Jul 16
i saw go before me, a great impossible thing.
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i saw go before me, a great impossible thing.
'I know'. She sings in a way that makes the stars vibrate again: make room in hell, ethel cain, new demo ♡
𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐥 𝐜𝐚𝐢𝐧 - make room in hell (demo) i saw go before me, a great impossible thing sensual and concrete splitting me open renders me obs
While the work on musical textures in Perverts is fascinating, what I missed was her voice—the vocal lyricism of the Ethel Cain of the past, swallowed in Perverts by an anemic minimalism and Baudrillard's negative philosophy. That lyricism finally resurfaces in this new demo, with those heartbreaking and sublime "I know" moments.
Perverts is a reflection of her dark winter of 2023-2024, whose torments were evident in her posts on Tumblr. She descended into a closure of communication and faith in others. By the end of the winter, she left Tumblr, and Perverts mirrors this closure, with the repetitive sounds of machines replacing the vocals. Perverts is a reflection of this dark solipsism. The abandonment of singing is the abandonment of giving oneself to others. (The overall tone of the EP plays into this—without revisiting the fascinating work on musical textures, Hayden mentions that this EP also functions like a showcase for creating film music.) The redundant noise of the machines is the soliloquy of the masturbator, lost in their labyrinth—the maze—whose dangers she had already warned of in her YouTube video, The Ring, the Great Dark, and Proximity to God:
"One can venture into the hole but will enter a perpetual sinking if one neglects to exit in time. They will enter the maze and become stuck forever."
Only Amber Waves escapes this closure, with luminous vocals reclaiming their place over the mechanical noise that dominates the rest of the EP.
And now, this new vibrant singing demo ♡
"They cry, you don’t have to go
My love
I know."
My cover of “Make Room In Hell” by Ethel Cain, produced and sung by yours truly <3
Hope you enjoy!!
(Cover art also by me!)
i’ll never forgive myself for not listening to this sooner. need to listen to the rest of ethel cains soundcloud asap
'The Oak Tree. Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?' - Orlando, Virginia Woolf
@vacillator: 'seeing old florida and my favorite grove of live oaks under a blanket of snow has been the most surreal experience of my life'
vacillator: 'haven’t slept in 48 hours, thinking about oak trees'
Audiobook: Pippa Nixon reads Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Penguin Classics Audiobooks. Available on Audible. 8 hours.
"Braced and strung up by the present moment she was also strangely afraid, as if whenever the gulf of time gaped and let a second through some unknown danger might come with it. The tension was too relentless and too rigorous to be endured long without discomfort. She walked more briskly than she liked, as if her legs were moved for her, through the garden and out into the park. Here she forced herself, by a great effort, to stop by the carpenter’s shop, and to stand stock-still watching Joe Stubbs fashion a cart wheel. She was standing with her eye fixed on his hand when the quarter struck. It hurtled through her like a meteor, so hot that no fingers can hold it. She saw with disgusting vividness that the thumb on Joe’s right hand was without a finger nail and there was a raised saucer of pink flesh where the nail should have been. The sight was so repulsive that she felt faint for a moment, but in that moment’s darkness, when her eyelids flickered, she was relieved of the pressure of the present. There was something strange in the shadow that the flicker of her eyes cast, something which (as anyone can test for himself by looking now at the sky) is always absent from the present — whence its terror, its nondescript character — something one trembles to pin through the body with a name and call beauty, for it has no body, is as a shadow without substance or quality of its own, yet has the power to change whatever it adds itself to. This shadow now, while she flickered her eye in her faintness in the carpenter’s shop, stole out, and attaching itself to the innumerable sights she had been receiving, composed them into something tolerable, comprehensible. Her mind began to toss like the sea. Yes, she thought, heaving a deep sigh of relief, as she turned from the carpenter’s shop to climb the hill, I can begin to live again. I am by the Serpentine, she thought, the little boat is climbing through the white arch of a thousand deaths. I am about to understand . . .
