In this post, I’ll attempt to type out a small description of every song of the album, writing a bit about what books or poems they might be based on, sometimes a bit about the music itself, or generally anything I deem to be relevant while trying to maintain a semblance of continuity through the explanations.
If interested, I already have a prior write-up here covering the overall theoretical base behind the album which you can find here (this walkthrough will be referred to this write-up a few times just as an fyi).
If you’re interested in the album lyrics, you can find them here.
So without further notice, let’s dig in.
Enlightenment
There isn’t a ton to say about Enlightenment as it simply serves as the intro of the album, but I believe it works well for setting the tone for the entire album. The song contains a sampling of doomsday ecologist Guy McPherson, simply uttering the phrase:
“Enlightenment is not a happy feeling. Enlightenment is the destruction of everything you thought to be true. I hope you will find this a completely shattering experience.”
An enlightenment to climate catastrophe as something traumatic is basically at the core of the album write-up linked above (but I can re-link it here). So if you want to read more about that, you know where to go.
I tried to find the lecture in question where Guy McPherson says these words in order to link it here, but it’s so many years ago since I actually wrote the intro and pulled the audio that I don’t remember which one of his lectures I have it from, and there are a whole bunch of them on YouTube (if I ever find it, I’ll add it here). In any case, if you feel like having your mood brought down a bit, go check out some of his lectures on climate change. It may be difficult to engage with the rest of the album’s theme if we’re not exactly on the same page with regards to the reality of climate collapse and our ongoing planetary-scale ecocide.
Inhumanism
Inhumanism, in the context of this song, relates to the philosophy of American poet Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers is an interesting character as he was very vocal about the disastrous effects of industrialization and human-caused degradation of the environment over a century ago, around the turn of the century, all the way up until 1962 when he passed away.
Jeffers is above all a poet, and not a theorist or philosopher per-say, but his notion of inhumanism is one that resonated with me when I first came across it. At it’s very core, inhumanism is the rejection of humanity as the center of our collective lives and understanding of the world. Jeffers had the artistic vision that how we live our lives would need to be more connected to nature as a whole, and that through this mentality we could avoid a lot of the darker sides of our own nature by learning humility and an appreciation for the world that sustains us. It is not a misanthropic philosophy, but rather one that places humans at a similar level as that of other living beings. As a normative point of view offering a distinct code of ethics and morality, such a mindset cannot directly be asserted scientifically other than based on a purely ‘realist’ affirmation that humans do not hold any particular place in our universe. That humans are above the rest of our planet’s species’, on the hand, has no scientific vindication whatsoever, and is a belief system (this album argues) that should be confined to the dustbin of history.
The beauty of our world resonated strongly with Jeffers, making it the core of his philosophy. The song Inhumanism is thus an ode to this sensibility that Jeffers so succinctly brought forth and which I cannot help but embrace as well.
In the middle of the song, I also included a sampling of a speech held by Paul Kingsnorth, where he openly questions the so-called myth of progress and our decision to assert ourselves above nature through technology and our anthropocentric worldviews. Paul Kingsnorth was one of the two founders of The Dark Mountain Project (together with Dougald Hine) - an art collective where artists from across the world meet, share, and co-publish in a variety of different art forms, with the underlying theme being that of Jeffers’ inhumanism. The direct relationship of the project to Robinson Jeffers’ inhumanism is quite explicit, as the very name of the project relates directly to the poem Rearmament written by Jeffers. The founding text of the project, The Dark Mountain Manifesto, also openly mentions the influence that Jeffers has had in the way the founders of the project think, and their desire to use art to convey a similar philosophy - or as they call it, ‘uncivilised art’.
I have always appreciated the work continuously done by the Dark Mountain Project ever since I first came across it back in 2013, and I must admit that the way I conceptualize Strandhem very much links to their vision of uncivilised art (Strandhem was also founded in 2013). More on that as we go along.
The full speech/lecture by Paul Kingsnorth from 2009 including the sampled quote can be found here.
Død Mand Er God Gødning
This song doesn’t have a whole lot of lyrics - only closer to the end does it express a few lines, based on the fairytale by famous Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, namely Hvad gamle Johanne fortalte (What Old Johanne Told).
Reading the text, I couldn’t help but be a bit amused by the following bit:
"Hvem har sagt dig det? Maren!" sagde skrædderen. "Død mand er god gødning! men den mand her, var vist for fornem selv til at gøre gavn i jorden, han skal ligge i gravkapel!"
("Who told you that? Maren!" said the tailor. "A dead man is good manure! but this man here was too posh to even do any good to the earth, he will be lying in a burial chapel!")
