The Teeming Brain

Last night I spent an enjoyable two-and-a-half hours watching Superman Returns at a nearby movie theatre. I’ve seen some fellow filmgoers complaining at online message boards about the uneven pacing that mars the movie, its lackluster portrayal of Lois Lane, and a few other perceived weaknesses. I happen to agree with most if not all of these criticisms, but that doesn’t change the fact that on the whole I found the movie to be a fun and worthy continuation of or successor to the original series with Christopher Reeve, on which I was weaned.

But what’s most interesting to me, aside from the movie’s success as a crowd-pleaser, is that Superman Returns is chock full of Christ symbolism. And it’s not subtle, either. During at least one scene, I was struck with a sudden, distinct feeling that a more accurate title for the picture might have been The Passion of the Superman.

[Warning: plot spoilers follow!]

A simple list of the Christ elements, in the order in which they show up, includes the following:

• Operation 3:16 — In one of the many instances where the voice of Superman’s father speaks in his memory to offer wise counsel, it says the human race can “be a great people. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you, my only son.” Um, John 3:16 anybody? “For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son. . . .”
• The call to ministry — When Superman and Lois are reunited for the first time in five years, she tells him, “The world doesn’t need a savior.” She has also recently written an article titled “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman,” for which she has been awarded the Pulitzer. So he flies her up to show her a God’s-eye-view of the city and region below, and tells her, “I hear everything. You wrote that the world doesn’t need a savior. But every day I hear people crying out for one.”
• The scourging — Lex Luthor manages to create a dark, spiny, gothic-looking island laced with kryptonite. Superman lands on the island and of course loses his strength and invulnerability, at which point the movie turns into The Passion of the Superman. Lex’s henchmen beat, kick, and abuse Superman horribly as he writhes and cries out and crawls through brackish water. It’s a blatantly Christ-like scourging.
• Blood and water — After this, Lex stabs Superman in the side with a blade made of kryptonite.
• The ascension — Lois finds Superman and pulls the broken-off blade out of him. Before returning to take care of Lex and Co., Superman flies up above the cloud cover to absorb the healing rays of earth’s yellow sun, and the mythic iconography of his ascent into the heavens is a clear echo of Christian ideas about Jesus’ final ascension. (Oddly, this scene comes before Superman’s death.)
• The crucifixion — Superman carries Lex’s deadly island out of the atmosphere and hurls it into space. He then faints from injury and exhaustion and begins a slow fall back to earth, during which his pose is quite revealing: his head tilts back, his arms unfurl, and his legs and feet curve gracefully in tandem. It’s such a distinctly classical crucifixion pose that if you removed his cape and combed back that trademark curl, he would look appropriate hanging on the wall of a Catholic cathedral.
• Death and resurrection — He flatlines after being rushed to a hospital and then returns to life a few days later.

There are probably more of these to notice, such as the fact that Superman’s return might well be considered a Second Coming (although it occurs at the beginning of the movie). Oh, and also the fact that early in the movie somebody tells Lex Luthor that he (Lex) wants to be a god, and he denies it and says, “Gods are selfish beings who fly around in little red capes and don’t share their power with mankind.”  This type of thing just fascinates me, and I was glad to see it worked rather gracefully into the new Superman movie (”blatant” doesn’t necessarily entail “ungraceful”)

Finally, a few non-Christ-related things that interested me were the various changes of language and behavior that were obvious “updates” to make the movie fit into, and perhaps appeal to, 21st century Western culture. For example, Lois smokes in secret because her boyfriend/fiancee doesn’t approve of it. Who ever heard of somebody disapproving of smoking in the original Superman mythos, other than Clark’s mild chiding of Lois for her habit in one of the previous movies?  The anti-smoking bias in the present movie carries the scent of contemporary puritanical political correctness.

When Perry White, the venerable editor-in-chief of The Daily Planet, holds a staff meeting to talk about the paper’s coverage of Superman’s return, he tells his reporters to find out “if Superman still stands for truth, justice — all that stuff.” The word on the street is that the filmmakers cut out “the American way,” which has always been the third item in that venerable list, in order to appeal to the international market.  Or maybe it was to avoid alienating that market, which in the current political climate might amount to the same thing.

The language of the film is a little freer with mild profanity than anything that appeared in previous outings, and I think this represents a cultural sea change. Jimmy Olsen uses the term “pissed off.” Somebody says “Shit!” (although they only get out the “Sh–” before being interrupted). Lois drops her purse and bellows out an angry, euphemistic, “Freak!” And so on.  Even this kind of thing would have been anathema in the past, in both the comics and the movies, not to mention the cartoons and television series.  Today, language that was formerly considered taboo for use in general circles, at least in American culture, has edged into acceptance, largely under the influence of popular media culture and its boundary-pushing attitude that has held held firm since it first emerged in the 1960s.  I’m not necessarily disapproving, by the way.  I’m just observing.

So all in all, I found Superman Returns to be both an enjoyable superhero ride and an interesting cultural document. I hope it achieves the kind of financial success that will pave the way for a sequel, and I can’t often say that about a movie.

