On this day, the sun
(Hiroshima by Agyega)
Appeared—no, not slowly over the horizon—
But right in the city square.
A blast of dazzle poured over,
Not from the middle sky,
But from the earth torn raggedly open.
Human shadows, dazed and lost, pitched
In every direction: this blaze,
Not risen from the east,
Smashed in the city’s heart—
An immense wheel
Of Death’s swart suncar, spinning down and apart
In every direction.
Instant of a sun’s rise and set.
Vision-annihilating flare one compressed noon.
And then?
It was not human shadows that lengthened, paled, and died;
It was men suddenly become as mist, then gone.
The shadows stay:
Burned on rocks, stones of these vacant streets.
A sun conjured by men converted men to air, to nothing;
White shadows singed on the black rock give back
Man’s witness to himself.
The two suns on earth caused a wave of fear. A “point of no return” for the entire history of the Earth.
Japanese culture carries something unique within itself, not only because of the catastrophe that became the end of the Second World War. During the Sengoku period, Japanese culture consisted of a state of permanent war. This remote island at the world’s end held within itself a war machine that refused stratification. But the beginning of the Edo period would bring precisely such a stratification. Like a poltergeist, the violence echoed. The film Harakiri (1962) by Masaki Kobayashi shows how this spectre stretched into a kind of catastrophe; the consequences of peace for a culture that had sustained itself through violent expenditure. Bushido’s code of honour became a necessity for the warrior class’s own self-identity, which was on the verge of fading in this new era of peace. It already knew then that it was living dead.
Torn between tradition and the external threat of the western capital-machine, Edo soon collapsed into a new era; the Meiji period. The warrior class fell, and what had previously borne the island’s identity and existence now began to wither away in the violent light of the sun. An explosion would come to organise the accursed share into a fascist war machine. This machine would be annihilated in two solar explosions.
Yukio Mishima would later write:
“The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.” (Sun and Steel, 1968)
My eyes see this only from a Western perspective (albeit with a Nordic melancholy), and thus I fall into the same trap as Bataille and so many other Western thinkers; I see what my eye desires. But it is precisely this desire that I wish your gazes to fix upon. What I am trying to reveal is a mentality that only a culture that has lost itself can see; where what is lost is war as such. Perhaps it could be likened to the Aztecs’ loss of their gods and human sacrifice. Where the old gods got banned, the Catholic saints would become the new images in which the old gods could survive, albeit as an after-image. Only in such a culture can Santa Muerte be awakened to life as Mictēcacihuātl—and only in a culture that has lost its title as warrior can the dance of darkness be awakened to life. Mishima would put words to this loss and thus become a manifestation of this geist of loss. Like Nick Land’s FromSoftware-destiny of fascist madness, Mishima fell into his own fascist destiny; an inevitably failed coup d’état and thereby an equally inevitable seppuku.
In 1959, Tatsumi Hijikata performed a play based on Mishima’s Forbidden Colors (1951–53). As a result, Hijikata became an iconoclast. His new dance would later be called “butoh” (舞踏), a word that had previously been associated with European ballroom dancing. In its way of both deterritorialising Western culture and traditional Japanese culture, a new art form had developed.
“I dance in the place where the large cosmos meets the small cosmos. I stand in the large cosmos and everywhere my hand reaches is the small cosmos. I understand where the meeting place is.” (Kazuo Ohno)
Butoh is a ritual; a becoming, an imago as after-image. The dance is only an expression of a placement; at the breaking point between macro and micro. It is in this place that the dead pass, and thus butoh is a dance with the dead. It is a carnival in the realm of the dead, where dead and living march side by side as equals. Let the dead steer your body. Imagine swarms of insects in your very own corpse and let all their desires tear you to pieces.
Through this placement; the intersection between the great and the small, what can be released? This is the question the butoh dancer asks themselves. In the light of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of concentration camps and lynchings; what have we become? The two suns rip the earth open, the dead pass at the intersection of macro and micro, and the dancer’s body is the ground where this meeting occurs.
We, trannies, fags and dykes, immigrants, addicts and vermin; what fucking choice do we have other than to allow our origin and pasts to move us? We are thousands lying in society’s ditches, rotting. In this multiplicity, in this multitude; what remains but a dance of darkness within our decaying corpses?
I don’t know about you, but I refuse to die as an abstraction. I refuse to be killed by an abstraction, and all my comrades in the realm of the dead haunt my body. The one that aches and enjoys and trembles and vomits. Whatever happens, I must walk in this palace between the large cosmos and the small cosmos. It means everything to me. Too much weight on one side and I fall into fascistoid paranoia. Too much weight on the other side and I die in the state apparatus’ abstraction. Butoh is the only way forward. Among the dead I can find myself; I can find my flock. Only there can I reinstate myself as warrior:
“Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.” (Mishima, Yukio. Blood and Steel. 1968)
We must occupie this community of warriors; as traces and after-images in the same way Mictēcacihuātl occupies the image of Our Lady of Holy Death. We are the choir of “De mördades fria republik [The Free Republic of Those Murdered]” in Dan Berglunds protest song. And thus, let us haunt all the ballrooms that exist and set all of Paris ablaze. What choice do we really have?