Spirituals

1.

The clocks roll back an hour tonight, and it’s my favorite moment of the year. Not only does it bring the night closer, it reminds me that if we can rearrange time, we can do anything we want. Invent new colors. Remove days from the week. Reset the internet to 2009. Have a functional government. Changing the clocks ought to be the year’s biggest holiday with fireworks, parades, and gift-giving.

Because I’m lucky, I get to experience the end of Daylight Saving Time twice this year. When C. and I woke up in Copenhagen last Sunday, we discovered the time had changed in Europe. It was confusing at first, but then came the giddy sensation of temporal slippage, and we felt extra refreshed, knowing we’d gotten a free hour of sleep.

2.

I’m finally learning how to keep a notebook: nothing is sacred and nothing is profane. Let it all blur together, the ruminations and hopeful plans and overheard phrases and client work and memories of my parents and shopping lists and aspirational routines and things to look up later and ideas for new songs to reverberate.

I’m learning to live in the grey. Sort of like the music in my headphones, the waves of hiss and low-frequency drones that muffle the 21st century. Because no matter where I go these days, some jackass is braying into a telephone and terrible music is playing.

But I found some unexpected faith in the human project at the Blue Lagoon in Iceland. Dozens of us bobbed in the steamy water while murmuring to our wives and husbands and children and friends in every kind of English and Cantonese and Portuguese and Arabic and Italian and Korean and languages I did not recognize from Africa, India, and Eastern Europe. Here we all were, at the top of the world in search of a warm place to float around, behaving with peace and decency.

“The people I like most are the ones who are always one sentence away from a laugh,” says C.

3.

In Copenhagen, we spent three days looking at art. We saw a lot of classics, some new favorites, and a fair amount of annoying contemporary work.

Earlier this year in Taiwan, I decided the purpose of art is to create a situation where language falls apart. Copenhagen taught me something more: my favorite artwork offers a question—it inspires possibility and speculation rather than stunting the imagination by bludgeoning the viewer into a specific point of view.

A highlight was listening to heavy rain fall on the skylights of the Louisiana while we looked at some Giacomettis and a Francis Bacon, our reflections merging with theirs in the glass. At the Statens Museum for Kunst, I admired the factual cadence of phrases like “Sirens were bird-women whose music comforted the dead on the way to the underworld,” and at the Glyptoteket, the frozen halls of marble gods from three thousand years ago was soundtracked by the delighted shrieks of riders at a nearby amusement park.

Most of all, I appreciated the sci-fi aesthetic of five-thousand-year-old figurines in glass cases, casting extraordinary reflections beneath the spotlights.

4.

Back in the Middle West, on Thursday nights I sit in the lunchroom of a financial services company with a dozen very different men and together we discuss spiritual books. For the first time, I opened my grandfather’s Bible, which he carried with him through France in World War II. It looks and smells like what you’re imagining: yellowed pages gone red at the edges, a velvety odor of damp and time. How such a ferocious smell can be stored away for so many years, I have no idea, but I feel like I’m in conversation with him when I come upon shakily underlined passages like “And God said to Moses, I am who I am.”

We’re queueing up Simon Critchley’s Mysticism, and I’m already haunted by the proclamation of Madame Guyon, a 17th-century mystic who declared that “God is all mouth.” I imagine a voice howling across time and space, framed by Francis Bacon teeth. (Bacon believed in “an area of the nervous system to which the texture of paint communicates more violently than anything else.” I think he’s right.)

But maybe the best way to survive the twenty-first century is to cultivate an appetite for mutation and strangeness.

5.

Tonight’s soundtrack harmonizes with this idea of time and mutation. Over the past several weeks, I’ve been smudging my favorite mid-century vocals across a heartbeat drum and some loops that were trapped in my delay pedal. The result is an hour-long soundtrack composed for Grace Wang’s photography exhibition, The Heart Has Not Stopped, at Clark Centre for the Arts in Toronto.

“Through dreamlike, layered images created with in-camera multiple exposures on film, Wang evokes fleeting moments of memory and time—an intimate meditation on a world both beautiful and unknowable.” The show runs through November 30. (If you can't make it, you can see some of her work here.)