I stumbled across a quote from psychologist Stephen Diamond today that could almost serve as a credo for my artistic and spiritual motivations and modus operandi:

“By bravely voicing our inner ‘demons’ — symbolizing those tendencies in us that we most fear, flee from, and hence, are obsessed or haunted by — we transmute them into helpful allies, in the form of newly liberated, life-giving psychic energy, for use in constructive activity. During this process, we come to discover the paradox that many artists perceive: That which we had previously run from and rejected turns out to be the redemptive source of vitality, creativity, and authentic spirituality.”

This is from his article “Redeeming Our Devils and Demons.”
Diamond is a psychologist and psychotherapist from the existentialist wing of the displine who studied under Rollo May and wrote Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity. A chapter from this book, titled “The Psychology of Evil,” is available online and has been a great favorite of mine for a few years, since it shows Diamond taking a page from his mentor May to explore the daimonic underpinnings of human behavior and the human psyche.

Another quote I discovered today that really does it for me, this time from Joseph Campbell in the form of a rhetorical question:

“How to render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark?”

Yes, that's right, I'm giving free stuff away. My teeming brain doth overflow with craziness.

The challenge is to identify a movie sound clip. The prize is a DVD copy of the movie in question, plus a copy of Daemonyx's debut album Curse of the Daimon when it's released. Visit the contest page for details, then return to this post and add a comment with your answer (or email me as specified on the contest page). The contest ends Friday, June 30th, at 11:59 p.m.

And don't say I never did anything for you!

EDIT NOTICE - Sunday, June 25th:
If you read this piece on Friday the 23rd or Saturday the 24th, please be aware I've just gone and made significant revisions to the final five paragraphs.  As if the thing needed to be any longer. . . .

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WARNING: Brace yourself for a very looooong post, the longest by far that I’ve yet had the temerity to post here at The Teeming Brain. What’s more, it’s also scattered, rambling, digressive, and self-indulgent. (Am I encouraging you to read it yet?) If you stick with it, I hope you'll be rewarded with a few thoughts and speculations that have been worthy of your time.

I’m assuming you’ve heard of Rob Zombie. I mean, after all, who hasn’t? The man is more deserving of the title “King of all Media” than his friend Howard Stern. From being a graphic artist and struggling musician in the 1980s, Zombie has gone one to become one of the masters of the entertainment world. He’s a heavy metal god, a movie and video director, a comic book designer, and master of a merchandising empire. The man is a bona fide pop cultural phenomenon. I mention him here at The Teeming Brain because he occupies a special place in my affections. Let me explain.

I chose the title of my former blog, Confessions of a Conflicted Cultural Skeptic, to highlight a longstanding contradiction in my affections, which is simply this: that although I feel a deep disgust for what I perceive as the pervasive evidence of contemporary cultural degeneration in America, at the same time I still enjoy and even revel in some of what this culture has to offer. Hence, I feel conflicted about it. And ranking high on my list of pop cultural memes and themes that inflame this feeling is Rob Zombie. On the one hand, I feel serious reservations about his influence on America, but on the other hand, I absolutely love his music and movies, and I find him philosophically fascinating and even inspiring because of the daemonic or daimonic nature of his artistic and commercial ascent.

Regarding my reservations, they stem from the combined fact of, first, my agreement with a lot of contemporary cultural criticisms along the lines of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, and second, what I’ve encountered in my frequent contact with adolescents through my teaching job. Postman, for his part, loathed modern American pop culture, including rock music, so very deeply that he hated it when his work inspired Roger Waters to title an album Amused to Death. That sort of elitism may be damnable in some people’s eyes, but in some cases I think it may be justified. I’ll let Postman himself argue the point with his all-purpose "graduation lecture" about the difference between the archetypal casts of mind and ways of life exemplified by the Athenians and the Visigoths, if you’re inclined to follow the link.

As for what I’ve seen in my teaching job, I’ll first ask you a question: Have you observed American youth culture lately? If so, have you thought about what it portends? I’m talking about the in-your-face variety that occupies center stage in contemporary mass entertainment a la MTV, hip hop, (un)reality television, and so on. Have you thought about the two-pronged question of what this crap culture reveals about the collective mindset of America’s youth even as it simultaneously shapes that mindset? I ask you to pay attention to the nihilism that’s evident in this culture’s pervasive casual attitude toward extreme violence and kinky sex. Also pay attention to the obsessive focus on scatology, gross-out humor, and “stupid” humor of the type heralded by the likes of Tom Green (who is surely one of the Four Jackasses of the Apocalypse). Also note the frantic idolization of “celebrities”—musicians and singers, movie stars, (un)reality television stars, people who perform stupid and dangerous stunts —that has reached positively stupefying heights of fake importance. Then consider that this same youth culture also seems to be equally obsessed with grim moods of hopelessness, despair, inner emptiness, ennui, and so on, as evidenced by innumerable popular songs. Remember Woodstock? Have you heard about the revival of this venerable event, which was originally all about hippies who preached peace and love, smoked dope, and grooved to peace-oriented songs, but which in its 1999 incarnation became a spectacle of Dionysian chaos? I ask that you mull this over and get a good feel for the overall picture it paints. Then ask yourself: What does this say about the worldview, the sub-zeitgeist, and the sense of self that these kids are growing up with?

