The Soundtrack of Our Lives – Broken Imaginary Time: A Requiem to Civilization

The civilization of the modern West appears in history as a veritable anomaly: among all those which are known to us more or less completely, this civilization is the only one that has developed along purely material lines, and this monstrous development, whose beginning coincedes with the so-called Renaissance, has been accompanied, as indeed it was fated to be, by a corresponding intellectual regress.

René Guénon, East and West (1924)

I am what I listen to– but what to listen to in times of Corona? Maybe it should be the easy and obvious parameters of something gloomy, something dark to soundtrack this surreal episode in a modern history that had installed ‘normalcy’ as a new and obviously fragile concept. But just nothing seems to satisfy the intellect. For all but the hopeless delusionists celebrating spring and life in their jams no matter what, the new reality triggers a natural selection of what you unleash on your soul and senses, a mental chain reaction that causes many of the songs you loved to fall over like dominoes.

The songs of pure introspection fall first, and with them all the iconic names and connotations. Songs obsessed with the individual psyche and sentiments show their insufficiency and deficiency more than ever in the new abnormal, the stiff and childish gush of words of the so-called psychologists, poorly illuminated simple anecdotes that never explored an unknown area of the mind, never discovered even the smallest forgotten corner of a passion.

Then fall the supposedly more demanding and apocalyptic songs, which are covered with the gloss of sophistication and mysticism, but which always remain so vague that it almost looks like charlatanism. A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall– and then Bob, what happens after stating the obvious? Dylan, the exceptional receiver, who always seems to be caught in the frequencies of prophecy, only able to bring them into a poetic, but not spiritual form.

In the background we hear the ever sexual Jim Morrisson singing about The End– under the influence of Greek mythological potency pills he wants to impregnate his words with meaning, and starts spinning a yarn of incomprehensible gibberish under the pretence of “soul-talk”: grasshoppers, the blue bus, killing his father, fucking his mother- if only he had stuck with Baudelaire.

Indeed, more than ever it is the time of instrumentals and avantgarde for people like me, it allows you to flow and construct freely and without a corset of thoughts and interpretations, without giving much direction. But it also inevitably reaches the limits of every freedom: the ancestral lines of every thought hover in the seduction of free form, a defect that ultimately leads to deconstruction. The free form, open to interpretation, is what the recipient does to it: democratic, arbitrary, and unsatisfactory.

The perfect form would be a naturalistic spiritualism which follows deep-rooted traces and at the same time paves a new path that runs parallely, a naturalism that reaches this world and the hereafter. Only Dostoevsky came close to this satisfying form in his entirety and overall art, otherwise these gems generally exist in a rare and isolated form. The Soundtrack of Our Lives‘ “Broken Imaginary Time” is one of them, a simple and sublime requiem to civilization which is not just rooted in the wordly.

***

Panic, fear, social distancing, quarantine, lockdowns, strangely technical draconic measures flanked by a medial, political & scientific cacophony– we are witnessing the confused dance of a doomed civilization, running in multiple directions like headless hens. Societies that clumsily emulated the ant and bee colonies, but could only build highly broken and imperfect versions of these succesful systems which are based unconditional submission and on not fearing death. Beyond all that cacophony and scientific evaluation- be it medical, psychological, economical, political, sociological… – if one thing can be observated with clarity right now, then it is the comprehensive visibility of the phantom thread from which our modern civilization is woven, and the doomed dance into ruin of that civilization, headed by the Far West: America.

“It’s the end of a broken imaginary time / It didn’t stay long / Your famous superficial golden tan”

The noun civilization was first used by the economists of the years which immediately preceded the French Revolution, it’s a young word and concept that didn’t find it’s way into dictionaries before 1835. But no matter how abnormal this civilization is, and how little sense any nostalgia makes in it due to its juvenile nature, it nevertheless claimed to be regarded as THE civilization par excellence, even the only one that deserves the name. Written almost 100 years ago, in his masterpiece East and West (1924) René Guénon gets to the core of Western thought:

„What does the truth matter in a world whose aspirations, being solely material and sentimental and not intellectual, find complete satisfaction in industry and morality, two spheres where indeed one can well do without conceiving the truth? /…/ Indeed, materialism and sentimentality, far from being in opposition, can scarcely exist one without the other, and they both attain side by side to their maximum development; the proof of it lies in America, where the worst pseudo-mystical extravagances come to birth and spread with incredible ease at the very time when industrialism and the passion for ‘business’ are being carried to a pitch that borders on madness”.

Broken Imaginary Time is very likely one most spiritual compositions you will ever hear, and it’s beauty lies in its simplicity, which uses the few words of a truth not instrumentalized for a reason, and reaches true intellectuality by including the superordinate and metaphysical. It is not sentimental hope. It is not the typical evangelical blurb about universal salvation through apocalypse and its psychopathic conclusion to therefore force apocalypse and work towards it. It is not another vague, pseudo-mystical spirituality of the new age, based on the rejection of one’s own irrelevance and punishment, a false castle built with many new roman-greek words, words like “tradition”, which derives from ‘tradere’, the latin word for trading. You need to know almost nothing else to recognize where this civilization’s journey is going, and how it was determined to go there. But, “unfortunately, being own to the Europeans is that they cannot easily find things that are not modeled after the usual manner of the Greeks and Romans, which they took as patterns”, Germany’s greatest poet and thinker Johann Wolfgang Goethe concluded.

“When It comes down to dust / You’re such a lightweight after all / You’re such a nobody at all”

Intentionally or not, the album cover reflects Broken Imaginary Time‘s naturalistic spiritualism: here we do not see the band as icons and not as monkeys of any kind, but rather in death masks equalizing almost all features. A much needed reminder of that death will get us all, a fact that the materialist and sentimentalist cannot accept. The album cover is at the same time as a visualization of the Abrahamic concept that is to be found in all three continious religious books: Human is made of clay. And indeed, science comes to agree on this theory, which easily includes subordinate scientific achievements such as the theory of evolution- just not as that “what holds the earth together in its innermost elements“, as Goethe’s Faust immortalized the eternal search.

Like the inflationary evoked concept of ‘democracy’, a subordinate thesis and instruction can and should be one of several foundations, but not the sole scaffold and enchantment of a society and its knowledge. Deprived of an overarching concept and entity, democracy was often used and abused to serve depravity, it was made responsible for many invasions and crimes under the disguise of exporting it to the “uncivilized, barbaric world”, which is another trait of globalism. But the spiritual and intellectual value of a singular foundation, which is primarily based on individuality and the freedom to vote equals to: near zero. However, the risk of confusion, chaos, and implosion lies simultaneously on the other end of the scale, the end we are collectively inhabiting currently.

Broken Imaginary Time ends with the typical American cacophony that tires us for so long now, that of a perpetual excitement and indignation superficialized as ongoing broadcast nobody had asked for. Only the last words of we do comprehend over the pastoral organ sound: “bombs” and “of mice and men”.

You’re such a lightweight after all.

***

It was the great American galleys transported to our continent. It was the immense, the profound, the incommensurable peasantry of the financier and the parvenu, beaming, like a pitiful sun, upon the idolatrous town which wallowed on the ground the while it uttered impure psalms before the impious tabernacle of banks.”Well, then, society, crash to ruin! Die, aged world!” cried Des Esseintes

Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (1884)

by Saliha Enzenauer

“Broken Imaginary Time” is from The Soundtrack of Our Lives’ third album Behind the Music (2001)