inward/downward

"My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers."

When writer's block gets bad enough that the only thing you can think to write about is how your writer's block feels[

:a punishing regime of self abuse:

It started as a high-pitched but barely audible whine, like that sound an old tv tuned to nothing makes] started and never left] after a while even the memory of the starting fades and you kind of accept it as part of your perception] a dulling of it] sit day after day staring out a window at a terrible, uneventful, mundane view, lacking even the energy to simply change the view] makes my hands [n[u[m[b[ and I drift off in the middle off typing this to look out [5 hours pass here, and I] can't even finish a sentence without a chorus of exasperated sighs
no movement no sense of humour

a migraine drills into my temples////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

:: lay waste my heart with monotones of boredom ::

Overwrought pressures compound the burden of knowing nothing. 

All the bodies have been removed, but it will never be clean here.

maybe, a psychic wreckage] maybe maybe maybe unmeasurable quantum excitations]

i am sure it was there.

this is where i left it]

frustration squalls and squeals like a field of blackboard-nails

[sometimes, when sufficiently panicked, my spine instinctively tries to flex in a distinctly inhuman fashion] reminds me of the contortions of a fish dropped on the ground] 

shaken by ultimate unknowns, your information is valueless

(pouring gasoline on ice-cold week-old dead-ash] the smell makes me nauseous and drives me from the room] the interrogation is over, the experiment is over] drilling recedes to a muscular ache in the back of my neck]  

"You recount your sorrows to a stone…" -Titus Andronicus Act 3 Sc 1

What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.

What kills you makes you stronger.

Yet another sleepless night
I swallow pill after pill
In a desperate attempt to fall asleep

Touchy subject eh? Significantly more often than I feel is healthy, I daydream about suicide, pure morbid curiosity. I'm far more likely to think about it out of boredom than depression…wonder what that says about me. 

"Such indeed is how the steadfast act: They are not attached to life." -Buddha

New Wave of No

"There is no doubt that life is given us, not to be enjoyed, but to be overcome; to be got over." 
                                                                                             -Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer has led me to Cioran, in a virtual pathway of pessimism. One's emptiness not fulfilling, I have filled me with another's emptiness until I burst. 

"with every experience i expand like a balloon blown up beyond its capacity. the most terrifying intensification bursts into nothingness."

I can't remember a time without anxiety. Shaking at the thought of interaction…touch burns my flesh with its ACTION. I withdraw like a turtle, freedom is slavery. Freedom from interaction is slavery to inaction in a world devoid of solitude. Am I hiding? What am I hiding from? Condemnation or boredom, I find those anywhere I go….everywhere I go. Can't survive a conversation, can't participate in the easy illusion of socialising without feeling dragged and lost and interminably bored. I spent an eternity listening to a filthy waterfall in a polluted river and all its breath came out mangled and contorted in a poisonous stream…

I daydreamed of a clean flood but no one understood my words, shrieked as they were.

"To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style…"

Singular elements of individuality, buried in the field. Flat, uniform, desolate - it unifies us. All equal, on the other side of the Dirt, but subsumed to the Dirt, we become the dust and lose ourselves. A grave is an impression on the immanence of suffering. A battle won, rest as the prize. 

"Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there."

leaves in river

     With the innate nature to grow between 

the two horns of Satan - inward virtue - you have been correct and careful! 

How is it that he who 

lights a fire 

kills living beings? 

They will not escape 

this fate anyhow: innumerable 

spheres in all directions wake from the trance. 

No perceptions - it is not suffering - but we have decided to retire from this world. 

Muhammed is the father of no man among you, for the crocodile chooses. 

The recapitulation was a disposal of the dead. 

Corpse-eating birds, carry the bones. 

The sharper people's weapons, the more they riot. 

Hollow becomes full and nobody thought 

me to be God while I dwelled in the tallest grass. 

There I performed the 

Great Death. 

I worshipped penance. 

Renounced birth. In this triple order, unworthy, ascetic. 

Only a skull left behind where I saw omens of chaos, adorned and guarded. 

Tell me, who are you? 

