Chu!I reach my heel back, swift kick to the rockhard gut Chu! Then airborne, squinting through approaching twilight, searching for marmot holes in the impossibly mottled grass. I will never ride as the Mongols do. There is something about being raised on horseback, coming from the greatest horse-people in the world, gyroscopic blood. Raised Wooden saddles, floating inches above the horseback; short stirrups, tied together beneath the belly, that would make our knees lock and scream. They fly in frozen standing stance, slouched to one side, pole-lasso in hand, poised in galloped rhythm — familiar as their own pulse.

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate…. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again–to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
Pico Iyer, Why We Travel: A Love Affair With the World

“What a fucking ridiculous place” —KJC

Vietnam, home of rice paddies and shards of American shrapnel embedded in jungle soil.

Mongolia is nowhere, nothing. Marco Polo and Chinggis Khaan. He is still Genghis to you.

Mongolia gives new weight to the phrase “Golden Years”. Nostalgia on a new plane.

But now’s your chance to see Vietnam. Before it develops they say.

Realize there is something morbidly fascinating about (post)-communism.

Choose Mongolia because you get to spend two weeks herding sheep and goats, and living in a _ger_in the countryside.

To lands returned
To realms uncharted.

Develop some stock answers to the question, Why Mongolia?

You become a minor celebrity in certain circles. Your mom’s email list. Your sister’s friends. Relatives. No-one at your school cares, or they hide it well. It is likely they resent you for out-exoticizing-internationalizing them. This makes you happy.

Go away–far, far away. You are tired of living comfortable. Which is ironic, since for a rich white male, you’ve had it less than easy. Then again, that’s not saying much. You long for culture shock. To be hung by your feet and shaken until everything falls from your pockets.

Mongolia—vast in her emptiness, tragic in her exile from sea and arable land, breathtaking in her humble beauty.

But don’t go for the food

Ode to Pepto O Pepto, how gracious thou art Calming the stomach’s sea Thy fair complexion glows as a rose in Spring Thy taste, as sweet as the finest chalk.

All romance is dashed, Upon that first encounter with the infamous phantom
That is Montezuma’s Revenge.

Or the sting of your hands,
As they freeze one morning
In October.

In Mongolia, vegetable soup consists of:
mutton salt potatoes
onions (optional)
salt cabbage (optional)

In Mongolia, your cab fare is computed using a simple formula:
(distancekm*300) / (mongolian language ability) / (number of mongolians with you) + 500 * (number of gringos) + random * 100

Big Brother is watching, don’t say the
Wrong thing, look the
Wrong way.

Traditional systems dis-
Integrate. Morals, ethics, freedoms and structures of life on the steppe.1
Yet what happens when Big Brother falls?

The veil is lifted, euphoria blossoms;
The image of the Tiger mesmerizes,
Nurtured by romancing Western winds.2

I gingerly held on to my seat as we bounced through marmot holes and over patches of grass, feet perched solidly on the footrests of my host father’s motorcycle as we sped through the night. The cool air soothed my skin, each molecule a reminder of the authenticity of the moment, and my very mortality. The motorcycle’s lone headlight danced its way across the steppe; I leaned back, resting my hands on my knees, and gazed up at the endless starry dark. My stomach full of боодог (boodog, Mongolian roasted goat), сүүтэй цай (suutei tsai, milky tea), айраг (airag, fermented mare’s milk) and архи (arhi, vodka), I smiled at the uniqueness and beauty of this experience, and drank in the Mongolian night.

With perestroika and the decline of Soviet power in the late 1980’s, Mongolia entered the first period of its post-communist development. This romantic period was a time of hope; Mongolia was to become the next Asian Tiger. Yet with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the halting of related aid money, newly democratic Mongolia was faced with an economic crisis of epic proportions. The fruits of democracy were enjoyed as well; newspapers sprang up, their variety reflecting the budding of Mongolia’s new multi-party democracy. Churches tripped over each other to send missionaries to cultivate her fertile sands, and Buddhism re-entered the public sphere. However, the lack of visible progress led many Mongolians’ to enter into state of now-familiar disillusionment.

Yet change proves illusory, as do the goods
That once lined the oppressive shelves of state-owned stores.
A dissatisfied electorate speaks with their vote;
Old are replaced by new: the heroic Democrats

Stumble forward.
With the suavity of a toddler’s first step, they apply the shock;
Sparks fly, illuminating their fresh faces frozen in naïveté and terror.
With the ferocity of a dead fish the Mongolian economy coughs,
Collapsing into torpor.

Elections brought the young Democrats into power, who hastily implemented an intensely neo-liberal plan to shock the Mongolian economy into complete liberalization. Despite optimistic forecasts from policymakers, the life of the average Mongolian took a serious turn for the worse. Problems that had been forgotten during the times of Stalinist ‘utopia’ ravaged the country. Unemployment, massive inflation (as much as 350%), shortages of essential goods, and an almost complete collapse of the Mongolian economy were among them.3 Social ills soon followed, with Mongolian males and their fragile egos faring worse that the women; alcoholism and violence, especially, spread amongst the growing population of unemployed young men.4 Such chaos swept the MPRP back into power, beginning another dark era of de-democratization, though with some economic recovery.

I took what must have been my 100th lap around the ger–I had struck a rhythm; long underwear snapping against the canvas roof to the beat of my stilted step. My right foot always hitting harder as it centripetally held me in an orbit–clockwise of course, even when committing flyicide.

31 August, Afternoon

Flies are everywhere. On my arm. … Fuck these godforsaken fucking flies. Wow, I sound angry, no?

31 August, 5:30pm

FLIES AHHHHHHHH Now Lkhakvasuren is running around the ger rambo-style with a towel in one hand, and my pillow in the other, windmilling her arms.

4 September, 3:55pm

Midday is definitely the worst time of day. It’s hot, and there’s nothing to do. My [host] father usually naps or watches TV, or both, while I make flashcards or do homework. Meanwhile, the flies go beserk. There’s no point in even trying to wave them away.

Right now the only sound is of flies swarming above and around me. A chorus that ebbs and flows to its own chaotic pulse. Usually, I get up every ten minutes or so to clear my side of the ger, if only to lessen the number in my immediate vicinity, for a few moments of relative peace.

It sorta works. At least I don’t feel helpless. My [host] father is going to tend to the sheep now…

8 September, 3:47pm

When this baby screams, it’s like the sun is shattering, screeching-swerving through space. Except less cosmic, graceful, grandiose, or poetic. The shit is just LOUD and SHRILL.

It’s also the witching hour. Or hours. WHen the flies all take their afternoon dose of speed and then go Bat-Shit-Insane all over the ger. Todo: Become zen so I don’t care

9 September, 3:00pm

…they joked that I should give them burzag blah blah, that I was a poor host –pause to kill some flies–

9 September, 3:55pm

Phew. There were 100′s, now there are, like, 20. The war is un-winnable, but I figure I can win a few battles to make their level at least tolerable. And strike some fear into their grimy hearts.

The Herd One mass, assembled A stream of fleece Flowing, bound by ground Horse and voice

Ger
An architecture whose elegance
Could only emerge from Time’s
Eternal forge, casting
Function, form, philosophy.

Swarms of flies, driven mad by midday sun
Melt silence into winged static.

Timelessness embodied in wooden chests,
The malchins’ mournful voice serenades his herd;
A wood-framed home in a woodless land.

Learn that everything extracted from, or grown in Mongolia goes to China; that everything that can be bought is made in China, perhaps from Mongolian materials. Which you hadn’t dropped Chinese. …

Fights

We are walking down the main drag, heading to or from a bar. A man is standing by the roadside. he is a dark shape revealed only in the passing slices of headlights, wearing a shirt that was once white, but is now streaked with red. Presumably blood. His face, also revealed by the headlights is similarly painted — and wears a timid grimace.

