The Festivity of the Void in the Lone Descent

 

Right after the brilliant tracks of the previous oeuvre (Solanaceae), OTW&TM new album picks up what it resplendently ended its last album with. The pseudo-narrator in Solanaceae who could saw her lady through the pines with his eyeless senses, now is raveling in his total emptiness. He celebrates his loneliness in the dazzling presence of “absence of everything”. Here everything in-being is an opaque shrouding matter concealing the lucid truth of a yonder joy. Herein lies the exhibition of vivid aesthetics of the extreme void.

There's a sunspot in my soul
A millstone round my heart and a Judas kiss
There's a darkness coming in
A golden troth for your emptiness
And we stray through infinite nothing
Haunted by our deadweight dreams

Any perceived change in rhythm here should be balanced by moderating one’s expectation through attending the lyrical content of this album. On the surface, the prevailing cadence is of those heard in the most crescendoing tracks of previous albums (say Wonderful wonderful sun or Hemlock and mandrake fields), but the substance which the lyrical motif loads on this familiar musical context, drastically alters the appreciation of such familiarity. These phrases never epitomize the might of life (as state of living and be-ing), but, in total contrast, mark some superior strength of the void, of something which precedes life (and its pleasure principle) and encompasses it existentially.

And when nothing remains
No love nor pain
In this illusion
This tomb of seasoned dye
The universe caves in, I’m on fire
Let the end begin, take courage!

 All the loss that the lyrics point out is expressed in a way to bold the ecstasy/ existence of the void. It’s neither the blessing the pleasure constrained by being and possession, nor the rupturing rapture of death drive; it’s beyond death drive; say, it is nothing, the nothingness which takes delight in extermination of will and being. That’s exactly why this very delightfulness flowing throughout the album is at the same time agitating and unquiet; for it’s the joyance of non-existence, of non-willingness and so the one who’s en-joying it is our double, our shadow whose joy is our very solicitude.

A love, a caress
Unreturned
You stick your hand in the fire
And I know how the story goes

Hence what we read in Holderlin’s famous poem “Voice of the people”,

Yet from the walls they threw all the servants down

Whom he sent; Much livelier than at once

The fire flared up, and they rejoiced, and

Brutus extended his arms towards them,

All were beside themselves. And great crying there,

Great jubilation sounded. Then into the flames

Leapt man and woman…

The delight of all particles born through these lines is of prodigal immediacy of the void. This is Bataillian eroticism: the luxury of being “with-in” total destruction; the luxury of a non-pleading sacrificial fore-giving. This wastefulness is too wanton to be grasped in contemplative states of mentality (One is tempted to bring up the expressive form of enunciation of death-drive in doom music; It’s an entirely different story. There we face some sort of traumatic confrontation of thinking death as to recreate it as a psychic state of appreciation. Experiencing Doom is beyond the pleasure principle, but essentially embedded within such region of the domain of death-drive which is inhabited by lamenting illuminations); here the lavish tendency to nothingness subjects all reflections to total derision. It rejoices the absence as post-lamenting hyper fate waiting to be remembered by an impossible form of being beyond the question of death.

Oh my little boy, what have you become?
A shadow of yourself, a moth caught in the sun?
We move through the silence and dive into darkness
Succumb to the emptiness of our lone descent

Take delight in the void (L, R)