Frozen Borderline

"She is ten times heavier

Stronger, than you found the grave

Or ever was…

I think you need

Ice water

But the only thing that

You really hate

Is all its emptiness”

--”Ice Water”, Cat Power

Intro/Thesis (CryoChronos)

    Nico’s “The Marble Index” is both a work of folk music genius and classical, sculptural beauty--existing in a space that is wholly its own. It is a work of conjuration, both archaic and futuristic.  This album is an example of what Bob Dylan called “Arsenic Music” or “Phaedra Music,” filtered through a Germanic classical ideal. This album is an ice sculpture, if the ice were frozen time.  Nico is a seer.  To understand Nico through standard rational-materialist lenses will do very little good, therefore I propose a new field that will help to understand her creation:  cryochronology, or the study of frozen time.  It will be an archaeology performed on the glacier that is “The Marble Index”.  It is a particularly slippery and difficult new field, and therefore my study will risk some inaccuracies, dangers, problems with methodology, etc.  Cryochronos is colorless amber, amber that can be used to freeze history, and look at it outside the contemporary delirium of acceleration and heat. Cryochronos allows us to achieve clarity through escape--one can view time as frozen.  Cryochronos is a form of time-travelling through music and myth. Cryochronos is magic, the magic of the North, the magic of the Frozen Borderline. Cold slows particles down, it sterilizes. Cold cosmicizes.

    Cryochronology is a subset of hypostition.  Hypostitions are the cold eternal truths that mythscience has told us about.  The Marble Index is made of hypostitions that I unearth throughout this paper.  I will explain hypostitions in full later in the paper.

Cryochronosis and hypostitions in general aren’t simply ends in and of themselves--they are tools to achieve political and spiritual clarity.  In an age that is overly hot, overly active, in meltdown, these methods are ice chambers that give one a vantage point in a Transcendent realm, located outside of an immanent meltdown.

Nico, born Christa Paffgen in Cologne, Germany, has long been such an enigmatic figure that even her biographical info is shot through with holes.  She has claimed that her father was a hashish-smoking Persian oud player, and mostly doesn’t mention significant details about her maternal family. Nevertheless, we know her as a glamorous German model that was “discovered” by Warhol (Nico dismisses Warhol as a “rapist” who made “communist … art”), became part of the Factory scene and joined the seminal proto-punk/noise/rock and roll band The Velvet Underground.  Her first solo album, Chelsea Girls, was all folk/pop covers, and received mixed reviews (I think it is gorgeous, but it wasn’t Nico’s vision). She hated the lavish strings that Tom Wilson put in the background of all her songs, and in general the way she was being pigeonholed as a folk/pop chanteuse. Her work with John Cale on The Marble Index and Desertshore would be more fruitful and more in line with her aesthetic ideals.

Nico recorded The Marble Index in 1969, in a four day recording session in LA.  It was not her first album, but it was the first in which she had full creative direction, and the first that was all original material.  Accompanied by her newly adopted harmonium, Nico had started writing songs--strange songs that sounded like folk music, or like very avant-garde music.  They were both new and old myths--archeo-futurist hypostitions.  Some of the lyrics came from Nico’s psychedelic experiences, which she had been encouraged to use as material by Jim Morrison.  Nico and Cale worked in tandem on the music, with Nico laying down a simple vocal accompanied by harmonium, and Cale building a frigid soundscape around her voice.

    Much has been made of Nico’s heroin use, especially during the recording of this album.  The tendency to attribute a particular aesthetic to drug use is overly common and misguided, though drugs may be chosen by a person with a particular aesthetic.  What should be noted, however, is that opiates are a drug of radical stasis, and internal cold temperatures. They are a drug for those who wish to withdraw from the world, a primal secular asceticism.  Understanding opiates through Burroughs’ description of them as a cool inertia, a return to a primal metabolic rate of zero, helps us to situate Nico’s drive toward de-creation. “While it may be a reductive interpretation to regard The Marble Index as the ultimate heroin album, its hunger for narcosis, its frigid expanses, recalls William Burroughs’ description of the junkie’s quest for a metabolic ‘Absolute Zero’.” (Reynolds, 301).  It also overlaps with the myths of the North, both previous/canonized myths, and ones that I create--new archeo-futurist hypostitions. The value of this album, if we are to reduce it to that, is that it sings the song of the North as zero limit, it builds this Ice Glacier that exists outside of time--it is a model for creating a myth to understand and escape the present delirium.

    The Marble Index is filled with wonders, too various to generalize about.  The album is a poetics of space and time in the frozen north. Nico builds a womb for herself to retreat into, out of some sort of quivering translucent material that looks like ice, but is actually frozen time.  The album is a series of scenes that are actually reanimated sculptures--they are three dimensional and seem alive but there is a feeling of suspension throughout. They could be compared to Calder’s mobiles, or some kind of theatre made of wind-up toys--they are scenes that become animated, but are essentially static and sculptural.  There are multiple competing theories on the universe that The Marble Index exists within. Some facts are generally agreed upon as true--it is set in the North (“that great expanse”), it is largely set within a single or multiple blocks of frozen time, the substance of frozen time is translucent and quivering, Nico longs for the womb.  Other theories are more contested. Some have suggested that Nico has a certain Nietzschean thread running through her work--one where fate is linked to visions of eternal recurrence and history as a series of violent metamorphoses. There are numerous clues that Nico had a deep tie to pagan mythos, but there is no hard evidence to tie her to a particular practice.  Everyone, of course, agrees that Nico was a junkie, but everyone disagrees about how much that matters. To some, the music is joyous, to others, deeply depressing (my personal theory is that if your spirit is of the North, you will find it natural, if you are acclimated to warmer temperatures internal and external, you will find it alienating).  

    Hyperstition/Hypostition

    This paper is not particularly political in the usual meaning of the word.  But the personal and aesthetic is inseparable from the political, therefore it is a political paper as well as a poetic paper.  The mythos that is used to tie it together can be understood better if I give a backstory on hyperstition, hypostition, and their relationship to time-travel and planetary meltdown.

    CCRU or the “Cybernetic Culture Research Unit,” was a student-run collective at Warwick University, concerned with an unconvential philosophical method of researching the phenomena of capital and acceleration.  Nick Land, Sadie Plant, and Mark Fisher were the most influential thinkers that emerged from the milieu, with Nick Land being the most notorious. Land was known to use amphetamine and trance music to commune with the demonic Lovecraftian gods of techno-capital.  His early intellectual persona was described as a “mad black deleuzean”. Land was concerned with the acceleration of technology and capitalism as a deterritorializing “meltdown”. He and CCRU coined the term “hyperstition” to describe a new form of post-truth mythos that created positive feedback loops with an apocalyptic telos.  Analogous to Dawkins’ concept of memes but with a richer understanding of the effects/vector/telos, hyperstition was understood as having the following qualities: “(1) an ‘element of effective culture that makes itself real,” (2) as a “fictional quality functional as a time-travelling device,’ (3) as ‘coincidence intensifiers,’ and (4) as a ‘call to the Old Ones’. The first three characteristics describe how hyperstitions like the ‘ideology of progress’ or the religious conception of apocalypse enact their subversive influences in the cultural arena, becoming transmuted into perceived ‘truths,’ that influence the outcome of history. Finally, as Land indicates, a hyperstition signals the return of the irrational or the monstrous ‘other’ into the cultural arena.”

