The Epiphany of Music

“I also think — always, when I think of beauty, because it’s so beautiful, for me — is I think of music. I love music. I think music is just it. I mean, I think that’s — I love poetry, as well, of course, and I think of beauty in poetry. But I always think that music is what language would love to be, if it could.” John O’Donohue in conversation Krista Tippett on On Being

In this passage, O’Donohue was talking about the beauty of classical music, but I think this applies to any form of music you find that lets you feel through and express parts of yourself that are closed off. I mean just think of the undulating swells of emotion that can be literally summoned from the void through music. Prose and poetry are more subtle, because they rely on your interiority to create the world or experience. Music is visceral. It encircles you and subsumes you into its reality. There is not much work one has to do to inhabit the world of music, because music creates worlds. It creates the texture of the moment. Music draws the raw emotionality out of us like water from a stone. I may be a writer, a fiber artist, but my real language is music.

One look to Halloween (1978) illustrates how this operates in film. In the final scene of John Carpenter’s classic, which is linked above, we see Michael Myers get shot multiple times by Dr. Loomis and fall off a balcony onto the ground below after Myers attacked Laurie Strode. With the gunshots done, Strode and Dr. Loomis have a short conversation filled with the ambient noises of the night. Dr. Loomis goes to look over the balcony with the sound of cicadas droning in the background and he discovers Myer’s body is gone. BAM, cue Carpenter’s classic film score for Halloween. The utter feelings of dread and doom are palpable as Carpenter takes us through a number of empty shots with Myer’s breathing ominously in the background. As Merkstave notes, “Only Doom is Real.” This is how music creates a world. This is the visceral epiphany that music offers us in our lives as well.

Living in a slow motion apocalypse surrounded by right wing religious fanatics for the majority of my life, metal music has been a real epiphany. The embrace of doom and gloom, anger, and even hatred has been a real balm. In a world full of corporate human resource training videos, political and religious demagogues, and advertisements telling you what and how to feel, metal music is just there to wrap you in a cocoon of cacophonous emotionality. This is precisely what I need in a world that negates death, anger, and hatred. I need to be wrapped in the visceral experience of those emotions through metal music to draw the water of my emotions out of the stone of my animated meat sack. Yes, dear reader, the guttural yelling, driving guitars, and thundering drums deliver me to a place where I can fully feel the difficult emotions that society has told me are inappropriate or wrong.

Sometimes we just need to be angry and hate things. Right now, that feels extremely apropos. All my kin in the trans community are under attack. Across the country, right wing religious fascists are making their very existence a crime across. That, dear reader, is the creation of a legal precedent for genocide. I would know. I am a PhD-trained sociologist that specializes in how powerful people justify doing horrendous things. Securing legal cover is always one of the key strategies that those in power use to justify their domination. I found that to be the case in my masters thesis studying the Cherokee Trail of Tears. The troops on the ground in North Georgia that escorted the Cherokee at gunpoint to Oklahoma continually pointed to a treaty, signed by a small group of Cherokees who were not authorized to make a treaty, to justify their forcible removal of the tribe. We all know how that turned out. Thousands of Cherokee died on that trek, which had the flimsiest of legal precedents.

What horrors will these laws bring about? I shudder to think. Its within metal that I find the solace I need. These are indeed the dark ages. We are surrounded by religious fundamentalists that are thirsty for blood in their new age crusade to remake the world in their image. This makes me angry. This anger isn’t denial. This anger is righteous and it burns more brightly than any “holy” flame they can muster. My hatred for them attacking my kin is real. I have no interest in civility with them or any conversation. I do not want to understand their perspective. I just want them cast aside into the dustbin of history like all previous forms of homophobic, racist, classist, patriarchal, nationalist zealotry that have used religion as a vehicle for their own self aggrandizement and power. I want them to know the pain of being completely irrelevant and left behind as a bigot. I want them to be left alone in the prison of their own obscurity and powerlessness.

More importantly, I want my kin in the queer and trans communities to be safe. I just want them to be able to live their f###’in lives without some religious fanatic trying to legislate their identity. I want them to live in a world where they don’t fear hate crimes. I want to live in a world the only appropriate form of hate is the hatred of any barrier that holds people back from living in a society of equals, free to live as who they are. I want to live in a world where we can redistribute financial resources and property to address historical and contemporary forms of discrimination and domination perpetuated against all my kin who have faced generation after generation of abuse. That will bring about real freedom. I want to live in a world where we render these dark ages as an obsolete cycle of the past. Until then, I will embrace my own righteous anger as a gift.

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