I promise, I really will get back to this blog’s main purpose of reviewing indie books soon. This strange detour we have been on for the past few weeks is actually related to that project, albeit—in typical Ruined Chapel style—not in an obvious way.

You see, I am trying solve a problem. The problem is what we might call ensloppification. (There’s another term, but I decline to use it.) In other words, why is everything becoming awash in slop? It’s getting hard to even find the kind of books I enjoy reading, due to the fact that the entire market for books is now being flooded with slop. Not all of it is AI-generated slop either, though I think some non-trivial and swiftly growing amount is.

Nor is this problem limited to the realm of books. Every facet of life is subject to this problem. There is a profound feeling among people my age that everything has gotten worse in a significant, yet undefinable way since the end of the 20th century. Maybe this is just nostalgia. But I submit to you that it isn’t. That it is rather the acceleration of trends documented by (among others) Paul Kingsnorth and Daniel J. Boorstin. These trends have been with us for centuries, but are now becoming increasingly large parts of life.

Which is not to say they are all bad. As one commenter pointed out, Kingsnorth’s “Machine” has brought with it innumerable material benefits. And when you come right down to it, slop itself can be viewed as a good. Give a starving man slop, and he’ll enjoy it as though it were a banquet. Give a gourmand a banquet, and he may well complain that the meal is ruined because the appetizers included plain gouda when he specifically asked for smoked. It’s all a matter of perspective.

That’s why I like to seek out different, rare perspectives. The author of today’s book is a case in point. In my opinion, Yukio Mishima is probably the greatest ultranationalist bisexual samurai bodybuilder ever to be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. If you can find anyone else at the intersection of that Venn diagram, I’d like to hear about them.

So what is Sun and Steel about? Well, the truth is, it’s a self-help book. But, um, not exactly a typical self-help book.

The quick summary is that Mishima was a quiet, sickly, bookish youth who demonstrated great facility with words, and not so much with sports and physical activity. But later in life, he realized the importance of physical exertion and muscular development to complement his artistic and aesthetic sensibility. So he started working out with weights and getting fresh air and sunshine, and in doing so, developed a closer connection with his own body.

That’s the CliffsNotes version. But see, there’s more to how Mishima approaches this than “lift heavy stone, make sad head voice quiet.” As in:

It was thus that I found myself confronted with those lumps of steel: heavy, forbidding, cold, as though the essence of night had in them been still further condensed. 

He makes lifting a dumbbell sound like a magic ritual in communion with powerful spiritual forces. They should have given him the Nobel just for that. And he’s not done:

Muscles have gradually become something akin to classical Greek. To revive the dead language, the discipline of the steel was required; to change the silence of death into the eloquence of life, the aid of steel was essential. 

Of course, this isn’t actually what Mishima wrote. It’s a translation from the Japanese. But something tells me it’s a good translation, because that sticks with you.

In summary, exercise strengthens not only the body, but the mind as well. People forget this, but the mind isn’t just the brain. It’s more complex than that, and anyone who has ever done any kind of physical exercise knows that it has a noticeable effect on one’s mental state.

So far, so good. But now, we have to talk about the more problematic aspects of Mishima’s work. You see that subtitle about “Art, Action, and Ritual Death”? Yes, well, it’s time we talked about that last bit. Part of Mishima’s desire for a powerful physique was driven by his wish to die young as an impressive and tragic figure, rather than wasting away in old age.

What’s more, he accomplished this by committing ritual suicide after attempting—with little hope of success, which he must have realized—to inspire the military to overthrow the Japanese government.

Now, it should go without saying, but this is the internet, so I will say it: Ruined Chapel does not endorse these activities. The fact that I admire Mishima’s writing should not be confused with support of all his actions. Suicide is never the answer, and as for his subversive activities, well, while I am not terribly familiar with the politics of mid 20th-century Japan, (or any other period Japan, for that matter) I do have some general comments on the concept.