Hyperstitions invoke meltdown, eventual planetary destruction.  They do this through making themselves into elements of effective culture that spread like a hyperbolic virus.  Hyperstitions are exaggeration/hype. One example of a common hyperstition is “growth is good”. It is an assumption and mantra that drives capitalism forward while justifying it ontologically, as well as provides justification for the priestlike proclamations of economists.  I have invented a form of countering this meltdown: hypostition.  Hypostitions are like hyperstitions in many ways--they are myth-memes that enable time-travel, they summon “Old Ones,” or at least some Old God.  But they are fundamentally cooling, they slow down reckless acceleration and even decelerate or decreate. They create wrinkles in time that are cryochronogenic chambers that the hyperstitional viruses of growth and capital don’t touch.  It is good to have a balance of cold and hot. In an age of hyperstitional cell death via planetary glutamate excitotoxicity, hypostitions are the gabapentinoids that cool down the overfiring neurons. Cryochronosis is a hypostition. The myths of the North and Frozen Borderline that I address throughout the paper are forms of hypostitions.  They are archeo-futurist time travel, but they seek to restore cosmic order via cooling. Hyperstitional meltdown is chaos, hypostitions are cosmicizing.   

Hypostitions stitch time together by bending it, or by finding resonant points and going through the thresholds.  Hyperstitions are exaggerations based on thin premises. Hypostitions are eternal truths (yes, that Platonic idea) that are always present under the surface, like an iceberg, but are often forgotten until they are unearthed.  Cryochronology can help to unearth the hypostitions we need to survive. I will discuss this further when elaborating my theory of space-time.  

   

Womb/Opiates

Lester Bangs, the legendary punk critic, discussed playing the album for his girlfriend and getting a reaction that borders on seer-like perception: “She listened to the whole thing in a state of mesmerism bordering on shock, then said of Cale, ‘He built a cathedral for a woman in hell, didn’t he?’ I called her up again today when I was fucked up about this article and she said, having still only heard it that one time, that she thought Nico was lost in her own blackness.  I said, ‘But there’s a pearl in there.’ I could hear her shudder over the phone, and suddenly she started talking very fast … ‘Her whole body can glisten, she’s just like a seed, the original seed of intercourse, her whole body can shine like the sun hits the water with sprays of light, and yet she’s chosen to de-create from the surface to de-create again and again until the only message is ‘I’m the life force itself, I’m the will to live,’ a human embryo without hope of maturity, just sending signals.  SHE’S IN THE WOMB, and what you call the pearl is just the pearl inside Mama’s belly, the pulsebeat. She’s accomplished de-creation: ‘Let me be behind everything human, oh god, the fact to catch a star in your eye or touch another human being, to feel another human being, to touch another universe is nothing, is just a frozen borderline’--that there is no nexus, just retreat, until the frozen borderline, until all you feel is the white light of survival and the abyss is the ocean around her …” (Bangs, 209).

    Nico seems to have been using opiates in an Appollonian way--as part of her magic worked to have control over time.  While Nico seems to fall firmly on one side of a lot of opposed forces and dichotomies, her magic also has to do with a metaphysical primal nature--a being present at the birth of creation, before the dichotomies were created.  For example, while she seems very Yin (archetypally feminine, passive energy, depression, moonlight, etc…) she must carry both yin and yang potentials within her as she is as a seed, germinal and pure. While her tendency towards chaos is Dionysian, her striving toward purity is Appollonian.  As Lester Bangs’ girlfriend points out in the passage above, Nico chooses to de-create, as a means to finding her way back to a primordial, undifferentiated nature, a nature that exists behind and before the aforementioned categories.  

    This specific drive--the drive toward de-creation and back toward the womb, is not a death drive, although it shares fundamental qualities with thanatos.  There is also some level of thanatos/fascination with death present in Nico’s music, but in their unsubtlety, most critics/commentators have mistaken her drive toward the womb and toward de-creation as a death drive.   But it’s actually as much a drive toward de-creation and primal/germinal nature as it is a death drive. The confusion may have to do with how similar death and birth are, though I wouldn’t know, because I can’t remember having died or being born.  De-creation is different than destruction, it’s a power that is more dangerous and weighty. Destruction can be random--destruction is temporally consistent with normal forward motion, destruction clears the way for the new. De-creation is never supposed to happen, it’s dark, infernal magic, it goes against nature.  Imagine the sound of a tape reversal of a glass shattering--creation by de-creation. Or a tape reversal of ice melting. All of what was dark becomes light, what was light becomes dark. Playing with time is dangerous, tampering with time ensures that you could be stuck forever. Maybe that was what happened to Nico or Bob Dylan after their peaks.  Why else would Nico, the ice queen, die in such a banal, decrepit way? The important part of her was stuck, looping perhaps.

“Junkies always beef about *The Cold* as they call it, turning up their black coat collars and clutching their withered necks . . . pure junk con. A junky does not want to be warm, he want to Cool-Cooler-COLD. But he want The Cold like he want His Junk--NOT OUTSIDE where it does him no good but INSIDE so he can sit around with a spine like a frozen hydraulic jack . . . his metabolism approaching Absolute ZERO. TERMINAL addicts often go two months without a bowel move and the intestines make with sit-down-adhesions --Wouldn't You--requiring the intervention of an apple corer or its surgical equivalent. . . . Such is life in The Old Ice House. Why move around and waste TIME?” (Burroughs, p. 9).

No One is There

In the song “Noone is There,” Nico explores a very different space than the rest of the album.  I choose to discuss it first because it has a certain clarity that stands out. To me it feels like a twisting garden path, perhaps one that leads into a dark forest.  There are more dark greens, in contrast with the rest of the album that is full of white, black, grey and pale, pale blues. Lyrically, it has the feel of a symbolist prose poem made into a dancing sculpture.  

Musically, “Noone is There” is one of the least dissonant and least sculptural pieces on the album.  It is orchestrated far more simply than many of the other pieces, and it feels the most like a “song”.  It consists of Nico’s voice with a simple string arrangement. There are a few cadences, but none that are outside of the aeolian minor mode that it is in.  It is a waltz--which is a dance that bridges the European classical and folk traditions, which I think is characteristic of Nico’s work. It is very lilting and dirgelike--but a dirge that is not overly heavy, although Nico’s voice sounds more world-weary on this song, especially in the lower registers, than it ever has.  The lyrics have a certain fatalism about them. Nico describes a dreamlike encounter with a demon:

Across from behind my window screen

Demon is dancing down the scene

In a crucial parody

Demon is dancing down the scene

He is calling and throwing his arms up in the air

And no one is there

All of them are missing as the game comes to a start

No one is there

A waltz is a dance--a waltz with a demon, a parodic demon.  The scene Nico’s describing is fairly simple, but also not-of-this-world.  I mentioned earlier that Nico was a seer.  Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet, laid the groundwork for a modernist definition of seership.  The most important characteristics were to reach the “unknown” through “disordering of all the senses”.  Seership is a Modernist mysticism--a praxis and understanding geared toward generating the Transcendent from the immanent, generating the sacred from the profane, generating clarity from radical impurity.  Nico is a seer because she is a visionary and a poet of thresholds, liminal spaces, places that are the “unknown” or “beyond”. This particular song is a wind-up toy of a moonlit garden. Even the demons are lonely, dancing with no-one, playing with nobody.  The lyrics both lend themselves to and resist analysis, because they are rich with associations but also irreducible, which is the best characteristic of true poetry.  Symbolist poetry as formulated by Rimbaud was about the power of words as vibrational--words as synesthetic musical triggers, rather than as structuralist rational objects.  So we will try to avoid interpreting Nico’s lyrics to death, as a symbolist association is different than a psychoanalytic association in that it is not dead--not an organ in a corpse.  A symbolist association is liberatory, schizo, it’s time-travelling. A psychoanalytic association is neurotic, dead, it assigns prescribed meaning via overcoded symbols.

Some are calling, some are sad

Some are calling him mad

No one is there

Across from behind your window screen

Demon is dancing down the scene

In a crucial parody

Demon is dancing down the scene

He is calling and throwing his arms up in the air

No one is there

All of them are missing as the game comes to a start

No one is there

And no sound has them

Declared

To be missing (to be missing)

To be missing (to be missing)

To be missing (missing)

Nico uses repetition in her lyrics in a way that is very characteristic of folk musics, and lends itself to the cyclical nature of those musics.  One can almost imagine some of these songs sung as rounds or as medieval chants. What renders the music modern is largely the string arrangement which is more Romantic or Modern in its use of counterpoint even while the content is modal.

