Nonfiction: September's best-written recent releases III
Read the opening pages of our pick below ^ Plus Part 50 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco
In today’s issue:
— ‘Until the glass crashed, I had been in what neuroscientist Richard Davidson from the University of Wisconsin calls experiential fusion—the state of being so absorbed that your consciousness itself becomes fused with what you are experiencing. During experiential fusion with music, you temporarily lose awareness of yourself as an individual entity, separate from the music; you and the music have become one’: our next pick from the recent releases in nonfiction. Our previous picks are here and here, where you can also find the full list of books considered.
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—’We’d lost our gag reflex. Our whole species had’: Nirvana, the penultimate part of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. This material is far darker than the rest of the series, which is available here. A free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com.
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Chapter 1: A Musical Species
Science seeks to find truth in the natural world; art seeks to find truth in the emotional world.
I’m walking on Revere Beach outside of Boston where the low tide has pushed the ocean far away from the shore, and the wet sand is squishing up between my toes. I came here for no particular reason—just to clear my head after two frantic weeks in the city surrounded by noise, construction, and crowds. A briny, sweet smell hangs over everything in the thick humidity of September. Warm air and wafts of cold breeze intermingle—it is T-shirt and jacket weather both at the same time.
I sit in a hard plastic seat on the Blue Line as the car speeds smoothly forward. The Blue Line trains are some of the oldest; they feel like an anachronism. I’m counting the stops to Government Center, where I’ll get off to pick up the Green Line, looking at the passengers. A couple of small children with plastic buckets taking sand souvenirs home. A college student lost in her book. A man with work boots and the dust of a day’s work clinging to his clothes. As we get closer to town more people get on and I can no longer see the children or the young woman with the book. The man in the work boots gives me a nod and I nod back. The train lurches and we instinctively grab onto a pole to stabilize ourselves.
Before reaching my stop I find myself in a coffee shop, my saxophone case under the table at my feet. I’m reading the morning newspaper, people-watching, enjoying a Danish and picking up bits of conversation around me. The place is jumping.
Different cities have distinct feels—the air smells dryer or damper, the sounds bounce off buildings and landscape in their own way. I walk through the redwood forests of Muir Woods in Marin County, California, and find a spot that is so quiet I lie down on my back, staring up at the tops of trees more than a thousand years old. The blue sky barely peeks through the dense greenery. I can’t hear a single human-made sound, and at this time of day, the birds are quiet—I have to wait a few minutes to hear a song far off in the distance. I close my eyes. Hello darkness, my old friend. With no wind, even the trees are silent and I’m lulled into a state of pure calm, a stillness and majesty that are mind-altering. I’m hypnotized by the thick, dark red bark. These trees exist on their own time scale, so much longer than human life.
Someone at the bar drops a glass and it shatters. I open my eyes and realize I’ve been here all along, in this room. The Keystone Korner, a jazz club in my home town of San Francisco. Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers have been playing, and I was lost in the music, here and yet not here, my mind taking me through different places and scenes all while sitting in my chair at this table. Wynton and Branford Marsalis have just taken solos on “In Walked Bud” and passed them on to Donald Brown, the young pianist. All of us were young then—still in our twenties, except for Art, who was my grandfather’s age—beaming, moving things along, “directing traffic” as he says.
Until the glass crashed, I had been in what neuroscientist Richard Davidson from the University of Wisconsin calls experiential fusion—the state of being so absorbed that your consciousness itself becomes fused with what you are experiencing. During experiential fusion with music, you temporarily lose awareness of yourself as an individual entity, separate from the music; you and the music have become one. If someone touched your hand and asked you, “Are you aware that you’re in a jazz club?” you’d almost certainly say, “Yes.” But that awareness is born only in the moment of the interruption, as you get yanked out of your absorption, back into the mundane. In both moments you’re attentive to the music, but only in the second moment do you have meta-awareness. If this sounds strange, compare it to sleep. If someone wakes you up and asks if you were sleeping, only retrospectively could you assess that sleeping was just taking place, and it was you who was doing the sleeping.