Grace’s pictures combine the haze of memory with the shock of color and unexpected overlays that edge toward the spectral. I tried to capture this sensation by letting bursts of Patsy Cline, Rebekah Del Rio, Nancy Sinatra, The Platters, Yao Su-jung, Roy Orbison, and other familiar voices gradually unfurl. In addition to these samples, the final track was built from tape loops, pitched-down field recordings, and a couple of selections from the excellent Echospace sound library.

Thank you for listening, and the request lines are open.

Bandcamp | Podcast

1

The man takes his large fingers out of my mouth, snaps off his latex gloves, and says he needs to scrape the flesh from the roof of my mouth and sew it to my gums so my teeth won’t fall out.

You sound like a horror movie, I say.

He shrugs. It’s possible to use the skin of a cadaver, he says, but it doesn’t always bind well. I can’t tell if he’s fucking with me. Whoever made your braces when you were a kid really screwed the pooch, he says. I tell him I never had braces. My parents couldn’t afford it.

He wants me to pay thousands of dollars to let him carve up my mouth. Maybe I’ll torture you with the world’s worst GoFundMe page.

Anyway, I’m back in America.

2

A few days before this encounter, I was on the other side of the planet, where a monk held my notebook over a fire to protect it from demons.

The Goma ceremony, practiced by an esoteric sect of Buddhism, empowers a god of justice to burn away the destructive desires that clutter the path to enlightenment. It’s rooted in the fire worship of ancient Indian Brahmanism and Iranian Zoroastrianism, and in Japan, this god is called Fudō Myō-ō, or “the immovable or unshakable one,” but he has many names, including Immovable Wisdom King, the Violent Wrathful One, God of Justice, and Destroyer of Obstacles—all of which might be the same thing, depending on your point of view.

A dozen men in gray robes sat with their backs to us, some barely visible in the shadows. A bell chimed, followed by the squeal of a conch and a chant, soft at first, flickering at the edge of perception until it became an undeniable rhythm. Then came the drums. The temple shuddered with a taiko boom so deep it rattled my ribcage, its drummer like a dancer, boom upon boom until it sounded like the universe was coming undone.

And I remembered: music is a religious technology.

Smoke rose from a cauldron of flames as the chant quickened, almost frantic, until the air was saturated with voices, drums, and incense. We lined up with our offerings to be blessed by the fire. Purses. Telephones. Hats. Photographs of the living and the dead. I handed my notebook to the monk, who silently passed it over the embers and performed his ministrations.

For the past two weeks, my head has been filled with the recording I made of this ceremony. It took several days to accept that no amount of audio trickery—bass boosting, EQ, compression—could capture the holy reverberations of those taiko drums. It felt like staring into the sun, so I turned in the other direction, subtracting drums and layering traces of the chants until it began to sound like static. It became an exercise in contouring the edges rather than attempting (and failing) to capture the mystery of the thing itself. Which, I suppose, is the point of any art.

After days of listening to these looped chants, I began to feel pleasantly haunted, finding information in the static, a hymnal in the hiss as I carved two hours down to the eighteen minutes we have before us now. Here are the ingredients:

• A drum loop from Woob’s “Odonna” (Woob 1194, 1994 | More)
• Goma ritual chants, tape hiss, static, and fifty-two pounds of reverb.
• Hiroshi Yoshimura – Adelaide (Flora, 1987 | Bandcamp)
• Some in-house synthesizers and a kick drum that, late at night, sounds like something knocking from the other side of the veil.

Perhaps demons are ready for a reboot. The grifters, faith-dealers, dead-eyed influencers, and screamers are stripping our world for parts, and we crave justice—not the justice of our rickety institutions, but something cosmic that assures us the universe can balance itself.

In that temple, I suspended my disbelief and trusted that a dozen men chanting around a fire could conjure something holy. And for a moment, they did.

It’s strange to think that the mouth has a roof.

All kinds of things require surrender.

Listen below—or take a deep breath and download the ceremonial mp3. (And here's the original recording I made of the ritual. Use it however the spirit moves you, and if you make anything out of it, let me know.)

Thank you for listening, and the request lines are open.