The pedigree of all creatures is nothing. From nothing we come into existence, and we are inclined in the most primordial mechanics of our being to return to it. Our starting point is nothing and the natural course of being ends in the same.
We are creatures, meaning: we are created; derived from something, not fashioned by ourselves, dependent for our existence upon something else. For once, nothing was. There is a time when each of us was not, and there was a time when our species was not. It strains language to call this “a time” because that which we experience as time itself had an absolute beginning. But we have no other way to try to make sense of this. Our limitations reassert themselves in our attempts to understand: “Nothing was”? How can nothing be?” How can absence register as something that is?
Absence and nothingness are elements of what we are. For we are not emanations of God, miniature frontier settlements of God’s being. We are invited into existence by him but we are not conjoined with his being when we come to be. We are finite, prone to exhaustion, inclined towards nothingness rather than its opposite. The lightness of being we sense in our experience of the world owes itself to the contingency and tenuousness of all that is, how it is suspended over the abyss of nothingness by God’s activity and nothing else.
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Metal may not be everyone’s preference, but I invite you to taste and see that some of it is good. For there is an uncommon profundity in the Swedish metal veterans Meshuggah, whose 2002 release Nothing plumbed the voided depths of nothingness. In this watershed album, the band forged a fresh intensification to their sound and pioneered a punishing, rhythmically complex style that would, in time, become prevalent across the global metal landscape.
Meshuggah had been sculpting their compositions with jagged salvos of detuned, staccato guitar for a few years by this point, but with this album determined to progress by emphasizing their idiosyncrasies and pushing the limits of repetition. The signature Meshuggah sound was unveiled with this album — discordant chugs circling two axes of advance: pulling against 4/4 beats, routinely repeating not on the one but elsewhere in the measure, linked up with cymbal hits that tether the drums and guitars in a tenuous but tight dance around the time signature.
Machine gun strafings of palm muted guitar are not gone, but utilized to a somewhat lesser extent than deep, distorted rumblings that more closely resemble amplified seismic activity. There are grooves but they are grooves that lurch, careening like rock formations colliding with one another. The sound is harsh but ordered, albeit according to an order we do not immediately recognize.
But that is part of the point. What many listeners will hear as chaos in fact reflects carefully disciplined regimentation, in terms of both playing technique and of composition. The interaction between guitars and drums unifies disparate rhythms in a logic of upheaval, lashing eruptions of molten guitar to a 4/4 grid, albeit one that does not regularly repeat where we have been conditioned to expect it.
The album opens with “Stengah,” the band’s new eight-string guitars stammering an awkward figure that sounds like nothing so much as tectonic plates shifting. The song’s kinetic motion evokes a process continually threatening to break down, paralleling the lyrics’ descriptions of hopeless, addictive patterns.
The next song, “Rational Gaze,” deepens the aural analogy of a broken machine repeating interminably toward its extinction. Like broken gears grinding against one another, the patterns repeat but not precisely where you expect them to, summoning headbanging from the listener who frequently loses his or her sense of where the pulse is.
Even the album’s calmer moments, as in the bridge of “Closed Eye Visuals” or the conclusion of “Straws Pulled at Random,” convey a certain dread; that, perhaps, of dangling over the precipice of being and glimpsing the nothing out of which we originate. That we are at all is due only to grace, and the terrible grandeur of this truth can be dizzying. We cannot secure our place in the universe, cannot guarantee any of our ambitions or keep that which we fear completely at bay. Our existence is gratuitous because there is no necessity to it. But the root of this word is important: gratus. We are simply because God in his inexplicable love wills it to be so. But it requires further grace to see and appreciate this as a good thing rather than a terrifying one.
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When we can no longer deny the erratic, meaningless fluctuations at work in our world we recognize that we stand upon nothing. Our only hope, then, is to see through faith the Word by which a good God holds us above nothingness and sustains us against its effects.
Existence is a risk, one we do not choose for ourselves. But the fact that any of us does exist testifies to the gift quality God associates with that risk. The perils that accompany creaturely existence do not inherently invalidate its goods, but it is a possibility: a possibility nothingness in its shadowy agency seeks to actualize. But there are experiences that attest to the fact that there is an exhilaration that does not cohere with the jagged edges of this world. It isn’t constant and it isn’t assured. It, too, is a grace from this same God and not the result of the universe being as it should be. It is not, and neither are we.
There is a God who loves his wounded, bewildered creatures in spite of their resistance to his efforts to heal them. And he himself has experienced the nausea of this world, has submitted himself to nothingness so as to bring it to nothing.
Order is not inherently good. Nothingness, after all, possesses its own logic and imposes its order upon that which exists. There are orders to which each of us submit and we chafe and erode under them: routines by which we eke out a living, patterns we wish we could alter but find ourselves painfully repeating. Nothing sonically manifests the invasive power at work in our lives.
But it is not simply a document of all that is awful and doom-laden. It is an abreactive event. For as it sonically distills the nothing that infects our world and ourselves there is a cathartic release. In its confirmation of my suspicions regarding life and the world, I find a solace: it really is as bad as it feels; this thing that is happening really is arbitrary and has no deeper basis or meaning. In its pummeling rhythms I receive an exorcism of that badness’s power as I perceive the sounds of chaos undermining and consuming itself. The cross of Christ proves that ugliness can be the site of grace. Nothing signaled an important shift in heavy music two decades ago and its power will persist for decades to come so long as people are in need of music that tells the truth about the world and helps them endure it.
The Karl Barth in here is *chef’s kiss.