This is my proposal and abstract I submitted to the academic journal Helvete, which is devoted to the study of Black Metal music. For their third issue, they opened it up to non academic writers. I wrote it is 2014, when my life was very different. I found it while rummaging through papers for something else. I have no idea why they rejected it. After four years I think it is unique, if a little intense. I was sorry not to have the incentive to delve thoroughly into Neoplatonism.
PROPOSAL FOR HELVETE ISSUE 3: BLEEDING BLACK NOISE
This proposal is for two items:
-
The main article, ‘Goats All The Way Down:
Problems of Hermeneutics in Black Metal ’ (below).
-
pPoem ‘What Really Happened to Pelle When He
died’. Here I contend that the founding
gesture of Black Metal was indeed the suicide of Dead. I present Dead as the
golden hero Sigurd, slaying the dragon Fafnir, and thus becoming one with him.
The poem is a response to the articles by Scott Wilson and Hunter Hunt-Hendrix
in Hideous Gnosis.[1]
GOATS ALL THE WAY DOWN: PROBLEMS OF HERMENEUTICS IN BLACK
METAL
I live in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Christchurch
underwent a devastating earthquake in 2011 and remains in a state of
problematic flux. I work in emergency psychiatry, at the local ED, doing night
shifts, where I relate self-destruction and psychological brokenness to the
destruction of my city. I began listening to Black Metal last year, and my life
has become suffused with it. Walking a broken city at odds with the rest of
society accompanied me into the fundamentally difficult and antinomian nature
of BM.
I propose to explore the apophatic nature of BM. Apophatic
spirituality (or the Via Negativa) talks about the Divine in terms of what it
is not. The best of such language points away from itself. For the Mystery
School thinkers, however, from Gnostic and Neoplatonist traditions, there was
no shortage of words as they attempted to explore the ineffable, to know a God
that was beyond existence or non-existence. [2]
The apophatic emerges in BM’s ultimate failure to attain
union with this dark and empty Divine. This failure sets up hermeneutic
difficulties. What in BM can be spoken of at all? How can the BM practitioner
seek purity of sound and ideology and yet evolve in real social time? What can
be shown and what obscured? How does the BM practitioner live? Can only
self-destruction serve to show devotion and transcend the mundane self? When BM finds a way out, for example through
Theistic Satanism or through NSBM, it risks becoming positivist.
The article will find negative spaces in the music itself,
what the music doesn’t do. My experience of it is aleatoric in that it changes
and randomises my physical environment. I describe walking the damaged city,
especially at night, and include nocturnal photography I have taken from ruined
houses and the riverside. This is
‘blackened walking’, where I bear witness to the decay of my environment and find
its dark and illicit spaces. I call this walk ‘Cthonic squeeze’ and reference a
failed rite of passage, of being trapped in the limen.
I conclude with a poem which I reproduce here in full:
RESILE
You cannot linger on the precipice.
Zoroaster knew that.
It was all dross and gold and shit on the way up.
In the end you have three choices.
You throw yourself off.
You get thrown off.
You stay there. The moon will freeze over. The dirty wolves
will get your daughters. Your ego will be devoured.
There is no resile from this. These are the last sounds you
will ever hear. Not pre-verbal. Post-verbal. Not primordial. What is left over.
No easeful stupid death. Black noise. The sound of soul scraping rock
All
The
Way
Down.
July 2014
[1]
Scott Wilson ‘BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum’ pp. 47-50; Hunter
Hunt-Hendrix ‘Transcendental Black Metal: A Vison of Apocalyptic Humanism’ pp. 55-58
Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory
Symposium I , Lexington, 2012
[2]
Richard T Wallis and Jay Bregman, eds. Neoplatonism
and Gnosticism SUNY Press Oklahoma,1992, p. 180
Here is the link to the journal
https://blackmetaltheory.wordpress.com/
