Sacred Attunement

The first Jewish theology in decades is the best rock criticism of the year:

Responsiveness is all, and it is cultivated through sound and its sequences. Speaking in this vein, about music as an aspect of the human spirit, Copeland commented: "Music is designed . . . to absorb entirely our mental attention. Its emotional charge is embedded in a challenging texture so that one must be ready at an instant's notice to lend attention to what is most required so that one is not lost in a sea of notes." Music is thus a training in attentive hearing, a cultivation of a certain mindfulness. ...

For the human subject, so often caught in the blur of noise, the majesty of music can therefore also serve to restore one's hearing to the hearable, and attune our sensibilities to its unfolding processes. How we heaer overtones and silences is fundamental for our human being; and it is music that may restore these qualities to us in all their timbre and significance.

We should therefore not ignore the moral or value dimensions here either. No less a person than Beethoven remarked, in a conversation reported to Goethe, "It takes spiritual rhythm to grasp music in its essence. . . All genuine [musical] invention is moral progress. To submit to its inscrutable laws, and by virtue of these laws to overcome and control one's own mind, so it shall set forth the revelation: that is the isolating principle of art." In this way, music may instruct the self in a patient attunement to the hearable. This is an artistic retrieval of the most formative elements, in their very elementariness."

--Michael Fishbane

Fanatical Doubt, part I

"When everything worth believing is so mysterious, what is there to do?"
--Fucked Up, from Hidden World.

You won't believe it because you've never heard of it, but then why on earth should you? Probably the most influential religious group in Washington is a private (not "secret") Evangelical organization known as the Family. Bipartisan (involved with everyone from Ronald Reagan to Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin) they got their start in the 30s as a spiritual alternative to unionism. In the 40s they recruited former Nazis, and in the 70s they encouraged American politicians to support dictators. The unifying idea is the pursuit of power in the interest of divinely controlled politics: "Let go, let God." They endorse what they called "the totalitarianism of God:" if you could recruit just one dictator to heed Him, you'd bring a whole country under His rule in one stroke.

It would be cool if they were right. If God is God, of course we should listen to Him, of course we'd prosper under Him. Exactly what's so horrible about trying to obey our benevolent creator?

What is so fucking horrible about it is that it can never, ever work, and we will always, always want for it to, so it will never stop being available as an incredibly powerful coverup for something else. Because of the way our minds work, we cannot possibly know that we are doing God's will. This limit is rooted in a fundamental problem of human nature: we cannot truly know things outside of our own experience. All we can do with a text (forgery?) or a vision (hallucination?) or a voice in our head ("sacrifice your son--the special one, the one you love most") is believe or doubt. Thomas Hobbes argued this devastatingly over 300 years ago, in 1651. And if every Western Civilization blowhard who touted "the classics" actually read this one, or Machiavelli's similarly classic Discourses on Livy (the classic exposé of revelation as crowd control) they'd want to burn them in one big pile.

We have no reason to believe that even once did anyone listen to these people because of God; they were just attracted to their certainty. This kind of satisfying conviction born of baseless knowledge is what Kant called Fanaticism. And in a country where sheer conviction doubles as moral force, this style of muscular Christianity has a balls-out mystical appeal. Jesus Himself was anything but muscular (or, Hell, Christian) but something sounds totally righteous about the idea of Todd Palin winning a 2000 mile snowmobile race with a broken arm.

We do have reason to believe that people like this succeed because of their unyielding conviction, pragmatically channelled into ruthless action. And this tends to make doubters feel both superior and impotent. Nothing's as boring as one of these cautious, right-thinking people, with their endlessly qualified wishy-washy hesitations.

But the sunny years of Reaganite conviction gave birth to at least one kind of doubt that walks and talks like fanaticism: Hardcore, the sound of twisting Todd Palin's arm the rest of the way off...

for the next step, see here

Broken Landscapes

People who get information overload from cities should spend more time in forests, not as a cure but to intensify the disease til they pass through to the other side and gain the potential to read everything around them.

