At 6:10 this morning, my friend texted me that guillotine watchers in France would drink the blood of executed people, the rich would get the blood delivered to them in bottles, and the poor would drink blood straight from the headless body. As I read this information, barely awake, my brain rattled.
Jasmine Amussen:
like would i drink the blood of some executed nobility?
probably
but like christians do this too
every sunday
i guess jesus was an executed criminal too
Severus Snape:
Good. Transsubstantiation. I was always like, “this is Jesus’ actual blood??”
I think you have it there. The criminal Jesus
Jasmine Amussen:
a practice satanists always found distasteful and alarming
Severus Snape:
But not every denomination believes that. Catholics do. Protestants don’t
Jasmine Amussen:
menses weirdly makes sense, as it’s actually super nutrient dense. idk if it would cure you but for the health standards of revolutionary france i’m sure there was rampant vitamin deficiency
Severus Snape:
I mean people still gobbling those up today
When Nietzsche went crazy he would rub his semen into his skin
Jasmine Amussen:
thanks for this bizarre 6am conversation
Severus Snape:
There is a tree in summer Berlin that gives off white pods that smell exactly like semen
You’re welcome
It jumped around in my brain because no one believed more in the curing power of violence, blood, than Mishima. Sword and Steel, his little muscle manifesto addressing his obsession, his ideas of the language of the body, his repulsion at overly thin or overly fat people, and his frighteningly pornographic description of being a shrine bearer. This sort of ecstatic, religious violence, he talks about with such holy reverence and charged eroticism that it’s almost impossible to read and not feel hot all over. I had to stop reading many times because I found my reaction frightening. This isn’t Jesus carrying his cross to his execution. Mishima is carrying the shrine to meet the sun, to restore the soul of a nation, through the violent weight of the shrine and the violence of his life and death.
On it’s face Sword and Steel is an essay about weightlifting, but it’s disjointed, dreamy, polemic against intellectual softness, against timidity of the mind or body. He extorts the possibility of the body as art, and his theory of ‘the language of the body’. The sentences are striking, sparse and tight as a drum. Towards the end of its tidy 100 or so pages, Mishima gets into a fighter jet, and like a spermatozoa, shoots forward to meet the fertile light of the sun. He describes his life work as meeting his fetish of the body to his fetish for reality.
I have never understood that as a desire, much less as a fetish. Reality, currently right now, is really, really terrible. There is nothing I want less than to be removed from this narrative that I never asked to be a part of. Being anchored in my body, day in day out, lifting weights, running miles, to keep from losing my mind, has lead me to snapping awake at all hours, staring at the ceiling, reading the messages on my phone from friends across the world, trying to keep my spiritual body pure.