Why Heavy Metal is poetically superior to Rap music
By Narziss (November 23, 2006)
Heavy Metal music is an outgrowth and at once both an intensification and purification of Rock, which, in turn, is a mutilation of the original spirit of Rock & Roll.
Rock & Roll was named after a term for making love – “rocking” gently and “rolling” together in, presumably, a young man’s automobile’s back seat while parked on Lover’s Lane. We see this intent epitomized in the King of Rock & Roll, Elvis Presley, who was a lover, not – Army tour aside – a fighter as such.
Rock chopped off the Roll and transformed into hate music – sexual aggression focused on the phallic lead guitar and its implications of orchestrating ritual gang rape. Slash of Guns ‘N’ Roses once described the electric guitar as – like a Rapper’s automatic pistol down the front of his pants – “an extension of what’s between your legs.” Yet, Alice Cooper once famously described Rock as being about “joy.” This paradox can only be understood by seeing Rock as a transitional, ideologically incoherent musical form defaulting to hedonism and anarchism, which stretches like a tightrope between Rock & Roll and Heavy Metal.
Rock & Roll being more joyful to the point of salacious, seductive hedonism, Rock, from its political and pharmaco-religious roots of Folk Rock, Acid Rock, and, later on, in a Reggae-inspired revitalising tangent, Punk Rock, struggled out of the 1950s establishment fantasyland and into an increasingly morbid dreamworld – sometimes genuinely inspired and still often insightful, if increasingly less delightful, at its best – of the 1960s British-launched rock-drugs-sex counterculture. Yet, that era was merely ultimately a utopian dream – theory made flesh with tie-dyed praxis stumbling down the hill after her – and the ongoing process of reality rendered Rock increasingly angry and embodying ever more aggressive hedonistic irrationalism.
Heavy Metal is the most pioneering evolution here, being rock musicians setting out to purify and amplify the sound, so that hate is emphasised. If Rock & Roll is a childish dream, and Rock something for increasingly frustrated and horny teenagers to “party” to, Heavy Metal is an attempt to grow up. It is serious.
A WORD ON RAP
Before continuing, however, a word of comparison with Rap music. Rap, in plain terms, is Black Soul music that has been frustrated and rage-filled for so long – “Who stole the soul?” – that it has developed the spiritual equivalent of Toxic Shock Syndrome. Rap music is the musical form par excellence for expressing bestial hatred. Whatever its more human incarnations, such as Public Enemy’s better work, and similar groups, who attempt to address social ills in a constructive or at least intelligently critical manner, the defining feature of Rap’s hatred is its directedness at white society and often whites themselves, who are conceived as the source of all evil. Hatred powers the discipline needed to articulate oneself in a rapid-fire cascading staccato of verbal abuse and self-lionisation. The rap-rap-rap delivery is the verbal equivalent of spitting on one’s enemy the maximum number of times per second. Gangsta Rap squares this effect through gun-obsessed symbolic sexual dominance of everyone, and especially whites and white girls and young women. Someone raised on Rap/Gangsta Rap has been ideologically programmed to enjoy serial killing and interracial rape.
At this point, an unbiased observer might throw up his hands and say, “Heavy Metal, Rap, they’re both hate music, so what’s the difference?” Indeed. That difference I now explain.
THE JOYFUL HATRED OF METALLICA
Heavy Metal’s fundamental idea is of joyful hate. It is not bestial hate, however, exactly, though that form of hatred can seep in to the degree that its adherents lose themselves in the despair of hopeless emotionalism. Dr. William Pierce spoke wisely when he called it “warrior music” in rationalising his acquisition of a pro-white music company known for metal and other aggressive Rock-oriented forms. Rather, it is an expression, not of the hopeless, vengeful cynicism of the prototypical money-and-sex-obsessed Rapper, but of the human hatred an adolescent mind feels when confronted with the “spectacular separation” of modern cultural-economic conditions that frustrates his powerful urge to become fully human. Metal is his expression of hope for a joyous future worth fighting for, in principle, even if in practice he is steeped in grief and despair which he refuses to let slip outright into absolute nihilism.
