Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion reminds me of Ben Lerner’s Hatred of Poetry and Leaving the Atocha Station.

In the beginning a boy, Mishima’s protagonist, is seeing for the first time and contemplating the eponymous temple (in Kyoto), after having journeyed there from the provinces—and on seeing it for the first time, is disappointed by its beauty. The temple has not lived up to the expectation set by his father’s high praise for it, persistent throughout the protagonist’s childhood.

‘The shadow was more beautiful than the building itself.’

The shadow being the boy’s idea of the temple, the anticipation he had of the experience of seeing it.

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In Lerner’s Atocha Station, the protagonist laments his inability to have a true “experience of art.” I take this to be basically a more based and ironic version of Mishima’s inaccessible sublime beauty-encounter.

‘I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life.”’

Moreover, Hatred of Poetry examines the tension between the ideal and the real poem. The author perceives the potential poem as more beautiful, and in comparison their actual product pales. I have often felt this, where I know how beautiful the poem feels but I cannot recreate the experience on the page. It is a tragic and beautiful experience itself, a subject no doubt deserving of a few books. A successful poem captures some element from the virtual world and brings it into the actual—this is very difficult to achieve.

Later in Temple, in an interesting evolution of these ideas, Mishima represents the beauty of the temple as only existing as being-towards-death. Set in WWII, the boy expects every day for the Americans to rain hellfire on Kyoto, but they never do. The promised bombs are what make the temple beautiful, i.e. tragic.

I haven’t finished the Mishima yet but I can’t wait to see how else the idea evolves. It is psychologically rich and the Lerner added context or prepared me for the encounter.

I am interviewed in nothing/in particular magazine. Please take a moment to read it! You can also read many other awesome interviews on the site. The publisher describes them as “non-serious interviews for writers,” which style has my full-throated co-sign.

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