He is trying to get home; with one hand struggling to pathetically hail a passing car, as he hunches over into himself.

Food

Don’t go to Mongolia for the food. Unless you like three things: Mutton, Salt and Fat. Then you should rather enjoy the cuisine.

The American doctor at the local Korean Christian hospital thinks Mongolians have high rates of kidney disease from not drinking any water. In the countryside, they drink suutei tsai (literally, tea with milk). Perhaps a more apt name would be davstai tsai (tea with salt). It is the beverage of choice when you’re not drinking airag (fermented mare’s milk, or koumiss), and can be conveniently used as broth for any soup or noodles. Main Dishes

You have the infamous buuz. Buuz are like Tibetan momos — little mutton-filled boiled dumplings. Except momos are smaller, and have spices and vegetables. Buuz have four ingredients: Mutton, Mutton Fat, Salt, and Onions. For cultures from the colder regions, the highest of culinary achievement is glorious lard.

Put the onions, mutton and fat in a dumpling wrapper. Make into dumpling. Boil. Eat with suutei tsai. Your first bite may be dangerous, you bite into the familiar dumpling shell only to receive an onslaught of flooding “juice”. Your mouth fills with mutton grease and the uniquely pungent taste of mutton itself.

Mutton is a uniquely fatty red meat, so bad for you that the Mongolian government runs a health campaign, promoting BEEF as the heart-healthy “other red meat”!

Up next, khuushuur. These are like hot pockets (maybe the calzones), but filled with one thing: mutton — and then fried to oblivion.

Tsuivan. This was my staple dish when eating at the only restaurants that exist outside the city (the capitol). Zoogiin Gazar, Buuz-eria, “Mongolian National Fast Food”. they serve several dishes, most which are randomly sold out at any particular moment.

I always order Tsuivan. it’s a simple dish — a safe choice mostly, though a few times I was served it with ketchup. Which threw me off a bit. Essentially it’s Mongolian lo mein. take flat wheat noodles, fry lightly with a generous amount of oil, slivers of mutton, and maybe a few veggies. even the noodles will take on the pungence of mutton, absorbed into the oils.

I arrived in Mongolia approximately August 23rd.

On August 29th, I recorded in my journal that “maybe I just don’t like mutton”.

I had just finished my first week.

First of fourteen. Cheese

One would think, given the number of livestock (35 million) and their centrality to Mongolian culture and lifestyle, and that all the main livestock varieties produce milk fit for the purpose (sheep, goats and cows) that Mongolia would have developed a robust cheese-making tradition. But no. There are two types of Mongolian cheese: aaruul and “Mongolian Cheese”. Aaruul is the traditional cheese made in the countryside and dried for weeks in the sun on the roof of the ger. It is hard. As a soft stone. Sure, you could bite it, but you’d be risking a ticket to both the dentist and world of pain. one of my buddies’ host mothers made this mistake. She must’ve been lving in the city so long she lost touch with the culture and forgot how to eat aaruul. Though city dwellers don’t drink as much cuutei tsai so maybe she was calcium deficient (thus the broken tooth).

So aaruul is a hard and very strong-tasting cheese. very salty.

Cheese #2/2 is textured pleasantly, between mozzarella and cheddar. It’s a bit rubbery. looks delicious until you take a bite. And realize it has no taste. Who knew it possible to make cheese with utterly no taste? i always figured cheese got most of its flavor from the cheesiness. y’know, milk (ie. goat vs. sheep vs. cow… all the cheese taste different) and the cultures…

But here was proof of the futility of my self-delusions. Stark in its blandness. My host family laughed when i bought some, and referred to it as davsgui byslag — cheese with no salt. So the one place I would gladly have welcomed a bit of salty tang, of course it is utterly absent.

The one thing that is wrong with all Mongolian Pizza is the cheese — and understandably so. When mozzarella is $15/lb, and you earn $400/month if you’re rich, then Pizza just ain’t gonna be the same.

Not that they don’t try… (Pizza King… )

I stared at the metal bowl placed unceremoniously before us. It was a matte-gray metal pot — like a wash bin – the standard vessel for all cooking outside the “apartmented gentry”.

I only got sick once in Mongolia. No, twice. Neither were especially severe – as in, long lasting – but rendered me physically weak, emotionally drained, and gastrointestinally anarchic.

Sickness, such as this reminds you of how connected and unified your GI tract really is. We tend to separate at the stomach. The top is for eating, the bottom for pooping. Yet once food passes the halfway mark, it falls under the realm of the nearest escape route. So on that fateful day when I drank a glass of Mongolian Coca-Cola with breakfast (my host father later told me my illness must have been due to that) the contents of my GI tract decided to riot and collectively exited my body.

Luckily (or unluckily, depends who you ask) I never experienced a majestic GI phenomenon known as the Wind Tunnel. When both sides of one’s GI tract decide to exit simultaneously, one is left in an interesting logistical quagmire. Then, a state of vacuum is created in the center of the body as you spew digested and undigested food simultaneously into the nearest drainally-able vessel.

It took me two weeks to learn how to get to school. Every school day we went the same way. From our rooms at the top of the student hostel, we descended to the increasingly frigid streets of UB. A short walk and a wait later, we were aboard a Korean trolley bus, creaking our way down Peace Ave. I still don’t past the east crossroads is a long stretch of empty road, only one stop or its 2.5 km. Then the trolley arrived at the end of the line, the war memorial. That’s what we called it.

–

Mongolia, land of the clear blue sky, transforms at night; her blue skies fade to reveal the blackness of empty space, overwhelmed by a silent swarm of stars, frozen in a distant dance. The moon, if she is out, burns with epic brightness, casting a cool glow across the shuffling herd, who peer at me with amazingly complete incomprehension.

(I stood outside the doorway to our ger, toothbrush hanging from my mouth. Gazing at the chaotic swarm of stars blanketing the night’s black. Mongolia, land of the clear blue sky, transforms at night; her blue skies fade to reveal the blackness of empty space, punctuated by the glow of distant stars.)

Bring lots of energy bars. Lots.

If, at any point, you manage to perform an act of explosive and/or otherwise notable bowel movement–be sure to proudly proclaim so to your travelling companions. If they fail to recognize you for your achievements (i.e. survival), realize they don’t get it (yet) and have faith that their time will come. Or find new travelling companions.

Develop some form of superstitious logic to explain how best to preserve your gastrointestinal health–if only to maintain some semblance of composure (sanity). The mind does not take well to dreading diarrhea after every meal, arbitrarily.

Halfway home, the bus breathes its last breath. It’s really more of a wheeze. Watch the driver frantically fan at the flames peeking out of a hole in the bus’ side panel as you walk away.

The air is filled with echoes of deep past—I feel reverberations, but this might as well be my primary source. The camera settles on a fidgety boy of about five years, happiness and innocence bubbling from his grinning face. He begins his joke while my parents film, chiming in at the appropriate moments and feigning just enough surprise.

Then there is a cartoonish blur; a body, celestial or earthly it cannot quite be told, streaking across the background. Light is faster but sound is not far behind, the words rattled off form a blur of their own. One parent’s voice splits off to the side, and we hear a stern, embarrassingly simple instructing only barely clinging to a distant pleading, to desperate God help us and our hellion of a child. The first boy completes his joke, delivering the punch-line twice, this time getting it right.

I am five, in Kindergarten, and it is still two long years until my meetings with the school counselor, Mrs. Whiteside. Her kind dark brown face, one of only two among the lily-white faculty, and perhaps a dozen more among the 500+ students—heard first as a firm yet gentle rapping on the classroom door. Out I go, excited to be missing class, boring class. Mrs. Whiteside is slow and deliberate, but it is okay; she brings calm to my rough seas. She gives me blocks to fit together, pictures about which to tell stories. At some point the visits stop, and my parents tell me somehow (though I have no memory) that I have been diagnosed with ADHD. Their bookshelves sag with newly purchased tomes espousing the best way to “deal with your hyperactive child.” 15 years later my girlfriend will find these books on the shelf in our tv room and giggle in delight. I smile with a strange sense of pride in my hellaciousness (and repossessed “otherness”).

