"Funeral Doom Metal" by Elijah Perseus Blumov

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Matthew's episode A Winter's Tale Pt. 2 

-Alice's episode Grilling Elijah Blumov 

-Why Metal is NOT Rock 

-"Black Sabbath" by Black Sabbath

-"Mars, The Bringer of War" by Gustav Holst

-Neoclassical Metal and Symphonic Metal

-Portrait of the Artist As A Young Dork

-"Stand Up And Fight" by Turisas

-"Twilight of the Thunder God" by Amon Amarth

-"Run To The Hills" by Iron Maiden

-The sacred bond of Metalheads

-Where Classical, Metal, and Poetry converge

-"Bells of the Black Basilica" by Tyranny

-The Tale of Bill and Fran

-The Self-Grilling of Elijah Blumov

-Rime Riche, Rime Sufisante, Rime Pauvre

-Romain Rolland and the Oceanic Mind

-Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents 

-Wagner's Tristan Und Isolde

-Schopenhauer's Aesthetics 

-What people get wrong about Stoicism

-Why Metal vocalists sounds like that

-Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Panther"

-We are a microcosm of the dying world

-The Birth, Death, and Life of Tragedy 

Text of poem:

Funeral Doom Metal

Flooding chords submerge the arid mind

until it knows itself as oceanic—

the crushing weight of death, of fate, of time,

is bound to sound, and so is purged of panic.

Stoic longing, without hope for hopes,

when beautified, becomes a kind of peace—

the demon of the soul wails in its ropes,

and mimics pain so its true pain will cease. 

Slowly drowning, slowly marching toward

the end of all, the universal doom,

the artist recognizes a reward

in the contemplation of the coming tomb,

and becoming, out of drowning, his own ocean,

at home within the tragedy of motion. 

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Send me a note at: versecraftpodcast@gmail.com

My favorite poetry podcasts for:
Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets
Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says
The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet:
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 3-10: “Funeral Doom Metal” by Elijah Perseus Blumov 

            Welcome to the show, everyone. I’m going to try to keep my announcements brief today, as I’m already running a little behind schedule. The first thing I absolutely must mention is that I’ve been on two other podcasts this week: the Sleerickets Secret Show and Poetry Says. In the former episode, my friend Matthew and I continue to talk about the literary theory of Yvor Winters, as well as our opinions about a handful of famous poems and the follies of the Romantic worldview. It’s a really juicy and contentious if incredibly nerdy couple hours. It is unfortunately behind a paywall, but there should be a button for a free week-long trial, or you can email Matthew at sleerickets@gmail.com and he will be overjoyed to give you a week’s worth of access for free. Also behind that paywall is another conversation I had with Matthew and Alice, “Cosmic Drop Bear Part 2,” so make sure to check that out as well. 

            Speaking of Alice, I was also on her amazing show Poetry Says this week, on an episode charmingly titled “Grilling Elijah Blumov.” We had an absolute ball talking about a very rich and beautiful poem by the great Australian poet Gwen Harwood, entitled “Prize Giving,” and we also got into a slightly spicy back and forth about my unabashed advocacy of meter and rhyme as outlined in my “Case For Meter and Rhyme” episodes. It’s a whole lot of fun, and it’s a good opportunity to hear more about my ideas on what the contemporary poetry scene should look like, and why I make this show in the first place. I’ll link to both of these episodes in my show notes, and please do check them out! 

            Lastly, I have to give a shout-out, once again, to my buddy Jack Cooney of Indianapolis, who made the incredibly sweet gesture of making a donation to the Ohio Poetry Association in my honor. Thank you so much Jack— for your friendship, your love of the show, and your support of the Ohio poetry scene.

            I’ll end just by asking to please consider supporting the show if you haven’t already, the details of which you can find in the show notes. If that’s not in the cards right now, please consider actively taking a moment this week to tell someone about the show. The more recruits we can get for the Versecraft army, the more effectively we can lay siege to the mighty citadel of bad contemporary poetry. To arms, my friends. 

