The Sword of Beginnings

At the mythical heart of Japan lies the story of a sword that is more than metal and blade. Kusanagi no Tsurugi, the sword that the god Susanoo found within the body of the eight-headed serpent, carries the legacy of the first heroic act and the power of divine order. It is not merely a tool of war—it is a symbol of legitimacy, protection, and the birth of a nation.

When Yamato Takeru later found himself trapped in a field of burning grass, Kusanagi saved him. The sword cut through the flames, like a mower of the grass, creating a path through danger. In this moment, an instrument of power becomes a living metaphor: the ability to bring order through the wild forces of the world, the beginning of a culture where myth and reality intertwine.Thus, Kusanagi holds the memory of divine deeds that marked the founding of Japan. Every story, every whisper of the legend is preserved within it—a poetic archive of beginnings kept alive in the hearts of the people. To speak of it is to see not just a sword, but the original breath of Japan, born from danger and courage.

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Extreme stress, such as that encountered in a life-and-death fight, is a teacher. In such moments, mechanisms unfold that remain hidden in everyday life. Attention becomes maximally focused. The dual separations between thinking and acting, intention and force, self and environment begin to blur. The trained body responds as an interconnected system. The state corresponds to transient hypofrontality. Illumination is not spiritual romanticism but the experience that, under maximum pressure, one’s inner order becomes visible.

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“Yes, you have these magical word qualities and let one travel in a wonderfully sensual way. It depends on the type of woman where each chooses to go with such a spell; the field is vast in the world of imagination, whether erotic or entirely concrete. Everything moves in its orbits—some paths lie closer together than others.” M.

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“This entire chapter is like dialing into a magical data highway, the full force of the signals, all the pride, mine again. Only for my master would I lick his hand like a kitten and purr ... completely tame ... A very arousing part. I think I need to take a short reading break here.” C.Z.

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Chet comes from Galveston. Galveston is a Texan city on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. Spanish conquerors were shipwrecked on its coast during the time of the Conquista; France claimed it as a colonial possession. Galveston later became (again?) Spanish, but it was the French pirate Louis Michel Aury who founded a European settlement on the island in the 19th century. Aury served as a mercenary in the service of Simón Bolívar; they fell out in New Orleans. Acting on his own account, Aury challenged the Spanish navy in the Gulf of Mexico.

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The Habsburg Empire successfully defended itself against the plague by fortifying its external borders: a cordon sanitaire stretching from Croatia to Moldavia. The Ottoman Empire placed it under quarantine by military means.

“On the Turkish side of the Balkans, the plague raged until 1840; on the Austrian side it was never seen again.”

This is recounted by the archaeologist Ian Morris under the headingCOVID-19 – Answers from the Past. Karl Heinz Götze notes in his essayThe Absolute Spirit, Cholera, and the Ascension of the Philosopher: Hegel’s Death and Burial:

“Prussia did (after the cholera outbreak in the year in question) what it knew best. It waged war on the disease ... Cholera laughed at it and on August 23, 1831 ... claimed Gneisenau, the commander-in-chief of the Prussian army, and in November of the same year Clausewitz, the famous strategist.”

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Until the advent of vaccination, quarantine was the primary means of protection against epidemics. Morris argues that COVID-19 has effectively pushed us back to a pre-modern level of vulnerability — comparable to that of the Habsburg era — until medical protection renders us less defenseless as hosts. For the time being, we face what he describes as a stark choice between distance and death.

Although this conclusion may seem premature, Morris simultaneously anticipates the emergence of a new global era in which Western democracies may no longer hold cultural dominance. He grounds this outlook in two historical reference points. First, he suggests that human societies were likely more egalitarian for far longer than we tend to assume — specifically during the hunter-gatherer period, which ended around twelve thousand years ago when sedentarization triggered a competitive rise of hierarchical structures.

Second, he argues that, over roughly the past half century, the large-scale use of fossil fuels has moved us back toward conditions resembling that earlier social regime. However, as is widely recognized, egalitarian impulses derived from this dynamic increasingly lose their legitimacy. When viewed in this broader historical context, Morris’s perspective gains additional weight and coherence.

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Paul B. Preciado approaches the horizon of negative expectations with the conjecture that the virus could freeze the current state of the world.

“Everything would remain frozen for all eternity in the condition the world assumed with the outbreak ...”

Quotes fromCorona and Us – Food for Thought for a Changed World/ Paul B. Preciado,An Apartment on Uranus – Chronicles of a Transition.