My body is a cage that keeps me
From dancing with the one I love
(Arcade Fire)

Descartes, widely touted as the father of modern philosophy, taught us to think that what we are most certain about, what we grasp most confidently and most tightly, is “in here.”  I know that I exist if I am thinking, he said, and this implies that I am a thinking thing regardless of what is “out there.”  It’s a picture that has been rejected by most recent philosophers, but it still casts its long shadow over Western culture.  It’s the picture that makes both The Matrix and Inception compelling.  I am my mind, and my mind is an inside that knows no outside, what Leibniz called a “monad.”  Even if I have a body, the body is outside, like a cage that imprisons me, from which I might hope to be set free in an afterlife.

Whatever life (in any strong sense) that I have, I have “in here.”  “I’ve got sunshine in my stomach. But I can’t keep me from creeping sleep.”  And worst of all, I might be truly alone.  Others are outside too.   Outside the cage, Rael sees his brother John (a name meaning “graced by God”).  It’s a cage not only because I am kept in, but also because others are seemingly kept out.

If my body is the cage, then it is so, so tempting to think that the “windscreen wiper,” the dick that the doc docks, might be some sort of key, but when it disappears into the ravine, isn’t it still radically unclear whether anything is really unlocked?

Bruce Cockburn reminds us that a cage is something that an animal might pace, that we catch ourselves “pacing the cage.”  And the cage in that context implies darkness, too:

Sometimes the best map will not guide you
You can’t see what’s round the bend
Sometimes the road leads through dark places
Sometimes the darkness is your friend
(Bruce Cockburn)

The cage is dark like a cave.  Rael’s cage, congealing after the cuckoo cocoon, is in fact a cave.  Here it’s difficult to avoid thinking of Plato’s cave, where prisoners are chained, watching shadows of reproductions of supposedly real things.  And the real things are outside.  Cages are joined together in a network, yes.  But John sheds a bloody tear and turns away from Rael’s cries for help.

When the cage dissolves, it’s still the body (another cage?) that revolves.

Palpating the texture of Rael’s story at this point, we find cages within cages.  But are any of them really cages?  They come and go (perhaps dreaming of Michelangelo?).

If I could change to liquid,
I could fill the cracks up in the rocks.
I know that I am solid
And I am my own bad luck.

Is it just too simple, too freaking trite, to suggest that we forge all of these cages ourselves, that we are our own jailers?  If so, perhaps it is even more trite, even more oversimplified, to think that I can find the keys to my own cages, all by myself.  The suggestion that there are others, that there may be an Other who must take part in our various releasements, may bring us back toward what I am broadly characterizing as “religious.”  I don’t mean that to be a narrow, highly controlled veering-back.  I don’t have a dogmatic agenda.

Or, maybe at one level, I sort of do.  If you pick up the idea that release from cages is necessarily tied to others, to An Other, then you are getting a major element of my drift.

But it’s only a drift, and I hope it carries you back to Rael’s story so that you may test it yourself.  In your own cages.

<—- Previous Look     Prologue     Next Look —->

Considering castration, a certain strange displacement occurred.  It didn’t really strike me until after writing the fifth look, but it was indeed a displacement, and as I think about it since, it seems stranger and stranger.  Death is what is displaced, and the reason why its displacement is so strange is because it is normally simultaneously final and transitional.

The Death card in a Tarot deck is often understood as ending, loss, or conclusion, but also often as transition or change.

With shaving, biting and cutting given the symbolic pride of place, death — so often the BIG finality, or the BIG transition — turns out to be not that big a deal.  Its caricature in The Lamb is in “The Supernatural Anaesthetist,” with its disarmingly brief and casual lyric:

Here comes the supernatural anaesthetist.
If he wants you to snuff it,
All he has to do is puff it

— he’s such a fine dancer.

Here is a figure of death unlike the skeletal Death of Tarot, or the darkly robed Grim Reaper.  This guy sounds like someone you might like to get to know, or perhaps someone who would like to get to know you.  Think of Joe Black (Brad Pitt).  Or think of the bubbly and alluring Death of the Endless, from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series.  This may be the better association, as “Anyway” voices the expectation that “she” is supposed to be riding a pale horse.  The anaesthetist merely “puffs,” presumably delivering a gaseous sort of sleep-inducing substance.  And dancing?  Why would he be a fine dancer?  Perhaps because (as in The Sandman) the delivery, though dark, is welcome and pleasant.

