I started falling into the latter category, for I lacked insight into that vast ocean known as the Self. At least that’s what my closest friends–and even some enemies–told me.

Read more   Listen  Watch  Walk they said.

Many of them held degrees and were educated in these matters, where what is elusive can be found in lengthy dissertations, lectures, and dense tomes written by French philosphers–or at least traces of what was once pure and innocent before the essence became buried beneath a thousand footnotes. Strangely, I was one of them for a time. Picking apart the past of our old city within its very walls. Despite my feelings, I respected them and their vocation, even though I knew in my heart they were wrong…Which meant I was wrong and disillusioned as well, albeit in a different way.

The world has a way of doing that even without us realizing what has happened. Maybe that is how I felt when I came across that frozen cat, truly disillusioned. Forgetting that I, too, was fragile and could one day die rather easily in the cold.

When I made my way home to my empty, lifeless house I ran a bath and turned off the lights, realizing after a time I truly knew nothing of myself. Within a few weeks I quit my job at the Old Library ( I had plenty of money stashed away), cut-off my cellphone, tv, power, and all the rest. Within a month my house was sold. I was free……..

Everyone experiences this Process, but few are conscious of it, and many more never see it to completion in any real way; again never conscious that it began in the first place. Now the situation has changed, so to speak.  He has become aware that the Process has been, how shall I put it, initiated.

My name is Mitsuko, and I know the Process well.

Names are a necessity on the bumpy road ahead, yet names are merely symbols or recognitions, a way of identifying without really knowing. My names have varied as the times and settings have transformed, but one consistency has been Joseph Carta, the Catalan (whose very prescence is enigmatic), and myself, unflinching.

The Door has been opened and our prisoner has been released. God help him and give him strength.

So following that logic everything must have a beginning and an end, despite the fact we never really know or understand our true beginnings, or the time and place of our endings.

We experience the time in-between two eternal mysteries (birth and death) that always fail to give us answers. But really, how could they? They are abstract concepts and they do not speak. I recently set out to answer a question about myself; a rather serious question, but at the same time a question that could be interpreted as purely absurd. The question involves my current whereabouts…Or to put it more bluntly,(if that’s possible) my point of origin or departure.

I feel like a wave at this point, sometimes a particle,trying to follow an invisible thread back to that unknowable point in the dark spectrum.

The following is what I know up to this point, which is not much considering what I’ve already said.

I stepped out of my house early one evening, just before twilight, as a nearly weightless November snowfall began. Since I live alone, the situation afforded me plenty of time to enjoy the pleasure of open spaces, while at the same time combating any traces of loneliness that may have been germinating in my bones. Lighting a small cigar, whose thick smoke nearly froze against the slowly dying light, I stopped at the corner and closed my eyes, content with the fact I was alone, though at the same time restless…

eyelids haevy and dark     sluggish speech   days blending into nights ad nauseum

As I walked  I came across a dead cat who had obviously frozen, eyes open wide gazing into nothingness, that eerie stiffness coupled with that sense of absolute finality, reminded me of my own eventual stiffness and decay.

Perhaps that is when everything began to take shape

My current name holds different meanings as well.

One meaning describes a series of chess openings (which I love), another is a region in Spain ( a place I’ve visited many times), while another describes the very language of that region. I’m neither a Catalonian by birth–insofar as I ever had a real birth–or fluent in Spanish, but I’m familiar with openings of every kind, whether they be gambits, variations, systems, or combinations. Regrettably I’m only a fair player at chess despite my love of its history and evolution, and I only use the game as a symbol of what is possible, which is infinite, or as close to infinite as we can perceive.

Now as the skies have cleared and the days have grown longer, it’s time for me to pursue again…

” There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. the world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you”

Perhaps this is why I had no use for a window, for I knew what I desired(or thought that I desired)–the smile of a young woman walking in my direction with the sun blazing behind her, soft music, cold evenings–and somehow these things would find me there in that room. Nothing came of course, until the day Joseph Carta entered the room and sat down across from me on the floor next to my piles of books, and pushed a single piece of paper across the floor with the following words: Time to go.