For me this isn’t just a matter of purely academic concern, because I teach high school nine months out of the year and thus live and move among contemporary teens. And after four years of this, I can tell you that the primary fact I notice about them—and bear in mind that these aren’t big-city kids but rural Midwestern ones—is their combined character of general affability, cultural ignorance, low-grade hopelessness, and in-your-face apathy. None of these qualities dominates the other. They all seem equally mixed. The kids are nice and often eager to please. And they’re also being taught by their culture, and especially by the entertainment culture that’s marketed to them with almost miraculous precision, that their real lives are meaningless, and that life as a whole is all about coarse and debased things. And so on.

So that’s one prong of my two-pronged response to Rob Zombie. Anybody who’s familiar with him knows that he’s the crap-culture king. In fact, he’s made a career out of glorifying and feeding off the gaudy luster of the Z-grade movies, television shows, comic books, and other cultural detritus that populated his youth. As such, he’s part of the problem that’s working to create a generation of Americans who—and I mean this in all seriousness—very well may help to usher in a new dark age of savage ignorance and civilizational collapse (in tandem with the advent of peak oil, of course).

But then again, maybe not. Because Rob Zombie is so passionately obsessed with his beloved Z-grade crap culture that he appears to be motivated by an authentic daemonic drive, and when we enter the territory of the daemonic, all bets are off with regards to making highbrow-lowbrow distinctions and moral judgments about subject matter. So here’s where my feeling of conflictedness comes in.

Consider: Rob Zombie was born Robert Cummings. He grew up in Massachusetts during the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s, where by his own account he was so bored with his world that he spent all of his time immersed in movies, music, and comic books. Later he moved to New York and started his music career while supporting himself by working various other jobs, including a stint as the art director for a porn magazine. He also worked for a while as a production assistant on Pee Wee’s Playhouse.

And now, of course, a short couple of decades later, he’s become like unto a force of nature in American mass entertainment. He directs movies, records and produces music albums, writes and sometimes draws comic books, directs music videos, runs a merchandising empire, and for a time headed up a Halloween-themed Rob Zombie funhouse/horror maze at the Universal Studios theme park in California. One can of course attribute all this to business savvy, a massive ego, a good measure of talent, a pathological ambition, and more. Probably some or all of these are involved. But it seems apparent to me that at a deeper level, the guy is driven by something more significant.

To cut to the chase: In my view Rob Zombie seems to be driven by a fierce desire to assimilate the various elements of everything that has been most important to him in his life—all those things that he always loved to immerse himself in as a boy—and to filter these through his own sensibility in order to produce artistic works that express a worldview, or that at least convey a certain cast of mood. If I’m right about this, then Zombie counts as a true artist, since that’s a description of what all artists do. It seems he’s possessed of an authentic daemon, an inner drive that amounts to a calling, a life mission, a direction given to him by fate.

I have also toyed with the pet idea that sometimes in the rather oblique lyrics to his songs—so oblique that they often seem like verbal Rorschach tests—Zombie all but comes out and announces this drive by directly describing his particular daemon. In many of his songs he borrows an idea from rap music by speaking or singing in the first person and repeatedly identifying or announcing himself. For example, back when he was heading up the band White Zombie he wrote “More Human than Human,” which begins with:

I am the astro-creep
A demolition style, hell, America’s freak

Later in the song he calls himself “the crawling dead,” “a phantom in a box,” “a shadow in your head,” “the ripper man,” and “the nexus one.” And of course, he is “more human than human.”

The “nexus one” identification seems to be key here. Maybe there’s a college professor somewhere who has already written about this, but if so I’m not aware of him, so it’s my own pet theory when I speculate that Zombie has tried to position and describe himself as the nexus of America’s collective insanity, much in the manner of Charles Manson. Zombie’s fellow shock artist Marilyn Manson has done the same thing but has catered to a more segmented and isolated audience, whereas Zombie has exploded all over the scene in his bid to be seen as the nexus of America’s pathology. And he always links it to Z-grade gaudy horror.

In his song “The Great American Nightmare” he says,

Call me the American nightmare
Call me the American dream
Call me your soul corrupted
Call me everything you need

Soon after this on his solo breakout album Hellbilly Deluxe, he began the first track by singing,

Hey, yeah, I’m the one that you wanted
Hey, yeah, I’m your superbeast

as if to say, “Okay, America, this is what you wanted me to be,” referring to the over-the-top "hellbilly" zombie persona that he adopted for that particular album, and that proved so massively popular that it almost tripped him up by disappointing some of his fans when he tried to abandon or move beyond it on subsequent albums.