            As you can already tell from the title, this is one of those self-indulgent episodes where I take advantage of my platform to talk about one of my own poems. Needless to say, if you’re here for classic poems and classic poems only, please feel free to skip this one. I try however to offer these episodes not only as unique opportunities to hear a poet analyze their own work, but also to give a little more of my own personal background than I would on a typical episode, so you can get to know me better. 

            Last time I did this I talked about my relationship to psychedelics. Now I’d like to talk about another force that has had a major spiritual influence in my life—namely, heavy metal music. 

Before I go any further, I’d like to zero in a little bit on what heavy metal actually is. Most people of course know it when they hear it, but those who aren’t fans may not be exactly clear on what distinguishes it as a genre, other than the fact that it is loud, distorted, and deals with dark subject matter. The first thing I’d like to emphasize, and this is a bit of a hot take on my part, is that Heavy Metal music is not a subgenre of Rock music. It did grow out of Rock music, and in terms of instrumentation, the two genres are practically identical. In spirit and sensibility however, Heavy Metal is in fact much closer to Classical music than Rock. I’ll return to this in a moment. 

            If we look at the origins of Rock music, it’s immediately apparent that it emerged out of the Blues tradition, with some Country, Folk, and Gospel elements thrown in. However, just because Rock grew out of Blues doesn’t make Rock a subgenre of Blues—by the same token, Metal is not a subgenre of Rock. What Rock did was take the rhythms and scales of the Blues and make a new art form out of it, one far more upbeat and swinging, and concerned less with working class suffering than partying and teenage rebellion, as we see in figures like Chuck Berry and Elvis. In the 60’s and 70’s of course, Rock took off in all kinds of directions, and became much more thematically versatile and musically sophisticated, but a high energy, electrified approach to the blues format is and will always be in its DNA— from Little Richard to The Rolling Stones to Led Zeppelin to Dire Straits, it’s an essential part of what defines Rock as a genre. 

            Metal, however, is different. People love to debate which song or band inaugurates heavy metal music, but as someone who’s been in the Metal community for a long time, I can say that the answer among real Metalheads is almost unanimous: Square one for Heavy Metal is the song “Black Sabbath,” by Black Sabbath, the first song on the album Black Sabbath. Press play on that song, and you’re immediately on a completely different planet from Buddy Holly, the Beatles, or even AC/DC and Motorhead. It begins with rain, the toll of a bell, and thunder. Once the atmosphere is set, the haunting guitar riff blasts in, devastatingly simple: G, G up the octave, down to C-sharp, creating the infamous tritone, the diabolus in musica, the ultimate suggestion of dissonance and evil. Tony Iommi, the guitarist, was inspired to create this riff based on the fearsome tritone motif from the British composer Gustav Holst’s orchestral piece, Mars the Bringer of War. The blues is nowhere to be found. Rollicking rhythms are nowhere to be found. This is not music about heartache. This is music about the ache of the soul confronted with existential terror. In artistic spirit, it is much closer to a requiem than to a boogie-woogie. Though Black Sabbath would go on to write music that often tread the line between Rock and Heavy Metal, with this song it had awakened, pure and unmistakable, a new animal in the jungle of the music world. 

            As Metal music developed, its relationship to Classical music only grew more defined. With bands like Rainbow and Iron Maiden helping to expand the foundation, Metal came to be associated, like Classical music, with epic themes, intense dynamics, straight rhythms, traditional tonal harmony, complex arrangements, and technical virtuosity. Metal musicians, many of whom necessarily come from a Classical background because of the technical demands of the Metal genre, have long understood this kinship, and many have even leaned directly into it: in the Neoclassical and Symphonic metal subgenres, bands have not only covered works by Verdi, Vivaldi, and even Wagner, but composed their own large-scale orchestral compositions. Certainly not every metalhead loves Classical music, and probably most Classical music aficionados don’t care for Metal, but the overlap is there, far more than most people realize. 