Left too long without release, Metal has splintered and produced, for chief example, the extremes of chiefly American Death Metal and European/Scandinavian Black Metal. These raise hate to the dangerous pitch of malice, expressed regarding the body (Cannibal Corpse) and the spirit (Deicide, Dimmu Borgir) respectively. They are dangerous – a kind of toxic-shock, too, in a fashion – because they are so immensely polarised and ideologically frozen: : Metal gone mad – so extreme as to be often indistinguishable from politico-sexual madness in a certain sense. Not that madness can bring no insights, but to explain the political value of Metal we must concentrate on the idea of Heavy Metal proper as an archetype.
THE ANIMAL WITHIN
As noted elsewhere, the human body and brain comprise a single animal which our human minds – made in the image of the unified creative potentiality of the universe, and so sacred – associate with, interact through with sensuous existence, and, most importantly, attempt to possess in order to further our politico-sexual self-interests as human beings capable of using our sovereign faculty of cognition to master the universe for the benefit of all and the glory of that in which’s image we are reflections of. Your every sensation, emotion, and thought which isn’t subsumed into the matrix of Reason-Agape that defines your mind as intrinsically human and not a lower form of life, is the antirational product of your bestial self.
Most people spend most, if not all, of their lives under the control of their body-brain, and, as a result, the societies they produce and consent to, whether tacitly to a Kingship or by voting in a Democracy, invariably express from their inception an axiomatic flaw that is eventually tragically expressed by an increasing tendency to eventually select acting subhuman leaders who express this flaw, neglecting or opposing the adaptive progress and scientific and artistic development necessary to society’s successful survival, until the principles of reality slowly erode the given society’s ability to survive, until, like our present world economic order, the collapse phase is entered, where the society must either regenerate through applied, profound thought, or perish.
But, this disconnect between antirational animality and rational humanity does not need to be. The Siren song of the possibility of its solution drives religion, perplexes philosophy, and seduces ideology into chasing mirages of fascism, communism, Aquarian utopianism, and Political Correctness. Whether the body is loved or hated, indulged or enslaved, the fundamental disconnect remains to undermine all real or imagined progress. The intuition is unshakeable, however, that there must be a way to reconcile our humanity with the animal flesh we paradoxically, painfully, infuriatingly, and all-too-rarely delightfully inhabit.
The thing to realise, is that the body is a living being and thus worthy of compassion as well as rational understanding. To grasp this, we must understand how the body conceives of the human mind which confronts it.
To the body – more specifically, here, to the image of the body your mind contains that is stereoscopically equivalent to your body itself – the (human, cognitive) mind appears as a vast and utterly incomprehensible nullity that giveth and taketh away without warning, logic, justice, or explanation. In other words, to the hapless body, the mind appears prosaic (akin to an inanimate force), chaotic, amoral (i.e. dishonourable), and, most of all, hostile.
These characteristics make the human mind absolute, blasphemous evil incarnate! “Becoming fully human” – i.e. becoming a cognitively potent human being willing to sacrifice, and potentially be horribly tortured and murdered, for the sake of civilisation – thus clearly threatens that demons will come and drag their screaming victim into Hell.
There are seven responses to this: (1) The response of grim willpower under a fanatical ideology, enslaving the body, belittling and suppressing its desires through ignorance, pain, shame, and guilt; (2) indulging the body by becoming a hedonist; (3) living an ordinary, Oprah-Winfrey-recommended nice, balanced, politically impotent life; (4) commit suicide and chance the afterlife; (5) go insane and become unable to conceptualise the question; (6) merge with the body into a Zen mindlessness of graceful flow; or (7) fulfill the promise implicit in, but not exclusively expressed by, Heavy Metal.
PAIN
The flesh rebels against the spirit, not because the flesh is evil, but because it is horrified. All existence is pain; pain is proof positive we live in a progressing universe, because only change generates it. Without change, we would have a timeless peace, and no jarring surprises for our nervous system to deal with. Pleasure is always the release from pain: an itch, one of the lightest kinds of pain, creates the potential to enjoy scratching it. A cool glass of water is more pleasurable to the parched than to the water-fat. A hot meal tastes better when one is hungry. A pretty girl can be a “sight for sore eyes.” Even the base pleasure of answering a call of nature is about release from an increasingly uncomfortable urge. All pleasure is the brain’s structural interpretation of a nervous event as easing instinctual discomfort. Spiritual pleasure is analogously so.
