Those lines are from “Altarwise by Owl-light,” the poem that most haunted me in my teens, largely because I just could not tell what the fuck it was about, a confusion not terribly alleviated by Thomas’s own explication, which I discovered in my high school library: “Those sonnets are only the writings of a boily boy in love with shapes and shadows on his pillow. . . . They would be of interest to another boily boy. Or a boily girl. Boily-girly.”
It’s probably his greatest performance, so it has the highest ratio of smashing lines to the kind of thing you’d expect unicorns to write:
This was the sky, Jack Christ, each minstrel angle
Drove in the heaven-driven of the nails
Till the three-coloured rainbow from my nipples
From pole to pole leapt round the snail-waked world.
If you don’t like “This was the sky, Jack Christ” or “snail-waked world,” you don’t like poetry. And if you can get the image of rainbows shooting out of pudgy-faced Dylan Thomas’s nipples out of your mind anytime soon, you’ve got a heaven-driven hole in your head.
There is a quirkiness to Thomas’s disregard for what part of speech a word usually is that at its best recalls Stevens—“A grief ago” is instantly, telescopically parsable. But at its worst, well—“I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain, / Let fall the tear of time” sounds like E. E. Cummings. In fact, Thomas’s lumpier excrescences usually recall no one so much as Cummings in his twilight-wristed cups: the willy-nilly word order, the grammatical burps, the nonsense masquerading as secular scripture. Of course Thomas is a better poet than Cummings (who isn’t?), but they are similarly susceptible to the smear of sentimentality:
No. Not for Christ’s dazzling bed
Or a nacreous sleep among soft particles and charms
My dear would I change my tears or your iron head.
Thrust, my daughter or son, to escape, there is none, none, none,
Nor when all ponderous heaven’s host of waters breaks.
Who does the guy think he is? I wouldn’t change anyone’s head for a higher thread count, either. The allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “No worst, there is none” feels unearned: Hopkins sincerely believed the state of his soul was at stake. All that’s at stake for Thomas is whether his self-pity has been gorgeously enough expressed.
And it has. That’s what I hate most about Thomas: if you care about poems, you can’t entirely hate him. Phrases, images, metaphors rise from the precious muck and lodge themselves in you like shrapnel. “And the dust shall sing like a bird / As the grains blow”; “The sundering ultimate kingdom of genesis’ thunder”; “the kangaroo foot of the earth”; “Always goodbye to the long-legged bread”; “The whole of the moon I could love and leave”; “And one light’s language in the book of trees”; “When, like a running grave, time tracks you down”; “I make a weapon of an ass’s skeleton”; “where maggots have their X”; “the synagogue of the ear of corn”; “famous among the barns.”
Like Hart Crane’s, Thomas’s faults protrude embarrassingly from the wazoo. Crane’s are a little easier to forgive, since he had vision, and Thomas was myopic. But at his best he has, like Crane, a towering presence of mind, a stranglehold on the language. Perhaps I’d love him more if I hadn’t loved him so much so early. I’ve made my peace with other early crushes who came to seem so much mannered mush: James Wright, Rilke, Neruda. Rereading Thomas now, I find myself thawing toward him, as I slowly did toward those others, whom now I love anew, love more clearly. So get you gone, Dylan Thomas, though with blessings on your head.
DESTROY YOUR SAFE AND HAPPY LIVES
In the beginning, William Blake writes a gonzo mythos called Milton:
All that can be annihilated must be annihilated
That the Children of Jerusalem may be saved from slavery
There is a Negation, & there is a Contrary
The Negation must be destroyd to redeem the Contraries
The Negation is the Spectre; the Reasoning Power in Man
This is a false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal
Spirit; a Selfhood, which must be put off & annihilated alway
In another beginning, a bunch of working-class drug users detune their guitars and add some horror-flick spookiness to the blues. Metal—no one can agree on when or why the “heavy” fell off—is born, half in love with easeful death, with Rimbaud’s “chaos of ice and polar night,” which could describe the sound of a record like the Norwegian black metal band Immortal’s Sons of Northern Darkness.I
These two histories probably have no connection besides the one they spark in me, even if “All that can be annihilated must be annihilated” could be every metal band’s credo, precisely because the line is a sort of affirmation—destruction in the name of redemption.II But this is how popular music works: in secret histories and self-contained channels. As John Ashbery says, “The songs decorate our notion of the world / And mark its limits.”
Metal and poetry are, among other things, arts of accusation and instruction. Together with Rilke’s archaic torso of Apollo, they say: “You must change your life.” To see metal as demanding something of us—a fundamental change, a shift in perspective, an acknowledgment that we are headed in the wrong direction—is to acknowledge that when we listen to it, we’re receptive to its message. (“I beg you to listen,” Ashbery writes. “You are already listening.”) But metal’s message is not the same thing as its rhetoric.
Metal’s most familiar trope is, duh, Satanism, which might be silly—okay, it’s definitely silly—but has a distinguished literary pedigree. Romantic diabolism since the nineteenth century has taken its cue from Milton’s Paradise Lost. “Milton’s Devil as a moral being,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley, is “far superior to his God.” Blake said Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” In the twentieth century, this view of Milton was charmingly defended by William Empson, who argued, more or less, that if by the end of the poem Satan is a rather unsympathetic character, it’s only because God’s such a jerk.
