There are many interesting connections between the work of nihilist philosopher Emil Cioran and the art of Depressive Suicidal Black Metal (for short DSBM). This should come as no surprise since Cioran authored such books as On the Heights of Despair, The Trouble with Being Born, and A Short History of Decay. Throughout his life, Cioran had suffered from insomnia and the pest of lucidity and deep awareness in a cold and meaningless universe. Trapped in a painful dilemma, Cioran hated living just as much as he did dying. While he praised suicide, he always lamented it coming too late, like all actions rooted in a mind on the brink of madness. Despising a moribund God, Cioran only craved the dark forgetfulness of the complete void, which he received when he was blessed with dementia in his old age.
In this post I just highlight a deep, organic connection between Cioran's early remarks on despair and the grotesque and the dark imagery of DSBM. Cioran wrote On the Heights of Despair at the age of 20, and already considered himself an expert in the problem of death. This fragment is from his early book.
Despair and the Grotesque
"Among the many forms of the
grotesque, I find the one whose roots are steeped in despair more unusual and complex. The other forms have less intensity. It is important to note that
the grotesque is inconceivable without intensity of feeling. And what intensity
is deeper and more organic than despair? The grotesque appears only in very
negative states, when great anxiety arises from a lack of life; the grotesque
is an exaltation of negativity.
There is a mad launch toward
negativity in that bestial agonizing grimace when the shape and lines of the
face are contorted into strangely expressive forms, when the look in one's eyes
changes with distant light and shadow, and one's thoughts follow the curves of
similar distortions. Truly intense and irrevocable despair cannot be
objectified except in grotesque expressions, because the grotesque is the
absolute negation of serenity, that state of purity, transparence, and lucidity
so different from the chaos and nothingness of despair. Have you ever had the
brutal and amazing satisfaction of looking at yourself in the mirror after
countless sleepless nights? Have you suffered the torment of insomnia, when you
count the minutes for nights on end, when you feel alone in this world, when
your drama seems to be the most important in history and history ceases to have
meaning, ceases to exist? When the most terrifying flames grow in you and your
existence appears unique and isolated in a world made only for the consummation
of your agony? You must have felt those moments, as countless and infinite as
suffering, in order to have a clear picture of the grotesque when you look at
yourself in the mirror. It is a picture of total strain, a tense grimace to
which is added the demonically seductive pallor of a man who has struggled
along horrible, dark precipices. Isn't this grotesque expression of despair
similar to a precipice? It has something of the abysmal maelstrom of great
depths, the seduction of the all-encompassing infinite to which we bow as we
bow to fatality. How good it would be if one could die by throwing oneself into
an infinite void! The complexity of the grotesque born out of despair resides
in its capacity to indicate an inner infinity and to produce paroxysm of the
highest tension. How could this intense agony manifest itself in pleasant
linear curves and formal purity? The grotesque essentially negates the classic,
as well as any idea of style, harmony or perfection.
It is evident to anyone who
understands the multiple forms of inner drama that the grotesque hides secret
tragedies, indirectly expressed. Whoever has seen his face grotesquely
disfigured can never forget it, because he will always be afraid of himself.
Despair is followed by painful anxiety. What else does the grotesque do if it
doesn't actualize fear and anxiety?" (Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair)
Shining is a pioneering DSBM band, formed by the controversial Niklas Kvarforth. The philosophy of the band is the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment through physical and mental self-destruction. To illustrate this concept, Niklas is known for cutting himself on stage and even feeding bits of his flesh to members of the audience. Needless to say, many Shining gigs would end up with Niklas being taken to the nearest ER. The frontman also prides himself on the fact that his music can drive people to commit suicide as he hates not only humanity but everything that lives and breathes and grows. Even plants and trees, God dammit!!
The cynically named Lifelover band was also based on a self-destructive, nihilistic concept. Tragically, but not surprisingly, one of the founders, Jonas Berqvist, has died of a drug overdose. He explained the use of his mask on stage by the fact that usually his corpse paint would start running and become very messy as he sweated playing his guitar, so he decided to wear the painted balaclava or ski-mask instead, which gave him an even more sinister and grotesque look.