Another way to understand this is to ask what is the absolute midpoint between pleasure and pain. The faintest pain we know is a tickle, as by a feather for instance, or a gentle scratch by a fingernail. These are surface irritations, gone as soon as the irritating action ceases. The faintest pleasure we know is a caress, something that is not rough but implies some kind of lubrication, as by the thin layer of oil on the skin, or by a tongue. This midpoint between these two is not nullity, but a state of uncertainty that generates a shiver of anticipation that the French termed frisson. Consider further, however, how fluid the boundary between our interpretations of what is pleasurable, and what is painful, really are. Most children, for instance, like being tickled. Other children find it intolerably painful. In adult life, a man may learn to enjoy the pain of lifting weights in order to build up his muscles, and a woman may learn to enjoy the grief a well-constructed film stirs within her. These things are not absolutes, or, rather, pleasure is not an absolute. Rather, pleasure is a special case of, and an inverted interpretation of, pain as the ultimate reality.
And why is this so, we might ask. Isn’t this a horrible thing to contemplate? Of course! - if you’re overexposed to it and unprepared. But this world forever changes, and changes insult every fixed system given enough time, damaging it, causing it strife and pain. All life, no matter how joyous in its release of instinctual pressures, eventually suffers the pain of death as entropy catches up with it. And in man, who faces a superior level of problems that define his existence and prove his character through his existential responses to them, the pain of knowledge of good and evil – knowledge of the imperfection that is, and the perfection that should be – makes him suffer like nothing else in creation, for his suffering is of spiritual meaning. And his highest fate is not the peace of ease as the popular, degraded sentimentalist would have it, nor sensual, small-emotional, or even conceptual pleasure. These things are all good in their time, very good, as Genesis tells us. But the highest mortal fate is to experience our fullest humanity, our cognitive capacity expressed as “tears of joy” for the sensual fulfillment of the unification of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth; of the experience of Agape through Reason. And beyond that, perhaps, Elysium, even if that afterlife is nothing but the satisfaction that it was worth it, and that good prevailed over evil.
Thus, both the body and the mind confront a universe of imperfection that expresses itself in an unending threat and spiral round of pain. Faced with a capricious and inexplicable alien god against which it is powerless, the body (or, again, more correctly, the bestial ego) is gripped with nervous tension that seeks to fly from the nightmare that the self-conscious “I” (human mind) portends. Most psychosis, neurosis, suicide, drug addiction, race-mixing, and Romantic and sexual and political impotence are symptoms of this internal war or sciamachy as animal body and human mind contend for hegemony, each, through many wiles and stratagems, seeking to possess the other.
THE POWER OF METAL
In such a struggle, there can be no truce. Immortality is at stake! The only rational solution is harmonic, hegemonic complementarity. The human mind must come to possess the body utterly, in principle if not necessarily always in controlling practice, and the body must both know it is so possessed (“owned”
, and take joy in that fact, serving its master faithfully to whatever end.
This is where Metal comes in. For Metal, as an anticlassical (antirational) musical form, is fundamentally the body doing the speaking. The body is singing out through harsh cries, punching drums, and sweet steel guitars, its hatred of the world as it is, and its joy at the promise of justice its passionate words prophesy.
The solution to the body-mind war is for the body to worship the mind as its absolute God, before which it will suffer no other gods. In other words, the fanatic body worshipping the categorically superior mind that reserves for itself but imbues parodically through interaction the godlike power of reason.
Achieving this does not mean beating the body into submission. It means treating it precisely like an animal that one is in a loving, playful, principled, intelligent training relationship with – that one will succeed in possessing – like those German Shepherd attack dogs in World War Two Germany whose lone masters were their world, and where when the master died the dog had to be shot for it would obey no other.
Doing this means understanding instincts (male & female, sexual), understanding Classical Humanism (the culture of humanity and what it means to be truly human), and disciplining oneself perpetually in a sado-masochistic exercise of demanding painful exertion of various kinds while periodically allowing carefully sculpted “down time” and hedonistic-like pleasurable indulgence, whether sensually, emotionally, or conceptually. This is not merely a carrot/stick regimen, but something organised where every sensation and experience serves some kind of loving purpose that fulfills the mind’s self-identity as a human interested in pursuing truth through investigation, endurance, and experiment. But, above all and crucially it involves grasping the idea this essay is attempting to jog in your mind to come to realise.
The body is like a woman – toward the latter of whom I mean no disrespect, here, but wish to employ the metaphor. It is an animal, instinct-ridden, antirational, and deceptive, but ultimately good and useful. It, like women, is concerned with relationships, here between neurons and organic tissues, and not with territorial unity as such, in itself, whatever its motivating instincts as a sex may be. Left to its own command the body will career into disaster as surely as, and essentially what we are seeing with, a society run by Feminists.
