his actions. This in my opinion, is what composes the essence of the samurai as Mishima’s ideal and how he describes the purpose of the total human being.
Regarding the martial arts Yukio Mishima had been a long time practitioner of kendo since 1958, and was training karate towards the later months of his life. What one begins to understand through the simultaneous pursuits of writing, and martial arts, is that there could not be anymore of a contrast between the two forms. How can one understand writing other than a deeply insular pursuit, confined to the world of words, and the confines of the mind? The mastery of form, or lack thereof is utterly resigned to the page, and entirely in-actionable. This is because good literature is not an instruction manual. No matter how hard you try, the isolate words on a page will never come to life; they will never be seen as anything other than pictures in the mind. A tangible book takes decades, if not dozens of them, to decay. A book will gather dust, it will be found, it will be reprinted, and the words will exist until the memory of the sentences are lost to time.
Martial arts are not that way. The martial artist and his forms, his practice and diligence, result in the total human being as his own artist. The art is confined by the span of his life, by the barricades of his skin, and the decay of his body. For instance, once a practitioner of jiu-jitsu dies, the exactitude of his art can never be replicated. Within martial arts there is no plagiarism, only winning or losing. The martial arts are many forms that are kept alive by muscle memories, by teachers and their students. It is a demonstrable art, retained by bodies. That is to say, martial arts exists solely in the physical form. There is a materialist purity to it, that when you spar, when you test your art against opposition, it is steeled and graded by your performance. You can only experience combat sports as an artist, through experiencing it; exalting your experience unto another and experiencing the faults in your own abilities, physically. The beauty of martial arts like jiu jitsu, is that there is no grade assigned in practice other than in victory or defeat. There are belt ranks yes, but the evolution of the forms in MMA specifically, is taught by the objectivity of the surviving style, meaning that the greatest martial artists, are those who have earned their position as great by defeating their opposition. Essentially, when two competitors are striving for dominance, this combative duality abhors abstraction.
There is nothing you can think if you are unconscious. There is nothing you can etherealize about a broken nose. The art forms of MMA, of any practical combat sport, demands superiority, or you will lose. The beauty of martial arts compels one to the physical. Combat sports command a force of beauty that reduce one to action alone.
I can ask you who the best writer is and anyone reading will give me a variety preferences. You can measure literary quality by too many definitions, and sadly, can even make the argument that quality is not measurable. While literature can certainly be gauged by it’s impact on the soul, or the mind, or the influence on the world through the body proxy, this argument about literary quality is for another day. The frustration of the art you are reading, carries the frustration of it’s physical impotence. I cannot reach out through the medium, into your mind and compel you to understand it. The art of literature is flawed indelibly by this truth, and no man can be forced to obey the gravity of meaning by mere virtue of sentence structure. Because a sentence is weightless, I cannot have these words parried or dodged, as a matter of gauging their real world agility. Every writer, deep down, comes to appreciate the inherent impotence of the written word. Luckily, I trust in the narcissism required to take me to the next sentence.
Maybe, one day, a long time after I die, my written thoughts will be refuted, or lost, or supported, and at best I will be nothing more than a ghost in your brain.