Is it even clear whose death has this unassuming harbinger?  Of course, the most natural reading is that it’s Rael’s death.  But the real death that soon follows is that of the Lamia.  I’m reminded of the Tarot reading at the end of The Gunslinger, the first volume of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, when the man in black draws that ominous card and speaks to Roland:

Death, but not for you, gunslinger.

And at the end of the series, this pronouncement is repeated, with amplification:

Never for you. You darkle. You tinct. May I be brutally frank? You go on.

It is as if Death, normally THE big deal, becomes no big deal.  Rael “writes Death off as an illusion.”  Yet death does come for another, and in both The Dark Tower and The Lamb, the death of the other is an immense burden on the heart of the hero (Roland/Rael).  I’m not sure how much help this is, however.  The doors come before in The Lamb, and the doors come after in The Dark Tower.  Well, maybe so.  But in each case there are doors.

This may be no more than the obverse of the previous look.  I’ve urged you to listen to the ways in which the (in)scisions mark the liminal sites, the thresholds.  The cutting is so much more significant, more to be feared than death.  Death dances, and nonchalantly puffs.

But maybe we should also remember that, as Emily Dickenson pointed out, “The distance that the dead have gone / Does not at first appear…”

The only thing that seems clear to me here is that, if you try to see death as a major theme in The Lamb, it doesn’t quite work.  I’m tempted to say that you’d be dead wrong.  But that might be too strong.

Another poet (Eliot) put in the mouth of his magus: “I should be glad of another death.”

<—- Previous Look     Prologue     Next Look —->

Translating Sigmund Freud’s writings into English has left a formidable heap of wreckage strewn across the twentieth century.  We’re used to saying “Ego” and “Id” when he simply used ordinary German words for “I” and “It.”  Most relevant for this look at The Lamb, we’re used to hearing (if we hear this part of Freud at all anymore) about “castration” or the fear of it.  Castration means the removal of the testicles, but that’s not what Freud was talking about.  He was concerned about the removal of the penis, or the fear of its removal, or the child’s suspicion that it has been removed in the case of the female.  The association with the idea of cutting is always strong, and of course blades (swords) may be phallic.  A blade may shave as well as cut.  Incision by a blade is a cousin of biting, some teeth being known as incisors.  Here I want to call attention to the chain of associations in The Lamb that includes shaving, biting, and cutting.

Now, bringing up Doktor Freud seems (to continue speaking Freudian language) hopelessly “overdetermined” by the violent contests that comprise the history of psychoanalytic thought.  It is so often assumed that the legacy of Freud is somehow “settled” or finalized, that he has been refuted, or subsumed, or otherwise tamed by subsequent inquiry, whether that inquiry bears the honorific adjective ‘scientific,’ or rests upon some other authoritative revelation.  I take for granted here, without providing any explicit argument, that it is still worth paying heed to Freud, and that doing so still evokes insight that is not negated by the countless ways in which viewpoints associated with his name have been criticized.  I ask to be allowed to invoke his name only provisionally, not simplistically as an infallible authority.  I do not expect acceptance of any view according to which “biology is destiny,” noting in passing that even Freud himself arguably did not hold this as a dogma.  I take up a Freudian gaze here not so much as what we usually think of as explanatory theory, but more as a hermeneutic lens.  Try it.  I’m not looking for unqualified commitment.

One of the most important things to realize about shaving, biting, and cutting in The Lamb is that it is clearly not associated with death.  The images that accompany death are very different, suggesting the violence of an impact at first (“Fly on a Windshield”), but having much more to do with breath, with wind, with blowing or sucking in of air, and of course with transformation of one kind or another, with throwing into question the borders of the real (Rael).  More on that soon.  Shaving, biting and cutting, on the other hand, are all focused upon the bodily loci of love and sex.

The heart (also “the porcupine”) is shaved.  Flesh is bitten by the (snake-like) Lamia, and they in turn are eaten by Rael (whose blood has killed them).  And then there’s the visit to Doktor Dyper.  “Don’t delay! Dock the dick!”  This cutting is presumably some sort of treatment (“cure”?) for the curse of being a Slipperman (which came from having “tasted love”). The preservation of the member in a yellow plastic tube (“honey-pouch”) promises “safety” of some sort, safety which brother John is unwilling to risk when Rael’s is lost to the raven, and into the ravine.

Think of how all of this involves severing.  What (or who) is severed from what (or whom)?  It seems as though the severings (including that of John from Rael) are essential in leading to Rael’s ultimate experience of seeing his own face where John’s should be.

