about
Bellowing
in Death Metal
especially what’s called old
school & sources in / links with the occult
Symbolists rejected the overwhelming realism that led everything living to die in art, said The Regular, all 19th century thought, in fact, the symbolists rejected reality, they wanted to get out of the world, just somewhere away, somewhere in hell, realism kills everything with boredom, they said, the symbolists’ transfigurations were a response to this boredom, to lifeless manifestations of things; beauty was dying out, because beauty, I think, is barely found on the surface of things, the beautiful, the true and divine, is inside things, the inner area, and that’s where transfiguration directs itself, a solution from under the suffocating surface of things …Transformative vision is everything, Bernharður, much more Greek, the idea of transfiguration originates in Christian mysticism, when the body of Christ goes to the angels, the avatar of Jesus lights up inside yet the body’s form is unchanging, its external manifestation does not alter, and so too in reality the manifestation of the world does not change after transfiguration, instead things become archetypal or prototypical in the Platonic sense, or, more accurately, the Socratic sense, meaning the idea that things do not die except at worst on the surface, life can be found within, in sleep, dreams, death and so on, it is the road to the world beyond the world …Why is Vincent Van Gogh a symbolist? His absinthe drinking and his aura? Slicing off his ear? … in my book, that is more accurately a deformation, a distortion, not a transformation, even less a transfiguration, but it is still an illumination from within, the night sky is lit up from within like with Christ’s transfiguration … Kirk Douglas interpreted Van Gogh’s existential pain remarkably in the old film, have you seen it? That was such a deep surprise, because it is one thing to be a European artist and another to be an American artist, is it not … Kirk Douglas playing Vincent Van Gogh! I was skeptical about the movie, to say the least, but when he jumps into the bushes at the peak of his madness at the institution … the essence of symbolism! …Van Gogh is really a reverse symbolist, a symbolist in negative or maybe not a symbolist?
Trey Azagthoth is not like most people, no one in Morbid Angel is like most people, in fact no one in death metal is like most people. Trey Azagthoth is a symbolist in the same sense as Van Gogh, who wasn’t a symbolist at all, perhaps, or maybe a new type of symbolist, a physical symbolist, for when Trey Azagthoth plays his guitar at a concert he cuts himself with a razor blade, marking an inverted cross and the devil’s star on his arm, he contracts and he vanishes behind his guitar, it seems very much like he’s getting sexual satisfaction as blood leaks down the strings, that he’s raging away on the instrument in some other world, just let others try and do as much! The Regular said, laughing so that his teeth glittered. Trey Azagthoth’s form falls into a trance and his inner experience of divinity blasts out the Marshall amplifier! … symbols … the language of the other side … for that matter, one might say that a Trey Azagthoth guitar solo is a tribute to Vincent Van Gogh and the sliced-off ear, perversion as emotional perfection, art, divinity …The venomous serpent’s sitting there not saying anything, The Regular said at Circus, the wormy, hearing-impaired poet with his big head just looks at us, hardly even thinking, doggedly fingering the base of his glass, watching us chatting together, not hearing any of it, maybe he’s reading our lips, are lips telepathic? …Worm Serpent sits and looks at us and drinks, his same old tweed jacket as ever, smelly and swollen by nihilism; some people go to the bar every day only to sit and drink and goggle at others and to eavesdrop, pretending to be thinking but not thinking, not that I know for sure, Worm Serpent looks like he’s thinking, with that gigantic head, that blinding forehead, that fur hat resting on top of his box-shaped head, the venomous snake seems lost deep inside itself, perhaps he’s gone deep inside to compose poetry, wandering withered fields of thought within his great head?