This somehow felt a bit like a class commentary, arguing that in some cases the more distinguished individuals in our society reserve themselves the right to be buried in fancy chapels, instead of giving their bodies back to nature like all living beings otherwise do (in one fashion or another). Stating that a dead human body is good manure in a way felt like such a grotesque portrayal of our humanity that it felt almost sobering: why kid ourselves! In the end, we’re just a bunch of biodegradable bodies that can do more good to the Earth by returning to the ground than by being put in some man-made, glorified box where our corpses serve no value to our life-supporting biomes. As carbon based lifeforms, the best we can do after we die is give back to our planet the elements we borrowed for a few cosmic milliseconds in order to experience life. Some other living beings will be needing the same matter we’re made of to start their own lives. Rich or poor, we all have to die, but only a rich individual who was greedy in life can also afford to be greedy in death (and isn’t that something).
The Commonplace
The Commonplace is based on a poem by American poet Walt Whitman of the very same name. I’m not sure if Walt Whitman really requires an introduction, as he remains one of the most (if not the most) famous American 19th century poets. Walt Whitman will always have a very dear spot in my heart, since it in many ways was his collection of poems Leaves of Grass that got me out of my late-teens depression. At the time, when I was around 17 to 19 years old, I was carrying his book everywhere I went, and every time I would start feeling down, I would open it up and take in a fresh dose of classic Whitman optimism. Writing a song in honor of Walt Whitman thus felt like something I had been wanting to do for a while (and it is also fitting that it is probably the chirpiest song on the album).
In many ways, Whitman and Jeffers are quite similar, and yet not really. Whitman was clearly more invested in the beauty of humanity, whereas Jeffers seems to take a more agnostic approach to humanity, yet both really emphasize the astounding beauty of life and the living. Both are very focused on finding meaning in the small yet fundamentally meaningful aspects of life and nature, while brushing aside the superficial. Both had the genuine artistic sobriety that allowed them to look at life from a rather distanced, birds-eye view, and in such a way put into words the sides of life that truly matter.
The Commonplace by Walt Whitman does just that, as the poem sings the ordinary. It’s a very short poem, and I definitely have poems of Whitman that I prefer over this one, but I liked the idea of praising what is elemental in our humanity. It also reminded me a bit of that famous Tolkien quote “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world”, which albeit a bit corny (Whitman can also be said to be a bit corny in that sense) still holds at least one dimension of truth. This is not overly intellectual or critical, but I think that is quite the point with what we could consider being the commonplace. It is basic yet universal, elemental yet familiar, and that’s the point. No need to overcomplicate it.
Life With Cold Death
Life With Cold Death returns to Robinson Jeffers, but instead of engaging with his philosophy more generally, it is a direct ode to his poem Rock and Hawk. The poem itself has the following passage from which the title of the song is taken:
Life with calm death; the falcon's
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive
What I liked about this poem was this juxtaposition yet symbiotic relation between the small living and the massiveness of our physical environment. It’s a bit the same feeling that many people have when they stargaze, trying to grasp the size of the universe and by extension the smallness of our own being. In this way, we humans and the rest of our planet’s living species’ are life with calm death: small forms of life amidst the enormous quietude of the void and the planet we inhabit. We cannot leave, we are “married to the massive”. Yet what I wanted to point out in the song, continuing along the lines of the previous songs, is our current disconnection from this symbiosis. While we can experience many animal or vegetal species’ lives in a sort of ‘chaotic harmony’ with their direct environment, we humans are not experiencing our own lives in the same fashion any longer. We have rather tried to tame our environment, instead of realizing our need to adapt to it. This whole condition is what I talk about at length in the album write-up (here’s the link, again), so I won’t dig into it too much here.
This admiration for the solemn massiveness of nature can be read across Jeffers’ works. I’ll quote the last passage of one of his other poems, Carmel Point, to amplify this position:
As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
Here once again we see the inhumanism of Jeffers shining through his writing. The song Life With Cold Death is thus another one on the album also attempting to capture that mentality in a different artistic form.
At the beginning and end of the song, I have also sampled some reading of Victor Hugo’s poem Soleils Couchants, as I felt that it also encapsulated a similar mentality of gratefulness and humility. In the poem, Hugo describes the process of aging, and the fact that like all humans, he too will soon pass away. Yet everything he cherishes in life - mountains, rivers, trees, etc. - will still be here, and that is what matters the most. Knowing this disposition of his, I can only imagine how disappointed he would be, should he get to see the current state of our environment. It turns out, as we know through the very creation of terms like Anthropocene, that humans can in fact alter in a very large scale all these things which for hundreds of thousands of years were considered unalterable. Mankind gave itself the power of Gods, and used it to create its very own hell.