On both Hellbilly Deluxe and his next album, The Sinister Urge, Zombie identified himself as the “demonoid phenomenon” (see the song “Iron Head” where he says explicitly, What is my name? Demonoid phenomenon). Earlier, in “The One” (from his White Zombie days), which appeared on the soundtrack for Escape from L.A., he had said,

Yeah, I am the One, destroying you and every mother’s son
Yeah, I am the one, the king of the world and the devil’s son

So what does it all add up to? “The One,” “Demonoid phenomenon,” “The nexus one,” “Superbeast,” “The astro-creep,” “The American Nightmare,” and more, much more strewn throughout all of his music—what does it mean? The simple answer is, I don’t know. But I’m fascinated by it because I’ve gained the inescapable impression that Rob Zombie is hinting at something, some core truth about himself, whether he even knows it or not. And I suspect that he does know it. He seems to have hit upon a central driving idea for the image he wants to create and project to America, and he exploits every metaphor he can hit upon from the world of Z-grade horror in order to illustrate that image. And what, exactly, is the heart of it all? I suspect it’s found in his personal daimon, which would indeed seem to be bound up with all of the things hinted at by those metaphors.

Now, I may be making a mountain out of a molehill by devoting so much space to the question of Rob Zombie. But like I said, it’s a personal fascination, and it’s not as though I’ve spent a great deal of time and effort to think it all through. Rather, it has thought about itself. I’ve chewed on it in the back of my mind for years. The man has gotten under my skin and into my head. I’m sure he wouldn’t be disappointed to hear this.

Finally, as for the issue of whether things daemonic or daimonic really do transcend or elude categories of moral and qualitative judgment, well, that’s largely what James Hillman says in The Soul’s Code when he points out that legions of artistic and other types of geniuses throughout history have been weaned not on high culture, but on the type of crap that I like to hate in contemporary America. It seems to be the daimon and not the conscious ego that makes these decisions about what “meat” will serve as its proper nutrition. “We need to remember,” Hillman writes, “that just as the bodies of sports giants have often been raised on junk food, the imagination may be fed by cheap, popular, and ‘unhealthy’ equivalents. What matters is passion, which may be more predictive of capacity and productive of motivation than other usual benchmarks. There is no right food and no wrong food; the food must only meet the appetite, the appetite find its kind of food” (my emphasis).

So, Rob Zombie as a child — or rather, Robert Cummings — was drawn to low-grade horror. This has proved to be his life’s obsession. I myself am drawn to Rob Zombie, as well as to various other leading lights that populate the world of horror entertainment in its literary, cinematic, and musical aspects. In fact, I've long been helplessly fascinated by the very things that Zombie himself loves. People who have read my published writings know me as a literary and scholarly type, but I'm also a sucker for Italian horror movies. Throughout my youth I devoured comic books of all types like they were candy bars. I could happily live alone with a stack of EC horror comics and a small supply of food and drink. I've spent many ecstatic hours reveling in low-budget American horror movies from the likes of Roger Corman and William Castle. Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer is one of my favorite films.

Along with all this, I’m also drawn to the type of concentrated reflection that I’m engaging in right now, regardless of the subject matter. I’m sure that you yourself have always found yourself drawn toward and repelled by certain things. The daimonic theory holds that your conscious purpose should be to find ways to nurture and release this sense of being drawn or led, since it represents your personal psychological/spiritual lodestone. It provides the direction that you are "meant" to go. And it makes itself known precisely through your involuntary obsessions. Hillman says obsessiveness is one of the daimon's primary defining and revealing qualities, which brings us again to the subject of Rob Zombie, and which exonerates and even elevates him as an object not of disapproval, but of inspiration.

I would love to leave it at that, and to end this extemporaneous and well-nigh directionless essay right here on a note of encouragement for each person to divine and develop his or her daimonic calling. But it's not that simple, because once again my inner conflict rears its head in the form of a voice that says, “How the hell can it be commendable for millions of teens to grow up absorbing through their very pores the atmosphere of pornographic violence and sex that Rob Zombie glorifies and exemplifies?” If you’ve seen either of the movies he has directed to date, House of a Thousand Corpses or The Devil’s Rejects, then you know what that nagging little voice is talking about. Ditto if you’ve leafed through one of his CD booklets and looked at the semi-pornographic and sometimes fully pornographic imagery. I read an interview not too long ago in which Zombie revealed that even Bill Moseley, the actor who played Otis in both movies, was so bothered by some of what he had to do in the notoriously sadistic motel room scenes in The Devil's Rejects that he hesitated to do it. So this is very extreme stuff we're talking about.