This, the age of doom and destruction, the failure and betrayal of humanity by reason and modern progress—now the innovators are brought into the folds. We, the “thinkers outside the box,” are the prophets of the 21st century.

No-one has yet to recruit AD/HD-ers outright, and perhaps they never will, but we can dream…

AD/Hyperactivity has several real-world manifestations beyond is theoretical murkiness, and perhaps more importantly, its skeptical appeal. Some of these effects are blatant and thus find remedy (for the lucky ___ %) in panaceaic medicines such as Ritalin and Adderall.

And some fade with age. Even the ADHD’d young man who is hyperactive to the highest order will not ‘run and climb about’ when ‘expected to be seated.” Just as even the most docile, obedient child cannot reasonably be expected to remain seated and rapt for more than a short while. And so we can appreciate this creature’s developmental nature…

Our brains have certain structure designed to act as an inhibitor over the other, more ‘creative’ functions. We are constantly parsing, permutating, impulsing, repulsing to and from, against, forward, with and to the world around us. But something acts to prevent those most ludicrous of impulses—c’mon, I know you have all had them—from taking actualized form. Usually.

But what if such a structure were missing? Or only half effective? What then…?

If you’re short of trouble, take a goat.
–Finnish saying

The goat saunters by like a pimp in a cadillac: regal and cool as can be — until one look from a cop (me) and they’re frozen in terror — then back to bizness as uzual.

Several events over the course of human/goat-history have shaped our Goat consciousness, at least in the Judeo-Christian world.1

First, deomestication: 10,000 years ago.

Goats are not people.2 nor are they bricks or pieces of lead pipe.3

But this is dangerous territory. We have already gone this way with our dogs — and those who see their dogs as pals recoil in utter disgust at the thought of eating one of their beloveds. But do we lift the goat and sheep and cow and pig to such a place? Never. To protect our selves from self-condemnation. You try watching Babe then sitting down for a nice meal of porkchops.

The life of the goat is driven by a raw spontaneity that has little human equivalent outside of childhood, senility or mental illness — and perhaps those hippie free-spirits who dance around in fields all day or drop lots of acid.

The kinetic momentum of a stampede, in the middle of the night, out on the empty step. Not a real stampede, like the kind that killed Simba’s mother. More like a shuffle-pede. One goat gets startled by a thought or a shadow or a gust of wind, and runs, headlong into another goat, who then runs in another direction. Rustling builds, then fades out as the energy dissipates. A self-reorganizing system — to the tune of their own internal “il-logic”.

The herd is ever-moving–a mile, two miles, three miles, each day. Out, then back. Again until grass turns to snow and howling other-worldy winds. Were it not for the endless blue sky resting behind, waiting to thaw the hearts of its people and the soil of its earth –the shoots of grass reawaken and the air is again filled with ambling calls.

The kids lag at the back, always, their short legs iterating walk walk ruuun MAAAA… walk walk walk ruuun MAAAA tongues slightly hanging, human-like in their maaaaah for mother.

Then, the pagan traditions which are eventually immortalized in the Bible (Sheep go to heaven, Goats go bring the plague to thy neighbor so you can return to village bizniss).

Third, medieval expounding on Biblical ideas, and the Knights Templar trials.

The diuell..dooth most properlie and commonlie transforme himselfe into a gote.
–R. Scott. ‘Discov. Witchr.’ v.i.89. (1584)

Goats have had their share of rough treatment over the years. It started as far as we can know, about 10,000 years ago in the Zagros Mountains of Persia.

The goat and the sheep, two animals locked in perpetual binary harmony. Like some star system, they graze together, but in realms beyond their comprehension take paths impossibly dissimilar.

In the Bible, it was decided that Sheep and Goats were Different and goats Bad.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
–J. R. Lowell, The Present Crisis. St. 5.4

Must’ve been those pesky pagans. Who worships sheep, anyways?

They must no longer offer any of their sacrifices to the goat idols [a] to whom they prostitute themselves. This is to be a lasting ordinance for them and for the generations to come. –Leviticus 17:7 (NIV) [a.] or demons

Herd or flock? A herd is a leisurely grazing through lush Biblical hills and valleys. Always following dumbly, sleeping soundly, until snatched in wolf-jaws.

The sheep blankly staring, flatulent falls, curled hair spiked with barbs for spinning and itching. Some have horns, and all follow. Their tails hang down. Some cultures dock the tails of their sheep. Others savor this, the finest piece of the sheep for eating–even if the herders must spend hours plucking maggots from oozing open slow-bite holes. Festering, crusted in shit. All fat.

Goats were given the humble and thankless duty of carrying the sins5 of a village into the woods.

The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a solitary place; and the man shall release it in the desert. –Leviticus 16:22 (NIV)

You can eat goats.6 Goat meat is called chevre. Goat cheese is called ooh la la.7

Cashmere is the hair of the goat. Of this fine hair, the holy tabernacle found its curtains.

“I will KILL YOU, fucking GOAT!” I calmly explain, “Then EAT YOUUU!” I kick the flank of my horse gently, and we trot over to the goats that just don’t seem to get the idea of following the herd.

The damned goates he doth despise; Poynts out his lambs, whose sinfull dyes hee purgde with bloody streame
–Sir W. Mure. ‘Spiritual Hymme.’ 326. (1628)

They fan out in directions, wider than my sphere of influence, and are lost in smashing skulls or chewing grass, or staring into space, pondering their own existence.

All it took was a few days herding and now the light I see. The bible is wiser than I ever knew.8

The diuell..dooth most properlie and commonlie transforme himselfe into a gote.
–R. Scott. ‘Discov. Witchr.’ v.i.89. (1584)

If you’re short of trouble, take a goat.
–Finnish saying

The goat and the sheep, two animals locked in perpetual binary harmony. Like some star system, they graze together, but in realms beyond their comprehension take paths impossibly dissimilar.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
–J. R. Lowell, The Present Crisis. St. 5.

The sheep blankly staring, flatulent falls, curled hair spiked with barbs for spinning and itching. Some have horns, and all follow. Their tails hang down. Some cultures dock the tails of their sheep. Others savor this, the finest piece of the sheep for eating–even if the herders must spend hours plucking maggots from oozing open slow-bite holes. Festering, crusted in shit. All fat.

There is one sheep, who we chase down, whirring in Chinese dirt-biking glory–it leaps blindly forward, eyes panick-stricken; away away, out out, between its legs flaps a blood-stained rag of a tail, maggots feasting deep in its flesh. One by one, the grubs are skewed and drawn from the baying flesh, like pulling a gummy-candy from ones mouth. (?). 10 minutes later, and there is a pile of fleshy naked bodies writhing in the dirt. A dusting of white powder on the wound to disinfect, and the knee is pulled off the sheep’s flank. It bulges to its feet and trots after its departed friends, reluctant victorious “baaa’s” sent back in our direction.

Herd or flock? A herd is a leisurely grazing through lush Biblical hills and valleys. Always following dumbly, sleeping soundly, until snatched in wolf-jaws.

Lying there, I heard the gentle, drowsy tinkling if a goat-bell, and presently the herds wandered past us, pausing to stare with vacant yellow eyes, bleat sneeringly, and then move on.
–Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals (1956)

The shepherd stands peacefully-by with crook and gaze–pious and holy–rising tall/towering above the grazing beastss–his eye fastened on the heavenly horizon.

As the goats,
That late have skipt and wanton’d rapidly
Upon the craggy cliffs, ere they had ta’en
Their supper on the herb, now silent lie
And ruminate beneath the umbrage brown,
Upon his staff, and leaning watches them:
And as the swain, that lodges out all night
In quiet by his flock, lest beast of prey
Disperse them: even so all three abode,
I as a goat, and as the shepherds they,
Close pent on either side by shelving rock.
–Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy, “Purgatory. Canto XXVII.”