The year after Blessed Are the Sick was released in the death metal Mecca, Tampa, Florida, I turned sixteen and my mother wanted to get me out of the house: the time has come when you need to look after yourself—but I stayed home and didn’t do anything but listen to albums; I was no good for anything. Some man had moved in with us and I didn’t accept him, refusing to talk to him, pretending not to see him, pretending he wasn’t there, who was this man? … My mother thought it a good solution to send this moody teenager away from the country, people do everything in their power to get rid of children nowadays, there are playschools, kindergartens, elementary schools, so on, you can use student exchange programs to get rid of teenagers, for a year or possibly forever, on the pretext that children gain experience in and knowledge of an alien world, but I didn’t want to go anywhere except one place in the world, Tampa, Florida, my mother was astonished at that, but I explained how Tampa, Florida, was the Mecca of death metal, the boiling point of a new world, the world I wanted to be in, I did not recognize myself anywhere in our world. Beyond that, I knew nothing about the city of Tampa, Florida, I knew Disneyworld was in Florida, that Icelanders flocked there, thinking it the peak of existence to destroy their children there, I had no interest in the sunshine coast or anything like that but I had Florida on the brain, I wanted to go to Tampa or nowhere, to take a swamp boat out among the mangroves to view pelicans, flamingos, and crocodiles during the day then go to a concert in the evening, although I’d heard that Tampa contains almost exclusively old people, the city pretty much a retirement home for Americans, but I couldn’t believe it, how could that be? That death metal flourished from a retirement haven? My mother said I could apply to visit the United States but I wouldn’t myself get to decide where I was sent within the United States, that wasn’t how things worked. I only want to go to Tampa, Florida, I said to my mother, nowhere else, and so a whole year passed with me refusing to accept the new man in any way, doing everything in my power to protest the situation quite unconsciously, mainly creating chaos and self-destructing so as to disrupt their courtship and attempt to capture my mother’s attention, it had just been the two of us and then this man burst into our lives and was trying to supplant me, to get me not only out of the house but also out of the country, you must go and gain experience and become a man, instead of hanging out in the garage all day and night with these long-haired, black-clad good-for-nothings, said the new man, talking about my friends through my mother, you’re destroying your hearing producing all this noise, and hearing is one of God’s gifts, to be treated with care, next I pressed hard to go to Australia because that was the farthest country from Iceland, might as well go far away if I was going to be smoked out of my country, but that didn’t happen, I was too late for the program there or something; then I was filled with a desire to learn about animal life in the rainforests, there was much talk about the rainforests disappearing, dying out, I felt within me a strong urge to experience the rainforests, to help save them, the lungs of the earth, before man destroyed them entirely on his journey to self-destruction, just like a heavy smoker, I pressed hard for a chance to vanish into the rainforest, planning never to return, given that my mother wanted to get rid of me by any means, having chosen this man over me, The Regular said, Costa Rica, it was a short distance to Florida and I could flee there once I was done losing myself in the rainforest, besides, I wasn’t so excited anymore about going to Tampa, death metal had dispersed around the world during the past year, was thinning out, I’d missed the revolution, there was no longer the same energy and excitement, everything had been destroyed because it had expanded and spread out, everything had become an after-image of the energy in Tampa, and therefore dead, so no point thinking about the rainforests in Costa Rica, I was too late again, I then got desperate to get away, and now my mother wanted to keep me at home and I wanted out, there were only two countries left with teenage exchange programs, Argentina and Paraguay, and I did not know anything about these countries, I asked some girl or other in the exchange office which
