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/ !
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