Shaving, biting, cutting, severing, removing, preserving (“pickling”).  And if Docktor Freud is taken at least as a reliable cultural iconographer, also borrowing two or four cents from Jacques Lacan, may we conclude that the forms of sexual severing (alienation?) in The Lamb are part of what clears the way for the Other as mirror?

I do not present this as a conclusion.  In order to understand why, think about how “It” is not a conclusion either.  “It” has always been my least favorite song on the album musically.  (See?  I am not WHOLLY uncritical of the album.)  “It” seems to act like a grandiose finale, and I’ve never thought it was really a successful one.  But as I’ve thought with Freud a bit here, it has occurred to me how completely apt this may be.

No conclusion, but suddenly a director shouts, “CUT!!”

<—- Previous Look     Prologue     Next Look —->

I’m counting out time,
Got the whole thing down by numbers…
Got my finger on the button…

Sure, I’ll do this first person, as if speaking for a “we.”  By doing so, I open it to an intractable vulnerability.  You may not identify with it.  You may think it foreign or strange.  You may think it objectionable, disgusting, sexist, or whatever.  But I’m betting some of you won’t.  I’m betting some of you will recognize bits and pieces of yourselves, or maybe even more than that.

Sexuality was a topic that wasn’t really broached directly in my youth.  We imagined that our parents had no idea how much we knew and did.  We certainly didn’t imagine what our parents actually had known and done, even before we were born, which was, like, before creation.  There were books to be read, if parents or nineteen sixties librarians allowed it, or if we managed to read them anyway, as we often did.  There was that polite near-silence among the “adults,” to be filled with contraband Playboy and Penthouse magazines.  There was that huge freaking mess of an ethical minefield where religious and moral expectations and performances made a strange shadow within which all sorts of things happened anyway, sometimes not reflected upon, or sometimes endlessly analyzed in a language that many of us would later recognize when Bill Clinton got caught in public (as my mother used to say, “in front of God and everybody!”) apparently trying to make out what ‘is’ is.

Sometimes when you hear a song, it’s as if you already know it very well.  That was me and “Counting Out Time.”  By the time I was initiated into the symbolic world of The Lamb, I was definitely a boy who was resting for his testing.  I knew what was meant by “digesting every word the experts say.”  I knew what Gabriel meant by “mankind handkinds.”  I’m strongly inclined to say that it was the first song on The Lamb that I REALLY understood.  I certainly felt like I understood it.  As adolescence progressed, it felt more and more like a chapter in my own story, including the disappointment and questioning.

It’s worth remembering how much it felt like my own story, precisely because of its just-so blend of a happy, upbeat sense of discovery with a dark, foreboding sense of objectification and abuse of women.  It’s worth pausing to study on its unapologetic privileging of male libido and its frankly expressed hope for an algorithm with which to elicit desired female response.   Hegel’s ideas regarding the importance of “lordship and bondage” find a musical conduit here, more subtle and deep than the more famous take by Cheap Trick: “I want you to want me.”  There was an uncanny waffling in that desire between the hope of dominance and forced (“automatic”?) submission on the one hand, and the hope of voluntary giving of self on the other.  “Just lie there still, and I’ll get you turned on just fine.”

The song is a profoundly deep meditation on a profoundly shallow gaze (regard) of a middle twentieth century pubescent male and his object, in precisely the Freudian sense of “object.”  Ah yes, I already did suggest that we might make a visit to Dr. Freud, but in this look I am only making an initial entry into the space of sexuality, and sexuality (like religion, evoked last time) will from now on be a constant companion.  But the point of this entry is the uncanniness, the discomfort, the vacillation between desire and disgust.  In my own case, I know that a twisted and destructive savor of sexuality haunted my adolescence, like an abusive partner that I would not leave, but would return to again and again.

In order to understand the comical but revelatory character of the other sexual images in The Lamb, even more important than a predictable Freudward nod, I would argue, is that we have a feel for the current running through it that is palpably misogynist on its face, and perhaps deeply misanthropic at its core.  It should remind us of the discomfort that arises when we realize that Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” both is and is not about sex (and, for that matter, religion as well).

Some of you may have some other route to the sort of discomfort that I am calling for here, but I suspect that something like the route I have traced here is familiar to many.  The allusion above to Hegel suggests the notion that there is something painfully paradoxical at the center of human desire, made most palpable in its sexual manifestations.  The suggestion that arises here is that a desire with no possible fulfillment, an incoherent desire, might be a part of what I am.

There is more to come, but listen from there for a while if you can stand it.