I started discussing “No One is There” because I consider it atypical on the album, and also the most simple song, certainly the purest.

However, the song that really shaped my understanding of cryochronosis/cryochronostasis as a substance, and shaped my idea of Nico’s sculptural use of sound, is the track “Lawns of Dawns”.  

    Lawns of Dawns

The instrumentation is tricky to figure out because of how processed this track is.  I believe it consists of Nico’s voice, harmonium, wurlitzer, glockenspiel, and various guitars.  The sound that is most characteristic of the “frozen time” texture that I discuss is a wurlitzer sound that has a lot of tremolo and may be slowed down.  The effect is extremely three dimensional--a texture like water but more solid, but not as solid as ice. The more trebly guitar notes cut through the gelatinous cryochronos like electrical pulses, as do the glockenspiel, while the harmonium drones incessantly, slightly out of tune. The effect is that of a whole universe in the form of a constellation or mobile that circulates incessantly within this particular star system.  The particular way that drones are used on this album is also established in this song. Cale had stated that he wanted to avoid drones and raga on this album, but it seems that drones are very present. However, they are used in a far different way than they are usually used.  Rather than establishing the river or flow of time the way drones normally do in Indian classical music, the drones are concerned with establishing the space.  The time is already established as timeless and fixed (unlike ragas and most folk musics which establish time as moving/flowing)--or as I stated earlier, the time is frozen, it’s a beyond-time, it’s a horizon past when time and space intersect.  The effect of using drones to establish space rather than time is sculptural. The drones become like beams of frozen light. The glockenspiel and many of the repeating drone parts are dissonant, yet hypnotic.  

(lyrics:):

Swim and sink into

Early morning mercies

Nico’s building a mythos.  In Eliade’s “The Sacred and the Profane” Eliade discusses how cosmos/sacred space is unavoidably tied to time.  Here Nico cosmicizes, makes time tangible as substance--a substance that one could swim in.

He blesses you

He blesses me

The day the night caresses

The night and the day are personified--or deified

Caresses you, caresses me

Can you follow me

Dawn your guise has filled my nights with fear

At each closing of my eyes

You never see these pictures in my mind

Can you follow me

Here, as throughout The Marble Index, Nico is concerned with limits, and the frightening, sublime nature of limits.  But let us not forget that sometimes limits are thresholds. “The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds--and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible.” (Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 25)

Fascism and Control of Time/Stasis

When I first saw the Cathedral of Light, or “Lichtdom,” a piece of Nazi architecture designed by Albert Speer, I associated it with Nico’s music somehow.  It took me awhile to figure out how Nico’s aesthetic actually fundamentally differs from fascism/Nazism.

    The Lichtdom was a stadium designed for Nazi rallies in Nuremberg.  Its most distinguishing feature is a wall consisting of “columns” of light, produced by powerful military grade searchlights that projected miles into the sky.  The effect was said to have been like being in a vast room, although there were no actual walls. The light beams were strong enough to seem like solid columns of glowing ice.  This is an aspect of a fascist aesthetic--radical stasis, or the “freezing over” of culture. The Lichtdom represents this by taking something dynamic/transient, like light, and using it to represent something permanent, like a column.

    “Virilio contends that modernity perceives stasis as death; therefore, modern political systems must unleash a gradual acceleration of speed to safeguard their stability.  Warfare is one of several possible outcomes of this hastening of social mobility because combat technologies always satisfy the desire for speed in an unprecedented fashion.  At first sight, Benjamin’s construction of fascism as a seductive regime of conjuration seems to argue in a very similar direction. First, Benjamin emphasizes that the regulation of movement and time constitutes one of the main pillars of fascist domination.  In fact, what one may call the pathos of aesthetic rulership--the pragmatic fallacy of fascism--is just another word for the endeavor to channel formative energies into the scenarios of public life and therefore gain control over the speed of transport, public motion, and communication.  Second, Benjamin observes that the acceleration of speed endows modern representations of the masses eo ipso with pleasurable qualities: ‘Mass movements, including war,’ he argues, ‘constitute a form of human behavior which particularly favors mechanical reproduction’. In essence, however, Benjamin implicitly rejectis Virilio’s simple opposition of speed and stasis, showing that the organization of social speed in fascism aims at warfare--and, hence, the stasis of death--already from the outset.  Fascism conjures the acceleration of social forms as a phantasmagoria to disguise the government of death and stasis at which it ultimately aims.” (Koepnick, 90).

   

    The similarities between Nico’s work and Nazi/Fascist aesthetics are obvious, though the differences are most important.  The Marble Index has a sculptural quality. Sound is, like light, inherently dynamic and ephemeral, and she conjures it into a form which is static and solid.  This formation is a conjurer’s trick that Fascism also shares. They both have an aspect of thanatos, of moving toward the stasis of death.  Nico’s Germanic iciness probably lead me to associate her with Nazi aesthetics.  But Nico’s magic is far more powerful and subtle than the Nazi Spectacle.

Nazis were a death cult founded on violently enforced kitsch as an aesthetic ideal, with little tolerance for chaos.  While fascism was seductive, let us not forget that it was also forceful, and didn’t rely fully on seduction. Nico finds purity in chaos, through de-creation.  

    Lester Bangs’ essay on Nico describes the milieu surrounding her death fixation in a very roundabout manner: “In Stargazer, his poetically definitive book on the Andy Warhol universe of the 1960s, Stephen Koch tried to come to some understanding for himself as much as his readers of Warhol by resorting to a quote from Baudelaire: ‘Half in love with easeful death.’  Then, just to drive home the point he was making about the intimacy between narcissism and Warholvian deathly otherness, he wrote: ‘Half in love.  Exactly’. Anyone more than half in love with death would have to be a monster, of course.  Perhaps a Gilles de Rais, Idi Amin, Adolf Hitler.” This is one of the main differences, I think, between Nico and a genuine Nazi.  She is only half in love with death, and easeful death at that.  Her relationship to death is not excessive, it’s not a grotesque fetish the way the Nazis’ was.  Furthermore, while much of her music has an underlying death drive, the drive to de-create is stronger, and is qualitatively different.  Nico’s magic is stranger, more psychedelic in the truest sense of the word--mind-manifesting.

Poetics of Space/Lyrical Analysis

    I’ve briefly discussed Nico’s use of time a lot so far, but less so her approach to space.  The spaces that her music occupies are liminal, in ways indicated by the whole of her lyrics and the sounds constructed by her and John Cale.  There are many icy, windswept vistas built on this album. Ice deserts--places of zero degree, places that cause snow blindness--blank canvases that hurt.  There is a particular horizon that I feel that a lot of her work deals with, especially the song “Frozen Warnings”. If time and space are two intersecting lines, this particular horizon is  where they meet. I believe the phrase “frozen warnings” is the navel of Nico’s particular dream world--it is a phrase which is irreducible, like the horizon I am discussing. William Burroughs discussed the idea of a metabolic “zero degree” that a junkie was always trying to get at--a stasis and chill.  While I want to avoid thinking of Nico’s relationship with opiates in a reductive way (opiates didn’t shape her aesthetic), this idea of the quest for an absolute cold or absolute nothingness is important to understanding The Marble Index. What is a “frozen warning” after all? A warning can be a kind of limit, or a way of knowing when one is approaching a limit, like the “frozen borderline” that Nico also describes in the same song.

Below, a poem of mine that aims at that specific limit/borderline.

