#ectasy

Tribute to Yukio Mishima by Zoe Lacchei

“II. Propositions on the Death of God

6. The acephalic man mythologically expresses sovereignty committed to destruction and the death of God, and in this the identification with the headless man merges and melds with the identification with the superhuman, which IS entirely "the death of God."

7. Superman and acephalic man are bound with a brilliance equal to the position of time as imperative object and explosive liberty of life. In both cases, time becomes the object of ecstasy, and, secondly, it appears as the "eternal return" in the vision of Surlei or as "catastrophe" ("Sacrifices"), or again as "time-explosion": it is, then, as different from the time of philosophers (or even from Heideggerian time) as the christ of erotic saints is from the God of the Greek philosophers. The movement directed toward time suddenly enters into concrete existence, whereas the movement toward God turned away from it during the earliest period.

8. Ecstatic time can only find itself in the vision of things that puerile chance causes brusquely to appear: cadavers, nudity, explosions, spilled blood, abysses, sunbursts, and thunder.

9. War, to the extent that it is the desire to insure the permanence of a nation, the nation that is sovereignty and the demand for inalterability, the authority of divine right and of God himself, represents the desperate obstinacy of man opposing the exuberant power of time and finding security in an immobile and almost somnolent erection. National and military life are present in the world to try to deny death by reducing it to a component of a glory without dread. Nation and army profoundly separate man from a universe given over to lost expenditure and to the unconditional explosion of its parts: "profoundly," at least to the extent that the precarious victories of human avarice are possible.

10. Revolution must not only be considered in its overtly known and conscious ins and outs, but in its brute appearance, whether it is the work of Puritans, Encyclopedists, Marxists, or Anarchists. Revolution, in its significant historical existence, which still dominates the present civilization, manifests itself to the eyes of a world mute with fear as the sudden explosion of limitless riots. Because of the Revolution, divine authority ceases to found power; authority no longer belongs to God, but to time, whose free exuberance puts kings to death, to time incarnated today in the explosive tumult of peoples. Even in fascism itself authority has been reduced to founding itself on a so-called revolution—a hypocritical and forced homage to the only imposing authority, that of catastrophic change.

11. God, kings, and their sequels have interposed themselves between men and the Earth—in the same way that the father stands before the son as an obstacle to the violation and possession of the Mother. The economic history of modern times is dominated by the epic but disappointing effort of fierce men to plunder the riches of the Earth. The Earth has been disemboweled, but men have reaped from her womb above all metal and fire, with which they ceaselessly disembowel each other. The inner incandescence of the Earth not only explodes in the craters of volcanoes; it also glows red and spits out death with its fumes in the metallurgy of all nations.

12. The incandescent reality of the Earth's womb cannot be touched and possessed by those who misunderstand it. It is the misunderstanding of the Earth, the forgetting of the star on which he lives, the ignorance of the nature of riches, in other words of the incandescence that is enclosed within this star, that has made for man an existence at the mercy of the merchandise he produces, the largest part of which is devoted to death. As long as men forget the true nature of terrestrial life, which demands ecstatic drunkenness and splendor, nature can only come to the attention of the accountants and economists of all parties by abandoning them to the most complete results of their accounting and economics.

13. Men do not know how to enjoy the Earth and her products freely and with prodigality; the Earth and her products only lavish and liberate themselves in order to destroy. Dull war, such as that organized by modern economies, also teaches the meaning of the Earth, but it teaches it to renegades whose heads are full of calculations and plans for the short run; that is why it teaches it with a heartless and depressing rage. In the measureless and rending character of the aimless catastrophe known as modern warfare, it is nevertheless possible for us to recognize the explosive immensity of time. The Earth as mother has remained the old chthonian deity, but with the human multitudes she also tears down the God of the sky in an endless uproar.

[No number 14 was included in the original text.]