I hasten to add that I certainly don’t condemn such things wholesale, as should already be abundantly clear from my list of personal loves listed above. To paraphrase a line from Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, which is really a book about creativity and inspiration in all its aspects, the artistic sensibility rejects nothing because it realizes that everything, no matter how dark or seemingly vile, is worthy if it’s approached with passion. (And boy, is that ever a loose paraphrase. I wonder whether Ray would even recognize its source in his own words.) But does this resorting to artistic and daimonic justifications really exonerate Rob Zombie and crap culture in general? Does it mean we ought to just accept the possible maiming of the souls and weltanshauungs of an entire generation of young people, many of whom don’t consciously feel that similar sense of being passionately guided by a driving obsession that will help them find their way safely through the dark thickets and tunnels of a pathological culture? Or does it mean this very view of things, including the phrasing of the question itself, is marred by an unwarranted moralistic ideological slant?

Obviously, I have no answers to offer. It's the mere pursuing of the questions that grips me. I hope it has done or may do the same for you, if you’ve come with me this far.

I just uploaded the bibliography page for my published and forthcoming writings. Its permanent link is of course on the sidebar under “pages.” The bibliography itself includes a few links to essays of mine that are still available for online reading.

A few years ago I discovered the Journal Intime of Henri Amiel. Amiel was a 19th century Swiss teacher and writer who led an outwardly dull and uneventful life — his friends and admirers even thought he was largely a failure because he had wasted his awesome potential by creating no great literary work — but who was revealed as a brilliant and profound thinker when his private journal was published posthumously. As it turned out, he had lived his real life, the life of his deepest self, in the pages of that private work.

I find the following thought from his journal entry dated December 30, 1850 to be oh-so-true. It deals with the matter of momentary inspiration and the importance of seizing the moment when such inspiration makes itself known. The thing is, Amiel's mode of expression can be so very flowery (as in the quote at hand), in a manner that seems archaic and alienating to most readers today, that I'm afraid his valuable thoughts are becoming increasingly inaccessible to the majority of modern people. But then, that's always been the way with literature.

The quote:

"Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect beauty; so, in the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiant kingship. Each star passes but once in the night through the meridian over our heads and shines there but an instant; so, in the heaven of the mind each thought touches its zenith but once, and in that moment all its brilliancy and all its greatness culminate. Artist, poet, or thinker, if you want to fix and immortalize your ideas or your feelings, seize them at this precise and fleeting moment, for it is their highest point. Before it, you have but vague outlines or dim presentiments of them. After it you will have only weakened reminiscence of powerless regret; that moment is the moment of your ideal."

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In other news, I just eliminated the "About Matt Cardin" page in favor of creating an "About The Teeming Brain" page. In addition to clicking the link just given, you can find a link to it in the sidebar under "Pages." It includes the update schedule for this blog as well as information about me personally. I've also included a couple of recent photos. The first was mostly an accident, and I liked the odd effect it created.

For the past year and a half I’ve been recording music with a mind toward publishing a CD. In that time I’ve returned frequently to the question of what I should name my musical project. Right from the start I knew the name would have to be something centered around the idea of the daimonic or daemonic, since that idea has been central not only to my musical endeavors but also to my writing and other creative endeavors for a great many years now.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, the idea of the daimonic is loosely related to the idea of the muse. Like the muse, the daimon concept comes to us from the ancient Greeks, who in addition to the gods and goddesses familiar to us all through classical mythology (Zeus etc.) believed in spirits they called daimones or daimons. In one respect these daimons weren’t very different from the animistic spirits that have populated the belief systems of all peoples throughout history. Daimons were thought to be local, limited spirits who inhabited certain places, affected the weather, brought good and bad luck, and so on.

But the Greeks also held a more distinctly spiritualized or psychologized view that eventually outstripped the first. In this second version, the daimons were understood to exist deep within the human psyche or spirit, where they made themselves known through their influence upon human thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and actions. They were intermediate spirits, neither divine nor human, who mediated the will and messages of the gods to people, and vice versa. It was such a potent concept that it eventually swept through the ancient world and became one of the cornerstones of Western psychological and spiritual thought. The iconic figures of both the angel and the demon in Western religion have their origins in the ancient Greek idea of the daimons (as combined with Jewish beliefs about spiritual hierarchies, which themselves had been inherited from Zoroastrianism). In the twentieth century, existential psychologist Rollo May turned to this ancient concept for help in articulating his understanding of the human psyche, and in his classic book Love and Will described it in terms that make clear for us moderns what sort of thing the ancient Greeks were talking about when they spoke of spirits that acted with an inner force upon the human mind and personality: “The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both.” This last idea is familiar to fans of Harlan Ellison, who closed his famous short story “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” with an epigraph drawn from May’s book that connected modern urban violence and the experience of social alienation with an upsurge of daimonic energy.

As for the evolution of the name, at some point during the Dark or Middle Ages the Greek word daimon became the Latinized dæmon or daemon. Eventually, the “ai” that had mutated into “æ” or “ae” collapsed into the simple “e” of the modern word demon. As we all know, a demon in the modern sense is an exclusively evil being that, according to Christian theology, was formerly an angel until it rebelled against the almighty monotheistic God. But when you mentally travel back in time and strip away the various religious/historical accretions and interpretations, you eventually encounter the ancient, pre-Christian dæmons or daimons, which are much more ambiguous and multidimensional. Many writers, especially in the fantasy and horror genres, have made a practice of referring to daemons or dæmons, as opposed to demons, when they want to invoke these older, wider connotations (think of the epithet Lovecraft often used to describe his made-up horrific god Azathoth: “the daemon sultan”).