Simian’s #2

Pt. 1

I’m stripped 

bare 

sky falling

a 

rancid cold

wind 

filling me

anonymous filth

Eternity’s running

out

like an angle

Angel’s fast

  too fast--

her car spunout

before passing

the horizon

dirty ice desert

--door shuts

on fingers

hunters crack

jokes at

the ice

Extracting

the body

from the 

car takes

jaws--chewing

through metal

and delicate 

pink warm-flesh

chewing

through a

corpse takes

the strength

of a born 

prophet

Pt 2

heart stuck

like glue

a death-

stink waking

me --

The outside on 

The inside

Everythings been

taken

frozen 

and thawed

like dirty

spring snow

but refrozen--

coarse courses

on my inside 

How can i

fall apart 

faster or at

least more 

gracefully

a race is 

run with 

metal taste

in mouth

race to

outer limits

nothing worse

than dying

safe and 

alone

But I always

end how

I begin

Turning into

a warm 

fluid, amniosis

in the cloth

dark and

familiar

and revolving

into eternal

space collapsing

in on itself

This variant

of warm

space is

here

but too 

scarce

these days

Sacred Space

    In “The Sacred and the Profane,” Mircea Eliade discusses sacred space as an irruption in space, a “spatial nonhomogeneity” that “finds expression in the experience of an opposition between space that is sacred--the only real and really existing space--and all other space, the formless expanse surrounding it.”  Sacred space engenders a religious experience “homologizable to the founding of the world”.  Eliade introduces the distinction between “cosmos” (sacred space, ordered) and “chaos” (the formless expanse that surrounds it.  A cosmos has an axis mundi--a center of its world, a pole or umbilical cord that connects the different worlds--the sacred to the profane.  Various sacred spaces are marked by signs, and built with thresholds--that act as doorways to the other world but also as limits, signs that designate the space as sacred.  Furthermore, in a sacred viewpoint, the concept of time is inextricable from the concept of space--each year is an interval that signifies the rebirth of the cosmos.  

The “frozen borderline” that Nico mentions is that primordial place in the North where time meets space.  It is the threshold of the sacred space that is the North. It is the edge of the map that the explorer wanders off, that brings him into a realm in which time moves differently, is thicker.  It is somewhat analogous to the ultimate limit--death.

The North

The North is a sacred space with a cosmology founded on the relationship to inertia and degrees of intensity relative to zero.  The North is also a point that is the Axis Mundi of its world. It is, like the pole itself, a floating, mythical axis mundi, that is usually understood to be unreachable.  The Frozen Borderline is the absolute limit of the North. It is a threshold to absolute zero. It is a limit. It is where time meets space at the end of or beginning of the world.  The myths surrounding the Frozen Borderline are numerous. Nobody has returned from it, but that does not stop speculation that there is a thriving, peaceful and almost alien civilization on the other side.  When you hit the Frozen Borderline you are dissolved into particles, you are lost in a whiteout. Few make it past the edge.

Being lost in a whiteout is sublime--a dissolution of all the senses, a religious purity.  It is often remarked that monotheism was the first atheism, perhaps we should reverse it--atheism as the religion inherent in the frozen purity of the North--a religion based in inertia, austerity, relationships to a zero degree, shades of white.  Rimbaud’s mantra that the dissolution of the senses is necessary for seership applies here, in an unexpected context. Snowstorms are both absolute chaos and absolute purity.  

The Frozen Borderline is the edge of the map--when you cross it, the screen glitches and you are at the mercy of the Real and the elemental.  On the other side of the Frozen Borderline, there is a land before time. Capitalism is a hyperstitional virus that is trying to infect this land, to destroy the origin story of time, and turn it into a universal liquid equivalent.  This is the last battle, and the only one that matters.

The mythos of the North is a mythos of absolute zero, the end of all things, but also the convergence of all things.  Yuletide is really a pagan festival of convergence. The lights are dancing, souls shining through the thin veneer of the sky.  The Pole is where everything converges. The Frozen Borderline is a limit and a threshold--the furthest horizon north. But what happens when you slam into that horizon, land “at the end of time”?

Here’s a poem that explores “The North” as a mythos--a land laying dormant within my body:

Untitled #1

If I was my

father's son

I'd grow up 

strong, pure,

fleet 

Silent in 

a dark wood

disappearing into

the snow, my

identity

a lack of

tone, contrast

A mirror, 

a canvas

A piercing brilliance

from the 

sun's glare

on snow,

the color

someone's hair

turns when 

they experience

a 

great loss

This color

was a zero

degree

a negation

a mirror recognizing

itself

in a 

mirror, the 

color of ghosts

ghosts of conquistadors

ghosts of

masters

We came from

the North

relished the

austerity,

juxtapositions

were clear,

contrasty

we ate dark

bread, we

worked, we 

were silent often,

like the blankets

of crystals that 

dampened the 

green wood

What was

there to say?

that hadn't already

been posited

by the terrible

turning of 

the planet,

of time

But I am 

tainted,

impure, tortured

by my 

impurity

I have sinned

I have been

not so strong

I have been

weak  

Worst of all,

I have relished

it, relished

my pain, lived 

in my stink

and my 

weakness

Focalin Rose

was a symbol

for us that

year 

a stained-glass

picture of a

flower that

we crushed 

up focalin 

extended-release

beads on to

snort, usually

crossing the 

lines like an 

ex

Focalin Rose

was a fast,

clean woman

more brilliant

than the sun,

hair lighter than

blonde, orphan

but not

a 

mutt

Two years later

I marveled at

what I'd managed

to achieve in

conjunction with

my psychiatrist

The meds I was

on, when taken

together, were

the closest to

zero-degree I 

could get

A perfect clearness

like empty 

glass, was all i

felt, and a 

corresponding 

fragility

I truly felt

nothing, smooth

and in HD, just

a reflection of

my surroundings

Frozen Warnings--Lyrical Analysis

“Frozen Warnings” is a track that is the navel of this album.  Here, time meets space. The viola drone here functions both as time-river and as light-paint-sculpture-piece.  There is a sense of uplift. The viola drones feel like the sun’s light on a vast tundra. The drones shift around like the sunlight, though always staying within the mode.  This song brings a sense of cyclical folk-music back to the album. Lyrically, the scene is not so warm. This is a song of a dangerous journey.

Friar hermit stumbles over   

The cloudy borderline

(a dangerous journey started)

Frozen warnings close to mine

Close to the frozen borderline

(a threshold described, a warning when near that threshold--an unforgiving natural limit--frozen borderline is a place of absolute zero-degree, metabolically, nothing moves, total stillness and coldness, the wind swallows you absolutely)

Frozen warnings close to mine   

Close to the frozen borderline

Into numberless reflections  

(numberless reflections--glinting snow crystals, the various harsh mirrors)

Rises a smile from your eyes into mine

Frozen warnings close to mine

Close to the frozen borderline

Frozen warnings close to mine

Close to the frozen borderline

Over railroad station tracks

Faintly flickers a modest cry

From without a thousand cycles

A thousand cycles to come

A thousand times to win

A thousand ways to run the world

In a similar reply

(This is incredibly Nietzschean--the idea of history as a wheel, as cyclical, is either Nietzschean or pagan or both.  “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' [The Gay Science, ,341]” ):

This idea of time as a flat circle vs. time as a line is repeated throughout various tracts of political economy, myth and metaphysics.  I will address it in full later, along with my synthesis of these ideas of time.

Friar hermit stumbles over

The cloudy borderline

Frozen warnings close to mine

Close to the frozen borderline

Frozen warnings close to mine

Close to the frozen borderline

Close to the frozen borderline

Close to the frozen borderline

Close to the frozen borderline

The melody sinks back into the drone--that drone that is both time and space, that drone that is the frozen borderline.  At the center of each note is a space, is nothingness. Nico knows how to inhabit the nothingness like an ice cave. The frozen borderline is the edge of a nullity.  What was traditionally thought of darkness vs. light is wrong--light is that which dissolves you fully into nothingness, light that is too much to bear. Imagine Nico lost in a blizzard.