The mind is a man, a robot, in a manner of speaking, concerned with unifying conceptual territory. The division troubles the mind and it seeks to seduce and unify with the flesh; terrified, the flesh flies and deceives the mind. With a proper Romance between spirit wooing – forcefully, if need be – flesh, in terms of Storgos-Eros-Philia (not Agape!) and bound by hatred of the body as an imperfect vessel, one which, above all, must be founded on a principle of absolute self-honesty and covenant of honour within one’s own mind not to lie in any way to the body by “saying” one intent and “doing” another that violates that internal honour, then, to the degree one truly comes to know oneself and is truly honourable, compassionate, rational – “fair” – the body redirects the hatred expressed-as-loving-discipline not back at its Lord, but toward the Lord’s enemies. Here, under Reason-Agape, that means not lifeforms and objects but problems of ugliness, untruth, and suffering that it’s the “will of the Lord” to destroy using the knowledge, tools, time, raw materials, and will that same Lord provides.
In such a blessed condition, the best Metal takes on a new hope, its joyful hatred the song of a creature that has found divinity worthy of worship and rejoices in the hatred that that divinity blesses it to use in its service, and in so doing, finds peace, even in the wildest action. Just as a puppydog is improved to think and act at a higher level than it ever could in the wild, through its loving interaction with a smart and fair boy, so is the body rendered superior when it comes to know its only true Master. This improvement is not an all-or-nothing affair, of course, and does not provide supra-kinesthetic or mental abilities, skill, or iron willpower. The specifics remain the same – but, oh, how everything is changed by a gem of faith in the collar on the neck of one’s animal ego. Building that faith is like lifting weights, demanding struggle and pacing and reward, but the faith itself is rational because it is always the rational mind directing its progress, and it is always the rational mind that must take the blame for its failure or diminishment.
All the damage sung about in Metal songs – which ordinarily in Rock forms promote, on a banal, symbolic level, a defensive reaction of a transformation into an armour-like enhanced Ego – becomes a metaphor for the animal’s struggle against an insane world in the quest to find shelter and comfort and instinctual release that reconciles it with the horror of the Absolute Non-Existence of the One – the death of “God” so to speak. That’s not the content of Metal, of course, which is varied and by turns specifically religious, political, and relational. Rather, it is the spirit of Metal. And while it remains an anticlassical style, and therefore not Poetic in the highest known sense of Schiller and Shelley, it stands as one of the highest, if not the highest, known form of anticlassical music and one that specifically addresses the principle of what might be termed Whiteness as the universal idea which the white race is most associated with in history – of compassionate, rational, and dogged futurism – making Heavy Metal specifically useful as an adolescent counterpoint to the adult human drive toward total, rapid, and brutal transformation of prepubescent player into adult worker. Or, when that adult human is merely an adult, not an acting human, the adolescent preservation of the righteousness that a banal society seeks to cheat him of.
Heavy Metal explains why adolescence is necessary at all. In the future, when the font of sanity has sprung anew for all to drink from, there may be other, better ways of efficiently expressing and acting on the joyful hatred paradox this essay has described. But, until that time, one of the most ironic and pretty ways of doing it might be for the repentant animal body to sincerely recite the following verse while listening to “Master of Puppets” by Metallica on high blast, all while the human mind, the self-conscious “I,” contemplates the actually human purpose of the enjoyable exercise in summoning the hope called hate, without which no better future can be. Rather than a poetic human hope of divine comfort alone, when said by the bestial Ego under these conditionalities, the verse takes on a parallel and convergent meaning as to the body it becomes something it itself says humbly to itself as a battle hymn.
1 The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeath me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou annointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
--Psalm 23, The Bible
Such is the proper relationship between body and mind, flesh and spirit, perfectly poetically described. And that, in germ, is the perfect principle of perfecting religion itself, to bind mankind ever faster and more enjoyably securely to his stellar destiny in a manner that does not cheat his most faithful servant of solace and reward. Such is the mortal condition of the righteous.