When I finally stepped out into the hall with my few belongings, I looked for the first window, noticing that night had already suppressed all that I wanted to see. But one can’t be too hasty to see, that much is certain.

                                                                                                                                                                *

“I cast a spell on the City, asking it to last”  “Every year about 98% of the atoms in our bodies are replaced”

The first quote is by the same sullen man from Prague, Franz Kafka. Touching. One usually asks for people or memories to last, rarely cities, if ever. Yet so much of our private selves exist in cities or the places we were raised. Down alleyways, under streetlights, in the graffiti, carved  in trees, or handprints put in wet cement. Those places hold us and keep us, until they, too, disintegrate, usually taking longer than people to fade away.

As for the other quote…

” I’ve found you my friend” Those were his first words to me. He paused to light a cigarette, the gleam of the deep moonlight brightening his face, which at the same time made it appear older and more mysterious, otherworldly.

“Did I send for you?” I asked stupidly, not knowing what else to say.

He turned to me, smiling.

“Situations such as the one we’re in needs no true explanation, simply because by the time we part from one another both us will not be the same people anymore. The very material that makes  you ‘you’ and me ‘me’ will be replaced. We are never the same people twice as you will see…

If only I had known this in the beginning when I was younger so I could have treated the world as a desert with so many illusory oasises, rather than waste so much time in a prison of my own making. And I do mean that quite literally–the prison has four walls, a ceiling, and a single door. No windows. Once a week news comes in the form of one page carefully written and slipped under the door, or in the form of letters from people who I don’t know, which I find strange but comforting. I’m in need of nothing else as food seems to find me in the same way the news does.

I created this prison,yes, but I found it impossible to leave, at least in the beginning.

What prevented me was my own fear. Fear of opening the door and realizing the World indeed did not exist anymore, or realizing that others didn’t believe I existed anymore, which seemed far worse, far more extensive in its implications. After a time–a long, dense length of time– the very notion that I as I knew myself possibly did not exist anymore made the transition of eventually leaving my cell (really a comfortable room with good lighting and books) that much easier.

That was when Joseph Carta knocked on the door.

This coming November marks the 40th anniversary of Yukio Mishima’s extraordinary death by his own hand. It’s impossible to know if the people of Japan are going to mark this solemn occasion in any way, but for certain the ones closest to Mishima will never forget what happened on November 25th 1970. I find it a shame that so much focus is put on Mishima’s death, and not on the incredible output of deeply insightful novels that he produced from his autobiographical Confessions of a Mask to his final four novels that comprise The Sea of Fertility. Having nearly finished Thirst for Love, I’ve read all that I can get my hands on of his work in English, and the words never cease to amaze me. After reading several biographical accounts, the consensus among some seem to be that Mishima was a disturbed individual, whose apocalyptic vision of contemporary society came from a deep seated need for self-destruction that grew with age. Of course, one can look at a person’s life and pick apart the  ” key events” that we believe leads someone to a certain endpoint, but in the end the art is what matters. And this is certainly true of Mishima, who despite once saying in his commentary on the Hagukure that “Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded too”,  we see a keen and insightful mind at work, searching for meaning, even if that meaning is the Void itself.

Here in the West I’m not certain how much of his work has had an influence on a younger generation of writers, or if many have read him at all, but my own embracement of his works has lead me to an evaluation of my own purpose of a writer and indivdual. That is what great art is supposed to do. Make us take a look at reality from a different angle, even if that perception is uncomfortable or contradictory to what we believe. Only from confronting the antitheses in life do we come to a better understanding of what it means to be human, especially in a time where the very twilight of the idols we have held in the highest esteem come crashing down. There is a fine line between madness and genius, and one will certainly see both in the works of Yukio Mishima if they take the time to challenge themselves. More later…

“Tell me whom you haunt and I’ll tell you who you are.”  Andre Breton