An Ode to Time

A few months ago, I first listened to the words “I love the passage of time.” I've heard them before, of course- they are from the Talking Heads song This Must Be the Place, and I basically grew up listening to Talking Heads. But I guess there's a difference between hearing something and actually listening, actually taking in the full impact of words at a time when you're ready to understand their impact. How scary is it to really love the passage of time. Time brings people into our life and takes them away, lets us grow close to others and pulls us apart.  Time crushes our hearts and opens up our eyes. Time is our mistress, make no mistake. The whole trick of life is learning how to love her, how to live within her and without her.  In honor of Time, I wrote the following ode:

1.        

Let’s stop and look at time, at how she moves.

She stomps. She scrapes, she grabs, pushes, runs off,

Stays far too long, then turns her back and scoffs.

Watch- her arms are wild, but her footwork smooth.

There is a pattern to this dance of time

She’ll sway, gyrate, undulate, oscillate

To a rhythm we can’t approximate

But if we cease to hesitate, we’ll find.

What we thought of as being stepped upon

Was not keeping with her response and call

Not playing our part, standing by the wall.

Her teasing then no strange phenomenon.

Time is what we build ourselves out of-

We’re conceived in the zeitgeist of her womb.

And our every thought borrowed from her tomb.

Without her, there can be no I, no love.

2.   

She has had other partners before us

This crone, this old and evil witch, Kali

This mother who birthed and will destroy me

She is so vast, and therein goes my trust.

She crushed my dreams, fears, and false perceptions

Danced atop my hopes and accomplishments

Underfoot my little embellishments

That I think of as me, those deceptions.

She kisses me (little thing I call my I)

But briefly and moves on (How can she? How?)

I was promised more (but just given now)

By falsehood (only guaranteed to die).

Some day she will step too harshly on me

I (little I!) will misstep, mistake, tire

She will dance atop me as I expire

I will be dispersed by her odissi.

3.        

Entropy seeps from her breasts like milk, sour;

To suckle at mother time brings collapse

But we can’t hide from her dance, can’t elapse

And her nectar is food we must devour.

For without her immunizing black pus

There is stagnation, no change; no sunset

Or the moon made arcane, complacent

With no bright future us nor joy of loss

Though no second returns, no light lingers

What she takes away circles back again

(love hope pain fear safety joy depression)

They spin, juggled in her wrinkling fingers

Every day she brings an apocalypse

A bit of the world ends forever

A sight that life had of itself severed

And each day new sights, new breaths in our lips.

4.        

We will never keep up, she will move on.

She switches up her tempo, but won’t rest

Every movement blending, blurring with the next

No matter how swiftly act our neurons.

Kali is not an enemy too hate

She chose to give us a bit of herself

To chew on, to experience ourselves

And all feasts have their expiration date

We have been promised but never insured

Another second from her, a next ride.

Like a wedding with a terminal bride

Savor every instant, nothing assured

She will have other lovers, has before

But is here for me now, makes love to me,

Evenings crystalized in eternity

She gives her presents and we ask for more.

 5.

In her eyes, there is no set divide

Between me as a child, adult, grave corpse

Each of my bodies from birth to death course

In one continuous fleshstream “I” slide.

Back to my father’s sperm, my mother’s cell

From Genghis and Jesus and Tut I come

My genes from corpses, from stars my carbon

And “me” preceded primordial gel.

She is greater than me, that tiny thought

But she sees me as all the universe

Shiva Nataraja, whose only curse

Is that he sees himself not as he ought

We are but the shred of a fingernail

Of the cosmos, continuing to grow,

That sees self as singular, as ego

Our present form just one step in this trail

6.

(And here’s a thing- what we perceive to be

Matter and anti-matter, positron/

Electron, could be one thing all along.

The same self, moved back and forth endlessly.

When these two particles collide, is it

Really collision, or just reversal?

Feyman says maybe gamma dispersal

Is from one thing changing, not two that hit.