The thing that connects all of this to my music is the ancient Greek idea that each individual person is accompanied throughout life by a specific daimon with whom he or she was paired before birth. The daimon is the guiding “higher self” that holds, guards, and represents the spiritual template for the life a given person has chosen to lead. We have all noticed that everyone seems to be born with certain predilections and personality traits already firmly in place. It seems that each of us possesses, or rather is possessed by, innate passions and interests, attractions and aversions, traits and tendencies. It also often seems that we are each led to encounter and experience certain sorts of life experiences and circumstances that are beyond our power to prevent. The theory of the daimon explains such things as the magnetic workings of the guardian spirit or higher self, which inevitably keeps drawing its chosen individual or “host” back into alignment with the prechosen life template. (Tangential to this but very interesting to me is the fact that all of this entered Western occultism a long time ago in the form of the “Holy Guardian Angel” that each person is charged with contacting in order to initiate and further his or her spiritual development.)

One doesn’t have to believe in this literally in order to feel its pull or sense its marvelous explanatory power. It’s possible to view it as a kind of perfect metaphor. It’s also possible to refuse to assign it an ontological status at all. This seems to be the tack taken by James Hillman, the fascinating and formidable psychologist who studied under Jung and who for the past several decades has pretty much been the heir apparent to the Jungian tradition. Hillman devoted the whole of his best-selling book The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling to explicating his theory of the daimon as a kind of life calling which can serve as a permanent source of personal orientation. And he did so without ever defining the whole idea as “real” or not.

When I was eight years old and started piano lessons, I immediately took to the instrument like the proverbial duck to water. The same instantaneous identification likewise happened with books, reading, and writing. Later, when I was in high school and college, my passion for playing music became joined by an additional passion to compose it. Today the entire nexus and webbing of passions remains active. In daimonic terms this indicates that all these things are part of my calling. And not only the activities themselves, but the types of subject matter that I’m naturally drawn to exploring. Without my being able to help it, there’s always something dark, dreary, horrific, melancholic, and/or mournful lurking beneath the surface and often breaking through into plain sight in all the creative works I pursue. I’m also ineluctably drawn to explore philosophical and spiritual ideas like the ones I’m discussing right now. Long before I encountered the concept of the daimonic, I had already spent a lot of time musing over my own sense of being driven by a motivating source I couldn’t understand, which led me to feel passionate about things I couldn’t control. The daimon theory gave me a name and background by which to contemplate these things more effectively.

So the name Dæmonyx, which was specifically suggested to me by Jason Van Hollander, expresses both the dæmonic/daimonic source of my musical motivation and the darkness (the onyx, as it were) that characterizes the music itself. By framing my musical endeavors in dæmonic terms, I have also freed myself to pursue whatever tangents I feel like pursuing. My writing has been fairly easy to categorize since it naturally comes out as either horror fiction or literary-scholarly essays, but my music has been less so and I don’t know how to classify it overall. Some of it is definitely New Agey. Some is all-out heavy metal and rock. Some is classical or classical-esque. Some is electronica. I hope that doesn’t mean it’s not very marketable in a consumer culture characterized by strict demarcations between genres, but in the end I hardly care, and the dæmonic connection has helped with this.

Oh — and the title of the imminent first album from Dæmonyx, “Curse of the Daimon,” gets at the fact that I really do feel at times as if the so-called “artistic temperament” that accompanies and characterizes all of this is a curse. How much simpler and nicer it would be to return to a former period in my life when I could read a book or watch a movie or listen to a song without feeling that if I myself didn’t currently have a creative project underway, then I was failing myself in some deep, frightening way. Yes, when I successfully finish composing and recording a song, or when I complete the final revision of a story or essay, I do feel an enormous rush of pleasure. Occasionally I even feel pleasure during the act of creation itself. But it’s accompanied by a distinct internal pressure that feels rather ominous, so that in the end it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the rush I feel upon completion isn’t so much due to having achieved success as having avoided failure. For ultimately the failure in question wouldn’t just be related to the specific song or story in question, but would more substantially be a deep failure to live up to something that always drives me onward and sets an often-impossible bar to achieve.

Incidentally, and in a much less self-absorbed vein, I like the title “Curse of the Daimon” because it harks back to one of the finest horror movies ever made, 1957’s “Night of the Demon” (released in the U.S. as “Curse of the Demon”).

And that, as they say, is that. Having talked about it so much now, I’ll hasten to upload an mp3 of the first song from the album, titled “The Gates of Deep Darkness,” some time in the next week or so in order to share a concrete example of what I’ve been going on about. I think I’ll also associate a contest with it, complete with a DVD or book prize. Stay tuned for details.