Urban areas present you with things you can't assimilate: messages to and from people that aren't there or don't speak your language. So do woods. They're called trees fallen across the path, marsh areas with no visible watersource, holes dug by God himself (apparently, because who else could have ripped a 50 foot tree out by the roots), quiet cries, rustling, snakes.

Urban areas present unassimilable elements but also new forms of order. New geological formations, as it were. New York's grid system, with its play of linear buildings marching down the avenue in a legible line. An intersection implies four directions, each of which will lead to a similarly structured intersection. Something like a basin and range, where one form implies the other.

It's the interstitial areas, industrial parks and cul-de-sacs visible from the train coming into the city that I can't read, don't like, can't stand. My first thought is that they're broken landscapes, but my second thought is that maybe they just haven't gone far enough.

Soundtrack: Rhys Chatham, Brooklyn Guitar trio and a very short, easy run at midnight by headlamp down the trail by my house.

Bless the Executioner

"Bless the executioner for he knows not what he does
Take the hangman into yourself, he is afraid of blood
Take the soldier to the sea, let him sleep upon the sand
And give the axe-man sympathy for he hates his own hands"
--The Kaleidoscope, "Bless the Executioner", Faintly Blowing

"And yet all grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears. God, who is the author of sovereignty, is the author also of chastisement: he has built our world on these two poles"
--De Maistre, St. Petersburg Dialogues, 1

De Maistre was talking about an idea that gave him pleasure, not a practical reality. With no clear effect on crime or social order, the death penalty has never been anything but a mystical exercise.

Deathspell Omega’s Kénôse is about divine violence. The three long tracks move like clouds and sudden hailstorms: they loom and swirl, then burst, grind and fade. Seven minutes into the second track, the series of climaxes feels like continually discovering new muscles: they tense and release, one after the other. The music disrupts to build to yet another another logical and visceral plateau.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5M78jWUuJ4

The Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, squat and vigorous, delivered a speech on the Death Penalty in 2002 which I heard. Hell, I wrote the press release.

He spoke of how God has given the state the power of life and death. It does not matter whether the state is just in our terms. The implications were absurd, delicious, nauseating if you were foolish enough to entertain this political mastermind as a philosopher of law. As head of a state, Saddam Hussein had the divine right to do what he did. Once we took the mandate of heaven away from him he became a murderer. The magic of the state alchemically transmutes lawless, unnecessary violence into lawful force, one of the poles on which God founded the world.

Scalia evoked St. Paul's claim in Romans 13: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God:... But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil."

A jaunty metaphysical adventure: believing Christians go happily into the night of death, confident that the power that wields the blade is always, ultimately, a firm, warm and familiar hand: “Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is, the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition [of the death penalty] has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe and has least support in the church-going United States. I attribute that to the fact that for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal, a grave sin which causes one to lose his soul, but losing this physical life in exchange for the next”

The full title of Kénôse track II is “Therefore GOD honours the sword so highly that He calls it His own ordinance, and will not have men say or imagine that they have invented it or instituted it.”

It continues, “For the hand that wield this sword, and slays with it is then no more man’s hand, but GOD’s, and it is not man,but GOD, who hangs, tortures, beheads, slays and fights All these are His work and His judgments…”

"Chastisement" reveals the sovereign God's necessary opposite number, the other pole on which he founded the world. The death penalty proves sovereignty exists. Killing by persnickety, arcane rules, the state shows we are no match for it; it is eternal; it is immortal.

Every person any state has ever put to death was a sacrifice to God and the State to prove their existence.

Why do they have to repeat this sacrifice over and over again?

Because it never works.

Walls in the Woods

Behind my house, down the hill, across the highway, everywhere there are woods. And if you walk far enough into the woods, you run into walls. None of them are intact, all have crumbled. You could climb over any, or all of them. They are made of rocks so big and mismatched that there's no way to tell on the face of it if they are from 60 years ago or 6,000. Someone was here before us. They modified the landscape, inscribed it with anonymous monuments, then faded into it.