Those were her words, spoken quite distinctly, but we cannot conceal the fact that she was now a very indifferent witness to the truth of what was before her and might easily have mistaken a sheep for a cow, or an old man called Smith for one who was called Jones and was no relation of his whatever. For the shadow of faintness which the thumb without a nail had cast had deepened now, at the back of her brain (which is the part furthest from sight), into a pool where things dwell in darkness so deep that what they are we scarcely know. She now looked down into this pool or sea in which everything is reflected — and, indeed, some say that all our most violent passions, and art and religion, are the reflections which we see in the dark hollow at the back of the head when the visible world is obscured for the time. She looked there now, long, deeply, profoundly, and immediately the ferny path up the hill along which she was walking became not entirely a path, but partly the Serpentine; the hawthorn bushes were partly ladies and gentlemen sitting with card-cases and gold-mounted canes; the sheep were partly tall Mayfair houses; everything was partly something else, as if her mind had become a forest with glades branching here and there; things came nearer, and further, and mingled and separated and made the strangest alliances and combinations in an incessant chequer of light and shade. Except when Canute, the elk-hound, chased a rabbit and so reminded her that it must be about half past four — it was indeed twenty-three minutes to six — she forgot the time.
The ferny path led, with many turns and windings, higher and higher to the oak tree, which stood on the top. The tree had grown bigger, sturdier, and more knotted since she had known it, somewhere about the year 1588, but it was still in the prime of life. The little sharply frilled leaves were still fluttering thickly on its branches. Flinging herself on the ground, she felt the bones of the tree running out like ribs from a spine this way and that beneath her. She liked to think that she was riding the back of the world. She liked to attach herself to something hard. As she flung herself down a little square book bound in red cloth fell from the breast of her leather jacket — her poem ‘The Oak Tree’. ‘I should have brought a trowel,’ she reflected. The earth was so shallow over the roots that it seemed doubtful if she could do as she meant and bury the book here. Besides, the dogs would dig it up. No luck ever attends these symbolical celebrations, she thought. Perhaps it would be as well then to do without them. She had a little speech on the tip of her tongue which she meant to speak over the book as she buried it. (It was a copy of the first edition, signed by author and artist.) ‘I bury this as a tribute,’ she was going to have said, ‘a return to the land of what the land has given me,’ but Lord! once one began mouthing words aloud, how silly they sounded! She was reminded of old Greene getting upon a platform the other day comparing her with Milton (save for his blindness) and handing her a cheque for two hundred guineas. She had thought then, of the oak tree here on its hill, and what has that got to do with this, she had wondered? What has praise and fame to do with poetry? What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself — a voice answering a voice. What could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown horses standing at the gate, neck to neck, and the smithy and the kitchen and the fields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and the garden blowing irises and fritillaries?
So she let her book lie unburied and dishevelled on the ground, and watched the vast view, varied like an ocean floor this evening with the sun lightening it and the shadows darkening it. There was a village with a church tower among elm trees; a grey domed manor house in a park; a spark of light burning on some glass-house; a farmyard with yellow corn stacks. The fields were marked with black tree clumps, and beyond the fields stretched long woodlands, and there was the gleam of a river, and then hills again. In the far distance Snowdon’s crags broke white among the clouds; she saw the far Scottish hills and the wild tides that swirl about the Hebrides. She listened for the sound of gun-firing out at sea. No — only the wind blew. There was no war to-day. Drake had gone; Nelson had gone. ‘And there’, she thought, letting her eyes, which had been looking at these far distances, drop once more to the land beneath her, ‘was my land once: that Castle between the downs was mine; and all that moor running almost to the sea was mine.’ Here the landscape (it must have been some trick of the fading light) shook itself, heaped itself, let all this encumbrance of houses, castles, and woods slide off its tent-shaped sides. The bare mountains of Turkey were before her. It was blazing noon. She looked straight at the baked hill-side. Goats cropped the sandy tufts at her feet. An eagle soared above. The raucous voice of old Rustum, the gipsy, croaked in her ears, ‘What is your antiquity and your race, and your possessions compared with this? What do you need with four hundred bedrooms and silver lids on all your dishes, and housemaids dusting?’