When a man lies he murders
Some part of the world
These are the pale deaths which
Men miscall their lives
All this I cannot bear
To witness any longer
Cannot the kingdom of salvation
Take me home
--“To Live Is To Die,” by Metallica
Narziss
By Narziss (November 23, 2006)
Heavy Metal music is an outgrowth and at once both an intensification and purification of Rock, which, in turn, is a mutilation of the original spirit of Rock & Roll.
Rock & Roll was named after a term for making love – “rocking” gently and “rolling” together in, presumably, a young man’s automobile’s back seat while parked on Lover’s Lane. We see this intent epitomized in the King of Rock & Roll, Elvis Presley, who was a lover, not – Army tour aside – a fighter as such.
Rock chopped off the Roll and transformed into hate music – sexual aggression focused on the phallic lead guitar and its implications of orchestrating ritual gang rape. Slash of Guns ‘N’ Roses once described the electric guitar as – like a Rapper’s automatic pistol down the front of his pants – “an extension of what’s between your legs.” Yet, Alice Cooper once famously described Rock as being about “joy.” This paradox can only be understood by seeing Rock as a transitional, ideologically incoherent musical form defaulting to hedonism and anarchism, which stretches like a tightrope between Rock & Roll and Heavy Metal.
Rock & Roll being more joyful to the point of salacious, seductive hedonism, Rock, from its political and pharmaco-religious roots of Folk Rock, Acid Rock, and, later on, in a Reggae-inspired revitalising tangent, Punk Rock, struggled out of the 1950s establishment fantasyland and into an increasingly morbid dreamworld – sometimes genuinely inspired and still often insightful, if increasingly less delightful, at its best – of the 1960s British-launched rock-drugs-sex counterculture. Yet, that era was merely ultimately a utopian dream – theory made flesh with tie-dyed praxis stumbling down the hill after her – and the ongoing process of reality rendered Rock increasingly angry and embodying ever more aggressive hedonistic irrationalism.
Heavy Metal is the most pioneering evolution here, being rock musicians setting out to purify and amplify the sound, so that hate is emphasised. If Rock & Roll is a childish dream, and Rock something for increasingly frustrated and horny teenagers to “party” to, Heavy Metal is an attempt to grow up. It is serious.
A WORD ON RAP
Before continuing, however, a word of comparison with Rap music. Rap, in plain terms, is Black Soul music that has been frustrated and rage-filled for so long – “Who stole the soul?” – that it has developed the spiritual equivalent of Toxic Shock Syndrome. Rap music is the musical form par excellence for expressing bestial hatred. Whatever its more human incarnations, such as Public Enemy’s better work, and similar groups, who attempt to address social ills in a constructive or at least intelligently critical manner, the defining feature of Rap’s hatred is its directedness at white society and often whites themselves, who are conceived as the source of all evil. Hatred powers the discipline needed to articulate oneself in a rapid-fire cascading staccato of verbal abuse and self-lionisation. The rap-rap-rap delivery is the verbal equivalent of spitting on one’s enemy the maximum number of times per second. Gangsta Rap squares this effect through gun-obsessed symbolic sexual dominance of everyone, and especially whites and white girls and young women. Someone raised on Rap/Gangsta Rap has been ideologically programmed to enjoy serial killing and interracial rape.
At this point, an unbiased observer might throw up his hands and say, “Heavy Metal, Rap, they’re both hate music, so what’s the difference?” Indeed. That difference I now explain.
THE JOYFUL HATRED OF METALLICA
Heavy Metal’s fundamental idea is of joyful hate. It is not bestial hate, however, exactly, though that form of hatred can seep in to the degree that its adherents lose themselves in the despair of hopeless emotionalism. Dr. William Pierce spoke wisely when he called it “warrior music” in rationalising his acquisition of a pro-white music company known for metal and other aggressive Rock-oriented forms. Rather, it is an expression, not of the hopeless, vengeful cynicism of the prototypical money-and-sex-obsessed Rapper, but of the human hatred an adolescent mind feels when confronted with the “spectacular separation” of modern cultural-economic conditions that frustrates his powerful urge to become fully human. Metal is his expression of hope for a joyous future worth fighting for, in principle, even if in practice he is steeped in grief and despair which he refuses to let slip outright into absolute nihilism.