            So why do I bring all of this up? It doesn’t have much direct bearing on our poem for today. It does however have a direct bearing on understanding me, both as a creator and consumer of art. I actually came to love and study Classical music after loving Metal music, but I love both of them for similar reasons, reasons which lie at the root of who I am, and inform my approach to all the arts, including poetry.

            When I was a child, I was fascinated by ancient and medieval warfare, mythology, and fantasy. Much of my childhood was spent reading Eyewitness books on subjects like Ancient Greece, Vikings, or World Religions, or else fantasies like Harry Potter and the Inheritance Cycle, and playing video games like Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, Prince of Persia, Medieval Total War, Dynasty Warriors, and Star Wars Battlefront. On the playground, my friends and I would roleplay fantastical scenarios and adventures, and make up our own rituals and religions. The rabbi’s son, I was once known for coming to synagogue every week—an awkward, chubby 5th grader with long, unkempt hair—sitting in the front row, and reading D&D manuals for the entire service. To top it off, I never even played D&D— I just liked the lore. 

            Certainly, much of this kind of interest can be attributed to escapism. I was never satisfied with the reality I was given: the reality of homework assignments, dull classmates, Texas heat, endless commuting in the car, and pretty girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day, despite the many love notes I sent them. Far better to be an adventuring warrior encountering mythical creatures and lands, a wizard, dragon rider, a Jedi, a Holy Roman Emperor punishing the Lombards for their rebellious folly. 

But it was more than just escapism. It was a sense that what was ultimately important in life was not the ephemeral, logistical experience of day to day concerns, but the possibility of seeing through these concerns to directly encounter the underlying impressions which move our imaginations, direct our actions, and allow us to discover meaning in our lives: the experience of beauty, grandeur, love, ambition, glory, nobility, mortality, adventure, and wonder. Such things are difficult to discover in the daily life of a modern child, but my soul demanded it. This sense of focusing on the grand themes of life, and being interested primarily in objects and experiences that bring out the grand themes of life, is one that has never deserted me. 

Nevertheless, in Middle School and High School I was sidetracked from this quest for loftiness by the very earthly experience of puberty. I became slim, attractive, and lusty, and as a result, I became more vain and trivial. I pursued acting partly because of the imaginative immersion it required, but also because I loved being the center of attention. I began listening to Hip Hop music religiously, partly because through it I discovered a love of verbal rhythm and wordplay, but also because it fed my new-found fantasies of hypermasculinity, aggression, and sexual dominance. 

            To be clear, these macho elements were legitimate additions to my personality, not substitutions or falsehoods, and are elements which still, for better or worse, sing their part in the chorus of my mental theatre. Still, in retrospect, I feel that they led me astray from my essential self during those years. 

            I began to feel hints that this was true, and a renewal of the old desire for transcendence rather than worldliness, starting near the end of high school. I don’t remember how it happened exactly, but I was browsing Spotify one day, and came upon a Finnish folk metal band called Turisas. I listened their song “Stand Up and Fight,” and all the old feelings came rushing back with renewed force—the desire to be an adventurer, a Viking, a servant of powers beyond myself. Giddy, I listened more, and explored more bands with similar sounds. Very quickly, the strong sense of virile masculinity I had once associated with gangsta rap became married to the old love I had once had of envisioning myself as an ancient warrior. I saw myself as a man set apart from other modern men, a man for whom, regardless of my surroundings, an old-fashioned destiny of epic proportions was reserved. 

            The year between high school and college was a strange one. Alone in Brooklyn, I had very little social interaction, listened to music all day, and dabbled in bodybuilding and paganism. On February 5th, 2014, partly out of curiosity, partly out of social starvation, I traveled hours by train to Huntington, Long Island, walked in broken shoes through several feet of snow, all to see one of the bands I had gotten into, Amon Amarth. The experience was formative: the sheer Dionysian power of hearing metal music live, the sense of instant, sweaty brotherhood obtained in the mosh pit, hearing the boys belt along to Iron Maiden’s “Run To The Hills” in between sets and wishing I knew the words so I could join them—all this made me decide, that day, that I was going to be one of them, one of their tribe—a metalhead. 