Do you know why popular opinion holds that the American Revolution was awesome, but the French Revolution was super creepy? Part of the reason might be that America is a global superpower that spreads its own version of history everywhere, but I think another part of it is that the Americans didn’t insist on destroying the British monarchy. A lot of the revolutionaries probably would have if they could have, but because of the Atlantic Ocean, they couldn’t. So, they were forced to settle for making a new government somewhere else.

Which is actually the much cooler thing to do. If you try to take over the existing government, then even if you succeed, you’re just taking on their problems. It’s like the Statutory Duel in The Grand Duke: “The winner must adopt / The loser’s poor relations / Discharge his debts, / Pay all his bets, / And take his obligations.” After their revolution, the new French government had the same problems as the old one. Even the most obsessive, hyper-focused, and determined administrative nerd of the age couldn’t fix the country’s fundamental problems. Much better to start anew someplace else.

So, in summary, I approve of Mishima’s ideas on the relationship of body and mind, of the inadequacy of words to express certain feelings. I do not approve of his ideas regarding ritual death and leading futile coup attempts. Now that that’s cleared up, we can focus on the important point: how all this relates to the problem of slop I noted earlier.

As the last several posts have discussed, we live in an increasingly technological, mechanical, and fundamentally anti-biological epoch. Our shelter from the harsh realities of the natural world means that our primary emotional experiences come in the form of transmitted images, produced artificially for our passive entertainment.

Now, a lot of people have started to notice this, and they are bothered by it. For example, I cannot tell you how many articles and videos I’ve read and watched about how movies nowadays seem so fake and lifeless. This is a valid critique, but it also does not go far enough.  It’s true that Lawrence of Arabia looks more realistic than Marvel Spandex Brigade #7000, but that makes it easy to forget that Lawrence of Arabia is also fake. Sir David Lean was standing behind the camera, capturing the perfect shot, which he and Anne V. Coates then edited for our consumption. Everything nowadays is so fake that the artisanal, meticulously-crafted fakes of yesteryear seem real to us.

(This, by the way, is why Boorstin is so valuable. He was writing in an era that people of my generation look back on as comparatively brimming with genuine reality—and it was—but that Boorstin already saw as thoroughly laced with the seeds of the fake and the simulated.)

This is where Mishima comes in. Reality is not in images or even words, much as it pained a wordsmith like Mishima to admit. Reality is muscle, it is sweat, it is the “runner’s high” that comes once you are thoroughly exhausted from physical exercise.

Most important, of course, is that reality is not always a pretty picture. Rather it is chiaroscuro of both pleasant and unpleasant things, and the true experience of reality must contain elements that are not strictly pleasurable, at least as the term is normally understood. Physical exercise is the perfect distillation of this concept, because it is an activity that can feel great and hurt like hell at the same time.

Understanding this strange duality, accepting that pain is a part of experiencing actual life, as opposed to consooming slop, is the philosophical insight at the core of Mishima’s writing and his aesthetic sensibility. It is also, in my opinion, the key to experiencing life after Kingsnorth’s “Machine.”

Note that I chose my words there very carefully. I did not say “resist” or “fight” or “destroy” the Machine. As Kingsnorth documented exhaustively, and then somehow himself failed to understand, people have been going against the Machine for over 4,000 years, and they have made no progress on getting rid of it. Despite some of the more occult takes that I’ve entertained, I ultimately don’t think the Machine is a supernatural force. It is just a thing. It does some good things and it does some bad things. Trying to fight it is like trying to fight the existence of atmospheric pressure.

Rather, what we are seeking is a way to survive in the absence of the Machine, just in case it stops. A way to find meaning in life separate from anything Machine-related, whether good or bad. Mishima’s philosophy is the philosophy of someone who has set himself apart from the world of the Machine, and learned to accustom his mind to the harshness of physical reality. Clearly, not everything he found there was idyllic, and to live in reality is by no means synonymous with living happily. It is only a start, not a final goal to be achieved. And as the old saying goes, the best time to start was 30 years ago. The second-best time to start is now.