At this moment some church clock chimed in the valley. The tent-like landscape collapsed and fell. The present showered down upon her head once more, but now that the light was fading, gentlier than before, calling into view nothing detailed, nothing small, but only misty fields, cottages with lamps in them, the slumbering bulk of a wood, and a fan-shaped light pushing the darkness before it along some lane. Whether it had struck nine, ten, or eleven, she could not say. Night had come — night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day. It was not necessary to faint now in order to look deep into the darkness where things shape themselves and to see in the pool of the mind now Shakespeare, now a girl in Russian trousers, now a toy boat on the Serpentine, and then the Atlantic itself, where it storms in great waves past Cape Horn. She looked into the darkness." ...
. . .
@mothercain: "The Consequence of Audience
As I went there through the long, long wood, I felt no-thing and I was no-thing and I was at ease. The grey ash trees and their mottled plumage were as one with each other, curving and branching to form a ceiling overhead. There was wide separation between trunks, creating vast corridors stretching off in all directions before me, behind me, all around me. O, what praise I could sing of that never-ending dusk fall I spent between those oaks! None came with me, none came upon me, for I was alone and I was at ease. Yet came the day the trees broke, the corridor ended, and I was thrust upon the rocky expanse that was the Great Dark. There I saw first face and heard footstep, few and far between, but I was no longer alone. It was a shameful deed to carry these two naked hands as they clenched hotly, now in full display for all to see. I had never noticed them in the wood, for I was at ease. Here, the taut skin seemed to stretch and sweat, almost glowing, as if exasperated of their own grip. For as I wandered the Great Dark, there was not but grey, barren rock as far as any eye could see. It did make a passerby out of an observer. I saw them trudge by, fingers dipped into their open mouths desperate for wetness, the lolled tongue. There, in the wood, I was the watcher, but here I am nothing but displacing air. Yet, within the smothering toil of my apathy, I had heard the bell. Murmur of God between their slick, bent fingers ruffled the hair on the back of my neck. My muscles groaned against the weight of the skin around them, aching to be set loose. All at once, I saw, from where I stood, there rose a great dome atop a hill on the horizon before me. Yes, I saw it there with mine own two eyes! The white exterior peered at me with flat orifices obscured through the mist, barely distinguishable from the dark sky behind it, as though all the world beyond the dome was cut from the same slab, only slightly effaced. The convex roof sat atop a disk, held up by great ionic pillars circling the temple. Steps radiated out and down the slope, like ripples in a pond escaping a dropped stone. It was greater than life, greater than the wood, greater than all else which filled this dark, and my gullible delight was that it was all mine. Yes, all mine! One could follow me to it but they could not follow me in. My hands stretched outwards with an audible cracking in the bone as I crept forward there. I could not tell you the rest. I would not even attempt, for it would change no-thing. To know if I did go completely naked into the theater of the divine. If I did need for no-thing, want for no-thing. If I was then full to the brim, cylindrical pull slid through my gaping jaw into my endless throat. If I saw it there, shimmering through the veil like pearlescent oil over crystal water. If it heard me singing with every atom that formed me, through every orifice and wound I had, polytonal in my begging for it to complete me with the fifth. If it looked into me, saw how I needed to know what God knows and to be with him. If it spoke back to me in flat dissonance, “how couldn’t ye?” It would be of no good to speak these things to you. In what way I was still returned to the ground, even if beneath it, intact with my puerile need to repeat my-self and my mistakes. Who would not climb the wall for a peer over the edge? The cautionary tale is the fool’s errand, and I am no fool. I am as my hands are; twisting in on themselves and bursting at the seams. I can-not contain the ache for sensation, just as I could not contain the grief as I fell, nor the agony as I crawled my way back to this rocky countryside, and lo! I am on my way there again now. I am, I am, I am! But I will not tell you the visceral details, as you already know them. You all do. It’s happening to every-body."