"Sin and Punishment", he replied. 

We floated on, 

heavenly, 

as the 

entire 

army

 rode

 into the sea 

to seek

 refuge from the sand.

post-structural miserablism : everything will always make me unhappy

a calm erasure                                     nowhere

of nothing

                                                    a void within

I don't hold                                            myself

                        this void holds me

                                    within

                                         it


if you seek
Unity
Oneness
don't discount
the path of
Zero
the path of emptiness
A path
or
No Path
All destinations
are perfect
and No destination
is the end
because
no destination
is the
End

"to put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire-
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid."
-Edgar Lee Masters  'Spoon River Anthology'

I suppose, in retrospect….

My words about "Transcendental Black Metal" earlier left out some important details, yea?

Like exactly WHAT I was ranting about?

Firstly, peep this:  Transcendental Black Metal (It's on page 53, though if you're here you'll probably enjoy the rest as well)….it assumes that you have some reasonable depth of knowledge about the black metals (at least in the Scandinavian sense), and I rather like it. It's all true, or at least not wrong, despite what the journalists and fans have had to say….pretentious, of course. But sincere enough I think, mainly because it seems to come from the romantic angle of having loved and loss -or maybe from experiencing a loss of faith?- rather than from an outsider, dissectionary observation. Goes to show that evolution can't be stopped, even if it can be diverted. When even a band (there was a point when I'd say the entire genre, but I think that idea has nearly gone with the wind) so vehemently against evolution and change as was Deathspell Omega originally, was eventually caught out experimenting (in an interview in or around 2000 they said breaking with tradition and musically or lyrically experimenting should be "punishable by torture"), then what is left but to toss all notions of any original or objective truth aside eh? At this point, the bands that DON'T experiment are the ones that are being left behind….Dimmu Borgir still claws their fingers bloody on the story of Lucifer, and Cradle of Filth haven't been relevant in a decade at least….

"Out of pure spite we pretty much always said the opposite of what the other said, no matter what they said, only to mark distance. That's how we ended up calling ourselves Satanists, despite the fact that we absolutely were not. There was not a single Satanist in the whole Black Metal scene in Norway in 1991-92." - Varg Vikernes

In this environment of permissiveness, Liturgy's "transcendence" loses a lot of lustre for me. It is exceptional as a mission statement for their specific genre-fracturing moment….but as some kind of statement on the state of black metal (even at the time of it's writing, which is admittedly quite in the past considering the acceleration of the evolution and fracturing of metal genres in the last 10 years or so), I feel like it just misses the forest for it's particular tree. It isn't enough to simply turn 180 degrees and go opposite the direction you were walking! What about what is on either side of the path? Below or above it? What about the bird that alights for half a second on the path, picks at the dirt, and flits away? What about the person unaware of the existence of a path that stumbles out of the trees, crosses the path, and keeps on walking? Or the same person stopping and marveling at the fact that here is a perfectly worn path, carefully plotted and heavily trod, and deciding to stop their romp through the woods to see where it leads?

"I quite enjoy this genre for its underlying irony: You have to be alive to play it and listen to it." - Henry Rollins

Evocation; an Elaboration.

When I first entered this Way, I relied on mySelf very readily. It was natural. It FELT natural, at any rate. It felt so real I fell into operating in a very-Real-manner almost at once. It was only after a dream-death that I came to the realization that, despite the "reality", despite the here-and-NOW-ness of it all…that this Way was just the many corridors of this trance. Despite the protests (of which there were plenty), I returned constantly. I dreamed about shattering the wall I'd inevitably find at the end of every path, though honestly, who is to say whether it is a wall or not (No wall. Not-wall. The Great Wall of Not)…after all, I can only touch it, sealed there in the dark, feel my way down its oddly textured surface. I grope desperately at every grain and graft (of which there are plenty) like someone newly blind. Like my eyes were taken forcibly and I'm far from adapting. It radiates a something….a drive, or maybe a hunger. I often make guess and estimations of its nature by listening to what it hungers for, drives toward….these guesses ultimately feel superficial and I think it knows this. I know it, at any rate.