I was surprised a couple of months ago to learn that a live-action movie adaptation of Milton’s Paradise Lost has gone into preproduction. Apparently it’s planned as a “major” motion picture with a large budget. The story appeared in Variety, on the websites for Christian Cinema, the Sci Fi Channel, The Horror Channel, Fangoria, and elsewhere. Scott Derrickson, who directed 2005’s admirably intelligent horror film The Exorcism of Emily Rose, is attached to direct, which gives me some hope for the project.

One of the aspects of Milton’s magnum opus that has long fascinated me is the way it hinges upon both a religious/spiritual thematic axis and a horror-oriented one. Milton’s epic vision of heaven, hell, angels, and demons ranks with Dante’s Divine Comedy as one of the two seminal texts that served to concretize popular imaginings about these things in Western cultural history. Regarding the current fim project, it’s fascinating to observe that the classic twin focus is not lost on contemporary pop culture, as confirmed by a glance at the variety of links listed above. Milton has already been smuggled into modern pop culture in the form of, for example, the fundamentalist/Pentecostal Christian supernatural horror novels of Frank Peretti (especially his early ones from the 1980s) and the long-running Prophecy series of horror movies. In both cases the religious-horrific axis is addressed directly via the incorporation of a lot of blatantly Miltonic tropes and themes, not to mention a host of angelic-demonic imagery drawn directly from the poem. (I personally enjoy referring to Peretti’s particular take on these things as “Milton-lite.”) It will be more than interesting to see what comes of the present audacious attempt to take on Milton directly in a modern fantasy movie.

Incidentally, I can’t help but chalk up the Paradise Lost project as yet another spinoff of the cultural wave caused by the Lord of the Rings movies. The various other results of this phenomenon have diverged wildly in overall quality; consider the Dungeons and Dragons movie as versus The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Here’s hoping Derrickson and Legendary Pictures produce a film that falls on the latter end of the spectrum.

Hello and welcome to The Teeming Brain! My name is Matt Cardin and the brain in question is my own, which indeed teems with thoughts, impressions, and creative impulses. This blog is a tool that I’ve created to help me glean it.

By way of introducing myself—and this information is of course archived on the “About Matt Cardin” page— I’m a writer with two books to my credit: the short fiction collection Divinations of the Deep (2002) and the novella The God of Foulness (2004). Both are horror fiction. A third fiction collection, titled Dark Awakenings, is tentatively planned for early 2007. I also write scholarly papers, essays, and reviews, and am fairly well known amongst a certain subcommunity of readers for my writings about contemporary horror author Thomas Ligotti. I have a master’s degree in religious studies from Missouri State University and have therefore written a number of substantial papers dealing with religious and philosophical matters.

In addition to my writing, I’m a musician and composer with twenty-seven years of experience as a pianist and keyboardist. Presently I’m in the late stages of recording an album of instrumental music that I plan to release some time in the next twelve months. It will feature nearly an hour’s worth of music representing various forms and genres—classical, New Age, electronica, rock, heavy metal, and maybe more. Much of it is informed by my twin emotional attachments to horror fiction and film and an atmosphere of unredeemed melancholy. Aided and inspired by some very helpful input from Jason Van Hollander, the award-winning fantasy and horror artist who is providing cover art for the album, I’ve decided to name my musical project, i.e., my one-man “band,” Dæmonyx (pronounced “Demonics”), for reasons that I’ll soon explain here at this blog. The album itself will be titled “Curse of the Daimon.” I’ll eventually be sharing the titles of the individual songs, notes about their inspirations, and a few mp3 samples here at The Teeming Brain. I may even give away a free CD or two.

Beyond all that, since the early 1990s I’ve kept a private journal in which I conduct an often-agonized philosophical conversation with myself. Three years ago I selected and edited portions of this journal to create a book-length work, portions of which were published just last month in a book titled In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing from Impassio Press. Much or most of my journal writing has been prompted by thoughts and feelings in response to the books I read, films I watch, and music I listen to, and I’ll probably end up sharing some of that here.

Finally, tangential to my real interests as described above, I pursue a hobby, which also happens to take up most of my daylight hours and serve as my primary source of income, of teaching English language arts to high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors. Given that this not only depletes much of my time and energy but also provides a great deal of fertile fodder for culture-oriented rants, I’ll probably have some things to say about that part of my life. Most of it will not be positive.

The Teeming Brain is effectively an expansion of a blog I started in October 2005 titled Confessions of a Conflicted Cultural Skeptic. At the time I created that one, I was caught in the grip of a stronger-than-average eruption of disgust at the insanity of contemporary American, Western, and world culture as evinced by everything from television to politics to the book publishing industry. This was abetted by the fact that I was reading Morris Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture at the same time that I was preparing to lead four sections of sophomore students through Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Berman’s 2000 book proved to be a searing and convincing diagnosis of late-stage cultural decline, while Bradbury’s, for its part, although it had long been one of my favorites, startled me all over again with its scarifyingly accurate depiction—fifty years ahead of the fact—of the cultural dystopia that America has largely become in this 21^st century of the Common Era. I used Confessions of a Conflicted Cultural Skeptic to conduct a few extended rants inspired by my then-current state of mind.