Whatever one thinks of this interpretation—and most modern critics reject it—it’s clear that Satan has the best lines:
That we were formed, then, say’st thou? and the work
Of secondary hands, by task transferred
From Father to his Son? Strange point and new!
Doctrine which we would know whence learned: who saw
When this creation was? Remember’st thou
Thy making, while the Maker gave thee being?
We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
By our own quickening power . . .
For Shelley, it is Satan’s “energy and magnificence” in such passages that mark his superiority. A similar energy inspired Lord Byron, whose epigones Robert Southey dubbed, to Byron’s evident delight, the Satanic School. And a bit later, in the France of the Second Empire, Charles Baudelaire would write a prayer to the “loveliest” angel, “a God betrayed, to whom no anthems rise”: “O Satan, take pity on my sore distress!”III
Well, Old Scratch has more anthems by now than he knows what to do with. And of course Satanism in metal—from Black Sabbath (some of whose early lyrics are actually kind of Christian) to the goofy Swedish pop-metal band Ghost, whose members dress as skeleton popes and devils—is just theater, a metaphor for nonconformity that affirms dark, creative energies that orthodox political-religious-scientific thought would repress. A few black metal bands profess a dully literal belief in Satanism, but I’m not convinced they’re actually interested in anything besides adolescent provocation. As the poet Brandon Brown writes in his obnoxious pseudo-translation of Les Fleurs du mal:
I’d worship Satan
if only I weren’t so allergic to the monochrome
gloomy sartorial orthodoxy
and Nordic vibrato of its brutal soundtrack.
You can quibble with his reading of black metal, but Brown’s po
int is well taken: Satanism is boring.
* * *
More seductive is another trope derived from Romanticism, metal’s enthralling evocation of nature as a sublime and eerie prophylactic against “killing technology,” as Voivod has it. This can get silly too: when I saw them in the summer of 2012, Agalloch had little shrines of animal bones set up on the merch table. Aaron Weaver, the drummer and songwriter for Wolves in the Throne Room, once said that the group’s black metal is inspired by “the moss, the roots and the trees, and the animals that live around here, and the weather and the natural forces that human beings encounter.”24 You expect him to try to sell you some beads. But when, on the band’s “Prayer of Transformation,” Nathan Weaver screams out of a shoegazing guitar haze, “Lay your corpse upon a nest of oak leaves . . . A vessel awaits built from owl feathers and moss,” it’s no longer merely silly, because the sound is overpowering, majestic, soothing and threatening at once, like a pretty dentist’s assistant slipping the mask over your face. I imagine a band playing in some natural old-growth cathedral, overtones crashing into boulders and echoing off ferns.
The apotheosis of this pagan current is reached in the video for Immortal’s “Call of the Wintermoon,” which suggests an infernal collaboration between Caspar David Friedrich and Walt Disney. The band members, dressed as wizards, scamper about in an impossibly green forest, breathing fire and posing dramatically in time with the song’s relentless clatter, which sounds a bit like one of those apps that play rain sounds while you sleep, except with someone croaking semi-comprehensibly about “winterwings” and “Northern darkness.” It’s both embarrassingly inane and, somehow, genuinely evocative of an eerie wilderness sublime, a hokey reminder of why the Puritans of early New England associated the forest with the devil. These corpse-painted Gandalfs are late for a black mass with Hawthorne’s Goody Cloyse.
Black metal’s romantic fetishization of nature is—like Satanism, really—an “angry lament for human folly,” as Erik Davis puts it in an article for Slate on Wolves in the Throne Room (“Evil is the nature of mankind,” the devil tells Goodman Brown).25 It’s a mystic-igloo version of Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us”—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.
—and just as didactic-mournful in its way as the sardonic eco-rage of a poet like Juliana Spahr:
We let the runoff from agriculture, surface mines, forestry, home wastewater treatment systems, construction sites, urban yards, and roadways into our hearts.
We let chloride, magnesium, sulfate, manganese, iron, nitrite/nitrate, aluminum, suspended solids, zinc, phosphorus, fertilizers, animal wastes, oil, grease, dioxins, heavy metals, and lead go through our skin and into our tissues.
We were born at the beginning of these things, at the time of chemicals combining, at the time of stream run off.
These things were a part of us and would become more a part of us but we did not know it yet.
Still we noticed enough to sing a lament.26
Metal’s iconography—devil horns, pagan altars, blood on the forest floor—embraces the dark and primordial; it’s a rebuke to our soft lives.IV We are, metal says, “out of tune.” Deathspell Omega, a wonderfully pretentious French black metal band (their latest album titles are in Latin), quote Georges Bataille: “Every human being not going to the extreme limit is the servant or the enemy of man and the accomplice of a nameless obscenity.” Which sounds like a translation back into English of a bad translation into French of one of Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell.” I’m surprised more bands haven’t plundered this treasure house: “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”; “The lust of the goat is the bounty of God”; “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”; “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”; “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.” Sounds pretty metal to me.