The band launches into “In a Sentimental Mood.” Billy Pierce, who’d been my sax teacher just last year before Art picked him up midsemester, is also up on the bandstand. He looks at me and smiles. He starts to play, and I’m transported again to another time and place. I couldn’t tell you where—but it is in turns thrilling, heartbreaking, bustling, radiant, and always, always moving forward.
Today, in my sixties, after a bad day at work, getting cut off in traffic, or just feeling blue and despondent for no discernable reason (that is a part of the human condition), there is refuge. Picking up my guitar, or sitting at the piano, it’s as if I’m in a bubble—feeling safe, contented, and that all is right in the world. And when playing music with Victor Wooten, Rosanne Cash, or Carlos Reyes, on a good night we feel that bubble extend out into the back of the room and lift up everyone in it.
Neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel J. Levitin reveals the deep connections between music and healing.
Music is one of humanity’s oldest medicines. From the Far East to the Ottoman Empire, Europe to Africa and the pre-colonial Americas, many cultures have developed their own rich traditions for using sound and rhythm to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind.
In his latest work, neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author Daniel J. Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain.
Levitin is not your typical scientist—he is also an award-winning musician and composer, and through lively interviews with some of today’s most celebrated musicians, from Sting to Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama, he shares their observations as to why music might be an effective therapy, in addition to plumbing scientific case studies, music theory, and music history. The result is a work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and jubilant celebration. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord highlights the critical role music has played in human biology, illuminating the neuroscience of music and its profound benefits for those both young and old.
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire. But the descriptions of The Return’s content are not fiction, no matter how much you come to believe or wish otherwise.
This section contains material that may disturb some readers.
Nirvana
The pond unblurred into being. The One shimmered on the water’s surface. I threw a pebble at its green reflection and watched its fragments explode out across the dark surface until they reached the pond’s rim and disappeared. Reflected in the water I saw my years of submitting, drinking, drugging, wrestling, compulsive thinking, kept hard at it by some terror or thrill or other, the odd moment of satisfaction but soon back again to cave in or to crave with my nose to the latest scent.
Here in my head Maddy’s tumour was spreading. Here in my veins Demmy’s blood slowed as fellow inmates kept his head down in the toiletbowl. He filled with one last ache for the woman he brought over to the sexual dark side, the bride without whose co-operation and inventiveness he might never have known those final years of liberation, the telepathic teamwork that kept the boys’ mouths shut, kept that Uath kayfabe.
Reflected in the ripples was a galaxy-sized infant Laura Palmer. Dripping off her chin were mascara and her father’s sperm. Blood ran from her groin. She ran but did not move. She looked classically beautiful, painted by an Old Master. Her mouth cried but no cry came. There was a moan or hum everywhere, plus a stink of coaltongs. The stink wasn’t coaltongs. The stink was Laura’s blood as it ran down her thighs, as she ran cut and facialised through my brain, her muted cry sucked off into the caverns of space.
I was being sucked towards a place or condition where human-scale terror barely registered as a blip or flicker. I fell into the pond and ran while being held in place within my brain. I was Laura Palmer’s run to nowhere in the sky. The primal horror of the ravaged animal out alone in the night, the source-home of every horror, it was in every branch of memory telling us that we might become that ravaged thing.
Then the galactic infant was garlanded by blue roses bigger than star systems. Again the style was classical, defined precisely, crisply. The roses became orgasmic faces: Saviles, Glitters, Jacksons, Harrises, Wests, Bradys, Epsteins, Andrews. Platinum blonde Myra Hindley hairs shot blood out of themselves. Grinning monks circled terrorised young paraplegics. A boar’s tusk penetrated an infant Granny Uath as her own granny roared the animal on. Farmhands roared on other farmhands inside eleven-year-old Trinna.