The comedian Brian Posehn once remarked, very accurately: “Metalheads are different from any other fan of music. You never see a guy with his shirt off screaming, “R&B!” We have our own symbol that means metal. You just do that to another metalhead and he’s just like, indeed.” 

The more concerts I went to, the more metalheads I met, the more I discovered that the appreciation of metal music does bring people together in a kind of sacred understanding. Every metalhead has the sense that his fellow metalheads have seen a similar vision of the world: a world of darkness and horror, but also of glory. A world where one of the most significant things you can do is take the suffering and anger and mediocrity of life and transform it into a beautiful, roaring celebration of life. Metalheads are some of the sweetest, most friendly people you’ll ever meet. Their secret is that they practice catharsis all the time. They exorcise their demons regularly. 

As I grew and deepened as a person, my appreciation for metal grew and deepened with me. What began as a desire for escapism, masculine affirmation, and community turned, over time, into an almost spiritual practice. When I experienced my first existential crises, the dark angst of metal music, an angst which is metaphysical rather than adolescent, was there for me. When I began to take philosophy and art seriously, my understanding of the vital and wholesome role metal music played in my life informed my judgements of what was the best way to live and what was the best way to make art. What I found in metal music, and what I later found in Classical music too, was a set of values which remain the ones I look for in all works of art, and which I strive for in my own: emotional intensity delivered through exacting technical mastery; a concern with the cosmic, spiritual, and primal aspects of human experience; and the treatment of dark emotions and subject matter with the goal of sublimating them to a greater understanding of the beauty and glory of the world. 

While I’ve never stopped listening to Metal since that fateful winter a decade ago, I’ve gone through many phases many preferences depending on my emotional needs and intellectual sympathies at any given time. Four or five years ago, I got deeply into one of the most extreme and obscure microgenres of metal, what is known as Funeral Doom Metal. For those unfamiliar, “Funeral Doom” might sound like a strange phrase, but all you need to understand is that types of metal are named in a similar fashion to biological taxonomy: Metal is the genre, Doom is the sub-genre, and Funeral is the microgenre. 

Now Doom Metal itself has been one of my favorite subgenres for a very long time: to put it briefly, it’s a form of metal that puts a premium on being very heavy and slow, and is centered around the delicious repetition of riffs. It’s actually probably the purest form of heavy metal, historically speaking, since it takes for its model the slowness and heaviness of early Black Sabbath, but on steroids. Its heavy plodding feel gives one the sensation of marching to one’s doom, hence the name. 

Funeral Doom however takes this heavy marching sensation to its logical extreme— in compositions of titanic slowness, heaviness, and length, the sound of the guitars often thickened by the sound of pipe organs, Funeral Doom seeks to create a cathedral of sound, cavernous and overwhelming, and to explicitly express the sensation of marching toward one’s death, living one’s own funeral march, drowning to death, encountering a Lovecraftian god, or some other event of comparable heaviness. What’s fascinating however is that if you compare Black Sabbath’s song “Black Sabbath” to a song like Tyranny’s “Bells of the Black Basilica,” the aesthetic continuity is unmistakable. 

Obviously, this kind of music is not most people’s cup of tea, but I was very attached to it, and in order to articulate what I felt was its appeal, I wrote the following poem, which also partly serves as an apologia for metal music as a whole: 

Funeral Doom Metal

Flooding chords submerge the arid mind

until it knows itself as oceanic—

the crushing weight of death, of fate, of time,

is bound to sound, and so is purged of panic.

Stoic longing, without hope for hopes,

when beautified, becomes a kind of peace—

the demon of the soul wails in its ropes,

and mimics pain so its true pain will cease. 

Slowly drowning, slowly marching toward

the end of all, the universal doom,

the artist recognizes a reward

in the contemplation of the coming tomb,

and becoming, out of drowning, his own ocean,

at home within the tragedy of motion. 