country she reckoned was better, Argentina or Paraguay, what would she do if she was being sent away, and she, whoever she was, didn’t need to think about it, she preferred Argentina, so I went to Argentina the winter of my seventeenth year, to a place no one had previously been sent, the southern end of South America, in a small village in the mountains where there was nobody to welcome me. I grew extremely unsociable and sullen and wandered the deserts of south Patagonia, I didn’t know a word of the language, it rushed by so fast, I made one friend in the village, a stray dog, he and I roamed the dusty streets and shared packs of cookies in the afternoon, finally I found a home, I wanted to take the dog with me to the home, but it was out of the question, we’d rather beat him, said the father of the household, and he treated me like a dog because I didn’t speak the language at all, but indeed I studied the language at an amazing rate, wrote down every new word twenty times, made a long list of terms, copied out grammar tables from a pocket dictionary until I understood it, I always remained loyal to the stray dog out on the main street, and he to me, he came running toward me on the dusty main street, and I tried to have something for him from the kitchen of the home, he was big and yellow, skinny and patchy, it was fun to share a packet of cookies with him, said The Regular, with a far-off expression … then one day I was gone … he’s definitely dead now, this was so long ago, although stray dogs grow so wise from their freedom and hardships, stray dogs in Buenos Aires, for example, have reached astonishing heights of civilization, they are grouped into classes and each class is a society in which certain rules apply, there’s a lead dog, a so-called alpha, all the others are under his power until he’s overthrown, often the dogs are also alone when they’re strays, one often sees a stray dog come trotting along the pavement, completely in its own world and letting nothing disturb it, determined, headed somewhere, and one thinks: now where is he going like that? The dog has taken a course, has a mission somewhere in the neighborhood; he comes to a large road, stops, looks both ways with a calm expression, and when the street is empty he jogs across it like nothing is more straightforward … I came back home, said The Regular, out to Iceland, as it was phrased in olden days, a changed man, independent, a stray dog amputated from its family, my mother having to mourn a son who was forever lost … at the time there was death metal in Florida and grunge in Sjóttl, the city of Seattle, think of the navigator Sea-Attila in ancient Nordic writings, and then hardcore in Nueva Jórvík … all these were variously seen as signs of the end of times, The Death showed up in Florida, it surprised everyone, death metal chose Florida because human beings were coming to an end there, it was the end of humanity, the end of Western culture, The Death in Florida, I’m thinking of writing a book about this, Bernharður, said The Regular, dedicated to Thomas Mann, to people sunbathing as they await death, to Disney, to the graveyard of humanity where Nasa attempts to scurry out of the pit up to the dark abyss, a book about death metal and old folks having a perfect communion.
What happens in transfiguration, a death which is not death but a transformation, is that people become archetypes for eternity, even as they fade quickly and disappear like rain on the sand, as the poet Worm Serpent would say; people later try to remember how the deceased was typical, an extremely fragile image, everyone wants some influence over her, we all distort her in our minds, certain idioms, particular foods, smells, intimacies … but once she settles into archetype she becomes unbreakable, that’s perhaps exactly what happens in a transfiguration: a fragile image becomes unbreakable … for example, a mother who has lost her son sees him always in the hoodie he wore everywhere, a hoodie she was constantly trying to replace with a warm, beautiful sweater she had knit for him, one he sniffed at, she couldn’t ever get him out of the hoodie, this hoodie he’ll now wear for eternity, up to the day of judgment, to the ends of the universe, in her mind and heart; this detail causes his mother infinite sorrow, at least for the short time it takes to grieve the boy and distort his memory and finally forget him as he was, said The Regular, and remember him as he was not, always in the damn hoodie which symbolizes that and reminds the mother how she was unable to deal with the boy and neglected his parenting and taught him to expect defeat, she disastrously failed at her goal, the goal of all mothers: to bring the seed to its luxurious fruition, where all the shattered dreams still shine whole, the dead dreams living yet, everything ending in universal distortion.
