The Beauty in Bleak (Exquisite Gloom Redux)

I feel down today.  I woke up to a life that had missed its turn many miles back and was now so far off its intended path as to make reversing course to find the untaken fork impossible.  Feeling excruciatingly foreign, I play at countering reasonless, fanatic beheaders from behind a suit-and-tie bureaucrat’s desk at an age when my younger self fantasized I would be eloquently and convincingly extolling the merits of my liberal worldview over cold lemonade with William F. Buckley.  Far removed from the tiny clutch of family and friends who so charitably care about me, I am desperately lonely but nonetheless so fully given over to my hermit introversion that I stridently choose drawn-curtain solitude over a walk in the sun for fear of being forced into a passing exchange of greetings with a too-eager doorman upon exiting the elevator.  I can’t bring myself to answer welcome, wonderful overnight emails from daughter, uncle, and long-lost friend because I am unable to imagine words I could type that would successfully escape the deep hole from which they were sprung.

It is goddamn glorious!  Every inch of my skin tingles with the electricity of sweeping misery.  The daydream visions behind my closed eyelids flicker in extreme high definition; so palpable I sense I could step into and live inside them if I could only find the right footing.  I am a bundle of rapidly firing synapses, my jittery thoughts somehow transmitting both trillions of bytes and nil data sets concurrently.  I spent an hour and a half on the elliptical just now, and could have easily done double or triple that.  The usual day-to-day cloud of numbness is banished.  I feel alive in my despair, brutally and magnificently alive!

Musically, there is but one option, albeit one I find myself unable to properly set to paper in my present state.  Happily, back in March 2013, some long-forgotten and in-all-likelihood fictitious person claiming my name managed to put the story to words.  I’ll let him tell it again this time:

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As an accompaniment to pitch black or candlelit tread-milling, it is hard to imagine a more effective conveyance.  Within minutes your consciousness is transported into a land of perpetual night, foggy-marsh stone castles, and loam-covered knolls.  The castles host a maze of shadowy passageways lit by flickering torches, a few wrought iron adornments affixed to otherwise bare walls.  You instinctively make your way towards the faint glimpses of a ghostly maiden that tease your peripheral vision in the twilight.  Her flowing hair, flowing gown, and flowing desire tantalize you, but she is continually beyond reach, not in mocking but rather sharing despair at the futility of your attempts to join her.  With each failure, your need for her grows until you can think of nothing else.  Only she matters.  You sense an inexplicable yet timeless connection.  You can discern not where or when but you know that you were are soul mates.

She has been taken from you unjustly and your love, no that’s not strong enough, your longing for her is all-encompassing.  Eventually you realize that she is being kept from you by otherworldly powers against which you have neither recourse nor remedy.  They care not for your suffering.  Your desperate pleas for compassion fall on deaf ears.  Despite the bottomless depths of your anguish, to them you are naught but an insignificant midge, unworthy of even a moment’s thought.  You cast yourself to the stone floor in hopelessness, doomed to forever haunt these nocturnal halls and hills with your beloved just beyond your grasp.  You yearn for Death to take pity and end your torment, but it will never be.  Your sorrow is eternal.  You are crushingly alone, with no one to lament your circumstance nor even to take pleasure at your woe.  You are inconsequential, and yet your pain fills the universe.  Please. End. This.

Such is the awesome splendor of English doom metal band My Dying Bride.  Their music is the perfect soundtrack for solitude, albeit not the reassuring solitude of sunny forests filled with chirping birds and gleaming, dew-covered leaves.  This is music for dark, lonely rooms and extended solo road trips through desolate landscapes.  This is music through which to escape the misery of one’s own earthly isolation by subsiding into the deeper, blanketing gloom of the vast, empty cosmos.

Joy is to be found here; the joy of recognizing one’s own utter irrelevance, the joy of realizing that there is no greater scheme, the joy of seeing that one’s personal suffering, while wholly unavoidable, serves no larger purpose.  My Dying Bride represents liberation from the shackles of hope.  There is true, boundless beauty in the abyss.  Come. Join. Us.

The Light at the End of the World: