My Variety Of Religious Experience

It upsets me sometimes when people poo poo religious folk. This isn’t to say that there are not terrible things carried out every day under the banner of religion — whether it’s killing, persecution, or the ill formation of societies. But, the religious feeling urge is something that’s been with humanity since there’s been humanity, and even though it has in the west been in decline for hundreds of years, the urge behind it will surely outlive various historical instantiations of it. I think there will probably be religion as long as there are human beings.

The thing that bothers me, then, in the dismissal of religion has to do not with condemning the transient aspects of it. That’s fine. But I think dismissing the impulse, the bone feeling, is wrong. Or, well not wrong in a normative sense. But it’s like dismissing the ocean or blood flow. It’s a meaningless exercise.

Music is not an intellectual exercise. Nothing — or hardly anything — is. Mathematical propositions are tautologies, a balancing act of equivalent notions by a sanguine equal sign. Language — despite its near-endless elasticity — is also a closed system, incapable of describing (here, again, notice the tautology) incapable of describing experiences outside its purview. Experience itself, phenomena, exist as aesthetic objects only insofar as there are people to notice them.

There is the feeling, though, that there should be more to experience and to life. I think that some people find this more, and that invisible over-fullness to experience is often ascribed to religion. It’s funny to joke about religion, and it’s useful to discuss it, but I also think it’s basically senseless to critique the religious urge from the outside. This flowchart was going around a while back, and it really bothered me. It just misses the point of religion so broadly. You might as well have a flowchart to determine who your love interest should be, or what your life philosophy should be. I mean, those things exist, but they’re jokes. They’re not really helpful. You don’t build a foundation for your very being by thinking about it. Your being is already here, and you have to discover it. You can make a dent in that process by thinking about it, but you won’t ever find the remainder of being — that part that exists outside of existence that you get by dividing being by experience the experience of it — you won’t find that by looking for it.

There’s this bit of philosophy that says,

It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)

I think what this means is that what I’ve been calling the “religious urge” is like a set of rails on which your whole life runs. You can change parts of your life, go faster or slower, but you can’t change the rails. Ethics and aesthetics function in the same way, are the same thing. Ethical urges aren’t the same as morality because morality can be influenced and changes over time. Aesthetics doesn’t mean Auto-Tune versus dynamic range compression or Old Master painting technique or the discovery of perspective. Those are contingent, nottranscendent. Ethics, aesthetics, the religious impulse — everything that’s transcendent — are all things you sort of talk around, necessarily. That’s why it’s not important, doesn’t even rate or matter, that there’s scientific evidence of the earth being this old when the Bible says it’s this old. You can reconcile discrepancies in knowledge, but transcendence is unconcerned with reconciliation, it doesn’t matter.

This all is a long-winded way of saying that listening to Kanye West is, for me, a sort of religious experience.

My conversion started when I heard “Runaway”, and it climaxed watching the movie of the same name. I’ve watched that movie like four or five times, and it’s not really very good. But I just remember, the calendar tells me it was a Thursday night, sitting in my office alone. Night time, no lights. And I’m working on streaming it on Kanye’s site with the speakers blasting. Stream, sputter, stop. Stream, sputter, stop. I eventually get enough of it cached so that I can watch it uninterrupted, and I swear my life changed in an instant.

It was an emotional reaction. Sometimes, and I believe I’ll get to this in a later post, you feel like you’re broken down inside — soupy — and it’s not your fault. Or everything lights up for you, not in a way that makes anything clearer — the opposite of that, really — but everything lit up. Or you feel like you’re very far away from where you’re supposed to be, but that you belong where you are. Or you feel like nothing really matters, that everything that worries you is a subtle riddle (like an LSAT problem), and that finding answers to them all is not important. That finding answers to them actually means you got them all wrong.

When I watched that movie, which ended up closely tracking how the album came out, more or less, it felt like discovering that your favorite and most pleasurable activity in the world also actually was beneficial for the world, made it work better. Listening to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is an endless task for me, and I know on an intellectual level that it’s pointless and not even that interesting probably. I know people who read Ulysses every year and make their living studying it and actually finding new things to say about it. I know people who are, like, scientists and they’re actually making things. But transcendence always only has as its root, material cause an accident, a contingency. You can trip on a pebble and transcend, but it has nothing to do with the pebble. That won’t preclude you from setting up a shrine to that pebble, though.

As I said in my essay about My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’s loudness, I can and do listen to the album non-stop. I can just pick it up at any point. Virtually every song on it has been my favorite song on it at some point. I never thought “Runaway” would be supplanted, until I heard “All Of The Lights”. I thought that was the most intense and best song on the album until I really started listening to “Gorgeous”. I used to think “Monster” was corny, but now I think it’s so cool.

I cannot read anything about My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy without at first, instantly, thinking 1) the author has no idea what they’re talking about, and 2) that whatever it is doesn’t matter because it won’t change the way I feel about the album. I have no idea why this is. It’s become a fixed point, like the rails of transcendence, about which my life turns. I don’t sit around thinking about the album all day, although I do sometimes. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is just something I feel as if I’ll always like, love, and have for myself. It’s an album that I think presents a vast array of interesting problems and aesthetic pleasures — almost in equal turn. I really, emphatically love music. That’s such a teenager thing to say, and I’m almost thirty years old. But at no point in my life, I mean every single day going forward from yesterday to today to tomorrow, have I ever loved music more than I do at any given moment. Every day I love it more. There’s just nothing I’d rather do than listen to music, and nothing I like writing about more than music. It’s exactly as deep and thoughtful as you make it, and it’s always different and also always the same. It’s an extension of being, but it also helps form being’s parameters in that as an object, it helps you elucidate the form and limits of your own experience. In a lot of ways, then, the talking about the album is a separate matter from the album itself. I mean, it just is — not even “in a lot of ways”. The music exists as a separate aesthetic object that exerts itself outside of subjectivity, thereby conditioning subjectivity. Any (and every) piece of music functions basically the same. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy just happened to be the piece that gave me a glimpse of >this<, the itness or quiddity of music, like an inference of transcendence, which you can only feel (in a human’s very limited way) and never know. It’s a religious experience whose ritual is almost beside the point, but essential nonetheless.

One Week // One Band January 20, 2011