The herd is ever-moving–a mile, two miles, three miles, each day. Out, then back. Again until grass turns to snow and howling other-worldy winds. Were it not for the endless blue sky resting behind, waiting to thaw the hearts of its people and the soil of its earth –the shoots of grass reawaken and the air is again filled with ambling calls.

The kids lag at the back, always, their short legs iterating walk walk ruuun MAAAA… walk walk walk ruuun MAAAA tongues slightly hanging, human-like in their calls.

‘I must discipline these idiots,’ Omolo said to himself…’I must beat them today, goats!’
–Inside Kenya Today. Mar 37/2. (1972)

“I will KILL YOU, fucking GOAT!” I calmly explain, “Then EAT YOUUU!” I kick the flank of my horse gently, and we trot over to the goats that just don’t seem to get the idea of following the herd.

The damned goates he doth despise; Poynts out his lambs, whose sinfull dyes hee purgde with bloody streame
–Sir W. Mure. ‘Spiritual Hymme.’ 326. (1628)

They fan out in directions, wider than my sphere of influence, and are lost in smashing skulls or chewing grass, or staring into space, pondering their own existence.

Flip through the study-abroad brochures advertising semesters in Prague, Vienna, Amsterdam. Flip to the next page.

Now you are in the Exotic section. Beijing, Hangzhou, Dakar, Yaoundé. Wish you hadn’t dropped Chinese. It couldn’t have been that bad.

The Dark Continent and the Exotic East, like two stepchildren. Appreciated intellectually, but when it comes down to the wire, people’s loyalties reveal themselves, and align conveniently with the flows of capital and genealogy.

You have narrowed your selection to two choices: Vietnam or Mongolia. Or Nepal. But you eliminate that because you’ve been, if only briefly. Feel bad for not wanting more to go to Africa. You must be an Orientalist asshole, or something. Make a note to work on that.

Vietnam, home of rice paddies and shards of American shrapnel embedded in jungle soil.

Mongolia is nowhere, nothing. Marco Polo and Genghis Khan. He is still Genghis to you.

Mongolia gives new weight to the phrase “Golden Years”. Nostalgia on a new plane.

But now’s your chance to see Vietnam. Before it develops they say.

Realize there is something morbidly fascinating about (post)-communism.

Choose Mongolia because you get to spend two weeks herding sheep and goats, and living in a yurt in the countryside. This appeals to you, but seems to be lost on others.

Develop some stock answers to the question, Why Mongolia? Your favorites are: Why not? or even better, Because it’s fucking awesome, that’s why. Deliver these with an air of definite confidence, as if the subject should require no further exploration.

you become a minor celebrity in certain circles. Your mom’s email list. Your sister’s friends. Relatives. No-one at your school cares, or they hide it well. It is likely they resent you for out-exoticizing-internationalizing them. This makes you happy.

Go away–far, far away. You are tired of living comfortable. Which is ironic, since for a rich white male, you’ve had it less than easy. Then again, that’s not saying much. you long for culture shock. To be hung by your feet and shaken until everything falls from your pockets.

You are going to Mongolia. Repeat 3 times. The words fail to become any less surreal. Two months later, you will echo this experience in downtown Ulaanbaatar, You are in Mongolia. Repeat 3 times.

Wonder if there’s something wrong with you because you don’t seem to be falling in love with this place. What does that even mean?

And the food is bad enough to prevent any long-term relationship from developing [past the early stages].

Learn that everything extracted from, or grown in Mongolia goes to China; that everything that can be bought is made in China, perhaps from Mongolian materials. Which you hadn’t dropped Chinese.

You want to make sure your Mongolian language skills reach a decent level. Find one of the five Mongolians in Boston and organize private language lessons for th etwo weeks before you leave.

Buy “Colloquial Mongolian” by Alan J. K. Saunders and Jansangiin Batereedüi.

Six months later, the most played track in your iTunes® will still be “Lesson 1, Dialogue 2–Fast”.

Have a sinking feeling halfway thorugh track 2 on the cd. Sample words: Sandal, Kharandaa, Tom, Jijig, Gobi. Goiv? Gobi. Figure it must be a mistake or typo. How can Gobi become.. well the G is swallowed, and calls up from the bottom of your throat, leading to a slippery o that somehow terminates in a soft V. Realize you won’t be learning this language from a book. You need corroboration for these crimes against reason. Wish you hadn’t dropped Chinese.

Enjoy thinking about how you must appear, Mongolian phrases emanating from your throat as you practice to the recordings on your daily commute on the wonderful MBTA.

Be glad you dropped Chinese.

Try not to think about how knowing this language will help you later in life. Fill your head with lots of liberal-arts learn for its own sake bullshit.

Mongolia is fucking awesome, that’s why.

If, at any point, you manage to perform an act of explosive and/or otherwise notable bowel movement–be sure to proudly proclaim so to your travelling companions. If they fail to recognize you for your achievements (i.e. survival), realize they don’t get it (yet) and have faith that their time will come. Or find new travelling companions.

Develop some form of superstitious logic to explain how best to preserve your gastrointestinal health–if only to maintain some semblance of composure (sanity). The mind does not take well to dreading diarrhea after every meal, arbitrarily.

Halfway home, the bus breathes its last breath. It’s really more of a wheeze. Watch the driver frantically fan at the flames peeking out of a hole in the bus’ side panel as you walk away.

I see it all unfold from about, without. A meta-travel. We goto this land for many reasons that are all the same. We run from broken homes, repentant lovers, dead pets.

Flip through the study-abroad brochures advertising semesters in Prague, Vienna, Amsterdam. Flip to the next page.

Now you are in the Exotic section. Beijing, Hangzhou, Dakar, Yaoundé. Wish you hadn’t dropped Chinese. It couldn’t have been that bad.

The Dark Continent and the Exotic East, like two stepchildren. Appreciated intellectually, but when it comes down to the wire, people’s loyalties reveal themselves, and align conveniently with the flows of capital and genealogy.

You have narrowed your selection to two choices: Vietnam or Mongolia. Or Nepal. But you eliminate that because you’ve been, if only briefly. Feel bad for not wanting more to go to Africa. You must be an Orientalist asshole, or something. Make a note to work on that.

Vietnam, home of rice paddies and shards of American shrapnel embedded in jungle soil.

Mongolia is nowhere, nothing. Marco Polo and Genghis Khan. He is still Genghis to you.

Mongolia gives new weight to the phrase “Golden Years”. Nostalgia on a new plane.

But now’s your chance to see Vietnam. Before it develops they say.

Realize there is something morbidly fascinating about (post)-communism.

Choose Mongolia because you get to spend two weeks herding sheep and goats, and living in a yurt in the countryside. This appeals to you, but seems to be lost on others.

Develop some stock answers to the question, Why Mongolia? Your favorites are: Why not? or even better, Because it’s fucking awesome, that’s why. Deliver these with an air of definite confidence, as if the subject should require no further exploration.

you become a minor celebrity in certain circles. Your mom’s email list. Your sister’s friends. Relatives. No-one at your school cares, or they hide it well. It is likely they resent you for out-exoticizing-internationalizing them. This makes you happy.

Go away–far, far away. You are tired of living comfortable. Which is ironic, since for a rich white male, you’ve had it less than easy. Then again, that’s not saying much. you long for culture shock. To be hung by your feet and shaken until everything falls from your pockets.

You are going to Mongolia. Repeat 3 times. The words fail to become any less surreal. Two months later, you will echo this experience in downtown Ulaanbaatar, You are in Mongolia. Repeat 3 times.

Wonder if there’s something wrong with you because you don’t seem to be falling in love with this place. What does that even mean?

And the food is bad enough to prevent any long-term relationship from developing [past the early stages].