That is to say that positrons are all

Electrons traveling the other way

In dimension four, tomorrow-today

And vice-versa, just one sole particle

And there could be just one of them, dancing

From the big bang to whatever comes next

All of space made by how it intersects

With itself, back and forwards, everlasting.)

The Aural Incarnation of 2012- Paralytic Stalks by of Montreal

Gloomy words warning! I spent much of this year in a hurricane of depression and isolation. I was living in a place that was totally unfamiliar to me, the woman that I thought I was going to marry ended the relationship, and my awareness expanded to a point where the horrors of the human condition were no longer something I could ignore like the sound of a busy road outside my house. I was coming closer to 30 and the world was getting farther away from anything I was comfortable with. I wasn’t ready for life beyond 2012 and wasn’t sure that I could imagine such a thing. I needed a ladder to get me out of the whirlpool of my own confusion. What I had instead was a map that showed me how to comprehend the terrain. 

This map, the album Paralytic Stalks by of Montreal, led me down into the depths of my own despair, but it also showed me that this despair is universal. There is no singular pain, no great cosmic suffering we must undertake alone in some self-absorbed christomimesis. Whatever caverns, whatever peaks we may possess, there is nothing within us too perilous or too sequestered that we cannot erect a bridge between our mountains and chasms and those of others. It is through the cartography of our abyss that we are able to comprehend our own depth and to appreciate that depth in others.

The album tracks a journey through the dark shadow of the human condition, starting with the bitterest of condemnations of our species and ending with a ray of hope in the form of interpersonal communication. What follows is my interpretation of this journey, which is definitely coloured by my own life and opinions and probably not entirely what most of the songs are intended to mean. The lyrics are intentionally complex and call for a large amount of unpacking and investment. If nothing else, this my version of the album, and like Crowley's version of the Tao Te Ching, is hopefully more fascinating by the divergence.

 The first song, Gelid Ascent, refers to the loveless path mankind has taken to to our present state. Barnes explains that we are all little more than the discarded atoms composed in the heart of a star, not intended for this world nor this world intended for us. We are genetically less evolved than most modern bacteria and historically intertwined with our species, one with a 200,000 year history of violence that is echoed in the voice of every human action. All we have to justify our existence is rare and often unexplored phenomena of empathy and love, and empathy is "impuissant" (impotent) and love often strips us of our sense of self in its "dehumanizing press." Like hope at the bottom of Pandora’s box, these redemptions are in many ways the most painful tortures of all.

Things don’t get lighter from there. Spiteful Intervention explores the pride of isolation and the pain of abandonment. This song screams at the fact that closeness brings pain, that fate rips people away from us that we have sown into our own hearts, and that only delusion can keep us from being constantly aware that own heart is going to be ripped apart by the passage of time. What Barnes feels he should feel the most shame about, however, is that he can only explain his pain to those who are hurting him by giving them the very pain he feels. He has come to define himself by this pain and sees kindness as a “blasphemy” against the truth of who he really is. Yet it is in this song that we also see the idea of hope, which itself might be the greatest pain of all. Barnes hopes for a “more elegant solution” to the problem of pain, but cannot find one.

I'm not entirely sure what "Dour Percentage" is supposed to mean (the measurement of how self-sacrificing you are?), but this song's alternate title, Tensional Parapraxes, seems to suggest that the song is composed of the unintentional slips of the tongue (parapraxes) that occur when relationships become strained. Here, Barnes embraces the feeling of abandonment to the point where it can be properly seen as a core element in the human puzzle. Barnes similarly embraces the fact that human interaction brings pain, but states that there is fuck all else in this world worth bothering with. He implores his listeners to then decide whether to remain locked up in the cellar of their selves or to join the circle of humanity that needs all the help it can get. This is the beginning of the outward journey

