The Sublime, Sleep Token and The Teeth of God: a meaningless, incomplete and meager rambling about meaning
(regular font quotes are from the graphic novel, italics from the ToG poem, bold from the ToG tour interludes)
| I'm turning reblogs on but would like to ask that, if you happen to have additional thoughts on this, please don't add onto my post when you reblog. Feel free to ramble in the tags/comments or make your own post, but I'd like to keep this as a standalone post on the topic, so it's just my own thoughts. Thank you. |
The sublime is a bit of a slippery concept, but Wikipedia concisely describes it as referring “to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation”. One of the most famous representations of the sublime is Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which links the concept to nature. In short, journeys to ‘extreme’ and ‘unexplored’ places prompted a distinction to form between what is seen as simple beauty and what is sublime. Binary oppositions or at least strong contrasts were drawn between humans and nature (boundedness-boundlessness, form-formlessness) and questions of the physical/metaphysical, of transgression and of life and death were explored. Awe and admiration and fear and attraction can all be attributed to reactions and representations, as well as the fear of annihilation. People seem to have come face to face with their own finite nature and were forced to consider inconsiderable concepts such as infinity and their own position in relation to that. But that’s probably enough fancy-speak. The sublime is indescribable and it makes you feel all sorts of things that may be contradictory. While you may try and grasp it, you ultimately cannot because it’s beyond the reach of understanding. Which is very much like the lunar anomaly. It’s inexplicable, it resulted in life and existence that cannot be categorized and it also threatens to destroy you.
If we look at it this way, The Director is looking for a stable point of reference in the unknowable because that's all that there is: “We now find ourselves consumed by the pursuit of understanding - it is truly all that we have left.”
He wants to understand. Not only that, he is consumed by it. He defines it as a pursuit, like a chase or, might I say, a hunt. He is hunting something - meaning - and that same thing is hunting him in turn. He describes being preoccupied, “terrified”, by what is “beyond” the “limitless tide”, you could say, of the “void beyond”. According to him, if he were to survive this encounter, he would become unrecognizable, “[a]n echo stuck in the throat of a dead god”. He would be consumed but not quite because he would be stuck, an echo, and it's a dead god. All in all, it’s an impossible state.
He later writes about "god": “can you see him biting into you,” “all these years you have hunted him and reached for him,” “he opens his mouth wide” and “I am so scared will you let me be the last human I understand now I am the teeth of god”. He is the teeth, “the line between”. He understands, he has become “the beholder,” but he can’t express of what; it’s beyond his human capacity: “I finally understand now I do I understand but will you let me keep my human fear will you let me” and “I am human and humans are always human and always scared because being human makes us scared and being scared makes us human”. He wants to retain his ability to fear, even as he has presumably experienced and now attempts to describe the indescribable. The dichotomy of fear and beauty appears here: “we spilled his paradise over the earth and danced within it such a beautiful dance horror would leap and dance with us”. Even as he casually mentions doing impossible things and the presence of a god and death and frozen stars and hot blood, it’s still humans who evoke this other impossible event, something close to the sublime. In this way, he also marks fear as an aspect of what gives meaning, at least to human existence. But other than that, he has lost himself in the pursuit of understanding because it’s an impossible thing. You can’t capture meaning, you can’t express it. Meaning can't be given meaning through language or any meaningful container, it's meaningless, as is trying to achieve it.