<—- Previous Look     Prologue     Next Look —->

After supper comes dessert.  Pudding.  But “how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”

Bringing up “Supper’s Ready” means rattling that dangerous chain of signifiers that includes Bible, religion, Revelation, apocalypse.  In the mid 1970’s, we knew about zombies, but there was not yet any strong popular associative tendril between zombies and apocalypse.  A more likely association, at least in my neck of the woods, was with Hal Lindsay’s popularization of dispensationalist theology in The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970) and other books (precursors to the more recent Left Behind series).

What comes after (ooh, we need a Terje Rypdal soundtrack here!), or the end (Doors?), in this case is the eschaton, the culmination, the “last things” in the argot of Christian theology.  The supper of the Lamb that is the last one.  Not “the last Supper” before the arrest of Jesus, but the LAST supper, when time shall be no more.  THE LAMB of the biblical Apocalypse, or Book of Revelation (please don’t add an ‘s’ to the end; in the biblical text, it’s THE REVELATION of the Christ, not a book of predictions!), it’s THAT LAMB whose Supper is ready on 1972’s Foxtrot.

What comes After Supper, then?  What’s the dessert?  Selling England by the Pound (1973) would rightly be called pudding as opposed to dessert (arguably motivated in part by a desire to keep Genesis’ image veddy British), but what we’re worried about here is The Lamb, the one that Lies Down on Broadway.  Off to America with a vengeance?  No, I won’t chase any speculations of posturing in relation to The Pond.  The connection that stands out here is THE LAMB.  Having any knowledge of “Supper’s Ready,” how could one possibly avoid bringing to Rael’s story an ear prepared for the continuing adventures of that same Lamb, the true dessert course after The Lamb’s Supper?  If we consider this as one possible gaze (regard), what do we see?

“Religion” is such a problematic word.  It probably originally meant something like “binding,” and this probable meaning still seems to echo loudly when its friends and foes both react to the various ways, both good and bad, in which we might think ourselves “bound.”  But let’s use it for the moment.  Sure, we can find some religious themes in The Lamb, even besides the obvious figure of the title, but aren’t they much more subtle, more muted?  And isn’t the climax this time much more clearly in tune with Eastern religion, where “you are that” (Tat Tvam Asi)?

What does The Lamb have in common with “Supper’s Ready” that might be construed in “religious” terms?  I’ll cut to my chase.  One central figure, but in each case the canvas is made of relationships.  Lovers.  Sex partners (casual or not).  Siblings.  Others whom one wants to trust.  Others who might deceive, who might betray one’s trust.  Others who comically conform to stereotypes, or who fail to conform.  Others with whom one might belong, or with whom one (hopefully) does not belong.  Must experience be solitary and lonely, or can it be shared?  Can’t you feel OUR souls ignite?  Or do others end up as silent sorrow in empty boats?

Remember that, for some streams of Christian theology, God is the “Wholly Other.”  Mightn’t Otherness be considered THE “religious” question, or problem?  THE site of the opening of the “religious”?  If it is not Other, then I cannot love it.  If it is not Other, then neither calling nor command could issue from it.

Now step slightly to your left.  Keep that same basic gaze, but shift it over here, ever so slightly.  Here are lyrics that we might call “religiously loaded.”  There are lyrics about love and longing for an Other.  Do you see any line of demarcation, any dividing boundary between the two?  I don’t.  I suspect that one of the places this will eventually lead us is a meeting of two Doctors (Dyper and Freud); the lack of separation here has always been palpable as far as I can tell.  But that meeting will have to do with “sex,” which we will treat under a separate gaze (at least one).  The differences between the gazes is provisional and strategic.

The Lamb is a sacrificial figure.  It is The Lamb that is slain (lies down).  (Death is here, and will be a more vocal visitor in gazes to come.)  When The Lamb lies down, is it not with The Lion?

Suppose “religious” has everything to do with Otherness, longing and love.  Suppose, under the provisional shade of “religion,” that I (or You, or Rael) could not be God.  (Leave aside, for the moment, that heroic/pathetic voice in the Third Impression of “Karn Evil 9,” desperately intoning:  “I am all there is!”)  Suppose that dessert cannot be eaten alone, that pudding must be shared.

Suppose the Last Things are Others.  Listen to the Lamb, with Rael as background rather than foreground, with Others as the foreground.  Have you ever noticed how many there are, other than Rael, or how his story is as much a story about those Others?  About Otherness?  It is that which I am recommending here as a “religious” gestalt, a gaze at The Lamb that comes after Supper.

Some of the other gazes may spring from some of those Others, but perhaps it will be helpful to see them first from here.

<—- Previous Look     Prologue     Next Look —->