Silencer was a brief presence in the landscape of DSBM and their only album Death-Pierce Me has received cult status mostly because of the lead vocalist's, Nattram, terrifying, animalistic, high-pitched shrieks. Strange rumors about the enigmatic frontman abound, but it's NOT TRUE that he cut off his hands and sown pig's feet to the bloody stumps for the pictures above (more on that here). However, that would have been a very metal and kult thing to do. The fact that the pig's feet are only props doesn't take away from the sordid, disturbing character of the pictures.
I don't know of any DSBM band to have used these images of a supposed Russian Sleep Experiment that took place in the '40s. But they would fit perfectly on a DSBM album cover. The Russian Sleep Experiment is actually a horror story published on Creepypasta that follows five patients who were given a gas that would eliminate their need for sleep. After 15 days, the tale goes, the subjects began engaging in bizarre acts of self-mutilation and self-cannibalism. Their behavior became less and less human, their speaking slowly changing into alien shrieks. As the experiment got out of control the researchers were ordered to kill the nightmarish guinea pigs. "What are you?" one of the doctors asked the last of the remaining subjects. "Have you forgotten so easily?" the mangled patient replied. "We are you. We are the madness that lurks within you all, begging to be free at any moment in your deepest animal mind. We are what you hide from in your beds every night. We are what you sedate into silence and paralysis when you go to the nocturnal haven where we cannot thread."
"I long to be free, desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free." (Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born)
I finished "The
Troop" by Nick Cutter a week ago but it still echoes within me like the
aftershocks of a major earthquake. What an exhausting yet orgasmic ride! The
book grabbed me from the first pages and I was under its spell till the last
page, and will probably feel its pull till the day I'm gone. It made me moan
and groan, gasp and scream and mumble to myself like a lunatic. Maniacally, I
underlined almost every sentence, the pencil my only defence against the
horror. Visceral, like any self-respecting body horror story, but also
infinitely disturbing and drenched in metaphysical anguish. "The Troop"
is tied to Ryan C. Thomas' "The Summer I Died" as the sickest,
scariest book I've ever read. Just like the torture of Tooth by Skinnyman in
Thomas' masterpiece, Shelley's killing of Ephraim makes me scream and pull my
hair out every time I think of it. I loved both Tooth and Ephraim like actual
friends and their unbelievable torment and untimely demise makes me want to go
to their graves and weep and mutter late words of consolation. It's not real,
you say, just fiction, but their suffering feels all too real to me, just like
my suffering for them.
The plot of The Troop
is simple. For the weekend, Scoutmaster Tim Riggs is with his troop of scouts
on the Falstaff Island, close to Prince Edward Island on the Canadian East
Coast. The troop consists of five fourteen year olds: Kent, Ephraim, Max,
Shelley, and Newton. On the first night they have an unknown guest, Tom Padgett,
who had just escaped from Dr. Edgerton's facility. Needless to say, Dr.
Edgerton is a sadistic mad genius with no regard for human life. Tom carries an infection, his body is taken
over by worms, monster worms, conqueror worms —
technically called "hydatid worms" — that take over your organism
and give your brain the command to eat, eat, eat. Only it's not you who gets
fed, it's them. They grow inside you and then, when you've fed yourself into
starvation, they leave your hollowed system and conquer another host. These genetically
modified worms are nothing but a biological weapon the military was
experimenting with.
The island becomes the
site of dangerous experimentation, and the Scoutmaster and his scouts are the
guinea pigs.
Now, the plot thickens
when we find that one of the boys, Shelley, is a psychopath who revels in
making other beings suffer; spiders, fish, cats, dogs, other people, you name
it. The panic that strikes his mates when the infection begins to spread is
sweet music to Shelley's ears. The island becomes his playground where he
finally has the opportunity to enact his twisted blood-games. All in all, with
conqueror worms and a sadistic killer on the loose, shit is bound to hit the
fan on the island.
Nick Cutter's original
lyrical style is on full display when he describes the five boys through the
eyes of Scoutmaster Tim: "All boys gave off a scent, Tim found — although it wasn't only an olfactory signature. In
Tim's mind it was a powerful emanation that enveloped his every sense.