Learn that everything extracted from, or grown in Mongolia goes to China; that everything that can be bought is made in China, perhaps from Mongolian materials. Which you hadn’t dropped Chinese.

You want to make sure your Mongolian language skills reach a decent level. Find one of the five Mongolians in Boston and organize private language lessons for th etwo weeks before you leave.

Buy “Colloquial Mongolian” by Alan J. K. Saunders and Jansangiin Batereedüi.

Six months later, the most played track in your iTunes® will still be “Lesson 1, Dialogue 2–Fast”.

Have a sinking feeling halfway thorugh track 2 on the cd. Sample words: Sandal, Kharandaa, Tom, Jijig, Gobi. Goiv? Gobi. Figure it must be a mistake or typo. How can Gobi become.. well the G is swallowed, and calls up from the bottom of your throat, leading to a slippery o that somehow terminates in a soft V. Realize you won’t be learning this language from a book. You need corroboration for these crimes against reason. Wish you hadn’t dropped Chinese.

Enjoy thinking about how you must appear, Mongolian phrases emanating from your throat as you practice to the recordings on your daily commute on the wonderful MBTA.

Be glad you dropped Chinese.

Try not to think about how knowing this language will help you later in life. Fill your head with lots of liberal-arts learn for its own sake bullshit.

Mongolia is fucking awesome, that’s why.

On your birthday, stop by a shop in town for a bottle of vodka. Your family will serve you a special meal: öökhgüi buudz and khuushuur (Mongolian dumplings and fried meat pastries without added fat!!!! a travesty!?!). Thank them. You are truly touched. They have forsaken fat for you, what could be more touching? Reflect on what this says about Mongolian cuisine. Or don’t.

Laugh knowingly when they pull out a bottle of vodka. Realize it’s going to be a long night. But this is your chance, the last hope of drawing N out of her awkward shell. You will be wrong. She will refuse the birthday vodka. Be confused, who rejects vodka in Mongolia? She said she drinks, but just “doesn’t feel like it.” On your birthday? Disagree, and let the two shots you’re ahead do the arguing. Engage in a debate. Wonder if its worth the fight.

Meanwhile, your host mother lobbies for opening the second bottle. You tell her only if N drinks with us.

Finally, she relents, in principle. Yet she continues playing with one of the kids’ videogames in the corner of the kitchen. Seeing her from afar, she is moping like the seven-year-old owner of the toy would. Her drink sits on the table unattended.

If she drinks, you miss it, and she is none the jollier. Find her sleeping in your shared room.

The next morning be cheerful. Hope that she had fun last night. Don’t be shocked if she replies, flatly, No. After all, you made her drink. Don’t bother trying to explain that it was her choice to make. You made it impossible for her not to drink.

Be amused that you have, apparently, just peer-pressured a 30-year-old into drinking on your birthday. Ponder the moral implications, and the hilarity of the situation during your frigid walk to town. Hopefully the thoughts will cloud your mind from the tingling of your stinging face and numbing extremities.

Be thankful you brought expedition-weight long underwear. You never knew such a glorious thing existed.

Try not to think about the fact that you’ve been wearing the same pair for the last two weeks.

On Rapport
Try not to complain too much about the cold–even if your translator seems to sympathize.

Also try not to tease her for holding irrational ethnic/national stereotypes during your first extended interaction.

These may, or may not, improve your chances of developing rapport.

On Translation
Accept the fact that after words leave your mouth, and before they reach the mind of your interviewees, they will take a vacation of epic proportions to lands unknown and unseen. After which they may not resemble their former selves. Ever since Jimmy came back… he’s… never quite been the same…

Realize there are some questions/words/concepts/jokes/idioms that just won’t be understood.

The first time I heard heavy metal–the kind I listen to, from Scandinavia– in Mongolia was also the first time I heard this music broadcast on mainstream TV, while staying with a herding family in East-Central Mongolia.

I was seated outside on a carpet with my language teacher, we moved throughout the morning as the patch of shade shifted with the sun. The dog who didn’t die–yet remains nameless, at least in memory–lay napping by my side. I tried not to sound frustrated as I generated yet one more lifeless sentence of grammar crap.

–

Flies – Ger – Annihilation (5mins)

I took what must have been my 100th lap around the ger–I had struck a rhythm; long underwear snapping against the canvas roof to the beat of my stilted step. My right foot always hitting harder as it centripetally held me in an orbit–clockwise of course, even when committing flyicide.

–

From my field journal…

31 August, Afternoon

Flies are everywhere. On my arm.
… Fuck these godforsaken fucking flies. Wow, I sound angry, no?

31 August, 5:30pm

FLIES AHHHHHHHH
Now Lkhakvasuren is running around the ger rambo-style with a towel in one hand, and my pillow in the other, windmilling her arms.

4 September, 3:55pm

Midday is definitely the worst time of day. It’s hot, and there’s nothing to do. My [host] father usually naps or watches TV, or both, while I make flashcards or do homework. Meanwhile, the flies go beserk. There’s no point in even trying to wave them away.

Right now the only sound is of flies swarming above and around me. A chorus that ebbs and flows to its own chaotic pulse. Usually, I get up every ten minutes or so to clear my side of the ger, if only to lessen the number in my immediate vicinity, for a few moments of relative peace.

It sorta works. At least I don’t feel helpless. My [host] father is going to tend to the sheep now…

8 September, 3:47pm

When this baby screams, it’s like the sun is shattering, screeching-swerving through space. Except less cosmic, graceful, grandiose, or poetic. The shit is just LOUD and SHRILL.

It’s also the witching hour. Or hours. WHen the flies all take their afternoon dose of speed and then go Bat-Shit-Insane all over the ger. Todo: Become zen so I don’t care

9 September, 3:00pm

…they joked that I should give them burzag blah blah, that I was a poor host –pause to kill some flies–

9 September, 3:55pm

Phew. There were 100′s, now there are, like, 20. The war is un-winnable, but I figure I can win a few battles to make their level at least tolerable. And strike some fear into their grimy hearts.
Anyways, so these guys show up…

–

In Mongolia

In Mongolia, vegetable soup consists of:
mutton salt potatoes
onions (optional)
salt cabbage (optional)

In Mongolia, the girls walk home to their slums wearing fake designer jeans and faux-fur-trimmed coats.

In Mongolia, Dogs are not man’s best friend.

In Mongolia, Chinggis Khaan is the God of Gods.

In Mongolia, marmots steal frisbees and other bright white, fast-moving objects.

In Mongolia, your cab fare is computed using a simple formula:
(distancekm*300) / (mongolian language ability) / (number of mongolians with you) + 500 * (number of gringos) + random * 100

In what capacity do the blue-collar jobless and I, a rich suburban college kid, find emotional common ground? If metal is the realm of the frustrated, angry, working class — then what the hell am I doing there? There’s a reason no-one in my hometown, high-school or college shares my taste in music; there must be.

It was 4th grade. I was fast. Real fast. The fastest in the school. We played touch football every day at recess, and I’d run for the hail mary, churning past the helpless defense. this was before puberty passed me by and took everyone else with it, leaving me small and athletically irrelevant.

i had a classic crush on a girl in my class named Claire.

My ADD was still not quite under control; the social pressures mounted as I unwittingly alienated myself from peers with exuberant abandon. It wasn’t active, aggressive animosity; just a general distancing and idle, abrasive needling, teasing.

The boys I played football with had figured out my little secret and so, naturally, they felt it appropriate to use this information for their own enjoyment.

We were walking out to the football field one afternoon; the teasing barter continued to fly. I’d long since realized the futility of defending myself, so I tried with equal futility to ignore. But I am my father’s son, and my mother’s father’s grandson; our blood boils hot and boils fast.

Time blurred; I see myself struggling with forces I do not, can not, will never comprehend. I turn and face the one who’d started the joke, he’d just launched a flippant jibe into my flank, took it a bit farther than the rest. He was down, on the ground. Both of us were reeling, my world had distilled into an edged clarity and a breeze cooled my neck. One punch to the gut, as I watched, a spectator to my own actions.

I helped him up, both of us in equal disbelief. Maybe I apologized. Maybe I told him ruefully that you did ask for it, didn’t you. Then the principal concerned strolled over, he was outside that day, and asked my pal if he was alright, he said yes, he’d just fallen down. Face was saved.

~

It’s little coincidence that I made the transition from dabbling in distorted guitars to immersion in mainstream hard-rock, and eventually, to full-blown heavy metal during middle school. Middle school was a stinking sulfurous hell on earth. A bastion of privilege, entitlement and pestilent wealth. And now I was small; I’d gone from 75 percentile to 25 percentile in both height and weight, and into a world where it mattered more than ever.

By 8th grade, I found myself with one real friend, and more than one enemy whose favorite pastime was to remind me of just how many friends I didn’t have. They were bigger than me, so no quick punch to the gut was going to solve anything.

I discovered heavy metal.

From punk (Offspring) and grunge (Nirvana) to hybrid nü-metal (Sevendust) and gothic industrial (Marilyn Manson), my music darkened with each passing year.

Then along came METAL. I felt an affinity to it all, from the grim solemnity of growling death metal, to the epic and fantastic bombast of its more cheerful cousin, Power Metal.

The quest for inner peace through metal was in gear.

-

When people reach college, or college age, it seems their perspective reaches a critical openness. The introspection becomes transcendental. I would never feel right saying I needed more, but I certainly wondered is this it?

Metal is a quick fix, not a sustainable, holistic process or way of life.

I discovered Buddhism; the un-religion; the anti-ism. I saw in it the intense introspection and honesty that I’d been forced to learn through years of social self-discipline, trying to learn the unwritten rules of society for which my brian found itself less than ideally suited. Yet there was also a belief in the ultimate power of human compassion to counteract our toxic egos and thought-demons. I felt a fit with my not un-ironic mix of cynical optimism.

But now I am a metalhead. Metal is not therapy, it is part of who I am.

I’d be lying if I said I don’t enjoy the look on people’s faces when I announce that I listen to death metal, wait, what? But… you’re not… head explodes n this new context difference is gold, who wants to wear a generic label, fit the mold?

How many hippie buddhist metalheads do you know?

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.¹

Brutality in a cage, contained, precisely machined from abrasive plasmic arcs

Not merely a continuous stream, our experiences of the possibilities of the near future and the certainties of the immediate past exist simultaneously with the experienced events of the hair’s present. All experience exists, therefore, not in the infinitely thin present of the traditionally conceived now, but in a temporal thickness that Husserl called the living present. This living present is the temporal window of the phenomenal world, the arena within which experience transpires. The halo of possibilities that constantly lurk before us in the future are referred to as protentions, and experiences that have just passed through the now-point are referred to as retentions. Within this living present, experiences exist for us as numerous facets synthesised together, dynamic gestalts moving from protention to retention.²

This is negative space — clusters of machined rips, lip-biting silence punctuates the in-between waiting spaces drawing pulling the ear into false-comfort, tension to be delivered by the protending riff.

word
heav•y |ˈhevē| adjective ( heav•i•er , heav•i•est ) 1 of great weight; difficult to lift or move :
• (of a class of thing) above the average weight; large of its kind : heavy artillery.
• weighed down; full of something : branches heavy with blossoms | feeling weighed down by weariness • Physics of or containing atoms of an isotope of greater than the usual mass. 2. of great density; thick or substantial : heavy gray clouds | a heavy blanket.
• not delicate or graceful; coarse : • (of the sky) full of dark clouds; oppressive : a heavy thundery sky.
3. of more than the usual size, amount, or force; doing something to excess 4. striking or falling with force : a heavy blow to the head | we had heavy overnight rain.
• (of music, esp. rock) having a strong bass component and a forceful rhythm.
5. needing much physical effort : long hours and heavy work.
• mentally oppressive; hard to endure : a heavy burden of responsibility. • important or serious : a heavy discussion. • (of a literary work) hard to read or understand because overly serious or difficult. [hard to listen to...] • feeling or expressing grief : I left him with a heavy heart.³

* * *

word METALLIC adjective: grating, harsh, jarring, dissonant.⁴

* * *

What is the meaning of a wrathful Buddha? We see all these wrathful images of Buddhas (gesturing around the temple). But in truth wrathful Buddhas have nine qualities. Their bodies are wrathful, heroic, and frightening. Their voices are laughing, threatening, and fierce. But mentally they are loving, peaceful, and powerful. Like all enlightened beings, their minds are peaceful, compassionate, joyful, and wise. If a being is wrathful on the outside and also angry in its heart, then it is a real monster — not a Buddha. Wrathful Buddhas look wrathful for a purpose: for pacifying, for taming negative forces. [From Tulku Thondup’s Talk in India 2003]

* * *

It all began some time between the third and fifth grades. I seem to remember things from this period by grades, if at all. Each year is divided by that one major change—moving to the next level in school. There is no clear beginning or end. I saw the music video for the Smashing Pumpkins’, Tonight, Tonight and was, for some reason, struck by it. Logically, I went out and bought the CD, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I wouldn’t understand the title of the album for at least five years. At least, I wouldn’t know that I’d understood the title. Was I an angsty 4th grader? Was I weighed down by weariness, my heart heavy with the troubles of the world? What about this melancholic, harsh music appealed to me, not even in my the clichéd dark teenage years? The meaning is a bit hard to miss when you hear the music. The album was released on October 24, 1995; so I was around 10 years old. Which is like, third grade, right? I always have to recount from the beginning to figure that out. So I bought the CD, a double album, despite the fact that the one song I knew was nothing like anything else on the album. Yet I don’t remember realizing that, or particularly caring at the time. But the songs I listened to most where the heavy ones. Like the buzz-sawing, Zero; the crushingly distorted Bodies; the ever-classic, Bullet With Butterfly Wings, with the timeless chorus, “Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage”. Etc.

* * *

Jesper was 16, I was 14. When you’re 14, 2 years is a bigger proportion of your life than it would be to me now, at 22. By exactly 4/77 times. Don’t ask me why that is important, it just is. So Jesper was from a band called IN Flames, from Sweden. I would later learn that Sweden is the second most metal country in the world. (Data forthcoming). Though he was from Pennsylvania. He had long dark brown hair and a dry, caustic sense of humor. He owned a stunningly shaped guitar: a red Gibson SG. Why is the shape of a guitar so important? So Jesper started a band and recorded a song with them. I tagged along and gained my eventual nickname, “roadie”. The next summer Jesper showed up with a CD and a story. The opening song on the CD (see below), captured my heart in an instant. The riffs were magical in their brutal beauty. It remains one of my favorite songs. And of course he had used the same main riff in the song he recorded the previous summer. There he was in the liner notes, Jesper Strömblad. But the picture didn’t quite fit. The Jesper Strömblad in the liner notes had long blonde hair and was… a different person. Our Jesper told us about the strict Swedish laws — that prohibited minors from publishing music, thus forcing the band to use a stand-in for the photos (and live shows? So he could goto school or something?). In any event, it’s unlikely I believed him then. I believed parts. I wanted to believe. I also don’t remember when, exactly, the illusion dissolved and he shed the identity of Jesper, but at some point he resumed his identity. But never lost that aura. He now sings for a leading death metal band in England. Or so he says.

* * *

I search for a definition of Metal. I could qualify it endlessly: Death, Black, Power, Progressive, Avant Garde, Symphonic, Viking, Doom, Folk, Nü, NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal), Pagan, Christian, Shred, Neo-Classical. It becomes absurd if it wasn’t already. What remains when the modifiers are removed?

* * *

For me, the path that led to this music was far from straight, and yet was strangely inevitable. Art appeals to an us that is raw, emotional. In my current context, one where metal is an extremely strange and alien concept, most of the people with whom I interact don’t see much of that emotional core. Finding out that I <3 metal can come as a bit of a shock for those who don’t already know a bit about me. But we all have our ways to excise the demons the world inspires within us. So I wonder, is that all this music serves to do? Does my love for metal extend beyond the realms of negativity?

* * *

My friend bought it. Someone brought it into school on their discman. I was intrigued. So I bought it. Smash by the Offspring. It 0wn3d me. It still does.

* * *

10 more minutes of standing, shuffling for a better spot, and fighting valiantly to protect the spots that are already had. A restless whisper rises throughout the room, it is not clear where it starts, or to what it refers. The stage is now dark. Necks crane and eyes strain to make sense of the fresh, shifting darkness. The shapes on stage begin to congeal into outlines, and the murmur of the crowd grows louder.

The music begins with a soft, symphonic scape of oscillating synthetic tones. The darkly peaceful chords weigh down on the restless bodies, which grow quiet.

* * *

There are several major rock stations that are receivable over FM radio broadcast in the Greater Boston Area (JOB?). Each tries desperately to define itself as THE definitive source of rock in the area, no matter how similar their mindless blathering DJ’s, or commercialized programming. But it was a start. And WAAF isn’t so bad. Or wasn’t so bad. Dunno about nowadays. There is no metal radio in Boston. Will there ever be? The metal scene is quite lively, especially out West in blue-collar Worcester, and I’m told in the Merrimack Valley as well. So I spent my middle school years listening to crappy alternative rock/Hard Rock radio, searching for my musical identity. I found, and would later reject, for right or wrong, some bands: Sevendust, Tool, Powerman 5000, LImp Bizkit (the first step is to admit, right?). Then I went to summer camp and met “Jesper Strömblad”.

* * *

Can you be Buddhist — live a life filled with compassion and happiness, and listen to Death Metal? Does spirituality satiate the same urge, the same hunger, as music? Some Christians would have us believe so. I heard a sermon in a Mongolian Evangelical church where the pastor lamented the youth’s finding God in “fun” things. He used music as his prime example and mimed it out for the crowd, hands cupping imaginary headphones and head bobbing to an imaginary disco beat, he grinned absurdly and continued the service, “Xogjim sonsdog…!” the service concluded with the parish band resuming their places on stage and leading the crowd in yet one more enthusiastic round of Jesus-loving song. But their needs were being filled by the Jesus part, not the music, right? Then why are there Christian death metal bands?

* * *

tss… tss… ts ts ts tsh six taps of a hi-hat later, the destruction begins.

* * *

I’d sign – a contract with the devil
I’ve tried – for so very long
I’d die – to become immortal
that’s why I sing this song
Am I a wannabe? – have I no dignity.
Who’d give up all my life, to be…

In the book of heavy metal –– METAALLLL!
In the book of heavy metal
-—Dream Evil, “The Book of Heavy Metal (March of the Metallians)

* * *

Would Buddha listen to metal if it touched his soul? Were I to become Buddha, would it cease to have meaning to me? The music excises the demons; so without the demons, can there be the music? Isn’t it all about the music?

From our lives’ beginning on
We are pushed in little forms
No one asks us how we like to be
In school they teach you what to think
But everyone says different things
But they’re all convinced that
They’re the ones to see

So they keep talking and they never stop
And at a certain point you give it up
So the only thing that’s left to think is this

I want out–to live my life alone
I want out–leave me be
I want out–to do things on my own
I want out–to live my life and to be free –Helloween, “I Want Out” (Keeper of the Seven Keys Part II, 1988)

A certain bleak cynicism. A morbid fascination with the dark, undesirable; a simultaneous familiarity with their emotional counterparts from a life of alienation and depression. A need for personal reality corroboration, art metaphors reflecting and reaffirming perspective validity.

Raise your hand, your fist in defiance proud Slay the armies of static grey plastic descending Blood rains, floods low-lying poor as the rich gawk from above In the metal universe, there can be no pleasure without acknowledging first the pain.

Poise and hubris in extreme. Superlatives R Us.

Death be not proud,
thou some have called thee mighty and dreadful,
thou art not so.
–Children of Bodom, “Follow The Reaper” (Follow The Reaper, 2000) (quote originally from John Donne, “Death be not proud, though some have called thee”)

Liner notes introduction: As a servant of light and defender of life, I’m proud to invite you all to the furthest horizons to fight united against astral chaos, the primordial enemy of the planetary wisdom. So relax your body, relax your mind, turn your speakers up and enjoy the virtual odyssey… –Luca Turilli (King of the Nordic Twilight, 1999)

word EPIC 1. noun: heroic poem, saga; 2. adjective: heroic, grand, monumental, ambitious, great.

Shattered hope became my guide
and grief and pain my friends
a brother pact in blood-ink penned
declared my silent end

Naked and dying under worlds of silent stone
reaching for the moonshield that once upon us shone.
–In Flames, “Moonshield” (The Jester Race, 1996)

word BRUTAL adjective: savage, ferocious, wicked, ruthless, sadistic; heinous, abominable. antonym: gentle, humane.

One day you’ll live in happiness
With a heart that’s full of joy
You’ll say the world “tomorrow” without fear
The feeling of togetherness will be at your side
You’ll say you love your life and you’ll know why
–Helloween, “Future World” (Keeper of the Seven Keys Part II, 1988)

Metal’s evil, eh?

Nowadays the air’s polluted
ancient people persecuted
that’s what mankind contributed
to create a better time
–Helloween, “Eagle Fly Free” (Keeper of the Seven Keys Part II, 1988))

Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato warned in The Republic that “any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited… when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.”⁵

* * *

In moments of silence when you are alone
You feel the desire is burning still strong
Open your heart and remember the day
When I sent you out on your way

I’m a wandering man, the heir of the crown
A lonely knight, I’m roaming around
I’ll never rest, I’ll never give in
Until my quest, has come to the end
–Freedom Call, “The Wanderer” (Crystal Empire, 2001)

word INTENSE 1. adj: extreme, fierce; exceptional, extraordinary; harsh, strong, powerful, potent, overpowering. 2. adj: passionate, vehement, fiery, spirited, vigorous.

On Death Metal:

But unlike the garbled sound emanating from the lovable and occasionally frenetic Cookie Monster, death-metal vocals seem to come from a dark spot in a troubled soul, as if they were the narrator’s voice on a tour of Dante’s seventh circle of hell… Early death-metal bands such as Death and Morbid Angel that emerged from Florida in the mid-’80s helped create the musical template that characterized the blasting sound as well as that of its Satan- and occult-obsessed sibling, black metal: fast, relentless drumming often featuring two bass drums; grinding, rapid-fire chording on guitars; squealing guitar solos; muted electric bass; unexpected sudden tempo changes; and a sense of theatricality that’s inevitably threatening–”a horror film put to music” is how Monte Conner, a vice president at Roadrunner Records, sees it… To be a true Cookie Monster vocal, said Mr. Conner, who signed some of the subgenre’s biggest bands, including Sepultura and Fear Factory, “it’s got to be really, really guttural. It should sound like they’re gargling glass… If you want to make music that’s terrifying, you have to sing about ripping people’s heads off. Singing about puppies and kittens isn’t too cool.”…⁶

While it is not clear to me if the motivating power of death metal is generating a vanguard of energetic youth or drawing artistic and creative young people into a trap of naive individualism, I believe that the political significance of musical sound is rooted in the meanings that the participants constitute and the consequences of those meanings for the participants’ lives and the larger society.⁷

The tonal dimension of music and the meaning sthat emerge from it are constituted by the subject’s active, perceptual organization of the sound in time.⁸

Starting from widely divergent perspectives and serving widely divergent conclusions, most scholars of metal have interpreted the music as an expression of the frustrations of the blue-collar young in a de-industrializing society that neither requires their labour nor values their presence.⁹

Up next, on Melting Point Radio, “This Week in Metal History”. But first, here is a Maiden classic, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. I toggled off the mic and spun my chair around to where my co-hosts were crouched over a laptop, busy scouring wikipedia for worthy events. Ohhh, 1945: The firebombing of Dresden? I scowled. Could I deny it was not, indeed, metal for an entire city to be incinerated in an immense firestorm? Did this not epitomize the kind of bleak, cynical world view typified by [some of] our beloved music? But the music lifts my spirits, I am blissfully unaware of the words being scrawled across the airwaves. So I ____ to associate my beloved metal with such a tragic injustice, for fear of it seeming an endorsement of such a horror.

I step through the doorway; the shrine room swallows me in darkness glowing with dim fluorescent tubes, mounted bare to the wall. My eyes adjust to the cool light and suddenly I find myself face to face with a scowling demon — its face twisted in agony. Beneath his feet were tiny people, frozen in their desperate dash to escape his thunderous ego-crushing step. Then it hit me, all at once, in one contained this is metal thought.

Metal is about many things, but it is surely MINOR and LOUD and FAST, at least archetypically.

How seriously do we take it? Alexi Laiho, possibly the most gifted songwriter in the metal world today, is a clown with a guitar as he admits during their epic live DVD in Stockholm, “So you see, basically we’re a bunch of fucking idiots… [proceeds to launch into a passionate rendition of a typically brilliant, pummeling, yet melodic song].” melt everyone’s faces with flowing, glorious metal]”

There are two amazingly cliché moments when metal played a serious role in keeping my mental peace. Both were also clearly clichés at the time, which I enjoyed immensely despite the circumstances. Heavy Metal & Breakups…

The first was my first real experience in romance, at summer camp the summer before 9th grade (I was 13?). Me and said girl’d been “going out” for about a week, I’d just been informed of the ending of our little arrangement by one of her friends. The important part of the story is that, devastated, I returned solemnly to my bunk, crawled in bed shoes clothes ‘n all, and fetched my disc-man and Marilyn Manson (c’mon, it was the closest to metal that I had). My friend stopped by and asked if I was alright. I said sure. I later laughed and told others that of course I wasn’t ok, I was lying in bed with my shoes and clothes on, listening blankly to Marilyn Manson…

End of serious 2.5 year relationship with basically no prior warning. Destabilization imminent or already occurring. I lay on my bed in Weybridge House and insert a very special CD into my stereo, “Into Oblivion” by Into Eternity.

I grinned demonically as the cd began to spin, and the opening track’s blistering harmonized scale runs washed over me, connecting somewhere deep wounded within. This album is special

Spiraling into depression
Spiraling into depression

Still you cannot bear all this pain
Still you cannot bear to walk away
Darkness still rips silently within
Still you cannot bear all the shame

Alone in your circle of despair
Your dreams are discarded
Clinging to a sterile existence
Self-pity and lingering grief
Depleted and beaten
Depleted and beaten

I sit down at my desk, pen in hand, headphones on, and click “play” on my iTunes playlist. How do I define this music that I love so? Is there a constant between these many disparate genres? It seems more like a series of spectra in various dimensions. Metal is a vague identifier that describes a subset of this multidimensional space, the boundaries of which are far from definite, and certainly not objective. I hypothesize that there are general lines within which most fans of this genre could agree to label “metal’. Sub-genres are sure to extend beyond this commonly held space, and not all sub-genres will occupy its entirety, necessarily (since some begin on the fringes and then continue into the distance). . Here are a few spectra I can identify..

Some have eyes but still can’t see. Their plastic noise is anything but music to me. Mechanized and computerized. Switch off your brain and make sounds that dehumanize. (Kreator, Love Us or Hate Us (Extreme Aggressions, 1989).

I’m writing a personal essay on what metal means to ME. But I don’t even know what metal means to me, since it’s so visceral. And at my current stage in life (22 years old. In college. Etc…) I’m trying to reconcile my worldview with my taste in a genre of music that seems to be at odds with said worldview.

There has been lots of musicological writing about what music means to us, and how we go about converting the acoustic energy that hits our ears into emotional and intellectual energy. It seems the process is far from objective, and doesn’t happen in a vacuum, social or otherwise. So metal is no different.

Lots of metalheads talk about how metal doesn’t really mean anything, that it’s just music, and it is what you make it. But then there are books written by sociologists about the metal “subculture”. The academic discourse on heavy metal is anemic, at best, but it does reveal some interesting things jflkdsjflkasdj

[The great Tibetan yogi Jetsun Milarepa] lived in utter solitude, in caves and isolated mountains. His clothes were very poor; he had no nice clothes. His food was neither rich nor tasty. In fact, [for a number of years] he lived on nettle soup alone, as a result of which he became physically very thin, almost emaciated. Now, if you consider his external circumstances alone, the isolation and poverty in which he lived, you would think he must have been miserable. And yet, as we can tell from the many songs he composed, because his mind was fundamentally at peace, his experience was one of constant unfolding delight. His songs are songs that express the utmost state of delight or rapture. He saw every place he went to, no matter how isolated and austere an environment it was, as beautiful, and he experienced his life of utmost austerity as extremely pleasant.¹⁰

For me, metal appeals on more than one level. There is a layer of intellectual and ironic interest that celebrates metal’s exuberant theatricality (hilarity). Then there is a chemical, spiritual magnetism;

“When used to describe electric guitar sound, distortion, to me, denotes a thickness or density characterized by harmonic complexity, sustain and cascading audible overtones.”¹¹

Music has often been called “the language of emotions” (Gabrielsson & Lindström, 1993). Many studies have shown that identification of basic emotions in music works reliably in experts as well as in nonexperts (Cunningham & Sterling, 1988; Hevner, 1936; Terwogt & van Grinswen, 1991). This is significant, because even if a listener enjoys music via headphones and alone, this may still be a communicative act that includes active interpretation… When thinking about the evolutionary bases of pleasure and chills in reaction to music, one should consider the possibility that it is not the phenomena such as the pilerection or shivers that make chills evolutionarily important, but the emotional process that takes place in response to a stimulus that contains information. In social groups, it is not only important to communicate facts, but also one’s emotional status. Music can be understood as an emotional communication system, and it is essential to learn to understand the communication of the social group to which one belongs. It has been said that most social groups have a certain style of music. If we want to belong to a group, we need to understand their emotional communication, which is partly found in music. This may be one reason why a certain musical style becomes important to us, and why we begin to identify with this style. It’s not the music, but the feelings of the people we hear playing that are important to us… it is not the music as a physical stimulus that manipulates our moods, but it is using the music as a communicative offering to influence our feelings in a re-creative process.¹²

Art is communication. An artist encodes a message, an image, a feeling, whatever in a medium which is then transmitted to the consumer who decodes the art. Good art conveys the message, or conveys a message, or makes the consumer feel as though a message was communicated to them. Art acts as a mirror, we appreciate that which tells us what we already know. For metalheads, the music acknowledges the darkness of the world; it is dark, but that is ok. I do not, ever usually dwell on such darkness

Music is cathartic it allows one to virtualize the expression of emotions without the usually requisite associated experience. Thus pent-up anger is released when exposed to violent/angry music — as the mind sees the musical stimulus as violence in sonic form, allowing the listener its cathartic effects while avoiding its anti-social tendencies (that is, violence).

Metal down beats Gods stomping, stampeding, galloping across aural scapes- malevolent keyboards synthesize __ anticipation — and recreates the virtual stimuli that would have instilled such unease.

One distorted chord. 1 and 5. Hold. Channel the choas and oppressive rumble of terrible empty space, of aural impartial chaos, the only God in a world of cellular automata. Carve and channel this dark force through air. Contained and executed sonic chaos.