Is this thing Me? Of Me? Merely INSIDE Me? Is this the dark passenger Burroughs mentions? It is stealthy, strong, and smart, but utterly beyond me apparently. It occasionally seems to be on my side though, which raises its own set of questions.

"One of our most ancient proverbs justifies the war prisoner: 'the captive will cry out, the dead man never.' "  -Aleksander Solzhenitsyn  'The Gulag Archipelago'

nothing is illuminated - back to black, the deck is stacked
against the wise
who rise to face clashing tongues wagging and
bragging for scraps on a dirty wooden floor notched from
teeth dropping from smashed faces bloody from
fucking
nothing
and crying like a dying dog
it sits, baffled at an end it couldn't see coming
because more than two eyes are required to
see into coiled cold snakes eyes
from birthrights to death rituals
we sullenly scrape the surface and find infinite surface
no progress.
ultimate regression is stagnation
backward
is a
forward
and
nothing is worth remembering

ambiguity and apathy

"Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts."  -Voltaire (The important one, not the goth-folk singer)

"I was known as the chief grave robber of my state." -Dan Quayle (no context given, none needed)

I hate how seemingly reviled the idea that there could be ANYTHING else beyond what we can see and measure is among people today…not that it looks very likely, but it's a romantic thought. Skepticism is such a humorless sport, or it is at least played that way by most. Boring Bores. Learn a different language.

sspread] your] antennæ]

to] acccept] ssoft] transsmisssion]

sshape] ssenssory] fallout]

unussable] ssignal]

                     deeefffaultt] too] regggress]

                     revevverrtttt] to] trrransslittt]erate]

                     thought to speech]]]

                     prriimi]tive]] orgggann]n] shed]

                     la]yyerss] [lierss] ov mean]ning]

stri/ipppp] h[3]art]ttt]] fromm] hus]k]k]

[[/məˈʃiːn s/sɪnθəsəs/s r][u][stsss]

st/ri/pp] g[ē]rs] tø] faull]t] 

lïn[z] ov] /kʌˌmjunɪˈkeɪʃən] /bɹeɪ̯k//daʊn]

f rr ag m ent] sp eee e eech] s hhif t]

sh atttt errrred] bab/bb/b/b/b/bbbb/bb/bbabblle]

vibb r r a t te] innnnnn co h h eren t ttt]

shape/shhhhif  terr] logo/ooo/rhee a]

m u ss cc l e] sp/as/as/ms]

tonggguess]-inn]-speak/k/ing] sp-l/int//er [sp-l//atttt-//er]]

v^v/o/mitt-tt] nothingssss]

aaaaaaaa/tttona/lllll] 

shhhhhhrrr/iiieeeeeee/kkkkkinnnn/gggg]]]

w////hhhhhiiiitttttt-ee///] 

nnnno]ii-i]ssse/]

jackkkkkkkk]]]]ha//mme/r/rrrrrrrrr-r-r-r-r-r-/r/r/rrrrr-r/rrr/r]]]]]]

"The simple slave, in fallow fields, shrugs off his burden and falls asleep."
-Wreck and Reference  'Apollo Beneath the Whip' 

The problem with Transcendental Black Metal; or 'How seriously can I possibly take myself?' (The answer is: ALL THE WAY)

I don't know what I'm doing. I stole from far more than the citations I -do- give, and I'll steal again if I'm not stopped. I will bathe you in unnecessary punctuation. I'm a monster! Don't listen to anything I say!

Is the "Haptic Void" really an endpoint, even a fabled and unattainable one? I think not....this thought is partially due to an idea that I can't seem to shake: that, as Hunter Hunt-Hendrix states, black metal in and of itself could NEVER reach such a space, even as it constantly pines for and crawls toward it. I wonder if this doesn't imply that the HV is not necessarily or even primarily a Black Metal ideal? Or is it less a sonic or emotional/physical space we move toward or away from, and more something akin to Zen for the nihilist? An incursion into that network of selflessness and Stoicism, a radical acceptance of suffering and Nothingness so commonly associated with Zen Buddhism? A Piercing (of the Veil of Maya? of reincarnation and the Bardos, or universal recursivity? Now I may be stoned, but….) from Below?