A quick glance at the rhyme scheme will indicate to us that this is an orthodox example of an English sonnet: three quatrains, ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, followed by a concluding volta couplet, GG. Having looked at so many Italian sonnets at this point, we are now somewhat better equipped to appreciate the differences between them and English sonnets on the level not merely of form but of thought. As I have said before, Italian sonnets usually work by describing a situation in the octet, and then reflecting upon that situation in the sestet. Because the turn to reflection, the volta, comes so much earlier in an Italian sonnet than an English one, the Italian sonnet is by nature the more meditative of the two. What the English sonnet gives up in reflection however it gains in analysis. 

Two men, Francesco and Bill, walk into a store in New York City’s diamond district, looking for the perfect gem. They are both connoisseurs of diamonds, but their technique of assessing them is different. Francesco will choose a diamond on display, stare at it for a long time, and then write down a detailed account of his reaction to it. Bill, on the other hand, will hold up the diamond to the light, angle it once, angle it twice, to see the play of all its facets. Once he’s done this, he’ll jot down a quick verdict in his notebook, and that’s the end of it. 

Because this poem is not so much an expression of an emotional reaction as the analysis of an emotional reaction, I thought the English sonnet would be appropriate, each quatrain giving me the opportunity to further develop and hone in on the phenomenon I was describing. 

Looking at this sonnet several years down the line, a few rookie moves immediately stand out to me. Firstly, the arbitrary assonantal slant rhyme of “mind” and “time.” Assonantal slant rhyme is not exactly illegitimate, but it is not only a lazy way to rhyme, more suited for songwriting than poetry, but it doesn’t fit the stylistic program of the rest of this particular poem, which doesn’t employ this technique or comparably casual techniques anywhere else. It sticks out like a sore thumb, and seems more a product of carelessness than intentionality. 

In line 8, I do exactly what I warned against in the last episode— I commit a third foot trochaic substitution, on the words “so its.” This doesn’t ruin the poem by any means, but it does make the rhythm slightly awkward in this line. 

One thing that isn’t exactly a flaw but is something I would do only sparingly nowadays is employ what is known as rime tres riche, French for very rich rhyme. In French poetics, rhymes are classified according to how much of the words rhyme with one another. In rime pauvre, or poor rhyme, only the terminal phoneme, which must be a vowel, rhymes, as in “do” and “to.” In rime suffisante, or sufficient rhyme, the two ending phonemes rhyme, as in “cat” and “mat.” In rime riche, the three ending phonemes rhyme, as in “strong” and “wrong,” and in rime tres riche, four or more ending phonemes rhyme, such as my “ocean” and “motion” and “panic” and “oceanic.” In French, a highly unaccented language, very rich rhymes trip lightly and gracefully off the tongue, but in the much heavier English, they can be quite cloying. Using one very rich rhyme is risky enough, but including two in a short poem that is not intended to be humorous strains the boundaries of good taste. 

Finally, and most notably, my inexperience is demonstrated here by the ways in which I make the structure of my English sonnet as glaringly obvious as possible. Aside from some mild enjambment in the ninth line, every line in this poem is end-stopped, and what’s more, eleven out of the fourteen lines conclude with a caesura-like pause, either a dash, comma, or period, to make these lines as clearly sonically demarcated as possible. Add to this the fact that the beginning of every quatrain is marked by an acephalous line, and you have a poem which has a somewhat disjointed and mechanical feel to it, and which screams its identity as an English sonnet throughout. 

Despite these quibbles however, I do think that the poem has some real merit, otherwise I wouldn’t be presenting it to you. Let’s begin the poem again, starting with the first quatrain:

Flooding chords submerge the arid mind

until it knows itself as oceanic—

the crushing weight of death, of fate, of time,

is bound to sound, and so is purged of panic.