As he earlier set out, he had “the hope that we would at least be able to discern some kind of meaningful understanding of what has happened”. He not only wants to understand, he wants it to be meaningful, which is an entirely impossible task, destined to fail. “The last precious remnants of humanity extinguished in the name of what makes us human to begin with. To shed what light we have left on this sea of the unknown”. Here, he defines the search for understanding as another markedly human thing, even as it is futile and results in destruction, something which he may have already begun to realize. He also writes, “what humanity once was … we too sought meaning through constant friction and unending movement, compelled by some core motive force that drives us to bring ourselves to bear on the world and manifest our own perceptions”. Humans search for meaning and that means science, war, art, and so many more things. It means trying to place yourself within existence, means finding a point of reference in the face of the vast unknowable. It means that we “spend out lives trying to drag forth some semblance of meaning from beneath death’s thick, dark shadow”. “Without death and our finite nature we would be stripped of all meaning,” but: “we do not die because it gives our lives meaning. We die because this is the way of all things. And in the end, is that not all we are?”, so death also can’t be meaning and it’s not the only unknowable. “One does not need to look as far as the end of their own life to be confronted with the unknowable,” because: “Look around you, about what can you truly be certain?”. “Death is merely … another cadence in this terribly beautiful symphony you sing to hopelessly,” it’s part of existence, part of meaning, but it’s not all. But there is hope again: death “is asking you to dance with both [hope and fear], after all”.
The Director writes, because he’s human and he wants to understand, “We must know what it is to become of us,” but he can’t and he later arrives at this knowledge. He will keep hunting and being hunted, the same as god has bitten into you and it cracked his teeth and you bite through the stars and dance and god opens his mouth wide-
I'd also like to go ahead and point out that the lines, "the line between," if you like, blur. He writes, "we spilled his paradise over the earth," but also "without us there was only silence but our blood made the flowers grow god spilled his blood over paradise". Who spilled what, then? If "his" blood spilled over paradise but "our" blood made the flowers grow, then could it be that they're one and the same? And "even when we are just tendrils we were always tendrils we could touch everything even things god did not want us to touch that is why he left us here that is why he thought we were ugly he could not wrap his tendrils around every part of us," but "you want his blood he made you with veins inside you like tendrils we dance through his veins". If you are like god but god thought you were ugly but your blood, or god's blood, made flowers grow, and your dance made beauty and horror leap, and you can spill the blood of god and "as we bite through the stars and dance and he opens his mouth wide I am so scared will you let me be the last human I understand now I am the teeth of god," then could it be that the consuming makes you, a human, both human and god, the search for meaning and understanding because you are bounded and boundless at the same time and everything and nothing and creator and created. You consume and are consumed and you are a human and a god and you bite into what is human but what is human won't stop being human, so you don't stop being human and you're scared and you make beauty and experience things you can't understand or describe and you are ultimately consumed by it because it's the way of all things.
But also considering other texts, the whole thing becomes even hazier, which I attribute to the fact that this whole body of text, Sleep Token's discography and their messages, are created by humans. They won't create a perfectly seamless narrative and I think expecting or claiming that misunderstands certain things, but again, I don't claim to hold the truth or the "one true meaning" because there is no such thing. It's also entirely possible, if not very likely, that not all texts are related. But we can still read them against each other because Vessel often deals with the same concepts, which I'd say shows how your approach or understanding can change with time or even from one moment to the next, especially since language will always be inaccurate and inefficient for describing the human condition.
The 2021 Heavy Music Awards featured this: "It follows us wherever we go. We were in love. We are in love. It is what floats above us as we try to sleep. It is what stands beside us as we gaze into nothingness. It is drowning us. It is eating us alive." It defines love as accompanying us, but also as something that drowns us and eats us alive. Multiple things can be consuming us, it seems, which is entirely possible. "Remind me, we’re both dying to find out what happens when we die. We’re both scared of being. We’re both stolen pieces of each other. We’re both exploring our own frontiers of grief. We’re both just strangers. We’re both just particles. We’re both so lost in what it means to be lost." Death appears here again, so does meaning-making, and so does being made of different pieces, being multi-faceted. Again, being scared is mentioned, being scared of being. It can be being scared that you don't understand or that you never will because that is being human. Fear of the unknown and of death, of nothingness, of meaning and of meaninglessness.
The Fall For Me music video message goes to say, "I am no god". It also says, "I am afraid. Are you afraid?" and "I want to understand what it is to let go".
So, and this sums up most of this: I am not god. I am human because I am afraid. I want to understand.