Whatever.

Truly unholy amounts of words have been written on the history of Black Metal. Unfortunately most of those seem to discount anything that happened after 1997, as if the entire genre had simply packed its bags and went home. Utilising such a set of histories one could be forgiven for believing that the genre had reached the peak and "lied down to die at the summit" but hopefully I can show that not only is that not the case, but also that the common idea of transcendence as the method of "leaving" is still inherently tied to the framework upon which it came to be considered necessary. That from a larger view, nothing has been transcended: you are still climbing the same ladder made from the same material. Only your position on it, and your name for the top rung has changed. The new doctrine(how arrogant -ed.) of Black Noise does two things: deconstructs black metal into its component parts in order to quantify and qualify them against all other sounds; and demonstrates an infinite recombinability with any or all types of sound(and, possibly, therefore philosophies? Maybe?), regardless of origin or stylistic parameters. A (hopefully) more "true" (should that be spelled trve?) transcendence of the transcendent. Stepping off the ladder, burning it, and scattering the ashes of Black Metal across all of music, all of theory, all culture. To create a unity that annihilates and supersedes the ladder.

One man's view of post-Scandinavian Black Metal expressed as quasi-intellectual hobknobbery uhhupthuhtuhptu (that's a sound you make with your mouth, go on, do it out loud. Just like it spells.)

Soon after black metal's punishing ascent toward this Void supposedly culminated in sacrifice to transcendence, the quest for transcendence was itself swallowed by the concerns of the transcended. Black metal had evolved and new concerns filled the holes left by solving the "puzzle" of Christianity and its inversion through atheism, agnosticism, irreligiousity (is that even a word?), modern paganism, simple modernism et al.

The attack vectors formerly used upon the cross easily and quickly became sublimated into attacks upon our dominant capitalist/conservative ruling class, whose primary mode of engagement with the black metaller (or anyone, for that matter) is through the anti-environmental and anti-human(though decidedly NOT anti-humanIST) power structure of industrial progress within capitalism that had itself in many ways evolved out from the same over-reliance on the grim, bureaucratic, post-Enlightenment Christianity for ethical and physical support that sparked the first two waves of BM.

(Absurdly long run-on sentence/train of thought: I think politics and religion become conflated in an American society because, thanks to proclaimed (but entirely fake) separation of church and state, the two patently refuse the necessary honest dialogue (on grounds of keeping the separation) between each other that would prologue an actual philosophical or technical separation (not to mention that politics seems to be accepted as the "science" that legitimizes religious participation in rule). Which makes this so-called "transcendence" still feel like the same old same old to me. Fighting the same battles in a new burning church of capitalism (insert Slavoj Zizek quote out of context). The source eludes me at the moment, but I believe it was Nick Land that attempted to reclassify the post-modern as simply hypermodern, as he claimed it had only pushed the modern further, NOT actually broken free of the same set of systems. I feel a connection here, and unfortunately can't sustain it. Must re-read some things. End.)

"It was the church more than any other agency, writes historian Randall Collins, that put in place what Weber called the preconditions of capitalism: the rule of law and a bureaucracy for resolving disputes rationally; a specialized and mobile labor force; the institutional permanence that allows for transgenerational investment and sustained intellectual and physical efforts, together with the accumulation of long-term capital; and a zest for discovery, enterprise, wealth creation, and new undertakings." - Michael Novak, 'How Christianity Created Capitalism'


And so, the aforementioned ladder was built. (Another needlessly obscure post-modernist aside: Will a post-capitalist society propose optimal conditions for the post-transcendant like those silly anarchos believe?)
Anyway. Back to history lesson nutshell.
The Cascadian scene is born of and flourishes within this new man and/vs. nature and control environmental meltdown dialectic, fashioning themselves as modern warriors of the soil or at the least heralds of doom, Melancology is born. Melting down the human and ultimately selfish desire for transcendence into selflessness by repurposing it as a selfishness for the world.

