Genesis
Breyer P-Orridge,
More than a decade ago, I told you that you saved my life.
I was in
college. My roommate at the time had downloaded D.o.A: The Third and Final
Report of Throbbing Gristle to listen to while we worked on our calculus.
A few tracks
in, and the calculus was forgotten. We were both in awe—and increasingly
uneasy.
It was
Hamburger Lady that destroyed me. It was a “blind” listen for me—I knew almost
nothing about TG, and certainly not about the song. I missed most of the lyrics
on the first listen, at least with my conscious brain.
But not the
sound.
I knew the
next day when I came back from class that I would play it again. And that when
I did, I’d be crossing a bridge I couldn’t come back from.
I played
it. I listened. And for the first time in my life, I knew real fear. Real
horror. That which is unspeakable and splits sanity asunder.
I slept
with the lights on for a week. I went to and from class like a robot. I avoided
my dorm—because that was where the sounds had played. Every surface felt
sullied. Within the mundane, I began to perceive the nightmarish.
It wasn’t
like the world had been painted in different colours. It was like the surface
veneer of hygienic, safe, suburban apathy had been peeled back to expose the
rot underneath.
I finally saw
the truth of that rot:
People suffer.
And around
me, people were just walking on by, going about their lives, like it wasn’t
even there.
But I could
see it when I looked at them—the fear. The
fear is always there, when you peel back the surface.
They are
just so scared they can’t even look at it, stare it in the face, unflinching,
and declare that some things truly are unacceptable.
And that is
why the refrain of the human race is, “Shut
up. We don’t want to hear about it.”
And so,
suffering continues.
At first,
my reaction—beyond the fear, was hate. I had to keep obtaining new copies of D.o.A.
because I kept destroying them—even as physical objects, they frightened me. I
considered you a kind of aural terrorist. You’d caught me off guard. You’d used
sound as a weapon of sorts—you’d deliberately blasted apart my sense of safety.
But love
can look pretty similar to hate, and when I examined my violent internal
reaction, I dug deeper. I learned everything I could about your life and your
work.
Here, at
last, was someone who was deeply, unflinchingly honest about suffering in the world.
Here was
someone who would not shut up—whatever
efforts were made to silence you.
It’s been
more than a decade since I traveled to meet you and Lady Jaye.
It would be
hard to explain how magickal finding
out about you was. There was never a sense that I’d discovered someone new. The
sense was that I had at last identified a golden thread that had woven always
through my life, unseen, but tangible and ever-present.
While I was
delving into my past to prepare for my autism evaluation this past year, I
found an old essay I wrote for an ezine about my first trip to NYC in high
school, a couple years prior to discovering you and your work.
The essay
describes beautifully—too beautifully—the ugliness of parts of the city. To me,
at that time, even the squalor I encountered in the city’s slums was part of
its allure—suffering was mere ambiance, aesthetic. I had overlaid a perception
of the ascendant, the heroic, some secret dignity upon its every crumbling
brick, its every homeless citizen.
Reading it while
I prepped for my eval shook me. I had forgotten where I’d come from.
I’m not
sure I actually saw it until that moment. Before you came along and obliterated
my safe, serene surface world, I literally was a solipsistic empathy vacuum.
I had lived
in a suburban snow globe my whole life to that point. I had (and have) Theory
of Mind deficits. So when I stepped outside it during that school trip to NYC,
when I saw poverty and social neglect, I didn’t recognize it as suffering. I
was, in the most demeaning possible sense of the word, a tourist.
Listening
to TG was like having someone shove my head underwater. Hamburger Lady was an auditory
representation of the abject state of
the comatose burn victim’s experience—not just a description of her wounds. A
part of me was forced to mirror that state when I heard it.
I saw the
horrors you wanted me to open my eyes to from the inside. Your music was an
empathy shortcut.
Her
suffering was unbearable to me. I needed it to end. And I was as helpless to
end it as she was.
And so, I
discovered compassion—and rage, and heartbreak.
And then …
Psychic TV and Thee Majesty were there to pick up the pieces. Through your
positivity, your honesty, your declaration that we create ourselves—you helped
me find the courage to fight the horrors of modern existence in whatever tiny
ways I can.
When I was
still in high school, when I wrote that essay about NYC, I was on a nihilistic
path. I’d cared always to pursue what was beautiful, and what was true—but only
that.
There is a
quote I love from UG Krishnamurti: “All the accumulated knowledge,
experience, and suffering of mankind is inside you. You must build a huge
bonfire within you. Then you will become an individual. There is no other way.”
I had believed that such a bonfire would demolish all—that I would transcend this world,
shake it off, and abandon it to the ashes.
But in you, I saw someone who was dedicated to building that
bonfire, but who had rejected solipsism and indifference—who had chosen to care
for this world. You burn the dross, and protect what is most beautiful: true
will.
You showed
me the value of pursuing what is good.
I still have Theory of Mind deficits. But you taught me kindness.
You set me
free.
I don’t
know if there is any universe where our paths ran parallel. In this one, they
split, because I was still on that compromised path when we met. But I have
carried that golden thread with me every day of my life since, and have fought
to look unflinchingly in the face of suffering, and fight back.
Eventually,
it was enough to pull me onto a brighter path.
The young
person who fell down the rabbit hole thanked you for saving her life.
Today, I
want to thank you again. Time has not lessened my gratitude. It has deepened it
in ways I’d never have expected.
Every day
for the rest of my time here, I will continue to speak the truth, to be kind, to
fuel the bonfire, to create myself, and to set others free to do the same, to
honour my will and theirs, and to protect all that is authentic in this world.
So I’ll
conclude with the immortal words of The Beach Boys:
God only knows what I’d be without you.
I hardly
knew you, and you hardly knew I existed—and that is the kind of change you
forged in my soul. Gods only know how many lives you’ve changed as deeply as
mine. But if I am even a scrap of evidence, you can guess. In a pit of coal,
amid the suffering, the rot, the apathy, the malice and indifference of so
many, you are a diamond. The difference you make in this world is vital, deep, incandescent,
and beyond any measure.