For instance, Bully-scent: acidic and adrenal, the sharp whiff you'd get of a
pile of old green-fuzzed batteries. Or Jock-scent: groomed grass, crashed
chalk, and the locker room funk wafting of a stack of exercise mats. Kent Jenks
pumped out Jock-scent in waves. Other boys, like Max and Ephraim, were harder
to define — Ephraim often gave off a life-wire
smell, a power transformer exploding in a rainstorm.
Shelly...Tim
considered between sips of scotch and realized the boy gave off no smell at all
— if anything, the vaporous, untraceable scent of a sterilized room in a house
long vacant of human life.
Newton,
though, stunk to high heaven of Nerd: an astringent and unmistakable aroma, a
mingling of airless basements and dang library corners and tree forts built for
solitary habitation, of dust smoldering inside personal computers, the licorice
tang of asthma puffer mist and the vaguely narcotic smell of model glue — the
ineffable scent of isolation and lonely forbearance."
Scoutmaster
Tim is caught off-guard by the appearance of hungry Tom on the island. Tom is
nothing but a shuffling corpse. Not strictly as zombie as his diet consists of
more than brains: some algae and foam from inside a sofa bed are good enough
for Tom; whatever he can stuff in his mouth and chew on. When the Scoutmaster
reaches for the radio to get in touch with mainland and signal an emergency,
Tom becomes violent, grabs the radio and smashes it on the floor. He then has a
coughing fit, and some spit splashes on the Scoutmaster's face. Thus, Tim Riggs becomes infected. The conqueror worms will grow and eat him up from inside.
He's a dead man walking.
Next, Tim manages to
neutralize the intruder and tie him up on the couch. He's feeling unwell and
hungry. Confused, he helps himself to more scotch straight from the bottle. The boys soon realize
that there's something wrong going on in their cabin and that their master is
unable to cope. Kent, their informal leader, is the most vocal of the bunch. When they
see the worms crawling out of the dead man's body and they notice that Tim is
losing weight at an alarming speed, they realize Tim carries an unknown,
terrible disease. Led by Kent, they mutiny. Together, they isolate Tim in the
closet of the cabin and lock the door with a key. To celebrate his victory over
an adult Kent takes a drink from Tim's scotch bottle. Thus, Kent too becomes
infected.
Psychopathic Shelly
observes these developments with a cold, calculating eye. His sick and twisted
mind takes center stage when he decides to linger by the Scoutmaster's closet
when all other boys go outside. A bar of light comes into Tim's makeshift
prison, from the small space between the door and the floor. Shelly decides to
cover that light with two dishtowels and tape them in place, while singing to
his master in a mocking voice:
Nobody loves me
Everybody hates me
I'm going to the garden
to eat worms,
to eat worms
Big fat juicy ones,
long thin slimy ones
Itsy-bitsy crawly-wawly
woooorms.
At
this point I realized I knew Shelly from somewhere. He reminded me of Patrick
Hockstetter from Stephen King's IT. Patrick is one of the members of Henry
Bowers' gang, the bullies who terrorise the loser club led by Stuttering Bill.
Like Shelley, Patrick is a major creepazoid. He keeps a pencil box full of dead
flies, which he kills with his ruler and shows it to other students. Like
Shelly, who drowns his cat Trixie while sporting a hard-on, Patrick takes
small, usually injured animals or stray dogs and locks them in a broken
refrigerator in the junkyard, leaving them there to suffocate. In a fit of
vague jealousy, Patrick also asphyxiated his infant brother when he was only
five. Although they have different builds —
Patrick is chubby, while Shelley is more tall and slender — they both have
moonfaces devoid of emotion, slack and doughy, and their eyes are blank, alien.
In Stephen King's book Patrick plays a minor role, just one
of the kids who go missing, a victim of
Pennywise the Clown. But who's the
crazy clown in Nick Cutter's book? A moment's reflection shows that Shelley is Pennywise. Shelley is the
disease, the crazy clown from outer space, the bringer of blood and chaos, the
firestarter. This line of interpretation is consistent with Cutter's portrayal
of Shelley throughout the book. Shelley is the first who realizes that Kent is
infected and Kent punches him in the face in a desperate effort to keep the
creep quiet. "Shelley just stood there. A trickle of blood run from his
split lip like heavy sap from a tapped maple tree. Did he even notice or care?