We Will Commit Wolf Murder then lashes out at the manic desperation of seeing other people as your salvation. We desperately want the help of a mentor, of a sympathetic voice, and the world hears us call out for guidance but is too busy with its own struggles. We see this every day and are every day guilty of ignoring the pleas for help inherent in the eyes of so many living beings. We yearn for that true connection, but even more so, we yearn for somebody who can lead us out of the madness of our own lives, ignoring that every human feels the same pain and confusion. We live on a planet where there is suffering everywhere and no redeemer to be found. We are the ones who "produce vanity holocausts" and commit other acts of misery. And then we forget we are the cause and look for a savior from outside ourselves. This is true on both the macro level of all of humanity and on the internal, micro level, where we torture ourselves and are desperate for somebody from the outside to relieve our self-inflicted suffering.

In addition to possessing the greatest single line in the album (“once more I turn to my crotch for counsel”), Malefic Dowery wades in the uncomfortable feeling of being loved, of not knowing how to take in something so desperately needed. Barnes is overwhelmed by the fact that love seems cruel and confusing to a person who is incapable of loving themselves. He is unable to just live in peace with somebody who he feels is greater than him and can't appreciate the other as an equal. 

This is followed by Ye, Renew the Plaintiff, a song about how love is no escape from the horrors of the personal abyss. Here, Barnes rejects the love that is given to him and instead swears revenge on the world for making him who he is and forcing him to suffer through his life. He still sees the pain as an externally-generated phenomenon- his personality is nothing more than sanctions placed upon him for being the child of his parents, for being a human. 

This self-hatred continues through Wintered Debts, where Barnes finally admits that he can’t deal with mourning at the carcass of his failures any longer and, as Jung wrote, lets his self drop. He stops externalizing the pain and just lets himself watch himself suffer. It is only after this that Barnes comes to perceive that universal weirdness and certainty of pain which brings a freedom to the self. He will not be left alone, but he will feel pain and punishment his entire life. Towards the end of the song, he has fallen out of love with the idea of needing a savior and with decides that he must face the darkness himself rather than rely upon another to do so. 

This brings the exorcism of the song Exorcismic Breeding Knife, where Barnes faces the utter disgust within himself and accepts the fact that he doesn’t have the more elegant solution hinted at in Spiteful Intervention.This is probably the most alienating song on the album, as it is a record of the confrontation of Barnes' inner demons with the realization that he cannot perform any surgery to actually remove them. It is only in deciding to carry this pain that we no longer look to others to be redeemers and can actually love other people without desperation.

Barnes emerges from this cacophony in Authentic Pyrrhic Remission with the understanding that his suffering is not unique. Here he uses the term "we" rather than the "I" of the previous songs. Every condemnation of humanity stated earlier remains true, but it is something he sees there is no escape from. The album culminates with the refrain that he loves “how we're learning from each other” -not, as earlier, how much he wants to be saved by another, but rather how we can help each other through the pain of mere being. Yes, who he is contains this depression and dejection and disgust with humanity, but in accepting the presence of these feelings he is able to no longer be crippled by them. He is looking forward to transhuman singularity, where we overcome the differences and build lasting bridges between each other. He finds that his home is in the connection between people- he was trying to escape through connection with a savior, a lover, but we can never truly form a bond with others when we are so desperate to escape from ourselves. We need to know our own peaks and valleys to form a bridge between ourselves and others. By accepting himself, he is finally open to communication. 

Is all this truly unique or unheard of? No, certainly not. But of all the music I've heard this year, this was the album that spoke the most to me of the struggles I and people I loved were going through. It helped me to embrace the challenges of isolation and abandonment and acted as a mirror, keeping me company as I went spelunking into the caverns of my own psyche.

You can download the album pretty much anywhere, but if you don't know how to download music maybe check out http://www.amazon.com/Paralytic-Stalks-Montreal/dp/B006HH614O ? Also, I recommend reading the lyrics as you listen to the album, if possible with a tab open to look up the sesquipedalian words that distinguish Barnes' writing. You can get lyrics here: http://paralyticstalks.blogspot.com/ !