With its thick, long, distorted, echoing chords, Funeral Doom music presents itself as a sea of sound, washing over your mind in waves. It offers itself as a quenching remedy to the “arid mind,” the mind which is figuratively “dry” due to its disconnection from its emotions and focus on rationality. Not only does the music provide a respite from this over-intellectualization, a healthy reconnection to emotions simmering beneath the surface, but it overwhelms the mind to the point that it loses track of its own identity—it becomes one with the music, oceanic and inseparable from the vibrations which surround it. I wasn’t even aware of this concept at the time, but my description here almost exactly echoes the idea of the “oceanic mind” coined by Romain Rolland and discussed by Freud in his Civilization and Its Discontents, a psychological state of unboundedness and limitlessness which Rolland considered essential to the religious experience. Freud hypothesized that to tap into this feeling was to tap into the memory of oneself as an infant, before one had developed an ego or a sense of self. While I hesitate to accept this hypothesis literally, it is certainly true that both mystical experiences and Funeral Doom can give one a sense of sublime helplessness, of being a child in the dark hand of the cosmos. 

To get back to Classical music for a moment, this oceanic melding of psyche with sound is also reminiscent of the compositional approach of Richard Wagner. Influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who saw music as the highest of the arts because it alone was capable of representing the pure motion and emotion of the cosmic will, Wagner strove in his music, particularly in works like Tristan und Isolde, to create an oceanic sense of waxing and waning harmonic tension designed to mirror the ever shifting thoughts and passions of consciousness and the progress of time and fate, an approach which would later inspire stream-of-consciousness writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Funeral Doom is less sophisticated and more limited in its scope, but it also attempts to embody psycho-cosmic forces: “death, fate, and time.” The mournful tones, dark atmosphere, and organ sounds connote death, the pummeling, marching riffs evoke the inescapable progress of fate, and the very fact that it is music, which, as Basquiat once said, is “the way that we decorate time,” creates an awareness of temporality. 

These elements are “bound to sound, and so are purged of panic.” As Schopenhauer pointed out, one way to temporarily relieve oneself of grief and fear is to take those subjective feelings and objectify them, to see them as events outside yourself, and thereby attain the serenity and security of an observer. Art, which can provide vicarious experiences of grief and fear, fulfills this function. Funeral Doom allows one to hear and experience externalized representations of mortality and fatality, which not only creates a sympathetic feeling of catharsis for the listener, but encourages them to associate these dark realities with a sense of beauty and grandeur. Not only are death, fate, and time bound to sound in the sense that they are objectified into a sonic representation, but they are also “bound to sound” in the sense that they are bound to emerge as forces in our lives, and the more we recognize this fatalism and grapple with it, the more we can grow to accept our condition, and be purged of panic. 

            Let’s now begin again, and this time read through the second quatrain:

Flooding chords submerge the arid mind

until it knows itself as oceanic—

the crushing weight of death, of fate, of time,

is bound to sound, and so is purged of panic.

Stoic longing, without hope for hopes,

when beautified, becomes a kind of peace—

the demon of the soul wails in its ropes,

and mimics pain so its true pain will cease. 

            Stoic longing may seem like a paradoxical phrase—after all, many people associate Stoicism with the elimination of desire and suppression of emotion. This however is a misconception. Unlike Buddhism, to which it is often compared, the object of Stoicism is not to eliminate desire, but to regulate desire. The key is not to suppress emotion, but to domesticate emotion, and learn to act independently of it in the interest of rational virtue. Emotions, even negative emotions, are necessary and inevitable— it is in how we respond to them that matters. 

The Stoic exercise of objectifying one’s emotions—acknowledging them as mental events, but not identifying oneself with them— is similar to the objectification of one’s emotions which occurs when listening to music. Listening to Funeral Doom Metal, I examine my own impossible longing for immortality with artistic pleasure and understanding compassion. When this longing is “beautified,” which is to say, objectively expressed in the pleasurable medium of music, I am able to look at life as a moved but serene artistic observer, accepting of my condition and appreciative of the tragedy of life as an aesthetic phenomenon. 