The empty vaults of his eyes filled with vaporous white, reflecting the lightning
that flashed over the buffs. They became the glass eyes of a toy clown."
Progressively throughout the book, the other boys grasp Shelley's lack of
humanity and refer to him as something
rather than someone. Shelley's The
Thing. Shelley's IT.
But what about the hydatid, conqueror worms? Aren't they the
real danger, the real disease? The relation between the mutated worms and
Shelly is complex and requires a study in itself. What Cutter emphasizes is that,
when Shelley eventually becomes infected, he welcomes
the worms, he identifies himself with
them. He wants to be their parent and help them grow and annihilate everything.
Shelley and the hydatid worms are two aspects of the same disease, of a
mindless cancer that aims to obliterate everything that moves and bleeds. Once
the worms infect Shelley, he thinks of himself as being pregnant with
them. He's both their mother and father. "His stomach was a swollen gourd.
It bulged through his shirt and over the band of his trousers. Its pale
circumference was strung with blue veins and sloshed with a dangerous, exciting
weight." Shelley promises the worms inside him to kill Max and Newton.
"First I have to kill them. Then I'll be alone. Then I can give birth in
peace. Then we can all play."
Clearly,
Cutter is a great portretist, a lyricist reminiscent of Ray Bradbury. However,
his poetic inclination doesn't impede the fast-paced action of the novel but
augments it with a deeper psychological layer. His description of Ephraim
sitting on a boulder and brooding about whether his body's infected with worms
and how to pull them out is burnt in my brain and will haunt me forever.
Ephraim is Kent's challenger, they're both athletic Alphas. When the island
gets hit by a storm, the boys decide to take cover in the cellar, wanting to
avoid the cabin with the dead guy and their sick Scoutmaster. But it's clear
that Kent is also infected. Nonetheless, the former brave leader wants to join
the others. Ephraim beats Kent up, a bit more savagely than the situation
required, given that Kent was already weakened. Moreover, Ephraim has anger
management problems, mostly because of an unhappy childhood, overshadowed by an
abusive father. So Ephraim takes Kent down and punches him again and again, his
first working like pistons. But in the process he touches Kent's infected
blood. The skin of his knuckles is cut open, Kent's blood is under his
fingernails. Is that how the worms wiggle in? Did Kent accidentally give
Ephraim the disease? Once they're in the safety of the cellar Shelley is quick
to ask Ephraim these questions, and take sadistic pleasure in gradually breaking
the other kid down mentally and physically.
"Shelly could tell
that Ephraim was afraid that whatever was in Kent had gotten into him — it'd leapt between their bodies, from Kent's lips to
Ephraim's hand, swimming in on the rush of blood. Shelly knew Ephraim was
scared and he foresaw a great profit in nursing that fear along. It would be
easy. Ephraim was so predictable — so predictably stupid.
Of
course, Shelley hadn't seen the teeny-tiny worms at that point — but he'd
understood that the sickness, whatever it was, scurried inside of you, ate you
from the inside out. That's what made it so scary. This wasn't a bear or a
shark or a psycho axe-murderer; those things were bad, sure, but you could get
away from them. Hide.
How
could you hide from a murderer who lived under your skin? [...]
Shelly
had a method of probing, of opening doors in people that was uncanny. He rarely
used this gift — it could get him in trouble. But he was able to spot the weak
spots the way a sculptor saw the seams in a block of granite; one tap in the
right spot and it would split right open.
I saw something, Eef.
That
was all it had taken. The smallest seedling — he'd slit Ephraim's skin, just
the thinnest cut, slipping that seed in. If Shelley did some additional work,
well, maybe that seed would squirm into Ephraim's veins, surf to his heart, and
bloom into something beautiful. Or horrible. It didn't matter which to
Shelley."
Masterfully,
Shelley plans the seed of doubt in Ephraim's mind. Thinking himself infected
Ephraim becomes distant, obsessive, and stops talking to Max and Newton, his
real friends who only wish to help him. When after the storm the boys decide to
go look for food, Ephraim tags along, but his thoughts are leaden with fear,
heavier and heavier, paralyzing anxiety.