As early spring comes and the brook rises, moss emerges on the rocks in increasingly brilliant and varied colors. It looks insanely verdant, screamingly alive. But it's motionless and quiet. It's not that a place like this induces a state of contemplation in you so much as that entering a place like this, you catch it already in a state of contemplation. The landscape broods, not waiting for you. What's restful about it is that it comes to life so gently, still looking tangled, wrecked.

For months I've fantasized about a horror movie with a couple of rules reversed. Instead of emerging in darkness and silence, the horror manifests itself amid bright daylight, settled areas, crowds and noise. The protagonists are forced to flee to remote, dark areas: places with no lights at night. When they stumble in the dark they need to feel their way. But they're safe there.

The title of an Earth album came into my head as I walked: Hibernaculum. I didn't remember what it meant. It turns out it's someplace to hide. For animals, a hibernaculum is where you burrow in for the winter, to hibernate.

In botany, it's a protective pod the plant makes that can sink to the bottom of the water during the winter, preserving the plant til the spring. Then the hibernaculum enlarges, develops airspaces, and rises to the surface to return to life.

Literally it means little winter.

We see ourselves as fleeing to music or the outdoors as an escape, where nature or sound can weave us a cocoon. But doing this taps an inherent dimension of our physical existence, like sleep.

We forget our capacity to crumble and become green.

Earth, "Ouroborous is Broken" from Hibernaculum, 2007 CD on Southern Lord.

Where are you calling from? How can I hear you?

"And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said to him, Abraham! and he said, Behold, here I am." Gen 22:1

"Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths...

"Moreover the two speakers are not on the same level: if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground, where it might be possible to picture him as prostrate or kneeling or bowing with outspread arms or gazing upward, God is not there too: Abraham's words and gestures are directed toward the depths of the picture or upward, but in any case the undetermined, dark place from which the voice comes to him is not in the foreground."

--Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature pp. 8-9

Since multitrack recording, we don't know where performers are. Were. Are. This is a shiny treasure of an idea still sheltered in the obfuscation-armor of Richard Meltzer's Aesthetics of Rock (NOBODY TALKS ABOUT IT SO IT DOESN'T GET DUSTY OR SCRATCHED). We can't orient them: not in relation to ourselves, not in relation to the space they recorded in (engineer Steve Albini's goal of capturing the sound of a band in a room is a good nostalgic manifesto). Did Jimmy Hendrix face his amp in "Crosstown Traffic"? Was he 20 feet down the hall? What happened when the song got mixed into left and right channels, so now his guitar's moved all up in the drummer's face? What if you're listening to it with your head in the left speaker? What if you're 20 feet down the hall? Dozens of different actual physical relationships laminated into the 5 minutes when you're making coffee and can't hear the stereo in the other room right.

Critics once touted My Bloody Valentine's Loveless as a radical break with previous sound. One of the simultaneously loudest and faintest things I'd ever heard, it made this weird new musical space, at once lifelessly flat and infinitely open, a theme of its sound. A rocket launching 500 feet beneath your feet. Now I have no desire to listen to it: like a lot of things that thematize their cutting edge it aged like shit.

I like to imagine supernatural sources for sound. The feedback just streams out of Ladytron's "High Rise:" I deny the existence of a guitar player. But since electrical amplification, it's become objectively true that sound doesn't need a direct physical source: you pluck a few thin metal strings on a wooden object's neck. Ten feet behind you a tin symphony sounds or a battleship crashes into an iceberg. Sound freed from its physical source.

God spoke to Abraham from out of the picture. Sound without a physical source once implied divine speech. Now that we can make it ourselves, we have to re-imagine the other world. Maybe it retreated somewhere further away, so it's safer from us and we from it.

Maybe it didn't.

The Girls, "Jeffery I Hear You" 7" (Hearthan 106, 1979), apparently about singer/drummer Daved Hild's brother who died when they were young.