Melville’s Apparition of Whiteness

The mythos of the North is inseparable from a discussion of whiteness.  In the chapter of Moby Dick “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Melville weaves a fevered hyperstition of whiteness as something that unsettles and terrifies, through tangible examples: the white bull in Greek mythologies, the innocence of brides, the white fire of Persian fire worshippers, Albinism, the pallor of the dead and of ghosts, and perpetually pale and snowy southern seas.  He tries to evaluate whiteness from a metaphysical and spiritual angle to find out what about it is unsettling: “Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for those reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a landscape of snows--a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?  And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues--every stately or lovely emblazoning--the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us ale peri; and like wilful travelers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.”  (Melville, 185-194).

Whiteness reminds us that we are in the presence of absence--it is a visible absence.  It is a void but at the same time the concrete total of all that is. Not just a darkness in which to rest, but a void that blinds, that is incessantly real and present.  It is what is left out of the dialectic, or what happens at the end. It is the true color of atheism, austere and blank.

The North gives us white in all of its shades, tinged with blue in ice, grey, sparkling, blinding.  In falling snow struck by light, you can see all of the colors that it separates into, white is not just a canvas but a prism also.

I once stared at various shades of white for 10 hours, while priming walls to be painted.  When I went outside the flowers and leaves burst out at me in vibrant color like a hothouse.  

The Frozen Borderline is the threshold of a whiteout.  A whiteout is the religious ceremony of the North.

The myths of the North are about slowness, austerity, the sublime nature of death.  When you live in the North you live with death side by side, and you great this death every day.  Nico lived this way, with a gravitas derived from keeping death as a companion.

But what is death?  It is something that cannot be understood.  Or it is just an inertia of organic matter. Modern science understands it in this austere way.  Death is incremental. There is brain death, there is asystole, there is respiratory collapse. It is a retreat by degrees back to the intensity of absolute zero.  It ends in a dissolution.

Dialectic of Time

In Mircea Eliade’s “The Sacred and the Profane,” sacred time is presented as a flat circle, an infinitely repeating eternity that one returns to when participating in a religious ceremony.  This is contrasted to profane time, which is an evanescent and irreversible duration that is a line pointing one way. 

This distinction between cyclical and irreversible time is presented elsewhere, for example, in Society of the Spectacle.  In SOTS, Debord discusses the political economy of time, e.g. the emergence of time from various modes of being, consuming and producing.  “The agrarian mode of production in general, dominated by the rhythm of the seasons, is the basis for fully constituted cyclical time. Eternity is internal to it; it is the return of the same here on earth.  Myth is the unitary construction of the thought which this society has in fact already realized within its frontiers.” (Debord, SOTS, 127)

Cyclical time is unitary, mythical, it is time “without conflict”.  Cyclical time was ceded to historical time, which is irreversible, it is the time of masters imposing their mark on the world.  “Thus the bourgeoisie made known to society and imposed on it an irreversible historical time, but kept its use from society.” (Debord, SOTS, 143)

But proletarians still live in a pseudo-cyclical time, while the bourgeoisie hoard the irreversible historical time one needs to author history.

The true revolution, according to Debord, is not simply a material conquest in the vulgar sense, but a capture of time, in which the working class seizes the irreversible time that the bourgeoisie hoards.

But Debord’s theory, the most eloquent articulation to date of Marx’s ideas, still has the same telos as Marx and Hegel, because it is rooted in their dialectic.  It still aims at a utopian “end of history” in which actual life supersedes art. As I will discuss later, the idea of the “end of history” invites interrogation.

Because of my qualms about this straight line aiming at a utopian end point, I present my working/nascent theory of a synthesis of the line and circle theories of time:

Thesis:  Eternally recurrent time (Time as a flat circle, sacred time in Eliade, cyclical time in Debord)

Antithesis:  Irreversible Time (Time as an irreversible line moving forward, profane time in Eliade, Historical time in Debord)

Synthesis:  “Queer time”  (This model of time is one in which time moves, usually/sometimes forward, but has cycles, and converges with the past at points.  Imagine a circle that rolls forward and diagonally and all around, leaving traces that it then reinscribes. Or a person drawing a circle freehand and trying to reinscribe it, imperfectly, so that it cycles around but each time has places where it escapes into an entirely new vector, and places where it converges heavily with a past cycle--the paper indented, almost ripped.  Or it could be time as a spiral--which is the most popular synthesis of circle and line--Giambattista Vico’s idea of “eternal history” is often described as a spiral rather than as a closed circle).

This theory is a work in progress and as of yet insufficient and scattered.  Yet it is important to put forward because the dogmatic view of irreversible, linear time still dominates--it is a hyperstition that was present in the beginnings of textual production and reproduction reproduction (which allowed for recorded history), picked up a lot of steam with the birth of Christ and the New Testament, and came to fully dominate society with the Industrial Revolution and growth of the bourgeoisie.  It is a hyperstition whose telos aims at the end of history.  

Eliade’s situation of time within the context of sacredness and mysticism is essential, but so is Debord’s almost parallel reading of time as political economy.  Either way, the world has been desacralized and resacralized with a faux-religion of Spectacle, and the new ruling financial class is obsessed with time.  Time and the future are the most important commodities for the new ruling class, so knowing how to control them, whether through technology, magic, or other means, is the most important power of the new millenium.
The current trend of techno-capitalist acceleration whose telos is either the technological singularity or global ecological and societal collapse, is still expressed in a line, but now the line is a curve--an exponential curve.  This curve evades the progressive Hegelian line that aims at the End of History and also evades the Hegelian Geist, or spirit of mankind. The curve of acceleration, rather than being driven by a universal spirit, is driven by the alienated products of mankind--technology and capital, acting as a demonic Other.  Both ends are undesirable, at least from my limited vantage point in the accelerationist meltdown. And herein lies my most important point in the paper, that hypostition, cryochronosis, all these cooling and freezing mechanisms and escape mechanisms--they all exist not only as ends in and of themselves, but as tactical methods to achieve spiritual and political clarity.  The vantage point from within meltdown is always going to be a confused and schizophrenic one, but the vantage point from within the cryochronos iceberg is so clear that it hurts.

Hypostitions stitch together points on a curve, bending it, or they identify overlap in the re-inscribed circles and enter them via thresholds.

But who can wield these powers--decceleration, reversal, freezing, decreation?

Ice Queens

To wield powers that deccelerate, that freeze time, that decreate, it helps if one is forged by a relationship to absolute zero.  It helps to be from the North, to know the Frozen Borderline. It helps to know death, to know what it is like to dissolve into white particles, to know what it’s like to exist at the end of time.

In “The Sex Revolts,” Simon Reynolds discusses the female archetype of the “Ice Queen.”  “Ice is the opposite of all that women are supposed to be: warm, flowing, giving, receptive.  Like Lady Macbeth, the Ice Queen has unsexed herself, dammed up her lachrymal and lactation ducts.  She offers cold, not comfort. Her hard surfaces can’t be penetrated. She is an island, an iceberg.” (p. 300).  Nico fits this archetype in her offstage behavior, her thick, cold voice, and in the mythos in her lyrics.

This kind of coldness is important because fear is such an essential element of seduction.  Societies and people are often driven by fixation and fear into collapses/crashes that were avoidable.  To be cold is a power, the power to avoid inevitabilities, to be at the very least an equal partner in the dance of seduction that death usually leads.

Reynolds elaborates “Nico longs to be beyond desire, to reach the numbed stillness of entropy (heat-death).” (301) Initially this desire could seem nihilistic, but if we situate it as a mode of escape from the schizophrenic terror of meltdown, we can see its value clearly.

Nico’s mythos of self-isolation and coldness is on display most in her song “Nibelungen,” from the Marble Index sessions.