"Sometime
around midafternoon, Ephraim sat down and refused to get up.
"That's
it. I'm not walking anymore."
They
had come to a copse of spruce trees. The air was dense with the scent of pine.
[...]
Ephraim
sat on the moss-covered rock with his fingers knit together in his lap. His
body position mimicked a famous Roman sculpture that Newton had seen in a
history book: The Pugilist at Rest. Ephraim
looked a bit like a statue himself. His skin had a slick alabaster hue, except
for around the lips and the rims of his nostrils, where it had a bluish-gray
tint. Newton had a scary premonition: IF THEY LEFT EPHRAIM HERE AND CAME BACK
YEARS LATER, HE WAS SURE EEF'S BODY WOULD REMAIN IN THIS FIXED POSITION — A
STATUE OF CALCIFIED BONE."
Besides being an
amazing lyricist, Nick Cutter is a masterful painter of decay. With surgical
precision he manages to capture the weeping of flesh. Weeping, in his writing is sometimes used as a metaphor for bleeding. A wound, a cut, weeps. When it
bleeds, meat weeps. In Cutter's universe organic matter is damned. It's a
cursed universe. Everything that lives and breathes is destined to agony. In
the words of philosopher Emil Cioran, "life is too limited and too fragmentary
to endure great tensions." (Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair) The Romanian philosopher argues that death
is imminent in life, it's not a reality outside of life, but buried deep into
the very source of life. Life breeds death. Such a fragile phenomenon, it can
only be understood as an abnormal materialization of death, a grotesque
disease. "The flesh," Cioran also writes, "is neither strange
nor shadowy, but perishable to the point of indecency, to the point of madness.
It is not only the seat of disease, it is itself a disease, incurable
nothingness, a fiction which has degenerated into a calamity. The vision I have
of it is the vision of a gravedigger infected with metaphysics." (Emil Cioran,
The New Gods)
In a way, Nick Cutter is a gravedigger infected with
metaphysics. He knows all the faces of death and can see it in the smallest
details of everyday life. Just like Leibniz's theory of monads or David Bohm's
Holographic Principle, in Cutter's world each part of the universe is a
reflection of the whole. And Cutter is an expert in capturing those bits of
reality that uncover the disease eating at the guts of the whole cosmos. Here's
one of those mundane scenes rich with metaphysical insight:
"Last summer, Max
had shared his house with a family of shearwaters —
a much fleeter version of a puffin. They colonized the cliffs overlooking the
Atlantic, nesting in the rocks. But due to a population explosion, shearwaters
had began to nest in the houses of North Point. They'd chip away the Gyprock
exterior, tugging loose Styrofoam and pink insulation to make room for their
nests.
A family of shearwaters
made one above Max's bedroom window. In the morning he'd crane his neck and see
the daddy shearwater poke his head out of the whole he'd chipped in the house's
facade, darting it in both directions before arrowing out over the water to hunt.
Max's father, however,
wasn't impressed. The lawn was covered in Styrofoam and pink rags of
insulation. The birds would wreck the home's resale value, he griped — despite the fact that he'd lived in North Point all
his life and would likely die in this house. He drove to the Home Hardware,
returning with a bottle of insulating foam sealant. He clambered up a ladder to
the nest, shooed the birds away, stuck the nozzle into the whole, and pumped in
sealant until it billowed out and hardened to a puffy crust. He climbed back
down with a satisfied smile.
But
the shearwaters were back the next day. They'd torn away at the sealant,
ripping it off in chunks with their sickle-shaped beaks. Now the lawn was
covered in Styrofoam, insulation, and
sealant. Max's father repeated the procedure, believing the birds would relent.
But shearwaters are cousins to homing pigeons — they always come back. I should shoot them, Max's father
groused, though he could never do such a thing.
Still,
he was angry — that particular anger of humans defied by the persistence of
nature. He drove back to Home Hardware, returning with another can of sealant
and a few feet of heavy-duty chicken wire. Using tin snips, he cut the wire
into circles roughly the size of the hole. Clambering up the ladder, he made a
layer cake of sorts: a layer of sealant, the chicken wire, sealant, wire,
sealant, wire. Okay, birds, he'd said. Figure that out.