The Myth of Normal
The Myth of Normal stems from a talk-turned-to-book from renowned addiction expert, speaker author Dr. Gabor Maté, who has become famous for his expertise on trauma, addiction, stress and childhood development (I’m taking this description straight from his own website as it’s quite on point).
I’ve been a big admirer of Gabor ever since I first came across his work over a decade ago. Gabor Maté is a big believer that our current modern societies are severely distorting our human nature for the worse, bringing forth our most toxic aspects while also inflicting a type of mental harm unseen in any prior human social constellations and natural environments. For many years now, Gabor has pushed forth the idea that a lot of the mores and ills we experience in our daily lives are directly linked to our living conditions under modern capitalist societies. This includes many varied forms of mental health issues that are becoming more and more prevalent, only to be dealt with at the atomized, individuated level through medication and psychological ‘self improvement’. He often argues that it is ludicrous that all of these problems that have systemic roots very seldom get approached or understood as such. Are you stressed because of your work? try mindfulness! Can’t sleep cause work stresses you out? here’s some pills! Too different to become an efficient laborer? Here’s a secluded space for you to dwell in, ostracized from the rest of society, as well as a nice label to make sure everyone always knows you’re different.
This reality is what Gabor attempts to approach with his notion of a myth of ‘normal’: what it is that we consider normal, does in fact not really exist at all. There is no normality in humans, other than simply being human. “Normal”, in this context, is thus much more of a social expectation than a state of being. One example he uses, which I have sampled in the song, is that of schizophrenics who receive widely different treatments in modern Western societies than they do in tribal, communal societies. Schizophrenics will typically be shun in the former and treated as problematic, while valued and accepted for who they are in the latter (I shouldn’t have to tell here which of the two has the more detrimental effect on a person’s wellbeing.)
I have argued on the album’s write-up (link, again) that how we typically understand mental health today remains deeply rooted in Enlightenment era thinking, and the development of the medical sciences during the 19th century to include normatively divergent mental states as a category of specific illnesses to be treated. With this mindset, treating mental health often means “normalizing” the individual to better fit the society in which they are expected to be a well-functioning laborer. Yet being a laborer in our very demanding capitalist systems often create the very symptoms that we then categorize as making us ‘different’. So our ‘normality’ (as in our nature) is negatively affected by a system that has imposed its own definition of normality, meaning that who we really are in most cases cannot be brought forth, because it is either seen as undesirable, or is distorted to the point that it becomes undesirable; such is the predicament of life under modernity.
I really liked Gabor’s analysis regarding our understanding of human nature as compared to that of zebras, so I will leave the quote here in full, from an interview he once did, because I believe it complements very well the theme of the album, and the notion of normality and human nature:
So every creature, including human beings, evolved in a certain natural environment. And we adapted … Our evolution itself was a series of adaptations to that natural environment. If you wanted to study a zebra, would you study the zebra in a zoo behind a cage? If you want to understand the natural, the true nature of the zebra, where would you study the zebra? You’d study one in the Savannah, or wherever he or she lives, in its natural environment. Human beings evolved over millions of years, as we know, over hundreds of thousands of years. And even in the existence of her own species, homo sapiens, we’ve been around for 150, 200,000 years. For the vast majority of that time we lived out in nature in small band hunter-gatherer groups.
That’s where we evolved, that’s where our nature was formed in response to nature. So studying human beings today and deriving conclusions about human nature from studying human beings in civilization, conditions of civilization, is like studying zebras in a zoo. We’re so divorced from our natural environment. A civilization—which of course has many achievements, advances, to its credit, going back to ancient times—is a new blip in human life. So even if our own species– if we’ve existed for a whole hour, then civilization is about 5 minutes of that hour, 5 or 10 minutes. And in those conditions of nature, our essence was to live connected to nature, to live connected to each other, in a communal, collaborative setting where children were always with their parents, where children’s needs were not frustrated but they were met, and where it wasn’t this belief that life is all about individual people competing aggressively and selfishly against one another.
That’s not how it evolved. So modern society has come as far away from our natural way of being as possible, and that invariably imposes pathology on people because our needs are no longer being met. The real challenge that we face as a civilization, and I’d say under globalized capitalism, as the world’s civilization is … Can we create societies in ways of being that incorporate the achievements and the findings and benefits of modern science and modern technology and modern forms of social organization with our evolution-determined needs and nature? So that’s the challenge that we face. Under present society, that challenge is woefully underappreciated, and this is why there’s so much suffering.
From human decentered to human centered living, secluded from all else; there lies the core of much of our grievances, our pains, and our very plausible incoming extinction. Gabor Maté remains today a gem and a beacon of sanity in an ocean of deafening insanity (and a big thank you to him for giving me the right to sample him in the song).