After the transfiguration, said The Regular at Circus, when the body is transformed into a spirit, its archetypical form, like a boy in an ugly hoodie, the ascension begins, the heavenly journey of Jesus Christ, as the mother accompanies her son to the State and as is recorded in the Virgin Mary’s heavenly journey, or assumption, because the son takes the mother up to himself after she has been in the ground and died in Jerusalem; it is said that the admission of both Mary’s body and soul and her clothes have become, after the assumption, a truth, a proof, although that doesn’t also prove that men have seen her naked before them … on the other hand, I’m against proof, I do not believe this, that the clothes of the Virgin Mary have been left on the earth is a sign of that she was admitted, naked and alive, to heaven; some theologians want it to mean that she has simply fallen asleep and woken in heaven, and some scholars say that her grave was empty on the third day and her flesh ascended, like the son, and her clothes too, but it is probable that she had transmuted and eyewitnesses watched the image of her spirit being admitted to heaven while they kept the body—not that I mean to contravene John Damascene, the most learned in these studies, the man Catholics call Doctor of the Assumption, said The Regular; John Damascene wrote The Fountain of Wisdom where he rightly refutes Islam as a heresy though he was a contemporary of its fount—but who am I to exchange words with John of Patmos, who composed the Book of Revelations in exile using God’s words, composed it as an encouragement for the survivors of persecution and sectarianism, popular for its poetry and symbolism, this John was named theologian and I am not a theologian, not by any stretch, just an amateur, I’m not Thessalonian John or Jerusalem Andrew or Jerusalem Modestus or Geirmundur from Constantinople, the writer of the literary Mystical History of the Catholic Church, which describes the symbolism or the “sign-sight” of Byzantine mass form, both ritual and liturgical; Geirmundur from Constantinople fought against the iconoclasm of authority and heresy alike, seeing holy symbols and signs as keys to the divine, Geirmundur was therefore called the servant of the image, the image-friend, the symbolist … and Gregory of Tours, who wrote The History of the Franks and had a major impact on Snorri Sturluson—but these guys all wrote about the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, said The Regular, and this is becoming too esoteric a conversation if we want everyone to follow along, all I have is my Book of Homilies on the bedside table, written in 1200, it must have something of value to its … the difference is that the Son ascends but the mother is taken up … contrasting that, in the beginning the mother gives birth to the son and takes him to her breast; after, the son steals the scene with pretense and self-pity and megalomania, so often the way with sons … it’s the mother, in fact, who’s tortured, not the Son, as Augustine points out in City of God, I don’t remember where exactly, but he does say it, the mother’s spirit is tortured and the son’s body, he endures it but she cannot tolerate it, she was too sensitive, too delicate for the world of Pontius Pilate, the mother grieves, she has sacrificed her son, truly, not the father or the son himself, the mother is humility in the world, she is taken up to heaven because the father and son waded into the world in a sick delusion that the world is their house, their dwelling, their company, the father is CEO and Managing Director, the son is responsible for operations, moving and selling tickets, managing inventory, marketing, in the end the son runs the company into the ground, the son plans to honor his father by becoming just like him but discovers he can’t, the father loves himself and no one else, in reality he hates himself and the entire world and cannot wait to destroy both himself and the world to teach his s
on a lesson; the son starts to despise his father, wallowing in self-pity, feeling the father has abandoned him because he doesn’t reward him, the son doesn’t receive an immediate promotion within the company, he has to start with the lowest jobs and can’t immediately take the helm, the son first follows the father then wants to get rid of him and take over the company (the world), the son has forsaken his mother in a blind rush to pursue his father, the mother pursues her son and eventually joins the family in heaven on a sticky Chesterfield sofa after her endless fragmentation on the ground down below and they cannot talk to one another, said The Regular. We have made a covenant with God which has force here in our ambiguous human world, it was called the Old Covenant because the covenant is indeed old, there are 613 laws which Moses wrote down according to God’s voice and word, laws Moses shared in whole with mankind, that is to say, Jews, the elect nation that knows itself as an underrepresented and excluded people, the children of Israel, and God’s children should be circumcised on the eighth day after birth, as Abraham was circumcised, and Jesus Christ was circumcised, that is to say castrated and amputated, so pleasure may be destroyed, the king sluggish, the venomous serpent kept in check so the heavens do not immediately collapse and the world remains disrupted a little while, too, until the Day of Judgment, which is coming soon, said The Regular at Circus, you’ll have proof before long.
At that the serpent poet turned away from his wilderness, he woke up, I do not know if he gleaned nutrition from his inner regions, the poet Worm Serpent ordered another glass of red wine, his tweed jacket is starting to look the worse for wear, his fur hat awry, more like a wet rag, his galoshes worn on top of his crumpled pants, the poet is clearly in dire straits and seems quite drunk, his big head weighs heavily on his dwarf adult body, Worm Serpent is a vagrant, said The Regular, a dwarf, vagrant poet. He lurched over to us with overcoat hanging over one hand, and held the wine glass like a small cup he had won at bingo, wearing a disappointed expression, resembling a distortion of the intellectual; the poet climbed nimbly into a chair and introduced himself with a polite bow, saying:
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