Steven Shakespeare in his Blackened Notes (Helvete 2013) analyses 'Rain' by the band Fauna pretty thoroughly, finally finding a climax in an echo of ash after a brutal (un)natural (un)birth. The lyrics and his words scream to me of coming -just- short of holding a darkened mirror up to the 'Starbucks, yoga, and secular Buddhism' set, with its attempted appropriation of an immaterial philosophy into a very material culture, -almost- cracking through into a spiral-ish return to the "positive zero" espoused in most Zen philosophy that ignore the original calls to not be deceived by thinking you're correct about your path; perhaps at the end proposing the next step be a sort of zen ex nihilo. The problem is of the singularity or individuality of the message. That despite all of this Other acting against Us, Black Metal still doggedly and slavishly attempts to follow the individualistic "heroic path"(Michalewicz 2007) set forth by its own mythology, just this time it is individualism disguised as….communitarian? Is that right? Am I using that properly?

Should I care?

----------Black Noise takes this "upward" trajectory and reimagines it outward in all directions. Finding it impossible to crack the ceiling to reach the sky, it burns the building down. Sifting through the pieces at leisure it is able to pressure each individual fissure, probing for places from which to rupture into experimentation, and posthumously granting "true kvlt" status on a entirely different plane of judgement  than utilized up to this point in a far grander show of inclusivity than purists could ever be bothered with. The individual is subsumed to or into the sound, even among one-man bands. Black Noise must necessarily perform this radical deconstruction in order to expose how universal the feelings evoked by black metal are, by showing that all of the individual parts of the assemblage, on their own, are interrelated and connectable to every -or any- other style. To show, as Zappa, Varese, Glenn Branca, Wreck and Reference, Merzbow and hundreds of others before and after, that there are no rules, and to explicitly challenge preconceptions about exactly what art or music (or Black Metal, or Theory, or Black Metal Theory, blablabla ad nauseaum) is. (It is but a trick of the light and perception that separates black from white or any other color after all.)

To paraphrase Burroughs, if nothing is true (trve!), everything is permitted.  When we stop considering the aim for an end AS THE END, but rather acknowledge that an aspect of "ending-ness" exists in all things, maybe we get a rebirth of the ability to create from a "cultural scratch", from absolute Zero in the OM of Nothingness. A plane of immanence referencing an equality of thought and the possibilities of theorizing about anything from within the Void. A deterritorialization of black metal (which frightens the diehards ever so much…) that easily strips superficial aspects of that common black metal synthesis of ultimate(real or feigned) sincerity with the aesthetic beauty of pageantry into a raw, howling, and distinctly smooth expression OUTWARD from a very-Zen Void that understands suffering, negativity, and pain in profoundly more depth than most practitioners of more positive Zen techniques or styles.

With no consideration whatsoever given to an enemy, an object or mode to be transcended, or even a potential audience or commentary, the authenticity of this Black Noise obtains an awesome and infinite mass to (at least) this scholar, dragging me inward and crushing all of my philosophies into singularity. Providing a larger unity through the inherent formlessness of its noise and finds its correlate, not in reversal toward the beginning, but in acceleration past the 'end' into the original dissonance of where the end of entropy becomes creation.

So…your point is…?

In summation, I propose the end of historical-linear genre debate, and a replacement with the idea of the rhizome, resembling a filling of a container until it bursts in ANY and EVERY direction, rather than the strict and terse genealogy of reversals and additions we've been taught. How about a transcendence of the ability to define a thing exclusively as Black Metal or to think that such a thing can ever exist without its environment? I think Black Noise illuminates a blueprint for applying the Haptic Void as a metaphor for acceleration, and allows for an exposition of black metal's similarities with a great multiplicity of other expressions across disciplines.

Apologies to Deleuze and Guattari for holding a knife to their thoughts' throats. In my defense, they never seem to come quietly. The Chicago Manual of Style can take a fucking hike into the Void.

?
What?
Don't EVER take me seriously.

Seriously.