Left too long without release, Metal has splintered and produced, for chief example, the extremes of chiefly American Death Metal and European/Scandinavian Black Metal. These raise hate to the dangerous pitch of malice, expressed regarding the body (Cannibal Corpse) and the spirit (Deicide, Dimmu Borgir) respectively. They are dangerous – a kind of toxic-shock, too, in a fashion – because they are so immensely polarised and ideologically frozen: : Metal gone mad – so extreme as to be often indistinguishable from politico-sexual madness in a certain sense. Not that madness can bring no insights, but to explain the political value of Metal we must concentrate on the idea of Heavy Metal proper as an archetype.
THE ANIMAL WITHIN
As noted elsewhere, the human body and brain comprise a single animal which our human minds – made in the image of the unified creative potentiality of the universe, and so sacred – associate with, interact through with sensuous existence, and, most importantly, attempt to possess in order to further our politico-sexual self-interests as human beings capable of using our sovereign faculty of cognition to master the universe for the benefit of all and the glory of that in which’s image we are reflections of. Your every sensation, emotion, and thought which isn’t subsumed into the matrix of Reason-Agape that defines your mind as intrinsically human and not a lower form of life, is the antirational product of your bestial self.
Most people spend most, if not all, of their lives under the control of their body-brain, and, as a result, the societies they produce and consent to, whether tacitly to a Kingship or by voting in a Democracy, invariably express from their inception an axiomatic flaw that is eventually tragically expressed by an increasing tendency to eventually select acting subhuman leaders who express this flaw, neglecting or opposing the adaptive progress and scientific and artistic development necessary to society’s successful survival, until the principles of reality slowly erode the given society’s ability to survive, until, like our present world economic order, the collapse phase is entered, where the society must either regenerate through applied, profound thought, or perish.
But, this disconnect between antirational animality and rational humanity does not need to be. The Siren song of the possibility of its solution drives religion, perplexes philosophy, and seduces ideology into chasing mirages of fascism, communism, Aquarian utopianism, and Political Correctness. Whether the body is loved or hated, indulged or enslaved, the fundamental disconnect remains to undermine all real or imagined progress. The intuition is unshakeable, however, that there must be a way to reconcile our humanity with the animal flesh we paradoxically, painfully, infuriatingly, and all-too-rarely delightfully inhabit.
The thing to realise, is that the body is a living being and thus worthy of compassion as well as rational understanding. To grasp this, we must understand how the body conceives of the human mind which confronts it.
To the body – more specifically, here, to the image of the body your mind contains that is stereoscopically equivalent to your body itself – the (human, cognitive) mind appears as a vast and utterly incomprehensible nullity that giveth and taketh away without warning, logic, justice, or explanation. In other words, to the hapless body, the mind appears prosaic (akin to an inanimate force), chaotic, amoral (i.e. dishonourable), and, most of all, hostile.
These characteristics make the human mind absolute, blasphemous evil incarnate! “Becoming fully human” – i.e. becoming a cognitively potent human being willing to sacrifice, and potentially be horribly tortured and murdered, for the sake of civilisation – thus clearly threatens that demons will come and drag their screaming victim into Hell.
There are seven responses to this: (1) The response of grim willpower under a fanatical ideology, enslaving the body, belittling and suppressing its desires through ignorance, pain, shame, and guilt; (2) indulging the body by becoming a hedonist; (3) living an ordinary, Oprah-Winfrey-recommended nice, balanced, politically impotent life; (4) commit suicide and chance the afterlife; (5) go insane and become unable to conceptualise the question; (6) merge with the body into a Zen mindlessness of graceful flow; or (7) fulfill the promise implicit in, but not exclusively expressed by, Heavy Metal.
PAIN
The flesh rebels against the spirit, not because the flesh is evil, but because it is horrified. All existence is pain; pain is proof positive we live in a progressing universe, because only change generates it. Without change, we would have a timeless peace, and no jarring surprises for our nervous system to deal with. Pleasure is always the release from pain: an itch, one of the lightest kinds of pain, creates the potential to enjoy scratching it. A cool glass of water is more pleasurable to the parched than to the water-fat. A hot meal tastes better when one is hungry. A pretty girl can be a “sight for sore eyes.” Even the base pleasure of answering a call of nature is about release from an increasingly uncomfortable urge. All pleasure is the brain’s structural interpretation of a nervous event as easing instinctual discomfort. Spiritual pleasure is analogously so.