There was no denying any of it. I was seeing what the entities see when humans think no one’s watching. What we’ll spread across the galaxy if nobody stops us.
In time it all receded into a hum scattered through the noise-vision in my mind. The hum said the human event was just a creature lost in a maze it couldn’t remember making, lost in the need for the oblivion of degradation. It said that everybody knows this in their blood. Trinna and César’s voices yelled out that somewhere in the maze there existed a figure powerful enough to rescue them, some Master to cling to so that in his reflected fury they might lose themselves among the mass and burn a path right through the maze.
And my own event as Andy denied the bitterness gripping it, and its own hope for a Master, hid them within the hope that this nobody druggy alcoholic raving security guard might one day be the only voice people wanted. Like the two of them I was compelled to run off towards the stark black void. Their lot was my lot, the slide into the ferocity that failed to abolish the horror, because it was itself that horror.
We snuffled and grunted through the maze. We renounced certain paths but knew we’d be back there within the hour. Our lassitude meant we could hardly remember our latest thoughts, or any thoughts really. Foggy gloopy numbness, porny forlorn druggy boozy brainfog. Dozy forgetfulness, mindnumbing, timenumbing, faded by drowsiness on the hazy fields of memory. What’s my name again?
The portal of true fear opened up. Something attacked Laura and me from both outside and inside, ripped this human body open with convulsive force, drove down and up within us and blocked our throat. Memories flashed of Dougal’s sucks on a Spar cucumber to train himself out of his gag reflex.
In the pond mothers and fathers welcomed the universal library of porn unfiltered onto their kids’ devices, yet another form of revenge by our century’s adults upon the young, and the kids watched the porn in awe and learned to masturbate to facials while they did their homework or brushed their teeth, some so compulsively they bled.
With alien detachment I observed our new law of physics, that the only valid route for cum was more or less elegant parabolas that ended on people’s faces. Onto open eyes until they pinkened, onto the faces of rapists driven out of their minds by porn, the faces of disabled men tied to chairs, FBI agents and secretaries, manbabies, sissy hypno’d Manbams and cowboy-booted neo-Nazis, of people who’d slashed their wrists in the bathtub, of weeping relapsing members of Sex Addicts Anonymous who themselves masturbated to clips of relapses, sexual warfare, all against all, divide and rule forever. Maddy, Demmy, Suds, Granny Uath, Dougal, Jorge, César, me, Trinna, Ella, Les—but never Stanley— at one time or another each of us had to give or get or masturbate to facials. A face it had to be, a consensual facial but not too consensual. Sometimes the face appeared to welcome the semen, sometimes it only accepted it. Kayfabe 1 or 3, or kayfabe 2.
The spirit of the age either exists or it doesn’t. If it exists, this has saturated ours: on our knees with our tongues out, metaphorical mascara down our cheeks, spattered with the permanent species defeat of the money shot.
Every minute for twenty years 100,000s of well-loved persons across five continents have settled down to bring themselves off to these spattered faces of their fellow women and men, girls and boys, by now 1,000,000,000,000s of orgasms to the sight of porn’s semen-clatted faces. Not to mention all the meatspace faces clatted as a result, all these supposedly private black masses that have released Christ knows what forces into the psychosphere, and welcomed to this plane the type of spirits that themselves get off on, feast on, and make a sacrament out of the acceptance/welcome of planet-wide submission and degradation.
For twenty years the world’s children and teens have been brainwashed down onto their knees to stick their tongues way out and submit to the arrival of that creamy goo and its slow drips off their chins. Then these children and teens have become adults who welcome in the universal library to teach the art of facials to their own children, who will later teach their own the same kneeling and tongue-out procedure, and so onwards till the end of human time, because does anybody see an end to global facials anytime before a mass extinction? If you want a vision of the future, imagine semen landing on a human face—forever.