Since the first of you and me asleep

In a Nibelungen land

Titanic curses trap me in

A banishment of stay

Symbols vanish from my senses

Stem and stave the view appears

Since the first of you and me asleep

In a Nibelungen land where we cannot be

Almond trees grow along the mountain trail

From their tongues the words are spelling

The telling numb

I cannot hear it anymore

I cannot hear it anymore

Since the first of you and me here and there

We lose the direction everywhere

Shrieking city sun shiver in my veins

In flames I run

In flames I run

Waiting for the sign to come

This song explores the suffering of being trapped on a frozen plain.  It is about a suffering that comes with dissolution, entropy, the horror of realizing entropy.  It is almost analogous to the Snow White myth. Nico as Ice Queen suffers, though you would think she wouldn’t.  Her suffering is that of dissolution--the souls getting smashed together into the white void at the Frozen Borderline.  You can see this horror on Nico’s face, and hear it, in her live performance of “Heroes,” in Preston, UK. She lights a cigarette, and casually starts the band in on the groove.  The band is good, but their performance is a playful, loose, fast, new wave version of the song. It almost feels parodic in its haste, like it’s poking fun at the optimism of the song, turning it into a dance track.  Nico’s vocals flange, they lag behind the beat slightly and slowly smear in the air. Her eyes are wild. This song is high drama. It has so much meaning. When Bowie sang it and performed it, there was a neoliberal aspect--the hero as xerox, as copy.   “He sings about a new brand of hero, just in time for the neoliberal revolution. The hero is dead—long live the hero! Yet Bowie’s hero is no longer a subject, but an object: a thing, an image, a splendid fetish—a commodity soaked with desire, resurrected from beyond the squalor of its own demise...

This hero’s immortality no longer originates in the strength to survive all possible ordeals, but from its ability to be xeroxed, recycled, and reincarnated. Destruction will alter its form and appearance, yet its substance will be untouched. The immortality of the thing is its finitude, not its eternity.” (Steyerl, p. 1).

Nico is a flip side of that shiny neoliberal xeroxed hero.  She is the flesh that the simulation is based on. She is decaying, dissolving.  She engages with a kind of anti-human point of view sometimes, but is essentially human, and it is that contradiction that gives her voice gravitas and pathos.  As she sings, you get the sense that she’s done this a million times before. But also that she doesn’t mind doing it again. She had her methadone, her cigarette.  She knows what death is. I see her performing in a cabaret in a spaceport, one in Shanghai, 1000 years from now. Just like now, she works herself into a trance, every time.  It’s the only way she knows to escape. Every word of the song has a meaning. The song (generalized) is a modern tragedy, about the gap between the beautiful vibrant futures people want, and what they get.  Nico emphasizes the horror of the tragedy by singing it not like she’s pretending (the way Bowie does), but like she truly believes all that she’s singing--believes in the fantasy, believes even that the love could last for longer than that one day.  When she gets into the high range, her voice is incredibly strident in a powerful way. She is immersed in the tragedy and the horror is in knowing that that love will be torn away.  But part of the poignancy is in the fantasy, in the gap between the real and fantasy, which is like the wall in the song, keeping lovers apart from the object of their love. At about 6 minutes in, she closes her eyes, and keeps repeating the line “we can be heroes,” but she’s practically moaning it, in a trance.  This is a religious ecstasy, contra to Bowie’s measured New Wave approach. The band takes it rock and roll--well as rock and roll as New Wave gets. They revel in the fast entropic tragedy. The particular feeling elicited by the gap between love and love object is taken up--Nico channeling by sucking up souls, pain, and channeling them in an ecstatic-sad meltdown, her hair disheveled, her eyes wild, sweat on her brow.  Nico’s reading of “Heroes” remakes the narrative, emphasizing the aspect of decay/entropy already present in Bowie’s lyrics, but to an extreme. Entropy was the birth of tragedy and eventually the death of tragedy. The tragedy in Nico’s “Heroes” is the growing distance between everybody, the distance inside, the distance from your lover even when you embrace them tightly, the distance between you and your dreams. They all continue to recede gradually, and you continue to unravel.  

Though nothing, will drive them away

We can beat them, just for one day

We can be heroes, just for one day

Nothing will drive the cold, expanding universe away.  Nothing will keep the lovers together, forever. But trying to cling together is the only real option left.

Summed up, the tragedy is the impossibility of heroism in an old, dissolute world, and a wish for a Transcendent realm, that like cryochronos--existing in eternity, frozen, untouched by dissolution.

Though nothing, will keep us together

We could steal time, just for one day

We can be heroes, forever and ever

 It is not all despairing, if you believe that a hero can slam  up against the impossible, the borderline, the threshold, and reach the transcendent.  

I, I can remember (I remember)

Standing, by the wall (by the wall)

And the guns, shot above our heads (over our heads)

And we kissed, as though nothing could fall (nothing could fall)

The wall in Bowie’s “heroes” becomes a gap, an entropic void-river, that grows between the lovers as they look on in horror.  But one must do anything for love--leap, cross that river! You’re only worthy of tragedy if you try, if you slam up against the limits imposed on you by a cruel god or the universe.

The difference between Nico’s version and Bowie’s version can be summed up thus:  The GDR that one of the lovers was escaping from was a perfect fantasy of State repression.  It was orderly, it was contained and compact. One knew who one’s enemies were, one knew the boundaries.  

Nico sings of a process and a time in which there are no more enemies.  How can one be a hero without an enemy? Unless the enemy is entropy, is death itself.  

Ragnarok/Nifleheim/Yuletide

While “Frozen Warnings” is the navel of The Marble Index--the piece that ties it together, Evening of Light is an entirely appropriate ending.  It is very apocalyptic and musically and lyrically creates a scene that fits into the ontology of the other worlds created on this album.

Lester Bangs describes the beginning of the song thus: “The song begins with a steady tumbling of harpsichord notes, like a silver rain which will build to apocalypse alongside the metal monster towering over them.  Enter Nico, backed up by the first faint rumblings and groanings of the juggernaut, intoning words that seem to issue from the same glacial intelligence as the music.”  The instrumental textures indeed mimic a storm. This is a very Wagnerian sublime, but Nico does it better, with less bombast, more eeriness. The relationship between her voice and the storm is thus:  Nico’s tremulous voice is issuing an incantation, calling the storm into motion around her, with clanging pianos and, eventually, gothic, aggressive electric viola arcs. She has the childlike quality of someone playing with something more dangerous than they should.

Evening of Light

Midnight winds are landing at the end of time 

 (this is the most clearly stated time/place principle on the whole album.. This is the line that could bookend the whole album on either side--it all comes back to this threshold/limit--the End of Time/the music on this track becomes more apocalyptic/aggressive--even the bells are eerie/ sinister, signalling the kind of magical pagan light festival that is the specialty of the North)

Midnight winds are landing at the end of time

A true story wants to be mine     

 A true story wants to be mine

 (Rimbaud: “Tough luck to the wood that becomes a violin…   If the brass awakes as horn, he can’t be to blame”-- this is an irreducible principle of seership--the seer is found through electric affinities, has very little choice in the matter)

The story is telling a true lie

The story is telling a true lie

Mandolins are ringing to his viol singing

Mandolins are ringing to his viol singing

Midnight winds are landing at the end of time

Midnight winds are landing at the end of time

Dungeon's sinking to a slumber to the end of time

Dungeon's sinking to a slumber to the end of time

Petrel sings the domebells pound into the unended end of time

Petrel sings the domebells pound into the unended end of time

(The only references I could find were a Tlingit legend about a man who had an everlasting spring of water, and the seabird “storm petrel”)

Midnight winds are landing at the end of time

Midnight winds are landing at the end of time

In the morning of my winter   

(synesthesia/metaphor--the body understood as having climate, etc..  myth--scale)

When my eyes are still asleep

In the morning of my winter

When my eyes are still asleep

A dragonfly laying in a coat of snow

I'll send to kiss your heart for me

A dragonfly laying in a coat of snow

I'll send to kiss your heart for me

Midnight winds are landing at the end of time

Midnight winds are landing at the end of time

The children are jumping in the evening of light   

The children are jumping in the evening of light

(the pagan light festival--the northern lights, lichtdom, ritual)

A thousand sins are heavy in the evening of light  

A thousand sins are heavy in the evening of light

(This event is a festival of convergence and returning and inversion… the veil between worlds is thinnest, exemplified by the Northern Lights…  all is revealed under the lights)

Midnight winds are landing at the end of time

Midnight winds are landing at the end of time

The festival could be a Germanic Yuletide, and it would make sense.  Yule is a time of sacrifice and feasting that correlates with a time of increased spiritual activity in the midwinter.  It doesn’t matter though, whether it’s culturally specific. The apocalypse could be understood to be a sort of festival of lights  (“A thousand sins are heavy in the evening of light”). Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, also comes to mind. It’s also hard to look at that line and not think of the Nazi “Cathedral of Light” where glowing inhuman lights lit up a stadium of sins and cruelties.   

A light festival is a time of great convergence, a time for sacrifice, and souls lighting up the sky, flowing upward.  It is for the darkest time of the year, a festival to conjure rebirth.

Ragnarok could be seen as a long and particularly dark winter--and as a festival of chaos, convergence and slaughter that doesn’t repeat, and ends the cosmos as we know it.

It is not hard to imagine Nico within the realm of Norse mythology, as an inhabitant of “Nifleheim,” the realm of icy mists, or in the company of frost giants.  I don’t believe Nico was a classicist as much as I believe she was semi-consciously channelling Teutonic aesthetic ideals and even myths. Many musicians and critics have associated Nico with a European and even specifically Germanic aesthetic. 

In addition, she has occasionally consciously chosen to align herself with Germany, including aligning herself with the aspects of Germany’s past that are considered most horrifying.  One of her most poignant performances is her rendition of the German national anthem “Das Lied Der Deutschen,” including the verses that were banned after World War II due to their association with the Nazis (‘Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles’ being the most famous of them).  She recorded this on her album “The End,” and performed this song live in Germany to boos, with a dedication to Andreas Baader of the Red Army Faction, which “problematizes” the Nazi association.

While it conjures ideas of a pagan “festival of lights,” “Evening of Light” also reminds me strongly of the Norse myth of Ragnarok, the “Dusk of the Gods,”--the end of all things, the “doom of gods and men”.  Ragnarok could be read as unfolding over the course of a section of “The Marble Index,” although it matches “Evening of Light” the most closely in theme and tone, and the album cannot be read at all as a literal narrative composition/programmatic music. Ragnarok is preceded, for example, by the “Age of Northern Winds,” a time of great discord, violence, and atomization.  “Sword blasts are cleaving the darkened skies. Fierce beasts from forests and mountains and barren wilds seek their prey among men…” (Mackenzie, p. 178). This age is followed by “Fimbul Winter,” in which “Heavy snows are driven and fall from the world’s four corners; the murder frost prevails. The sun is darkened at noon; it sheds no gladness; devouring tempests bellow and never end…    Thrice winter follows winter over a world which is snow-smitten, frost fettered, and chained in ice…. Yet wars are waged, blood is shed, and evil grows greater….” (Mackenzie, p. 178)

There is a possible reading of the “Marble Index” in which the tracks leading up to “Evening of Light” are simply context for Ragnarok--the growing evil and decadence and cruelty of the world, before the final battle is unloosed, in the final track.  I do not totally stand by this reading, but don’t disavow it either--it may be a layer of what is there, even if it is not a fully opaque layer. Nico’s myths are archeo-futurist, which means they are new even though they draw on the old as a form of time theft.  They are wholly her own, and are not a literal interpretation of Norse mythology. By discussing Norse mythology and especially Ragnarok, I’m trying to point out a kind of similar mythos she may be channelling with varying levels of consciousness, as a seer does. If she is consciously using these myths, she is treating them as living material rather than the dusty pages of history.  

Nevertheless, there are a lot of easily homologizable moments between the myth of Ragnarok and “Evening of Light,” even musical moments.  The swirling harpsichords that start the track remind me of the moment when “Gymer sits upon a mound alone, playing a harp; he is merry because of what is at hand.  Long hath he awaited the hour of doom.” The noisy, oppressive, viola arcs that Cale lets out throughout the track conjure visions of the “Gjallar-horn…” from which the god Heimdal blows a “thunder blast which awakens the nine worlds….”  The sounds throughout “Evening of Light” and some of the other tracks evoke “Sword blasts cleaving the darkened skies… Goldcomb crow [ing] loud in Asgard … the Storm-Eagle flap[ing] heavily its wings, and tempests bellow[ing] over ocean and land…” (Mackenzie, 178)

It is hard not to see the track “SAGEN DIE GELEHRTEN,” an outtake from the Marble Index, as parallel to and invoking Ragnarok.  The title, translated, is “Tell the Scholars”. An excerpt (translated):

And suddenly the sky looks like blood 

And suddenly the sun looks like glow 

This does not allow our gods 

Tell the scholars 

Tell the scholars

This has not happened before 

With the power of mankind to deprive their mind 

This does not allow our gods 

Tell the scholars 

Tell the scholars

The punishment is not high enough 

They do not need light to die 

Nobody is watching them

The theme of catastrophe that happens without an omnipresent, omniscient eye watching over it is a strong theme.  It is a theme from the atheistic North, borne out of a pagan mythos, that is ultimately atheistic--e.g. there are gods/forces in the world, but there is no All-Seeing One.  In a way, this Northern religious atheism that we posit as the religion of our North, is an inversion of God, in which “Nothing” is posited as void and entity, as the positive void which is the combination of all things, the white light of all of the violently merged souls.

I read the recurring “tell the scholars” not simply as an invocation to a scribe to record the events, but as a provocation, a reminder that scholarship can only impotently witness catastrophe/tragedy, not participate in it or stop it.  The scholars cannot dance, they can only theorize. Dance is the only way you can ride out chaos.

Sacred Time (cont’d)

In ‘The Sacred and The Profane,’ Mircea Eliade discusses how Sacred Time is tied to space--the sacred produces a space time continuum that is holistic and inseparable:  “First of all, an observation that is not without importance: in a number of North American Indian languages the term world (=Cosmos) is also used in the sense of year. The Yokuts say ‘the world has passed,’ meaning ‘a year has gone by’...

The cosmos is conceived as a living unity that is born, develops and dies on the last day of the year, to be reborn on New Year’s Day… The intimate connection between the cosmos and time is religious in nature:  the cosmos is homologizable to cosmic time (=the Year) because they are both sacred realities, divine creations.” (Eliade, 73)

Thus an end of the cosmos is an end of time.  Ragnarok is not simply an end to all things, it must be an end to all time, at least as previously conceived.  But there is still a dawn after Ragnarok which ushers in a spring--new growth, free of the decadence and violence that characterized the death throes of the old world.  Similarly, the End of History is approaching, but there will still be time after history’s end, a world after the end of the world as we know it. Understanding Ragnarok can help us understand the apocalyptic telos of techno-capital.  

In “Evening of Light,” Nico sings “Midnight winds are landing/at the end of time”.  This conflation between space, physical phenomena and time is deliberate--there is a convergence of all things, the end of the world is the end of time.  Eliade also discusses “sacred space,” as a non-homogenous space which is real and exists as real in contrast to the formless expanse surrounding it--cosmos vs. chaos.  The spaces that Nico creates on “The Marble Index” have to do with the mythos of the North. The North is Nico’s cosmos, the “frozen borderline” its axis mundi.  But this axis mundi is not fixed, it is a spiritual threshold, an unfixed point, like the magnetic North Pole.  It is always defined in relation to the subject and to the zero degree, rather than as an absolute value.  

Why it Matters: Nico’s Poetics of Time, De-creation, Creation

To explain why I think this album and this mode of art-making matters, I need to give an incredibly condensed account of history, time (in its various forms), Christianity, and capitalism.

“Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture.” (Fisher, p. 5-6)

Deleuze and Guattari use the term “deterritorialization” to describe the spatial-territorial effects of capital, which renders all previous markers and signifiers obsolete and meaningless.  In Mircea Eliade’s book “The Sacred and the Profane,” the sacred is described as the revelation of the divine Real which gives life meaning. Sacred space is cosmos being founded out of and opposed to chaos.  It is real, it is organized, it is an interruption. Sacred space is non-homogenous. Eliade goes on to describe how even the most secular man experiences “sacred space” in various ways--the first place they met a lover, their children’s birthplace, their childhood retreat.  It is inherently human to organize space and time in a way that is sacralized, whether we realize it or not.

Capitalism brings with it a terrifying acceleration and a kind of brutal natural selection that desacralizes all culture and leaves only the aspects of humanity that are cold, machinelike and technical.  The teleology of capitalism is a cold outsideness (entropy, chaos) that is somehow melded with a hot (activity, heat death, speed, growth) acceleration. Out of the few who have fully grasped this, none know how it might be combatted.  It is treated either as a social construct that can be overcome (by Marxians) or a terrifying lovecraftian god of nature that must be submitted to (by Right-Accelerationists/Neo-Rx). The exponential quality of the growth/acceleration curve means that there are no previous models, or at least recent previous models, that can truly help us.  In the words of Chris Burden: “Science has failed. Heat is life. Time kills”. But I plan to contradict myself. Pure science, or for that matter, any modernist-industrial-rational lens, cannot help us, at least solely. What we are dealing with is total chaos, catastrophe, the unknown. We are readying to weather a storm that will ultimately destroy most of what is known/comprehensible.  For that reason, we need to reach to mythos, which is the only way to shape a cosmos out of chaos. We need to birthe the world anew, found it. Studying myths of the ends of and beginnings of worlds are the only way we could ready ourselves even slightly for the years ahead. Perhaps these myths could suffuse the sciences so that for once, scientific research is not sightless and abstract, but guided by a renewed and heroic humanism. 

The most prevalent myths guiding our current industrial-capitalist society are that of the possibility of endless growth and the “end of history” myth.  The “myth” of endless growth is hardly a myth, but just a mangled bedtime story, whispered in our ear. It is part of a materialist-universalist modality that has turned space into homogeneous desacralized stuff and turned time into interchangeable liquidated blocks of 24/7 insomniac duration.  While profane and tasteless and absurd, this modality is a powerful mind-virus that is not to be underestimated.  The second myth, that of the “end of history,” is a myth that started with Christianity, jumped to Hegel, then Marx, and ultimately makes Marxism and neoliberalism look like uneasy bedfellows.  I don’t find it necessarily “wrong” or “incorrect” but it deserves scrutiny, especially in the details. It starts with Historical time, founded by the Christianity of the New Testament. (The very idea of a New Time, which renders the previous teachings obsolete, is probably the first example of historical/irreversible time replacing cyclical time).  Sacred, primordial time is cyclical, reversible and recoverable. Historicized time, rather than being a flat circle, is a line or arrow moving irreversibly forward. It is evanescent and uninterrupted. The teleology of historical time is addressed by Hegel and then inverted by Marx. The idea that history is moving toward an endpoint wherein all contradictions will be resolved was first Hegel’s idea and then Marx’s.  In Hegel’s idealist dialectic, Geist, a universal spirit of history/self-consciousness of the collective consciousness of mankind, moves History to a resolution, while in Marx’s materialist dialectic, it is the workers that have to actively move history to its endpoint (Geist is viewed as a metaphor).  Frances Fukuyama, a neoliberal political theorist, theorized the endpoint of history as the ultimate dissatisfactory compromise between nominally democratic capitalist Western-modelled states, that would realize that the system of capitalist democracy was the lesser of many evils.  Marx’s idea of the end of history was a utopian classless, stateless society. It is clear that Fukuyama has been proven wrong and neoliberalism is no longer a consensus. We shall see if Marx is proven wrong. What I want to put into the air, however, is the question “What comes after the ‘end of history’?”  For Marxists and Neoliberals, this question is easily answerable (by the way, Neoliberalism looks great on paper, but in practice… ;).  However, it is worth considering that historical time is not the only kind of time, and a cosmos can still exist after historical time is over.  There are also thousands of possible ways a cosmos could exist that do not correspond to the aforementioned utopia. So I think it is crucial to think deeply about time and space and formulating new mythos and poetics based on a close study of time and space, rather than sticking to the dogmatic script of History.  

A radical theatre company I know--Bread and Puppet--has countered Margaret Thatcher’s famous neoliberal mantra “TINA,” or “There is No Alternative” (to capitalism), with “TATA,” or “There are a Thousand Alternatives.”  In response to the choices presented by fascism, capitalism, and communism, we might expand this phrase, to “There are a Thousand Alternative Modernities.” It may not make a catchy acronym, but it is undeniably important.

That said, what does this have to do with Nico?

Nico has practiced a magic and a poetics of space and time that transcend History.  Nico has made the experience of primordial-sacred time accessible in an age of profane, homogenized timespace.  It is important to note that escape isn’t always escapist.  True escape is a righteous jail-break, a line of flight that successfully clears the fence, or a magic hiding spot that’s folded into a wrinkle in time that the virus can’t touch because it’s too cold for any lifeform besides an Ice Queen.  While Nico’s aesthetic may be somewhat solipsistic/inward-driven, it is not dishonestly so. She apprehends the problems of modern existence and transcends them. She is a seer and a practitioner of magic and of cryochronosis.  In an age of heat-death, where the collective bodies and nervous systems are too overworked to do anything but reflexively spasm, Nico steps outside of the exponential curve of post-modern history, to see clearly.  She throws ice water on the smoking engine of industrial civilization. She conjures spirits that modernity still has never reckoned with.

I propose that in an age of Spectacle, which can be defined as a kind of faux-magic, learning about actual magic is more important than ever.  The faux-magic of Spectacle and ersatz religion of commodity fetishism can only be superseded by real religion and real magic. At the very least, knowing how magic and mythopoeisis and time function is a prerequisite for being able to weather the upcoming storm.

“And suddenly, the sky looks like blood 

And suddenly the sun looks like glow 

That does not let our gods 

tell 

the scholars tell the scholars

The punishment is not high enough 

But they do not need a light to die 

There is no one watching them”

But don’t be a scholar--scholars are the most useless.  They can write about catastrophe and try and analyze it but they cannot act in a crisis.  Or even be present to witness the sublime nature of the catastrophe.

Learn new forms of intimacy, if you want a chance.  

All that matters in this nightmare is courage, but not blind courage.  The courage to stare into that totalizing void, that atheistic flash, the way Nico did, wild-eyed and with a latent sad smile.

Entropy killed Guy Debord.  It killed Nico. It took heroes everywhere away from us.

Guy Debord was striving for heroism, even a kind of radical atheistic mysticism, in his moment, in the Situationist battle against the Spectacle.  He was one of the last heroes, one of the last people who believe that a better world could be achieved, the nightmare of passive consumer culture superseded by teeming, painfully real life.  It didn’t work. But his ghost is in the gun of every bank robber, in every Amazon package you open, lurking in every advertisement--a ghost of alienation and heroic dissatisfaction. Nico’s ghost haunts the North, creeps into the space between lovers, crystallizes frozen silences.  It is the unspoken counterpoint to meltdown, to phallic amphetamine overload of machinery and speed.

What is important, in an age where mass politics are dead and despair presses down like a debt ceiling, is to remember to dance.  Music is magic, it is ritual, it is a time-travelling device. Dancing is the only way to know chaos, to make death your friend.  Dance with entropy. When you see your lover on the other side of that frozen silence, look at the growing gap and think “I love what you are bringing me, you are a herald of darkness never before seen--you are the most oblique seducer, I will come to know you in the time ahead.”  Look at your lover and the gap, and dive.

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Entropy killed Guy Debord

money is definitely a way to try and avoid death through surpassing limits, but it contains in it the entropy/death that it tries to avoid

1. Time Kills
2. Entropy Kills
3. Entropy is Time
4. Time is Money
5. Therefore Money is accumulated-entropy-death