But I soon realized that I had limited myself by framing the blog exclusively in terms of that state, which, when it comes over me, consists largely of a combined attitude of rage, disgust, and despair. For instance, it occurred in January that I wanted to write something in response to a religious question I had received from a student, but the parameters of my blog didn’t quite accept that. Similarly, for several years I’ve been increasingly interested in the apocalypse-level issues of peak oil, global warming, American culture-death, and the impending world financial crisis, but that, too, was properly excluded from my blog as I had framed it.

So while Confessions of a Conflicted Cultural Skeptic will continue to exist over at Blogger, I will no longer be updating it. Instead, I’ll incorporate a few of its posts into the categories I plan to create here, and will then use this broader format to pursue not only that particular tangent of cultural angst, but also many of the other subjects that interest me as well. The categories here at The Teeming Brain will eventually expand to include Books & Authors, Movies, Music, Philosophy & Religion, Writing & Publishing, Apocalypse Watch, Rants & Such, of course Dæmonyx.

Regarding the title I’ve chosen, the expression “teeming brain” comes from a famous poem by the English Romantic poet John Keats in which he expressed his “fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.” In other words, he was saying that he felt himself so fertile with unexpressed thoughts, emotions, and impressions that he was afraid he might die before he had had the chance to write down everything that was demanding to be written. I sometimes share this sentiment; hence, my loose borrowing of Keats’s wonderfully evocative term. I’m one of those unfortunate types who is saddled with a volcanically active intellectual, emotional, and imaginative life that I frequently squander due to a lack of time, opportunity, and quite often the sheer will to bring all of it out into the open instead of letting it rot and die inside me. Thus, as stated above, I’ve created this blog as one modest effort among several others to help me glean my teeming brain before it kills me. (Incidentally, I also like the term “teeming brain” because it conjures up a vague image of a brain or psyche that’s bristling with bizarre, half-formed organisms like schools of mutant fish shimmering and struggling for dominance in psychic space. Or at least that’s one connotation it has for me personally. Chalk it up to my long-running love affair with the writings and persona of H.P. Lovecraft and a few other relevant horror writers.)

As I close this first post, I’m sensing the arising of a question on the part of you, the reader, and so I’ll go ahead and be helpful by stating it for you: “Why should I or anybody else care about any of this? What sort of deep-seated vanity has led this Matt Cardin guy to conceive, let alone to execute, a blatantly narcissistic plan like this one?” By way of deflection, I can’t help but think back to a clever and related moment from an episode of that late, lamented, short-lived television series from the early 1990s, Key West (which was really just an attempt by another network to create a clone of CBS’s hit Northern Exposure) that went something like this: The lead character, played by the ever-amusing Fisher Stevens, asked permission from his editor at the local newspaper to start writing a weekly column. When the editor asked him what he wanted to write about, Stevens said, “Well, you know, thoughts about lots of things. Observations. Insights.” The editor asked, “And just what makes you think anybody gives a damn about your observations and insights?” Stevens paused for an uncertain moment, and then said, “Well . . .” To which his editor replied, “Good answer.”

But to return to this point, why indeed have I created this blog? Aside from the fact that blogs are presently multiplying at such a blinding rate that it seems they’ve become a kind of cultural imperative, if not a full-blown requirement for citizenship in the Information Society, there’s the fact that I don’t entirely agree in all cases, at all times, with the otherwise sage advice given so brusquely and obliquely by the editor of the Key West Meteor. This is because most of my greatest satisfactions and even exhilarations in life have come from discovering that my own deepest, most personal insights and observations have been shared and expressed by someone else. Essentially, I take what Tom Ligotti identified as the sole authentic consolation of fictional horror in his indispensable essay “The Consolations of Horror” and expand it to apply to life as a whole: “This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own feelings and has made of these a work of art which you have the insight, sensitivity, and—like it or not—peculiar set of experiences to appreciate.”

If it should so happen that something I say in text or music, that some thought, emotion, or idea that I express in a journal entry, short story, song, or rant, ends up invoking that same sense of identification in somebody else—perhaps you? — and that it perhaps helps to solidify and sharpen your own thoughts and feelings about the matter, then the question will have answered itself. Or maybe you’re somebody who just shares some or all of my interests and will be interested to see, read, and hear what I have to say about them. I know I’ll certainly be interested to read your own words if you choose to comment or if you have a blog of your own. And although the present post may seem to belie it, I’ll aver now that instead of uploading gargantuan posts very infrequently as I did at my last blog, I plan to post more concise ones and do it on a regular basis, probably several times per week. (Of course, I’m on summer break from teaching right now. We’ll see what happens when school resumes in August and the slow pressure-cooking of my spirit begins again.)

In any event, that’s the purpose of this blog. It’s an ongoing transmission of gleanings from my teeming brain to yours.

NEXT UP:
An explanation of the name Dæmonyx and my reasons for applying it to my musical activities.