Broken Continuum
The idea for the song Broken Continuum came as I was reading the book Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress by author Christopher Ryan. This is a book that perfectly encapsulates and describes, based on a whole array of anthropological research, the ways in which modernity is essentially killing our species and making us miserable in the process (am I beating a dead horse yet?)
The name of the song comes from this one passage from the book that goes:
The continuum has been broken because the human animal no longer lives in a human world. We live in a world created by and for institutions that thrive on commerce, not human beings that thrive on community, laughter, and leisure.
The continuum that Ryan talks about is the same one that Gabor Maté mentions in the interview I quoted: for the vast majority of the existence of our species, we humans lived in relative (not perfect) harmony with our environment, yet we no longer do and the consequences are many and dire. If we managed to survive as as species for 95% of our existence - hundreds of thousands of years - as hunter-gatherers, yet have now managed to basically destroy our habitat in the span of a few centuries, can we really argue that progress has been a net positive? Maybe what we are experiencing today is rather the way (and I pardon any potential trauma triggers) an addict might experience the last minutes of their lives as they overdose on their drug of choice; a sort of lethal frenzy concluding a long lived life that unfortunately spiraled out of control.
The way Ryan puts it: “Civilization is like a hole our clever species dug and then promptly fell into.”, and this quote has always stuck with me ever since reading it (and an altered version of it is even part of the lyrics of the song). If we then return to the ideas brought fourth in for example Død Mand Er God Gødning: we fall in a whole, possibly a grave, yet maybe this is where home in a way truly is? I hope this doesn’t get understood as a romanticizing of death or suicide, but rather as a twist on how we can understand hope in a hopeless world. We come from the ground, only to experience a completely distorted version of life, entirely disconnected from our nature and headed for mass extinction, so when we return to the ground upon our death, it could be seen as a place that is in some ways more of a home than what we call home in modern life. If life under modernity is plagued by misery and alienation, well then returning to the ground to serve as fertile ground for the grass we love, the flowers we enjoy, or the trees under, in, or on which many living species’ seek shelter, it could be argued that this is maybe our most elemental calling. We can destroy the Earth in life, but we can also serve it in death (granted we aren’t buried in fancy chapels).
I’d say it’s fitting that Broken Continuum is probably the gloomiest song on the album, because it is also lyrically the most sobering one. As we broke the continuum of our living, there isn’t much left to call home. In many ways all we can do is find hope amidst hopelessness. This sentiment I outlined in these few spoken lines in the song:
It turns out, there is no such thing as death
It is but the salvation of the lost
For the human animal no longer in a human world
For the ones led astray from joy and communion
Uncivilization
Uncivilization does not really have any lyrics per say, although it has two different segments of spoken words. The first one is a sampled reading of my favorite passage from the Dark Mountain Manifesto, which stresses out the importance for artists to recognize our antagonism, our last social taboo, being that of civilization itself.
The second part is a reading by yours truly of a poem I wrote a while back, thematically very much in the same vein as the rest of the album. Together with the text from the manifesto, I believe the two compliment each other well, and with the rest of the song tie together the entirety of the album. The only screaming you’ll hear have no words - they’re simply very primal screams that in themselves attempt to capture this essence of the ‘uncivilized’. This is not to be understood in the way that Western colonial ideology still today frames other cultures it considers inferior, but rather a rejection of language, of conventions, of ‘proper’ expression. A scream is a scream; we all scream at times, it’s a deeply human - even animalistic - sense of expression. Often, it needs no words, yet we can find in it more truth and sense than we can do with words.
So Uncivilization - together with the rest of the album - is my attempt at engaging with what the Dark Mountain Project calls “Uncivilized art”. What is Uncivilised art you may ask? Well, on this note I will leave you with the “eight principles of uncivilization”, the framework laid forward in the Dark Mountain Manifesto, and maybe this will help explain the big picture of what Enlightenment - as an art project on top of a political one - is all about:
We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.
We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.
We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.
We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.
Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.
We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.
We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.
If you have read this far, I hope this has helped shed some light on the idea behind the album. I invite all of you to have a go at some form of uncivilized art, to use your own personal forms of expression to tell the stories that so urgently need to be told. I firmly believe in the power of art to change the minds of people - to sneak up behind their egos and appeal to their sensibilities. Good art can ‘force’ the subject to think critically without hurting the ego, without coming across as confrontational or threatening. Good art can change the way we even see the world, the way we see ourselves and understand ourselves in the world.
Listen to Enlightenment where you usually find your music.
Links to Spotify and Bandcamp here.
Thank you.
Strandhem
April 2024