Another way to understand this is to ask what is the absolute midpoint between pleasure and pain. The faintest pain we know is a tickle, as by a feather for instance, or a gentle scratch by a fingernail. These are surface irritations, gone as soon as the irritating action ceases. The faintest pleasure we know is a caress, something that is not rough but implies some kind of lubrication, as by the thin layer of oil on the skin, or by a tongue. This midpoint between these two is not nullity, but a state of uncertainty that generates a shiver of anticipation that the French termed frisson. Consider further, however, how fluid the boundary between our interpretations of what is pleasurable, and what is painful, really are. Most children, for instance, like being tickled. Other children find it intolerably painful. In adult life, a man may learn to enjoy the pain of lifting weights in order to build up his muscles, and a woman may learn to enjoy the grief a well-constructed film stirs within her. These things are not absolutes, or, rather, pleasure is not an absolute. Rather, pleasure is a special case of, and an inverted interpretation of, pain as the ultimate reality.
And why is this so, we might ask. Isn’t this a horrible thing to contemplate? Of course! - if you’re overexposed to it and unprepared. But this world forever changes, and changes insult every fixed system given enough time, damaging it, causing it strife and pain. All life, no matter how joyous in its release of instinctual pressures, eventually suffers the pain of death as entropy catches up with it. And in man, who faces a superior level of problems that define his existence and prove his character through his existential responses to them, the pain of knowledge of good and evil – knowledge of the imperfection that is, and the perfection that should be – makes him suffer like nothing else in creation, for his suffering is of spiritual meaning. And his highest fate is not the peace of ease as the popular, degraded sentimentalist would have it, nor sensual, small-emotional, or even conceptual pleasure. These things are all good in their time, very good, as Genesis tells us. But the highest mortal fate is to experience our fullest humanity, our cognitive capacity expressed as “tears of joy” for the sensual fulfillment of the unification of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth; of the experience of Agape through Reason. And beyond that, perhaps, Elysium, even if that afterlife is nothing but the satisfaction that it was worth it, and that good prevailed over evil.
Thus, both the body and the mind confront a universe of imperfection that expresses itself in an unending threat and spiral round of pain. Faced with a capricious and inexplicable alien god against which it is powerless, the body (or, again, more correctly, the bestial ego) is gripped with nervous tension that seeks to fly from the nightmare that the self-conscious “I” (human mind) portends. Most psychosis, neurosis, suicide, drug addiction, race-mixing, and Romantic and sexual and political impotence are symptoms of this internal war or sciamachy as animal body and human mind contend for hegemony, each, through many wiles and stratagems, seeking to possess the other.
THE POWER OF METAL
In such a struggle, there can be no truce. Immortality is at stake! The only rational solution is harmonic, hegemonic complementarity. The human mind must come to possess the body utterly, in principle if not necessarily always in controlling practice, and the body must both know it is so possessed (“owned”
, and take joy in that fact, serving its master faithfully to whatever end.This is where Metal comes in. For Metal, as an anticlassical (antirational) musical form, is fundamentally the body doing the speaking. The body is singing out through harsh cries, punching drums, and sweet steel guitars, its hatred of the world as it is, and its joy at the promise of justice its passionate words prophesy.
The solution to the body-mind war is for the body to worship the mind as its absolute God, before which it will suffer no other gods. In other words, the fanatic body worshipping the categorically superior mind that reserves for itself but imbues parodically through interaction the godlike power of reason.
Achieving this does not mean beating the body into submission. It means treating it precisely like an animal that one is in a loving, playful, principled, intelligent training relationship with – that one will succeed in possessing – like those German Shepherd attack dogs in World War Two Germany whose lone masters were their world, and where when the master died the dog had to be shot for it would obey no other.
Doing this means understanding instincts (male & female, sexual), understanding Classical Humanism (the culture of humanity and what it means to be truly human), and disciplining oneself perpetually in a sado-masochistic exercise of demanding painful exertion of various kinds while periodically allowing carefully sculpted “down time” and hedonistic-like pleasurable indulgence, whether sensually, emotionally, or conceptually. This is not merely a carrot/stick regimen, but something organised where every sensation and experience serves some kind of loving purpose that fulfills the mind’s self-identity as a human interested in pursuing truth through investigation, endurance, and experiment. But, above all and crucially it involves grasping the idea this essay is attempting to jog in your mind to come to realise.
The body is like a woman – toward the latter of whom I mean no disrespect, here, but wish to employ the metaphor. It is an animal, instinct-ridden, antirational, and deceptive, but ultimately good and useful. It, like women, is concerned with relationships, here between neurons and organic tissues, and not with territorial unity as such, in itself, whatever its motivating instincts as a sex may be. Left to its own command the body will career into disaster as surely as, and essentially what we are seeing with, a society run by Feminists.