Although metal lyrics provide a trove of such sentiments, no one should listen to metal for the lyrics, which are mostly unskillful. They’re also mostly indecipherable, so no matter. (Yes, there are plenty of exceptions—smart lyrics, clear vocals, both at the same time. I said “mostly.”) Metal makes its argument viscerally. It’s “a triumph of vulgarity, velocity,” says the music critic Chuck Eddy, with “no redeeming social value.”27
Erik Danielsson, frontman for the Swedish black metal outfit Watain, told me that metal “is the form of music through which Diabolical energies flow with the most swiftness and potency.” All metal is a variation on two themes: loud and fast. Some songs are quiet and slow, but always against the background of normative loudness and speed. (Punk and free jazz are loud and fast too, but metal is louder, faster, and less wholesome.)
That said, what always has to be emphasized to metal skeptics is that, as Eddy writes, “it really doesn’t ‘all sound the same.’ By now it’s more varied than any other white-rock genre.” If you never listen to something, it’s easy to say it all sounds the same. But Guns N’ Roses’ tuneful boogie doesn’t sound at all like Converge’s war punk. You can hear Iron Maiden’s guitar trellises in Carcass’s jet-engine revs, but you’d never mistake one for the other. Kvelertak and Baroness throw pop hooks; Gorguts have more in common with Scott Walker than with Metallica. Cauldron and Hammers of Misfortune geek out on ’80s power chords; Grave Miasma and Nile flirt with Middle Eastern modalities. Corsair is obstinately pretty; Incantation is ugly as sin.
Metal doesn’t sound evil. Evil has no particular sound. Metal doesn’t sound fascist—the camp commandant listening to Beethoven in the evenings has become a cliché. If you read about metal, you’ll learn that it often employs Aeolian progressions, staccato rhythmic figures, perfect fifth intervals, and other things I but dimly apprehend. What metal sounds like is the biggest rock and roll you’ve ever heard. I have the TV on as I write this, and I’m half watching the cheesy post-apocalyptic drama Revolution, in which the world has gone dark, when a scene catches my attention. A band in a bar is playing Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” as if it were a My Morning Jacket song. The bartender is telling a story about the day the power came back on unexpectedly for a few minutes after fifteen years of candlelight: “That Wurlitzer over there roars to life, plays ‘Ramble On’ for like four whole minutes, and then just goes dark. People cried. They said it was like hearing the voice of God.”V It is, of course, the voice of a god, Apollo, that issues the imperative from Rilke’s stone.VI
Somehow this wouldn’t work as well with “Gimme Shelter” or “Born to Run.” Greil Marcus wrote that Zeppelin’s music “meant to storm Heaven, and it came close.”28 That’s a definition of metal I can live with, or at least of metal at its best: Death’s Sound of Perseverance, Converge’s Jane Doe, Mercyful Fate’s Don’t Break the Oath, Mastodon’s Remission, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell, Van Halen’s 1984, Atheist’s Unquestionable Presence, the last two-and-a-half minutes of Black Sabbath’s “Heaven and Hell,” when Terry Butler’s throbbing bassline doubles in tempo and Tony Iommi solos in blizzards of single notes and Ronnie James Dio sings about the lies of this world like he’s running along a collapsing bridge, one step ahead of the crevasse. They mean to storm heaven. They come close. “Go, and speed,” Chaos tells Satan in Paradise Lost, “havoc, and spoil, and ruin are my gain.”
* * *
Rock and roll says: why don’t you take a good look at yourself and describe what you see—and baby, baby, baby, do you like it? It says you must change your life. But rock and roll, like all art, lies. Publishers Weekly closed a review of Edward Snow’s translation of Rilke with the claim that “readers will be helpless, after passing through this book, against the command that closes ‘A
rchaic Torso.’ ”29 But no one has ever changed his life because of a poem or song. Changing your life is for Simone Weil or the Buddha. The rest of us need German poetry and Norwegian black metal because they provide the illusion that we are changing, or have changed, or will change, or even want to change our lives.
This is one of many points at which punk and metal dovetail.VII I just picked up my old copy of Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces (a reading of punk in the light of Dada, Adorno, Lettrism, and the Situationist International) to see if Marcus might have used Rilke’s lines, only to find them quoted on the inside cover, in Robert Walsh’s blurb. “Destroy your safe and happy lives before it is too late” (the Mekons) is the punk version. No one ever has. The Mekons know this, just as the grindcore band Liberteer doesn’t expect anyone to actually enact lyrical exhortations like “To be happy, god damn it, kill those who own property.”
A pop song—and metal, for all its fuck no, is pop music—is a commodity, and its market conditions are written into its chord structure. It is caught up entirely in capitalism’s circuits. A wash of guitars and a blast beat do not have the power to resist the contradictions they expose and express.
Imagine if, “after passing through [a] book,” presto, we were “helpless” to avoid changing our lives. Sometimes I wonder what metal would sound like after capitalism, or whether we would even need metal then. I wonder the same about poetry.
Equipment for Living Page 4