You do see why your sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, nephews, nieces, students are being trained through porn to see the world this way, accept it or welcome it as simply how the world is, and if you can’t beat them join them. This goes beyond sex. You can see that too.
A number of beings in Dark Matter took note of these developments and wondered how they’d let things come this far and what it could achieve in the long run, kids in their 100,000,000s watching seas of sperm aimed where no other species on this or any other planet or plane ever dreamt they might aim it, and how this could possibly hurry along the all-singing, all-dancing Promised End.
In the pond the reflected lettering dissolved into something depraved, contemptuous, cheesy, egomaniacal verging on sociopathic, gaudy, fake, forlorn, dehumanised, repetitive, flat, dead-eyed, sadistic; populated by the antisocial fetishistic centre of the universe, plus a cast of plectoids, perverts, ciphers, slobs, psychopaths, vermin, fembots, assertive women degraded or ridiculed, submissive pretty women bedded, battered and murdered at will by unconvincingly domineering men; also farcical implausibility, half-bakedness, dead air, no suspension of disbelief, moral squalor from the performers and production team, at best a flippant attitude to sexual abuse and the debasement of people with disabilities and at worst cheering them on, stilted dialogue, infantilism, awful acting, Oo-oh… YOU’RE nice and wet, and the rest of it, a laughably unsubtle mirror designed to reflect back to us what we’ve become and come to value, to show in gaudy neon that the nudges of the prologue were finally over and that the wait for the evolutionary leap from our sty was at an end.
And our corporate gatekeepers waved it through with grins and cheers and gave it a standing ovation at our most influential festival. Hardly anybody else blinked an eye, and many of those who even noticed stuck their tongues out and begged for more.
A kind of misty fever filled the air entering my throat, Laura’s throat. It thickened to a transparent jelly. It was impossible to breathe but still it poured into us. What was breathable was separated from what wasn’t, ruthlessly, unarguably, one thing and not another. Into us came little jelly orbs similar to snowglobes but featuring tiny degraded Lauras wearing lingerie, fake eyelashes and clown makeup, and no snow for them to play in.
Now into our throat in gushes came the sex sounds. Slurps, grunts, groans, shrieks, wheezes, zips unzipped on denim worn by BOB-Demmy-Suds. Sticky-sucky choking sounds. Effete dubbed voices. Tiny drenched Lauras, Ellas, Trinnas, Dougals, Andys, Demmys, Granny Uaths squealed what a BIG load that is.
Next came the smells. Juices, semen, fresh sweat, stale sweat, mascara, coaltong, menthol, denim, bloodsoaked magazine paper, Tia Maria breath, saliva, urine, faeces, discharged gonorrhea. Our mouth could taste them as the air they filled went down. Capillaries transferred them to every organ. Sex stinks were in each particle of air and each particle of our being.
The ground was gone. Opening up was a giant abyss. The bottom had dropped out of the world. Mascara kept running down our cheeks. The lump swelled in our throat till no breath passed either way. We’d lost our gag reflex. Our whole species had. We’d opened ourselves up to magnitudes of numbness, denial and shame that few species in any realm were ready for. Chuckles at that from the surrounding night, giggly denial of our guilt-shamed conscience.
Our fingers clung to the soil around us. The abyss was gaping. Then the fingers slipped and the fall began, down towards a loneliness beyond loneliness, deserted not just by everything human but everything substantial. Here the desolation of existence was laid bare, and the night dissolved into a nowhere and nowhen so chaotic that even denial was useless, pointless. And so denial ended.
Identity as well, then, scattered by absolute randomness. Inescapable, this chaos. My form and Laura’s form were burned away and absorbed into the nothingness of the pre-natal. Lights snuffed out, darkness, no-world, void. The end of the fall, the true end of the Line, el fundamento, the chaos and nameless estrangement at the core of non-existence.
Welcome home.
…
Reworks passages from Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil.