I often feel like I’m at war with my brain. But you’re not a different entity than your brain. Well, no, I’m not. But an Advaitic Hindu thinker would say that I’m also not a different entity than you, or my neighbor’s cat, or a road sign. And as one Taoist thinker has said, “Although the ten thousand things are different, their differences are equally real and equally false. To see the real in the false and the false in the real is how the wisdom of sages differs from that of others.” So in all my sagely wisdom, I choose to see both the reality and the falsehood in my alienation from my own brain, and my need for strategies to control it.
I spent years convinced that I was simply too neurodivergent for meditation. There are four entities I credit with helping me meditate for the first time. Two are friends who explained that many of the stereotypes and popular definitions of meditation are overly restrictive at best. The third is the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, whose lecture “How to Deal with Strong Emotions” taught me basic mindful breathing techniques and contextualized them with beautiful ideas and metaphors about happiness, suffering, mind, and body. The fourth is an Australian doom metal band called Holy Serpent. More on all of that soon. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and I don’t tend to think in an orderly way.
* * *
I’ve felt weird about gender for a long time. In my freshman year of college, when I was first seriously confronted with the idea that someone I saw as a man could actually turn out to be something else, I was on the wrong side of the issue. I sat in the warm lamplight of my too-patient friend’s pleasantly feminine dorm room and said a lot of stupid things. But one of the stupid things I said came from somewhere real: “If someone says they can’t be a man because they don’t hunt and fish and play football, where does that leave me? I don’t do any of those things. They’re saying something about what I am by saying what they aren’t.”
I argued that if we could get rid of all gendered pronouns I’d be for it, but I didn’t want to be left holding the bag if some people opted out of masculinity, didn’t want assumptions to be made about me just because I hadn’t vacated the premises when others did. In classic smart-kid fashion, I had found a fairly sophisticated way to defend a very stupid position born largely of fear.
My too-patient friend probably said “Huh” to that one, and eventually the subject changed. At the end of the evening, I went back to my dorm room, a fluorescent-lit trash heap with nothing on the walls. The space would have made a perfect image for a meme about male-coded squalor a decade or so later.
I curled up in bed with my laptop, probably watching 12 oz. Mouse or falling down a Wikipedia hole, but mainly trying not to think about the masculine traits and interests I didn’t have. Athleticism. Aptitude for violence. Confidence. Stoicism. Reserve.
I tried not to think about my whole shtick in relation to that. Doughy. Awkward. Opera major with sensitive-boy music taste who couldn’t shut up about his feelings. Gender was a construct, sure, but it was a bad one and I didn’t want anyone giving it any more weight than the zero grams it deserved. I was angry and afraid a lot of the time then. That part hasn’t entirely changed. Sometimes you feel like your anger could swallow the world.
* * *
By sophomore year, I had to confront the fact that I’d been struggling to complete my coursework or even regularly attend classes. I’d known college would be harder than high school, but I hadn’t expected it to drown me. Someone suggested I might have ADHD. I can’t remember who. What I can remember is the sudden feeling that it made perfect sense.
My psychiatrist sent me to a specialist who insisted on a day-long battery of tests (including that paragon of scientific rigor known as the Rorschach test) to diagnose me. He prided himself on going above and beyond, testing for all possible personality disorders or neurodivergences that could have created ADHD-like symptoms. Have you considered that you might be struggling in school because you’re a psychopath? I was told the ADHD-specific testing would take 20 minutes, but all the tests together would take about seven hours. I hated the dull, stifling rooms the tests took place in. Hated the people who administered them. Hated that they didn’t feed me or give me a long enough break to go get a proper meal.
At the end, they told me I had ADHD, slow but thorough visual-processing abilities, and problems with authority. That last one is because during the Rorschach testing they asked what I saw on every card, where I saw it, and why I saw it. I asked them how that third question was different from the second, they refused to tell me, and I expressed annoyance. They asked me the same stupid question nine times, and I told them it was stupid. It’s pretty telling that the medical community considers that pathological behavior on my part.
Anyway, the specialist didn’t tell me anything about how to manage my ADHD apart from medicating it. Sometimes when I tell this story and complain about the seven hours of testing, people say it’s good that the doctor was thorough. You want a doctor to be thorough, after all. To many, it seems impossible that I might be the best authority on my own experiences. And these people had me second-guessing myself for 15 years.
But I’ve since realized that if he had truly seen ADHD as a complex phenomenon, and seen me as a complex person rather than a potential drug-seeker or lab rat, and really cared about being thorough, he might have told me that people with ADHD often struggle with emotional regulation. Or that we can have trouble setting priorities, or discerning sounds from one another. Or anything at all about the myriad ways in which my brain is atypical.
He also might have thought about the possibility that I was autistic. He tested for psychopathy instead.
I resent that man and his practice. 16 years later, if I dwell on it, I can still summon enough anger to raise my heart rate. This is true of almost everything that has ever made me angry.
* * *
In my 30s, I came upon a Twitter thread about the autistic community’s embrace of self-diagnosis, accompanied by a list of less-frequently-discussed autistic traits. One leapt out at me: extreme obsession with fairness and justice. I remembered a time that a friend had irrationally sided against me in an online argument, and how every day for over a week I remembered that argument and got so angry that my hands shook and I had a panic attack. Other pieces started falling into place. I had always identified strongly with Abed from Community. Had that been a sign of something more than my own desire to feel special? Where had these keys to understanding myself been when I was younger?
I once had an abusive partner who fell silent whenever I mentioned my belief that I was autistic. She never engaged with me on the topic, until one time when I brought it up in couples therapy and she said, “I have always validated your self-diagnosis.” I was apparently supposed to know that her silent treatment was validation. I’ve been expected to magically understand a lot of things throughout my life. When you’re neurodivergent, sometimes the whole world feels like an abuser.
* * *
A couple years ago, at a low point, I was unable to feed myself properly. I would buy healthy ingredients and they would rot in the fridge. I relied on fast food and frozen meals, but I could actually feel my physical health suffering from the lack of proper nutrition.
My therapist recommended an Instagram influencer called ADHD Nutritionist. I made an Instagram account just to look at her stuff. She had some helpful tips. Also a lot of the kind of ADHD content that’s less meant to help people and more meant to make you point at the screen like the Leonardo DiCaprio meme. But she basically encouraged an approach to eating where you go with the grain of your own impulses, and build structures that allow your brain to have the relationship with food that it wants to have.
For instance, pre-cut vegetables are more expensive, but if whole vegetables will just go bad, you’re not saving money. I was beyond the point of cooking even with pre-cut vegetables, but it inspired me to build some structures that helped. I allowed myself to buy pre-made salads. I set about creating meals that provided a reasonable facsimile of complete nutrition using only shelf-stable ingredients. If I spent a week eating only fast food, nothing would spoil. And after such a week, if I got a sudden a burst of motivation to make something like a decent meal, I wouldn’t have to go grocery shopping first.
At one point, I thought to search for pills that would give me vegetable nutrition. I found fizzing tablets with kale in them. I cried. Crying in the grocery store isn’t a rare occurrence for me. My therapist says that’s a pretty common neurodivergent thing. That’s a pretty common thing for her to tell me. Why do I hate taking showers? Why can’t I make myself understood? Why does my anger feel like it could immolate me from the inside? “Well…”
* * *
This is the same period where Holy Serpent came into my life. I was doing gig-economy delivery work at the time, and Holy Serpent’s Endless was one of several doom or doom-adjacent albums that helped calm me while my brain juggled orders and apps and street names and emergent hazards.
For those unfamiliar with the metal world, doom is a subgenre defined largely by low pitches and slow (or slow-for-metal) tempos. A music created by people who liked to play Black Sabbath singles at the wrong RPM.
Holy Serpent can be called doom metal, stoner metal, heavy psych rock, or any number of other things. Genres are silly. A slightly better way to tell you what Endless sounds like would be to say that it’s always reminded me of Smashing Pumpkins and My Bloody Valentine, but that doesn’t really do the trick, either.
The instrumental textures are thick, the distortion less a buzzsaw shriek and more the warm and uniform grit of good earth. The vocals float in a shimmering place above the roar and churn, sung in syllables that slide along just outside of decipherability.
I bought Endless on vinyl recently, in part for the same reasons I buy any album on vinyl, but also in significant part because I was hoping that the liner notes would provide the lyrics. They didn’t. That might be for the best. It seems entirely possible that a song called “Marijuana Trench” will not have lyrics that match the profundity of what I feel when I hear that song. Who’s to say, though—cannabis has a long history of ceremonial and mystical usage. Maybe the lyrics are beautiful. Some things are only more powerful for the mysteries they hold.
Throughout the album, the tonality is minor, but the riffs and melodies are not menacing or sad or danger-sexy in any clear-cut way. There are traces of melancholy and longing, but also traces of something like triumph and something like peace. It’s ethereal but grounded. Enigmatic but assured. Dark but comforting. Plaintive but knowing. It probes the mystery and it is of the mystery. Anything it is, it also isn’t. Now I’m speaking in contradictions and negations, which is probably even less helpful than esoteric genre names.
Then again, there is a rich spiritual tradition of description through contradiction, explication through negation. One translation of the Tao Te Ching begins:
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
And the Avadhuta Gita is practically a litany of contradictions and negations. In one translation, an early stanza reads:
You are the pure Reality, always the same;
You have no body, no birth and no death.
How, then, can you say, “I know the Self”?
Or how can you say, “I don’t know the Self”?
So it’s probably fitting that an album I can’t describe without resorting to negation and contradiction is the one I reached for when I first tried mindful breathing meditation. More on that in a minute. First I have to discover the Tao.
* * *
During this same period of gig work and depression meals, I watched the YouTube video that would change my life. I can’t tell you the name of it. Tracking it down would take hours. But in a Q&A video, the music theory YouTuber Adam Neely says if you have written an A section and are struggling to craft a B section to go with it, you should identify something that you are doing in the A section—is the melody mostly high or mostly low? Does it mostly move in large intervals or small ones? Is it in a major key or a minor key? Is it fast? Is it slow? Legato? Staccato? Identify a noteworthy characteristic, and as the starting point for your B section, do the opposite. He says something like, “Opposites are not as unrelated as two things get. Opposites are actually very closely related by virtue of being opposites.” This cracked my skull open.
I started thinking about how joy and sorrow only make sense in contrast with one another, how love and hate are both forms of passion, how birth and death are both attended by blood and pain and fear (and through most of history have often occurred simultaneously). I mulled over this for days and days, all the while on some level congratulating myself for having such Very Deep Thoughts spinning out from a music theory Q&A. And then at some point I realized, Oh. This is yin and yang. This is old wisdom.
* * *
My friend Adam is a practicing Buddhist and an accomplished yogi. Shortly after my revelation about yin and yang, I went to a gathering at his apartment where a large group of us watched Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice. In that film, a man burns down his home for spiritually loaded reasons while wearing a bathrobe with a prominent yin and yang design on the back. This reminded me that I’d been meaning to ask Adam where I should look to understand more about the spiritual and philosophical frameworks around the concept. He said, “I can tell you some stuff, but I think David would be better equipped to tell you about that.” David happened to be standing right there. I was just getting to know him at the time. The first thing he said was, “Well, the Tao that can be explained is not the true Tao.” Adam gave a slow, emphatic nod and a little smile. David recommended Lieh Tzu and Chuang Tzu, and the three of us talked for a while about spirituality and mysticism.
I mentioned that I did not believe myself to be capable of meditation. “I don’t think my brain is wired in a way where meditation can feel the way it’s supposed to feel.”
Quickly, quietly, with a look of playful challenge in his eyes, David said, “How do you think it’s supposed to feel?”
I said, “Not… frantic.”
David said, “Frantic is okay.”
Adam said, “One of my most important early lessons was learning to embrace how terrible I felt.”
As the party dwindled, Adam mentioned the Tao Te Ching and showed me a copy he liked. I went looking for that translation at BookPeople and instead found the one by Ursula K. Le Guin. In her note under the first verse, she mentions “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges. I love that story. I was not too familiar with Le Guin at the time, but I had read a tiny bit of her work, and here she was translating the Tao Te Ching and talking about Borges. I knew I had to buy the book.
I still wanted to buy the one Adam had recommended, so I ordered Ralph Alan Dale’s translation online. When that one arrived, I was struck by the extreme contrasts between one and the other. I’ve come to despise Dale’s translation since then, but in the introduction he mentions the invaluable resource of Jonathan Star’s translation. Well, not Star’s translation itself, which I also despise, but the charts cataloging numerous possible translations for each Chinese character in his so-called Definitive Edition. I ordered that, too.
I thought it could be interesting to really dig into the language, to attempt some kind of relationship with the original text that wasn’t entirely mediated through another person’s relationship with it. It took me a few months to embark on that journey. But in the meantime, I formed a deep affection for Le Guin’s translation and bought another one by prolific spiritual writer and translator Red Pine. At the time of this writing, I own 12 translations.
* * *
By this point, I was living in a space sadly not too different from my freshman-year dorm room. It was there that I first heard Thich Nhat Hanh’s voice. The link to the video had been sitting in my text messages for weeks, waiting for a time when I could find enough quietude within myself to watch a monk speak very slowly for 20 minutes. My brain doesn’t like to do things like that. You don’t like to do things like that. I pressed play.
Sitting hunched on my single mattress on the floor, surrounded by most of my belongings arranged in a configuration nobody would consciously choose, I stared up at my $30 used television whose warm/cool color balance I could never get quite right, and watched a dead man say with both total calm and deep emotion, “The number of young people killing themselves is very big in each country.” I had thought about killing myself before. It hadn’t been all that long since the last time. There was no trace of taboo in the way he spoke of it. Just a fact presented plainly, and positioned alongside the fact that we can breathe our way through difficult feelings.
* * *
Now we come back to my first meditation. I had too many urgent tasks that day, and a panic attack was preventing me from doing any of them. I felt locked into a chaotic hyper-subjectivity, each minute stuffed with more thoughts than seconds, and trying to reason myself out of my paralysis only made it more painful.
I thought of Nhat Hanh’s teaching that the mind is like the highest branches of a tree. That if our awareness is located primarily in the mind, a storm of emotion can whip us about violently. That an awareness located in the trunk can weather the storm with less disturbance.
I thought of conversations with Adam and David where they told me that meditation didn’t have to look any one way, didn’t have to be still or silent or serene.
I reached for my over-ear headphones, laid down on my back, put on the first track of Holy Serpent’s Endless, and turned it up as loud as it would go. Deep belly breath. Total emptying. Navel rising to ceiling and falling to spine. Again. Again. Churn and roar and shimmer. This was music of the trunk. I was still having my anxious thoughts, but they were getting smaller. Small enough to fit into the spaces between breaths. Not overwhelming. Not panic anymore.
I thought of Nhat Hanh’s teaching that happiness is made out of suffering. That we shouldn’t aim not to suffer, but learn to suffer well. Tears were softly streaming down the sides of my face. The first song ended. Seven minutes had passed, and something big had changed.
* * *
A little over a month later, I laid on my stomach on that sad little floor mattress, propped up on my elbows with five books in front of me: Tao Te Ching translations by Le Guin, Ralph Alan Dale, and Red Pine; Jonathan Star’s Definitive Edition; and a handmade leather-bound notebook I had acquired for this purpose. I had made a haphazard mark on the first page of that notebook in an effort to banish my fear of imperfection, to remind myself that it existed to be used. As had become a habit by this point, I turned to a random page in Le Guin’s translation and searched for personal resonance, finding it easily in verse 11, a meditation on the virtues of empty space. This verse is often interpreted as an exhortation to empty one’s mind of opinions and preconceptions. It can also be read as encouraging appreciation for the parts of the world we are prone to ignore. Read this way, as Le Guin says in her commentary, it can “suddenly double the size of the universe.” To me in that moment, it said, You can’t be everywhere at once for the people you love, nor should you.
I read each translation carefully, along with all included commentaries. I dug through the chart in Star’s Definitive Edition character by character. In some areas of linguistic theory, meaning is measured not by depth of meaning, but by multitude of possible meanings. I tried to sit with each character in its full, multitudinous beauty. I read each translation again, and returned to the chart. Then, I started picking out words and writing them down in my notebook, playing with sounds and connotations in my head, adding notes and alternate versions of lines. I refined it on the next page.
When I finished the process, I had created something. The poem in front of me was mine, and it wasn’t. It was something that I shared with its original author, with its other translators, with all its readers in all translations, with the world.
* * *
thirty spokes join
on one hub
in the nothing within
lies the wheel’s purpose
clay is molded
to form a bowl
in the nothing within
lies the bowl’s purpose
wood is carved
to build a room
in the nothing within
lies the room’s purpose
thus, where the thing
becomes profit
the nothing
becomes purpose
* * *
It makes sense that my spiritual exploration brought me to an artistic act. I’ve been a songwriter since prepubescence. I used to be an opera singer. I’ve written poetry before. Occasionally, I write essays. Creativity is part of who I am. Art had long held a place in my life and worldview similar to where many others place religion.
Much like I was once wrong about gender, I used to be wrong about spirituality. I thought every religious person believed in the concrete, literal truth of something unlikely and unverifiable. I thought that was dangerous, cowardly, weak. Why would you need meaning prescribed to you by some divine authority? Humans make meaning. We’re good at it. Have you heard of art?
Many of the things we think of as supernatural are accomplished in some way every day by art. Art gives us portals, afterlives, time travel, telepathy. In high school, I drew meaning and comfort from Five Leaves Left. Nick Drake lived his whole life in a country I’ve never visited and died before I was born, and a piece of his heart lives in me. That’s magic. Why would we need to invent something magical to believe in when there is verifiable magic sitting right there in our very capacity for invention?
Well, the answer is in the question. For many of the most thoughtful practitioners, spirituality is less a matter of belief and more an artistic state of being, a poetic way of interacting with reality. It can be an extension of the very practice of artistic meaning-making I so value. So in my translation work, I tap into spiritual truth, spiritual energy, in the same way I have since I was ten years old: artistry.
Viewed in this light, it makes complete sense that most of the greatest spiritual texts are works of art. Some of them are stories. Many of those stories are written poetically. At my bar mitzvah, I didn’t simply recite my Torah portion; I chanted it. The Avadhuta Gita and the Dhammapada are both in verse. Some of the Tao Te Ching is written as formal verse and some isn’t, but as Le Guin says, “As we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry … And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth.” I don’t like to be an essentialist about artistic forms and genres, but it feels like there is some reality as well as some falsehood in my gut sense that poetry is a medium especially well-suited to addressing truths that can’t be spoken directly, engaging with things hidden and ethereal.
* * *
My relationship with heavy music isn’t entirely about mysticism. I’ve already mentioned how Holy Serpent first entered my listening rotation not as a meditative aid but as a way of calming my brain enough to focus on delivery driving. To quote Videodrome’s Nicki Brand, “I live in a highly excited state of overstimulation.” Over the last few years, I’ve found that high volumes, distorted textures, low pitches, and slow tempos help me calm that state. With the right music, I can have one thought at a time instead of a dozen. It’s probably similar to how other neurodivergent people experience a weighted blanket (though I personally find weighted blankets viscerally unpleasant).
I did a web development bootcamp last year, and I quickly found that the inside of my head was far too crowded to sit in silence and pour pages of code into it. I use this low, slow music to approximate the kind of functioning that other brains can just choose to access. Doom metal albums like Hellish Form’s Remains and Bongripper’s Terminal are on frequent rotation for this kind of work. But in the world of metal, it doesn’t get much lower or slower than drone.
Drone metal is a niche genre, but the name is more intuitive than doom or death or thrash. Drone metal does what it says on the tin. It occupies space. It is music of duration, moving slowly enough to no longer sound very closely related to rock music. Sometimes you will hear a guitar chord or note through most of its lifespan, from the attack almost through to the end of its natural decay, before another note or chord begins. Bonus points if it’s the same one. Often, pedals are used to extend that lifespan far beyond what would ordinarily be possible. Some call it a subgenre of doom. Genres are silly. This is the music I find most freeing, the stuff I can use to be productive or to be still.
When you go looking for the best drone metal, the first band you find is probably going to be Sunn O))). The “O)))” is silent. The first album of theirs I got into was Life Metal, an uncommonly beautiful and ethereal piece of heavy music from 2019. I used Life Metal to drive, to code, and to meditate. I even invented a private form of vocalizing meditation specifically to do while listening to it. I would fill my lungs and quietly sing a single note in harmony with the music, gearing my vocal technique toward maximum duration of sound from each breath. When the droning note or chord changed, I would respond, changing my note to be in harmony while maintaining my tone unbroken until my breath ran out entirely. Refill, repeat. This felt almost psychedelic.
Drone metal seemed so perfectly suited to spiritual practice that I was compelled to go hunting for music along these lines that was explicitly dedicated to spirituality. This is how I found Dhyana, a one-man project from Louisiana. The word “dhyana” is Sanskrit, and its Japanese cognate may be more familiar: Zen. Each Dhyana song and album is named after a Buddhist concept. Their Bandcamp page describes them as “Meditative sludge / Dharma doom.” Genres are silly, and many in the metal world like to have a little fun with that silliness.
The music is lovely. Slow, simple beats on a drum kit with fuzz bass and guitar creating a meditative atmosphere while doing as little as possible. Some of it feels influenced by Eastern musical traditions, but none of it feels touristy. It is clearly a product of genuine reverence and passion, an egoless creative drive rooted in a need to provide something of spiritual value to the world. Since 2021, they have released ten albums and EPs, ranging in length from 18 minutes to over two hours. Many of the Bandcamp pages for their releases have a few explanatory paragraphs illuminating something about the underlying Buddhist ideas.
I have used Dhyana to meditate a number of times. Each time, I must rise to meet the music where it is. Each time, I am rewarded. I’m especially fond of their album Satori, and the 48-minute single-track album Dzogchen is a marvel of rigorously patient simplicity.
Part of what I love about Dhyana is the just-a-little-guy quality of it all. When I first discovered them, their music wasn’t even on Spotify. Now some of it is, but only some. One person, recording at home, operating in obscurity. That’s passion, that’s dedication. But that quality cuts both ways. The enveloping roar and churn, the good-earth texture that I spoke of in Holy Serpent, is not quite as rich or as grand here. That stuff takes more money and/or deep expertise to accomplish than I suspect Dhyana has at their disposal.
* * *
Sunn O))) does not lack for money or deep expertise to realize their vision, and my search for spiritual drone metal eventually brought me back to them and their 2015 album Kannon.
The raw aesthetic experience of Kannon didn’t initially call to me to quite the same degree as some of the other music I’ve discussed here, trafficking a little more in the kinds of sinister-sounding minor tonalities that are notably sidestepped on Life Metal and Holy Serpent’s Endless. It sounds a little more typically metal than those records. But it does suit the shape of my brain. I end up judging a lot of this music less on artistic merit or conscious aesthetic preference and more by the simple metric of whether it works on me, whether it helps my brain behave in ways I find difficult otherwise. Isn’t that basically what everyone is doing with music? Drawing out feelings and patterns of thought that wouldn’t emerge in a vacuum?
“Kannon 1” follows a rising and falling harmonic pattern that holds throughout the 13-minute song with only rhythmic and textural variation. After a couple minutes, the vocals enter and they are all fry, a croaking growl that would sound corny if it didn’t so effectively convey a sense of deep mystery. “Kannon 2” has multi-tracked chanted vocals. These could sound both corny and orientalist if not (as with Dhyana) for the obvious serious-minded sincerity of the endeavor. The guitars respond to each line in a manner reminiscent of a congregational call and response, or the group intonation of the punctuating “dayenu” at a seder table.
These two tracks are both prime Sunn O))), massive and rich. But it’s “Kannon 3” that holds the greatest moments of transcendent beauty for me. The first is at the track’s opening. A high, harsh quavering sound comes in first, joined soon by a softly textured chord whose notes all bend into their unsteady places. It’s hard to say what the instruments are. The liner notes credit some electronic musicians, but only for the first two tracks. They also credit a conch trio, which could account for some of what I hear in this moment but not all of it. Some things are only more powerful for the mysteries they hold. It sounds almost heavenly. A second, equally beautiful chord occurs before one of the notes drifts back up to its previous position. The high, harsh sound gets harsher, then the low end comes in, the spell is broken, and a different spell begins. All told, this portion of the song lasts about 20 seconds. A part of me wishes I could stretch it out endlessly, and part of me treasures it all the more for its brevity. If only you could feel that way about relationships, life phases, lives.
The guitar tones on “Kannon 3” alternate with satisfying, meditative consistency between earthy, rumbling chords and brightly metallic, gong-like plucked notes. The rumble-chords repeat a descending pattern, a heavy settling into place. Through most of the song, the vocals are chanted like in “Kannon 2,” sometimes growled like “Kannon 1.” But on three occasions, they shift to a scream. This scream is not—as so many metal screams are—one of rage or sorrow or performative evil. It feels more like a brief expression of the ineffable wildness at the core of a human soul.
* * *
The liner notes hold an essay by writer and multidisciplinary artist Aliza Shvarts, which explains that Kannon is the Japanese name for a Buddhist deity. Other well-known names include the Sanskrit Avalokiteshvara and the Chinese Guanyin. Kannon takes many forms, but always represents compassion and mercy.
Sometimes I like to pretend things happen for a reason, that the universe is speaking to me and I just need to listen. Like how I bought a translation of the Tao Te Ching I hadn’t meant to buy because the translator mentioned a short story I love. That decision led to so much discovery for me. It’s possible that I would never have fallen in love with the text or begun my translation work without it. So a band I love writing an album about an unfamiliar deity seems like a good reason to learn more about that deity.
The lyrics are one place to start. Like with Endless, they are difficult to hear, but unlike Endless, Kannon provides them in the liner notes. They are drawn from stories of Kannon/Guanyin/Avalokiteshvara across various traditions.
“Kannon 1” outlines an origin wherein Kannon allows herself to be destroyed by the work of caring for others. This destruction is what allows for her rebirth and apotheosis. The Tao Te Ching speaks of power and submission in similar terms. Gia-fu Feng & Jane English’s translation of verse 61 concludes, “It is fitting for a great nation to yield.” Verse 76: “The soft and weak will overcome.”
Later in “Kannon 1,” we are told that Kannon’s presence in hell would destroy it. In “Kannon 2,” we are told that she “turned hell into paradise.” Hell cannot exist in the presence of compassion or in the presence of enlightenment. We can suffer in the presence of these things (remember how Thich Nhat Hanh says that without suffering there can be no happiness), but we cannot experience hell.
“Kannon 3” declares, three times in a chant and three times in that transcendent scream, “She destroys mortality.” There’s a lot in Taoist thought about immortality. Verse 50 of the Tao Te Ching claims that a sage need not fear death by weapons or tigers. The Buddhist Lotus Sutra claims that one surrounded by wild animals need only contemplate Avalokiteshvara to make the animals depart.
It is not totally clear how literal these concepts about immortality and deliverance from mortal danger are meant to be. Being equal parts mystic and skeptic, I don’t gravitate toward strictly literal readings. Near the beginning of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna speaks of the Atman. This is defined in a footnote of the translation by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood as “the Godhead that is within every being.” Krishna says,
Know this Atman,
Unborn, undying,
Never ceasing,
Never beginning,
Deathless, birthless,
Unchanging for ever.
How can It die
The death of the body?
I believe that when the Tao Te Ching and the Lotus Sutra claim that spirituality can save you from wild animals, or when “Kannon 3” claims that Kannon “destroys mortality,” the truth being spoken is that we have the power to cultivate greater connection with the piece of us that does not die the death of the body. Kannon cultivates this connection through compassion, and through emptiness.
* * *
In Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of the Heart Sutra, Avalokiteshvara says,
all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness;
their true nature is the nature of
no Birth no Death,
no Being no Non-being,
no Defilement no Purity,
no Increasing no Decreasing.
That is why in Emptiness,
Body, Feelings, Perceptions,
Mental Formations and Consciousness
are not separate self entities.
…Whoever can see this
no longer needs anything to attain.
What does emptiness have to do with compassion? In Taoist thought, emptiness is a sublime quality. In Jonathan Star’s Tao Te Ching character chart, the character 孔 (or “k’ung”) is given the possible translations of “empty,” “great,” and “all-embracing,” among others. A little more research turns up further possibilities, including “opening” and “orifice.”
In Shvarts’s Kannon essay, she characterizes the intensity of much metal music as a “phallic thrust,” and posits Sunn O))) as a kind of yonic counterexample: “As a sensation, intensity is not merely penetrative but is also immersive; as a feeling, it does not merely enter the body but also surrounds it.” She suggests that Kannon invites confrontation with “the enormity of an emptiness that encompasses both the formed and unformed, an emptiness that is full insofar as it is active.”
In emptiness there is a kind of embrace. Contemporary therapy speak includes a lot of talk of “holding space.” Contemporary therapy speak has a lot of problems, but this is a lovely turn of phrase. To show compassion, to hear the troubles of another, to sit with them in their hurt, is to hold space. Kannon is sometimes depicted with elongated ears, or defined by a superhuman capacity for hearing the cries of the world’s suffering masses. Kannon holds space.
In emptiness, there is unity. Talk of deep unity shows up in mysticism everywhere. Buddhism, Taoism, Kabbalah, Christianity. It is the very core of Advaitic Hindu thought, expressed with stunning and idiosyncratic force in the Avadhuta Gita. Better known here in the West is the concept of Indra’s Net, the notion in Buddhist and Hindu cosmology that all of existence is an infinitely large net of interconnected threads, and at each intersection point the god Indra has placed a jewel. Each thing that exists—each person, place, idea, object, and event—is a jewel in the net. And each of the infinite jewels reflects every other jewel.
Indra’s Net models both more separateness than is intuitive and more unity.
The jewels never touch? I can reach out and touch you! But on an atomic level, touch is only an illusion caused by energy fields. And on a psychological/human level, no matter how much we touch or talk or love or fuck, I can never know you as you know yourself. And how well can you even know yourself? The more you zoom in on a community or a mind or a piece of matter, the more disparate its pieces seem. But in that separation, there is the productive kind of emptiness. Matter doesn’t work without the spaces between atoms and electrons. And love doesn’t work without the extension of understanding across some kind of divide.
The jewels all reflect each other? They’re connected by threads? I’ve never met most people! But on a physical level, we are all heated by the same sun and all experience interconnected weather patterns as they move through the same vast, borderless bodies of air and water. And on a psychological/human level, you have affected and been affected by everyone you’ve ever met, and each of those people has affected and been affected by countless others. This essay itself is a thread connecting me to you. You can’t help but reflect me. Is it possible that this same web does not touch everyone as it touches you?
I have come to believe in the deep unity of emptiness, to believe that all divisions are as false as they are real. That existence, viewed a certain way at least, is one undivided whole. Therefore, I believe you cannot love the world if you hate anything, you cannot love yourself if you hate anything, and you cannot love anything if you hate yourself. Knowledge of unity necessitates compassion, necessitates Kannon.
Recently, while meditating with Kannon, not trying to clear my mind or avoid all thoughts but simply trying to observe my thoughts and relate to them differently, I suddenly saw myself in a new light. I was all clutch and crave. Needy and worried about everything, clinging to phantoms, rushing from place to place, doing everything but the work that was most necessary. I am ridiculous, I thought. I laughed, actually laughed out loud at the small, silly creature I now saw myself to be.
But crucially, the laughter held no trace of derision. It was a kindhearted, indulgent laughter, a laugh one might laugh at the irrational fears of a small child. I saw myself as childlike—even, perhaps especially, in my most anguished moments and most serious efforts. The laughter momentarily replaced the judgment and self-hatred that are so habitual for me. How could I hate myself? I’m just a little guy.
This is Kannon. Knowledge of unity necessitates compassion, and compassion is what makes the experience of unity possible. Compassion for loves, for enemies, and for the self. Not a jealous, insecure, hypersubjective kind of self-advocacy, but an extension of love to oneself as one would extend love to another. This is Kannon.
* * *
Though Kannon and Guanyin are depicted as female, they are universally understood to be the same entity as Avalokiteshvara, who is depicted as male. Complicating matters further, when the Lotus Sutra enumerates the many incredible powers of Avalokiteshvara, these include the power to adopt a multitude of shapes (some human, some supernatural, some godly) to aid and teach those in need. Some of these shapes are explicitly female.
Kannon of many names. Kannon of many forms. Kannon of no fixed gender.
* * *
At some point in the last few years, I lost the ability to ignore my feelings about gender. In 2022, I read the stunning essay “I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out,” published under the name Jennifer Coates. Nobody knows the public name of the author. In it, she lays out a litany of complicated feelings about the accepted norms of gender discourse among progressives, and how these norms alienate pretty much every gender category except cis women. She obviously protects her identity to avoid outing herself as trans in daily life, but she also plainly states that she doesn’t feel safe expressing these feelings and opinions in progressive communities.
Several times while reading the essay, I had to put my phone down and pace around because I identified with some of her feelings so strongly I felt like I might throw up. I had long felt wounded by the men-are-trash essentialism I saw among progressives, the assumption of righteousness in anger against any man, the memes and anecdotes about worthless men who kept their mattresses on the floor. The feeling that others saw me as having chosen the side of evil in an ancient war. I had also never felt entirely comfortable with masculinity as a concept. I’m not sure anyone really knows what it means. Define masculinity. Sometimes it seems like a blank screen onto which everyone is projecting their fears and desires and patriarchal trauma. A ridiculous thought entered my mind: I never want to discuss gender again with anyone who hasn’t read this essay.
It wasn’t until over a year later that I seriously considered the terrible fact that I had the power to redefine my gender. To signal that I contain multitudes, that the unmasculine parts of me are not accidents, that I reject patriarchal masculinity not only as an abstract ethical stance but in a way that is intrinsic to my personhood. It first occurred to me while sitting on the toilet. What if I just quietly changed all my social media accounts to include he/they pronouns? I worried about how such a move would be seen. By making a linguistic tweak in my identity rather than an overhaul or a change in my presentation, would I be seen as stealing queer valor? I pushed the thought out of my head.
It came back. For some reason, usually while sitting on the toilet.
Eventually, I mustered up the courage to tell a small group of friends, including Adam and David, that I wanted to expand my pronouns. I told them about all my anxieties about changing too little, about stealing valor. Several of them supportively told me I already had queer vibes. I remembered that there have been many occasions where strangers assumed I was queer. Later that night, I said that an album I liked was “chock-full of bops.” David laughed: “Queer vibes.” The others concurred.
* * *
When I started talking to my therapist about my pronouns, she brought up Nick Walker and the term “neuroqueer.” Just hearing the word stirred something in me. I had an immediate intuitive understanding of it, and it felt validating, liberating. It also felt validating and liberating to hear that, though her first name is Nick and she has neither stereotypically feminine hair nor clothing in any public-facing photographs, Walker’s pronouns are she/her. Basic facts of her lived existence serve as reminders that norms hold no sway over who we are.
In her short essay “Neuroqueer: An Introduction,” Walker says, “I originally conceived of neuroqueer as a verb: neuroqueering as the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously.” As an adjective, she says it indicates an “individual whose identity, selfhood, gender performance, and/or neurocognitive style have in some way been shaped by their engagement in practices of neuroqueering.”
I still feel some trepidation claiming some of these terms. They seem a little grandiose for anything I do. I’m just a little guy. Is it an act of queering when I soar into falsetto singing Macy Gray or Fiona Apple at my favorite karaoke bar? Does it matter that most of the songs I sing there are by women? That my love of singing them has no trace of irony? Is it queering that I have decided to stop being embarrassed by some of the more effeminate tendencies I have in how I hold my body or talk with my hands? Is it neuroqueering when I casually ask for accommodations in social situations where I feel overwhelmed or overstimulated? When I walk around a bar or a party solving and unsolving my beloved metal puzzle cube so I have something to do with my hands while I talk to people?
The answer to all these things is probably yes, even if only in small ways. I probably also do things whose atypicality I’m not aware of, like speaking in uncommon rhythms or dropping phrases like “chock-full of bops.”
* * *
Another neurodivergent trans writer who has influenced my thinking is Devon Price. Sometimes, especially online, Price will adopt a playful, impish stance when talking about his gender and sexuality, seeming to delight in using language that might seem contradictory or unserious to someone not on his wavelength. But the things he says about himself in this tone are never unserious or nonsensical, always come from somewhere real and deeply considered.
I envy this willingness to risk being dismissed or misunderstood. Perhaps one day I will have the courage to express something real about my own identity in a similarly impish way, to publicly and prominently declare, right up there with my pronouns, that I can be referred to as a “dude” or a “guy,” but not as a “man.”
Another perspective I picked up from Price, from his book Unmasking Autism: “Neurotypicality is more of an oppressive cultural standard than it actually is a privileged identity a person has. Essentially no one lives up to neurotypical standards all of the time, and the rigidity of those standards harms everyone. Much as heteronormativity harms straight and queer folks alike, neurotypicality hurts people no matter their mental health status.”
* * *
“There is no self” is a statement often attributed to the Buddha with no canonical support. “The self is real but also an illusion” is no more canonical a statement, but it is perhaps a more accurate one. The most obvious way the self is an illusion is that there is no fixed self; it changes not only over the arc of a life but from moment to moment. Tug on that thread a little and we come to the next obvious truth: the self constantly shifts in response to its surroundings. The self is relational. And there we start to get at the overlap between Advaitic thought and Buddhist thought; the self is merely part of a larger fabric, with no clear lines separating one part from another.
Divisions, differences, and categories are all in some sense illusory. They can also be helpful. There may be no clear line separating an autistic person from one who isn’t, but the category helps explain me to myself and others. Genres all smudge and bleed, and metal subgenres are a perfect example of the esoteric silliness of music obsessives, but I know that I’m far more likely to enjoy a doom or drone record than a thrash record. There’s no easily identifiable point where a man becomes something more complicated. Gender and genre are related words.
When I think about queering, neuroqueering, and unmasking, I often come back to the core Taoist principle that our natural state is sublime. That newborn infants hold profound wisdom before they are warped by society. I sometimes feel immense grief thinking about myself as a child, about all the ways I was misunderstood and crammed into ill-fitting boxes, denied the freedom to just be. Perhaps Kannon is so often defined by their capacity for perception because one of the greatest forms of compassion is simple observation, a willingness to know what someone is independent of what anyone wants them to be. Perhaps holding that kind of compassion for yourself is a necessary precondition to receiving it from others.
* * *
The Tao Te Ching has thoughts on gender. They may not at first blush seem particularly progressive to 21st-century sensibilities. Taoist thought positions femininity and masculinity as corresponding to yin and yang, meaning that they are a dichotomy, the only two genders discussed. My knowledge of this text is as of yet incomplete. I do not consider myself to know a verse until I know it well, until I have rolled up my sleeves and gotten my hands dirty in the language. I know maybe ten percent of the book well. But with the limited knowledge currently at my disposal, I have a few things to say in defense of the gender sensibilities of an ancient text.
First, the masculine yang represents what is considered most obviously valuable in a society of people who do not understand the world or themselves. Yang is not without value, but it does not need its virtues extolled. Yin is often positioned as deep, hidden value. I am no gender essentialist, and as I’ve said before, I don’t think we as a society have a particularly coherent idea of what masculinity is, but I do think most contemporary progressives could see some reality as well as some falsehood in this correspondence.
As for the binary of it all, yin and yang do form a dichotomy, but a fluid one, defined by interplay, intermingling, balance. So in bringing yin and yang into the gender sphere, there is an almost inherent suggestion of non-binary positions, since very little if anything in this world is all yang or all yin. Darkness and emptiness, both ideas with positive connotations in a Taoist philosophical framework, correspond to yin. Light and form are yang. What of dusk, or the half-full cup? Furthermore, there are many traditional yin/yang correspondences when it comes to the different flavors and qualities of food. So perhaps there is an available progressive Taoist perspective where gender, like food, holds many possible oppositions. Perhaps gender is not a spectrum on a line from one point to another, but one in two or more dimensions. The spectrum can have edges, and points along those edges, each edge point with its corresponding opposite, and still hold room for near-infinite complexity.
One of my favorite things about the Tao Te Ching is its open, capacious quality. It’s really not very long, and so much of it is open to interpretation. There’s a lot of empty space in there.
To return to Nick Drake for a moment, he had a special way of gesturing at a lot of things while saying very little. “River Man” has no story, but it suggests a thousand stories, perhaps even a cosmology. The sense of mystery there is not a product of a linguistic, temporal, or cultural divide. It is a feature.
I believe there is some value in attempting to understand how an ancient Chinese person would have read the Tao Te Ching. But there is also value in understanding that even to an ancient Chinese person, the text could have been almost infinitely multivalent. It’s worth remembering that some linguistic conceptions of meaning measure it by the multitudes held within emptiness.
Verse 28 begins with an exhortation to let masculinity and femininity coexist within oneself. It concludes with a lesson on the spiritual power of uncut wood. It’s hard to say precisely what to do with that. If there were only one interpretation, it wouldn’t be poetry.
* * *
There is one album I have used for meditation more than any other. I discovered only recently how fitting this is. Pyroclasts by Sunn O))) is itself a product and document of a meditative act. Every day while recording Life Metal, Sunn O))) and their collaborators would set aside time at the beginning or end of the day’s work to play 12 minutes of improvised droning. Pyroclasts is described by the band as “a sister, or perhaps shadow album” to Life Metal. Sounds pretty yin to me, and that fits. One is immediately recognizable as sonically related to the other. The biggest differences between the two are that Life Metal is a lot longer and contains a lot more large-scale variation. For instance, in the songs on Life Metal, occasionally there will be a chord change.
Most people would probably find Pyroclasts boring. Some would find it actively unpleasant to hear. To me, it has been a balm, a teacher, a companion. It helps me work, meditate, regulate, function. I hope my words can give more people access to what this album has to offer, or at least render my relationship with it comprehensible to others. For all my adamant strangeness, I want so badly to be understood.
Pyroclasts is the most Sunn O))) of any Sunn O))) record. Thus, it is the best Sunn O))) record. It represents a band taking their preoccupations as far as they will go without breaking the tensions that make them interesting to hear. You want uncut wood? No divisions? This thing’s barely got notes in it. It’s just. Sound. Big clouds of it, grey and all-enveloping and occasionally lit from within by a slow-motion flash of colored light. The sounds have pitches, but with very few exceptions the sounds’ texture and duration de-emphasize those pitches; you’re discouraged from thinking about the pitches in relation to one another to piece together anything like a riff, a melody, a chord progression, even a chord. If asked to imagine what enlightenment sounded like, I would point to this. Immersive intensity, unbroken fabric, compassionate emptiness. No gender or genus or genre. No separation. No illusion. Just. Sound.
* * *
This essay terrifies me. I want so badly to be understood. I worry that the connections between these threads will seem tenuous to anyone reading. That I’m trying to do too much and, in turn, accomplishing nothing. That my feelings about mainstream feminist rhetoric will read as misogynist. That my translation work will be seen as arrogant, appropriative, colonialist. I worry about including any of those translations here, about a reader more knowledgeable than me spotting some egregious error. I even worry that this show of vulnerability will just look politically expedient, or that my hand-wringing about translation will seem out of place attached to this verse at the end when I already included my translation of another verse with no such fanfare earlier. But here I am, ridiculous as ever in my clutch and crave and contradictions. And here is my rendition of verse 28.
* * *
know the masculine within
hold the feminine within
be a river
for all under the sky’s power
be a river
of eternal goodness
never ceasing
and return again
to be a newborn child
know the light within
hold the dark within
be a guide line
for all under the sky’s power
be a guide line
of eternal goodness
never straying
and return again
to be without borders
know the high within
hold the low within
be a valley
for all under the sky’s power
be a valley
of eternal goodness
full and sufficient
and return again
to be plain wood
plain wood is cut
to make tools
but with just the plain wood
a sublime soul
can become a leader
therefore, the finest craft
lies in not cutting
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