No discipline, just problems

I.

[Karl Popper] wrote there there are no disciplines, just problems. So I always knew what my problem was: chance and misunderstanding of knowledge - I've had it for as long as I can remember. But I am still looking for a discipline.

Interview with Nassim Taleb

The quote about appeals for the obvious omnivorous idea, but also because you can extract the phrase no discipline, just problems, which works for me.

II.

I stayed out drinking on Wednesday night until the sun came up. I was drinking with a guy in one bar and we ended up at another place sharing a table with two women, the hours between 3am and 6 passing in a blur. Whatever happened was of no significance, but it took a long time just the same.

When the sun came up I stumbled out and rode my bicycle home. The streets were full of people starting their days, and if they saw me go by and gave it any thought they probably imagined I was a healthy early riser too, on my way to tai chi in a park.

It was a normal night for Osamu Dazai.

III.

The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This is how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world. I learned to behave rather aggressively, without the endless anxious worrying I knew before, responding as it were to the needs of the moment.

Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human, p125

This is the kind of book that I'd have been crazy for as a teenager, Notes from the Underground with more sex and drink. It begins: Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being. It reminds that I should've died, been badly injured, arrested, had a career or become a father several times over by now, but somehow I escaped each time and ought to be more grateful for what I half chose and half fell into, one year without a boss on December 1st.

I don't think dissipation's so romantic now, and don't aspire to getting wasted every night on a rockstar bohemian trip. I want to be as healthy as possible, so that sometimes I can do unhealthy things.

Men's nature's are alike, it is their habits that carry them far apart.

Confucius

Mishima once met Dazai, and they had a confrontation. The gist of it was that Mishima (the younger man), although admiring Dazai's work, was disgusted by the weakness that he showed in throwing himself into drink, drugs and women, the general lack of masculine discipline. His friend and biographer suggests that he was really shocked by recognizing his own desire for death, quoting this passage from Mishima's account of their meeting:

Naturally I recognize Dazai's rare talent; and yet I know of no other writer who from my very first contract with him filled me with so violent a physiological revulsion. Possibly....this was due to my immediate sense that Dazai was a writer at pains to expose precisely that which I most wanted to conceal in myself.

Jonathan Nathan, Mishima, p93

Dazai killed himself at 38, while Mishima did so at 45, two paths to the same end.

Related posts:
Mishima's head on a plate [incl. picture]
All posts tagged Mishima Yukio

Fat man in a cul-de-sac

They don't have to tell me about this human condition: I'm in it.

B.S. Johnson, caption from Street Children

B.S. Johnson's Fat Man on a Beach has turned up, and all five parts are posted below.

If you don't know him, then it's of limited interest [almost certainly none], probably like the rest of this post.

He was a modernist writer who got caught in too many traps, mostly set by himself. I think he had very limited talents that he stretched too far with style, and when the talent broke and the style ran out there was little left over to live on. He killed himself in a bathtub at the age of 40, in 1973. With better choices perhaps he could have been Georges Perec, who died of natural causes [lung cancer] at the age of 45, in 1982, but he wasn't.

Although he did have some good titles, and to my way of thinking [which I accept is a little cracked] Instructions for the Use of Women is at least as good as Laferrière's How to Make Love to a Negro, although the latter is the better work, and neither are that outstanding.

I read Jonathan Coe's good biography of Johnson earlier this year, which a) explained why I'd been able to read all of this hard to find author's works while at university [Warwick had an English professor who was a supporter, and the library was well-stocked], and b) made it plain that the best I could have hoped for if I'd pursued a literary career would've been to become a failed B.S. Johnson. Moreover, and more importantly, that a failure in this case would still have been better than the real thing, as long as it was done fast (as it more or less was).

Some people have easy lives, but most face a long series of struggles. I write that, thinking about B.S. Johnson, with no idea if it's true, having no access to the lived experience of others. My life is very easy, with the few problems I ever face are nearly all of my own devising. But this might signify an emotional poverty or lack of daring on my own part, an unwillingness to engage more completely. I don't think it matters - I'd rather be a pig in shit than a sad philosopher.

part one

part two

[The start of the anecdote Coe mentions about the motorcycle accident / cheese starts near the end of part two...]

part three

[...and finishes at the start of part three]

part four

part five

Achieve success, kill yourself

Tokyo Undressed

Camus said there's only one serious question, and that's whether or not to kill yourself. Even after I grew up that quote stayed cool for a while, but mostly struck me as dumb. Life is not an either / or decision, there are many ways to live or slowly die.

The aim of this blog is to keep a record of various things and see what emerges many years later. The patterns aren't supposed to be too apparent at first. So, time for the first of a series of posts noting when people who have achieved professional success and the respect of their peers choose to kill themselves. Since all information will be gathered online, it's likely to be restricted to famous people. In addition, the basic rules are that the person should still be at or near the height of their powers and with no impending health crises, no obvious external reasons to kill themselves. The model for this is Yukio Mishima.

First up, as you can probably guess, is David Foster Wallace,

(February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer as well as a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Wallace was best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels (1923-2006).

Wikipedia

Who'll be next?

Posts tagged Mishima.

Mishima's head on a plate

When I was in college I used to have a serious idea that the first third of your life, say until 25 or so, was what formed you, the second part saw this bloom, and the last part was you dealing with the consequences.

It's not something I think about these days, but it came back as I was working on a project to revisit the authors who meant a lot to me when I was in high school. One of these was Yukio Mishima.

Perhaps I know now that he's more insane than cool, that his longed-for 'great cause' should have been his family or a lover, not nationalism and blood. But when I open anything of his the discipline, solitude, cruelty, and masochism draw me into that world again, a super-heightened teenage sensibility. I think I like his writing even more as I get older, and his style in general. Why not cut your belly open and have someone chop your head off after making an ill-considered, ill-received, and totally pointless grand gesture? Look at the severed head, above, he's smiling.

A few weeks ago I picked up a secondhand copy of Mishima: A Biography, by John Nathan [who knew Mishima in the '60s and translated his works]. It's my reading this weekend to break the run of science and psychedelia, to bring me back to the flesh. From the preface to the original edition:

In two months, Mishima would have been forty-six. He had written forty novels, eighteen plays, [...] twenty volumes of short stories, and as many of literary essays. He was a director, an actor, an accomplished swordsman and a muscle man [...]; seven times he had been around the world, three times he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize. He was, besides, an international celebrity with a famous zest for life, a man who always seemed singularly capable of enjoying the rewards of his prodigious talent and superhuman will. A few days before his suicide he had been planning for fully a year, he confided to his mother that he had never done anything in his life he had wanted to do.

What claims to be Mishima's last interview