Max
returned from school the next day to find a dead shearwater in the bushes. The
daddy — he could tell by its dark tail feathers. It lay with its neck twisted
at a horrible angle. Its beak was broken — half of it was snapped off. It's
eyes were filmy-gray, like pewter. It'd made a mess: shreds of sealant dotted
the lawn. But his father's handiwork held strong. The daddy bird must've broken
its neck — had it become so frustrated, so crazy, that it'd flown into the
barrier until its neck snapped?
When
Max's father saw the dead bird, his jaw tightened, he blinked a few times very
fast, then quietly he said: I just wanted
them to find someplace else to live.
In the
middle of the night Max had been woken by peeping. The sound was coming from
the walls. Max padded into his parents' room. His father rubbed sleep crust
from his eyes and followed Max back to his bedroom. When he heard those noises,
his face did a strange thing.
At
three o'clock in the morning, Max's dad had climbed the ladder. His housecoat
flapped in the salt breeze. Using a screwdriver and vise grips, he tore out the
sealant and chicken wire, working so manically that he nearly fell. By the time
he'd ripped it away the peeps had stopped. He'd reached deep inside the hole,
into a small depression he'd had not realized was there. He placed whatever
he'd found in the pockets of his housecoat with great reverence.
In the
kitchen, his face was white with shock, he laid them on the table: the mama
bird and two baby birds. The mama bird's wing was broken. The babies were small
and gray-blue, still slick with the gummy liquid inside their eggs. All three
were still."
In Cutter's
universe caring leads to death. The daddy shearwater's care for its family
leads to its destruction. Life is limited and fragmentary. The bird was
programmed by Mother Nature to answer the distress calls of its baby birds.
Equipped with a limited range of behaviors, the slightest change in the
environment — the layered cake of sealant and chicken wire built by Max's dad —
leads to the shearwater's self-annihilation. Life is mad. In a gruesome
instantiation of Einstein's definition of insanity, the daddy shearwater tries
the same thing over and over, peeking away at the sealant, while expecting a
different result. Care and love, the things that stay at the heart of life, are
nothing but harbingers of death. In the words of Dr. Edgerton, "love is
the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to
save the people they love that they end
up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing
so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. But that's people.
People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate
price." On
this sobering picture, Mother Nature is nothing but a dying hysterical whore,
crushed by the fear and guilt of being alive, yet desperately fighting for each
and every breath, blindly clawing handfuls of earth and worms and stuffing them
in its toothless, gaping maw.
All in all, "The
Troop" is a remarkable novel, entertaining yet literary, warm yet visceral.
I recommend it to all who have the strength to face the real horror behind the
veils of the mundane and the stomach for the ugly metaphysical truths crawling
inside it.
On a brighter note, here's a Six Feet Under song with relevant lyrics.
My face shows no emotion The mind of an animal behind human eyes Restrained with a rope Crudely tied to wrists and ankles
Eyes jellied from chemical injections Devoid of all compassion I place no value on human life, life
Body temperature drops rapidly But death comes slow Post-mortal muscle reflexes Repeatedly choked
Your torture brings me pleasure Your torture brings me pleasure Your torture brings me pleasure I climax as I murder
A mass of empty flesh Chosen to die brutally Not one has survived My torture and abuse
Unbearable pain and cruelty Hatred for all fucking life Hatred for all fucking life Hatred for all fucking life
Abducted, beaten and murdered A slow, cold-blooded death Bones have been boiled And removed of all flesh
Your torture brings me pleasure Your torture brings me pleasure Your torture brings me pleasure I climax as I murder
Tortured until your death Loss of blood drains from you now Out leaks the human soul Out leaks the human soul
My face shows no emotion The mind of an animal behind human eyes Devoid of all compassion I place no value on human life
Body temperature drops rapidly But death comes slow Post-mortal muscle reflexes Repeatedly choked
Your torture brings me pleasure Your torture brings me pleasure Your torture brings me pleasure I climax as I murder
Burning, I'm burning your blood Burning, I'm burning your blood Burning, I'm burning your blood Burning, I'm burning your blood