. . .
mothercain-deactivated20231124: dark oak brown, potato sack beige, faded paper yellow, rust red…… the color palette of earth and age is what i use to paint my life…….. yep……..
. . .
'a voice answering a voice', new song by ethel cain, make room in hell:
𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐥 𝐜𝐚𝐢𝐧 - make room in hell (demo) i saw go before me, a great impossible thing sensual and concrete splitting me open renders me obs
"someone who took you on a journey, right to the edge of the abyss, of the nightmare, of the unknown, and says: 'Look.'"
Ethel Cain: "I don't really care about reasons. I care about 'does it enrapture'"
ethel cain - make room in hell (demo)
Roberto Benigni: "Freud explains everything, and Fellini didn’t like those who are content with merely explaining. 'It’s like this, or like that…' He loved Jung a lot because he was like a farmer, a peasant, a magician. He was someone who took you on a journey… Jung takes you by the hand, right to the edge of the abyss, of the nightmare, of the unknown, and says: 'Look.'"
(Excerpt from Fellini: I Am a Big Liar, Damian Pettigrew, Arte)
N. T. Binh, to Michel Ciment: "I’d like to return to the way you explain the mix between the need for rationality and the taste for the imaginary in your work…"
Michel Ciment: "I can take an interest in filmmakers of rationality, but one that can be pushed to such an extreme that it tips into the irrational. Many great 19th-century realist writers (Balzac, Théophile Gautier, Maupassant, Mérimée, and others) explored that moment when extreme rationality collides with what seems incomprehensible and shifts into madness or the fantastic. (…)
All of this coexists within me: a taste for rationality and for the fantastic. (…) The notion of myth is intrinsic to humanity. This ties into my interest in Boorman: mythological thought. (…) And his entire cinema is Jungian—it’s a cinema of archetypes, of dreams, of the imagination, while still retaining a sense of realism. In psychoanalysis, the great rupture between Freud and Jung hinges on this very issue. David Cronenberg illustrated it remarkably in A Dangerous Method, with its brilliant Mankiewicz-like dialogues and intellectual debates between the two psychoanalysts. I had discussed it with Cronenberg.
In my view, with filmmakers of Jewish origin (like Kubrick, Polanski, or Cronenberg), rationality prevails. Even when they make fantastic films, they are always governed by a rational thought process. Whereas filmmakers with a Christian background tend to be Jungian, where imagination takes precedence. I think of Fellini, Malick, Boorman, David Lynch. It’s a radically different orientation, even though all of them engage with the fantastic."
(Le cinéma en partage, Editions Rivages)
Ethel Cain: "I don't really care about reasons. I care about 'does it feel good, does it feel true, does it invigorate, does it inspire, does it captivate, does it enrapture'… So sometimes, almost, reading… the explanations, for certain things, make me like it less."
Ethel Cain: Étienne-Louis Boullée - Tour of my art books part 2 (YouTube) Wonder of Étienne-Louis Boullée Film: The Belly of an Architect (
'The world is deep, and deeper than the day could read'
'O human! Take heed! What saith deep midnight’s voice indeed? “I slept my sleep—, “From deepest dream I’ve woke, and plead:— “The world is deep, “And deeper than the day could read. “Deep is its woe—, “Joy—deeper still than grief can be: “Woe saith: Hence! Go! “But joys all want eternity-, “-Want deep, profound eternity!”’
THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA 'THE DRUNKEN SONG’ Friedrich Nietzsche
Waltraud Meier: O Mensch! Gieb acht! Symphony no 3. (Gustav Mahler)
"someone who took you on a journey, right to the edge of the abyss, of the nightmare, of the unknown, and says: 'Look.'"
Fellini, David Lynch, Ethel Cain - make room in hell:
💬 0 🔁 4 ❤️ 12 · David Lynch: 'We don’t realize how vast the mind is. It’s a beautiful place, but sometimes, it can be completely dark.' ·