It’s a curious fact that when we listen to music with lyrics, we rarely imagine the song as being sung to us. Instead, we usually imaginatively place ourselves in the position of the singer. This is the case even when the lyrics are mostly unintelligible, as is often the case in extreme metal subgenres like Death Metal, Black Metal, and Funeral Doom. The demonic styles of singing in these genres—growling, shrieking, howling— reflect a desire to tap into the purely animal aspect of one’s being. Though such vocals strike many people as off putting, they are in fact a logical and effective means to reach a Dionysian primal state. People sometimes get upset when they hear harsh vocals because they feel like they’re being screamed at. What such people fail to understand is that these screams are not intended as an assault on the listener—they are an invitation for you to scream, too. 

In line seven, the “demon of the soul” refers to this bestial persona which is activated and channeled through the music. It is the self which wishes for absolute freedom, absolute dominance, absolute life, and is held down forever by the ropes of mortality, fleshly embodiment, and social circumstance. Like Rilke’s panther, it is a beast in which a strong will is paralyzed by confinement, a defeated shadow of itself in most circumstances, but which is occasionally struck with a sense of its own potential and the enormity of its imprisonment. Though this demon cannot escape the body, cannot escape death, there is nevertheless a pleasure in being able to assert the presence of such a bestial self that seeks transcendence, for it is a reminder that we are more than ourselves. To give voice to the pain is to ease the pain. The demon wailing in its ropes is also meant to evoke the vibrations of guitar strings.

Let’s now go back, and this time, read all the way through: 

Flooding chords submerge the arid mind

until it knows itself as oceanic—

the crushing weight of death, of fate, of time,

is bound to sound, and so is purged of panic.

Stoic longing, without hope for hopes,

when beautified, becomes a kind of peace—

the demon of the soul wails in its ropes,

and mimics pain so its true pain will cease. 

Slowly drowning, slowly marching toward

the end of all, the universal doom,

the artist recognizes a reward

in the contemplation of the coming tomb,

and becoming, out of drowning, his own ocean,

at home within the tragedy of motion. 

            Though it is not literally possible to drown and march at the same time, I wanted both verbs because it’s easy to oscillate back and forth between these two impressions when listening to this crushingly heavy music—when the chord changes, you take a step forward; then you drown for a while; then you take another step forward. It also however is meant to suggest the fact that we are not only marching toward death, but we are slowly dying all the way there. 

The doom is universal because not only do we die, but our universe will too, and so this music can encompass both personal and cosmic dimensions. We are marching toward our little dooms, but that is but one fractal mini-tragedy within the grand tragedy. We are a microcosm of the dying world.

The artist, which could be either myself or the actual performer, explicitly recognizes through listening to this music that the contemplation of mortality can bring great cathartic pleasure, and even a sense of tranquility. I then symmetrically conclude by returning the idea of the mind as ocean—from the sensation of drowning, one dissolves into the reconciliation of self and other, and becomes the ocean itself. In listening to this therapeutic music, I am able to condition myself into a greater acceptance of death, fate, and time. Motion itself is a tragedy because it is motion—synonymous with entropy, the arrow of time— which both births all things and necessarily brings about the death of all things. Tragic and futile as it is, however, the beauty of life convinces us that the universe is a glorious happening worth existing, worth participating in. Our first goal is to be able to remove ourselves and see the tragedy of life as a spectator; our final goal however is to be able to reassume our roles within the tragedy, with a smile behind our masks. 

            With all that we have learned and explored, let us read through this poem one last time, as an old friend: 

Funeral Doom Metal

Flooding chords submerge the arid mind

until it knows itself as oceanic—

the crushing weight of death, of fate, of time,

is bound to sound, and so is purged of panic.

Stoic longing, without hope for hopes,

when beautified, becomes a kind of peace—

the demon of the soul wails in its ropes,

and mimics pain so its true pain will cease. 

Slowly drowning, slowly marching toward

the end of all, the universal doom,

the artist recognizes a reward

in the contemplation of the coming tomb,

and becoming, out of drowning, his own ocean,

at home within the tragedy of motion.