The mind is a man, a robot, in a manner of speaking, concerned with unifying conceptual territory. The division troubles the mind and it seeks to seduce and unify with the flesh; terrified, the flesh flies and deceives the mind. With a proper Romance between spirit wooing – forcefully, if need be – flesh, in terms of Storgos-Eros-Philia (not Agape!) and bound by hatred of the body as an imperfect vessel, one which, above all, must be founded on a principle of absolute self-honesty and covenant of honour within one’s own mind not to lie in any way to the body by “saying” one intent and “doing” another that violates that internal honour, then, to the degree one truly comes to know oneself and is truly honourable, compassionate, rational – “fair” – the body redirects the hatred expressed-as-loving-discipline not back at its Lord, but toward the Lord’s enemies. Here, under Reason-Agape, that means not lifeforms and objects but problems of ugliness, untruth, and suffering that it’s the “will of the Lord” to destroy using the knowledge, tools, time, raw materials, and will that same Lord provides.
In such a blessed condition, the best Metal takes on a new hope, its joyful hatred the song of a creature that has found divinity worthy of worship and rejoices in the hatred that that divinity blesses it to use in its service, and in so doing, finds peace, even in the wildest action. Just as a puppydog is improved to think and act at a higher level than it ever could in the wild, through its loving interaction with a smart and fair boy, so is the body rendered superior when it comes to know its only true Master. This improvement is not an all-or-nothing affair, of course, and does not provide supra-kinesthetic or mental abilities, skill, or iron willpower. The specifics remain the same – but, oh, how everything is changed by a gem of faith in the collar on the neck of one’s animal ego. Building that faith is like lifting weights, demanding struggle and pacing and reward, but the faith itself is rational because it is always the rational mind directing its progress, and it is always the rational mind that must take the blame for its failure or diminishment.
All the damage sung about in Metal songs – which ordinarily in Rock forms promote, on a banal, symbolic level, a defensive reaction of a transformation into an armour-like enhanced Ego – becomes a metaphor for the animal’s struggle against an insane world in the quest to find shelter and comfort and instinctual release that reconciles it with the horror of the Absolute Non-Existence of the One – the death of “God” so to speak. That’s not the content of Metal, of course, which is varied and by turns specifically religious, political, and relational. Rather, it is the spirit of Metal. And while it remains an anticlassical style, and therefore not Poetic in the highest known sense of Schiller and Shelley, it stands as one of the highest, if not the highest, known form of anticlassical music and one that specifically addresses the principle of what might be termed Whiteness as the universal idea which the white race is most associated with in history – of compassionate, rational, and dogged futurism – making Heavy Metal specifically useful as an adolescent counterpoint to the adult human drive toward total, rapid, and brutal transformation of prepubescent player into adult worker. Or, when that adult human is merely an adult, not an acting human, the adolescent preservation of the righteousness that a banal society seeks to cheat him of.
Heavy Metal explains why adolescence is necessary at all. In the future, when the font of sanity has sprung anew for all to drink from, there may be other, better ways of efficiently expressing and acting on the joyful hatred paradox this essay has described. But, until that time, one of the most ironic and pretty ways of doing it might be for the repentant animal body to sincerely recite the following verse while listening to “Master of Puppets” by Metallica on high blast, all while the human mind, the self-conscious “I,” contemplates the actually human purpose of the enjoyable exercise in summoning the hope called hate, without which no better future can be. Rather than a poetic human hope of divine comfort alone, when said by the bestial Ego under these conditionalities, the verse takes on a parallel and convergent meaning as to the body it becomes something it itself says humbly to itself as a battle hymn.
1 The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeath me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou annointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
--Psalm 23, The Bible
Such is the proper relationship between body and mind, flesh and spirit, perfectly poetically described. And that, in germ, is the perfect principle of perfecting religion itself, to bind mankind ever faster and more enjoyably securely to his stellar destiny in a manner that does not cheat his most faithful servant of solace and reward. Such is the mortal condition of the righteous.
When a man lies he murders
Some part of the world
These are the pale deaths which
Men miscall their lives
All this I cannot bear
To witness any longer
Cannot the kingdom of salvation
Take me home
--“To Live Is To Die,” by Metallica
Narziss
