Yahweh or the Highway

Obscene Testimony in the Era of Epstein

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

Epstein.

Yesterday, feeling overwhelmed, I tried to reorient myself within this sick, fucked up story.

I went back and watched some interviews with Julie K. Brown, the Miami-Herald journalist who (re) broke the Epstein story in November 2018, leading directly to Epstein’s arrest in the following July.

However, the problem with “orienting yourself” in all this is that it’s like orienting yourself in a hurricane. The big picture is helpful, but in some way disorients you to the details, which come flying at you unannounced like some decapitating shingle in a category 5.

The brutality of the story is too much to bear. On the one hand, it is good that it is so. Some things, as Falkner says, should be unbearable:

“Some things you must always be unable to bear… you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame… Not for kudos and not for cash, not for your picture in the paper nor the money in the bank either…”

However, I think we have to be very careful about what becomes unspeakable, because strangely, this sets up a structure that benefits the abuser. There is a curious, poisonous effect that the very obscenity of predatory desire that must be named, limits or distorts the uptake that such testimony may receive.

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In another piece in which I’m writing about Joanna Newsom’s Milk-Eyed Mender, I employ the metaphor of the album or the song as a phenomenological prism, something like a kind of psychological technology to help us explore our inner lives, and something about the weird structure of intersubjectivity and symbolic life, etc.

This essay is a companion piece to that one, employing its method and acting as a counterbalance to its overbearing sweetness. Here I want to consider Yahweh or the Highway, the album by Arab on Radar.

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In SF CityBeat writer Peter Hoskins’ interview with Arab on Radar singer Mr. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, there is one exchange which is probably relevant for our discussion here,

Hoskins: One thing I always couldn’t wrap my head around was whether you guys were making weird, sick jokes or if your perverted, often disturbing lyrics were sincere. Do you consider it a joke? Or something more sincere? Or maybe a mix of the two?

Mr. PTSD: I have always viewed the lyrics as a very important Public Service Announcement for the mentally ill.

This album is normally treated as a kind of pure provocation, and I think that ignores the really interesting diagnostic work that is being done in the lyrics, and the very interesting phenomenological work that is being done in the chaotic and intense musical expression - in a work I take to be about abuse. In particular, I want to address the obscenity of the album and treat it not as some kind of pure excess or spectacle, but rather a lens which is required to see clearly the structures of abuse which it diagnoses, and the psychological weapons of the abuser.

I’m reminded of the scene from The Exorcist, where coming up the stairs, the doctors and the priest, and the mother (the whole official, straight world with its authorities, both ethical and epistemological), encounter the possessed girl writhing uncontrollably in her bed. I’m sure it’s commonplace to point out the tragic sexual connotations of the scene. The girl begins to shout really upsetting sexual obscenities. Here the film echoes (perhaps consciously, perhaps not) something dark about real abuse, which is the way predatory adult desires colonize the mind of the victim - Regan’s sexual proposition is a dark ventriloquism, but it is also plausibly testimony, which embodies its truth though its own forbidden form, the obscene.

Yahweh or the Highway is doing something like this. This is a testimony which originates in the forbidden places of the body,

My nuts are a pressure cooker.

But is managed and suppressed by cognition,

My mind is a muffler.

The mind is downstream and acts to suppress and contain.

The images here are disturbing. Read on with care.

The opening section of the first song, My Mind is a Muffler, reads as the Epstein files rendered in poetry.

Sometimes I just gotta jerk off,

my nuts are a pressure cooker,

my lymph nodes are swollen laughter,

canker sores in traffic, sponge bath his habits.

Here, sexuality is in some sense perverted and turned into a painful condition like a canker sore or some kind of dirt or stain which needs to be bathed away.

Sometimes I just gotta watch her jerk off my mentor.

The word “mentor”, as it is used here, is gutwrenching.

This speaks to the way in which the abused are often coerced into participation. Again, this is the Epstein files rendered in the abstraction of poetry, but the brutality of this image might be the cost of its existence as a kind of artistic testimony.

They blamed me for eating the dirt.

I just lack the nutrients found in the American meal

The album, it seems to me, again and again inverts the moral claims of those who occupy the anti-obscenity position. There’s something in the dirt which is lacking in the American diet - artistically, spiritually, and morally. One is better off eating dirt than consuming the hegemonic package.

Sex offenders seek salvation in batting practice

We’re warned off, in some sense, the more we think about this song from seeing Epstein, et al., as embodying a form of primarily elite nihilism. This take seems to be an emerging orthodoxy. The position is basically:

Every social and moral order has an obscene shadow element, such that public virtue is a mask, and underneath it a face of sadistic obscenity. This breeds elite nihilism - which then breeds abuse.

I basically agree that any moral order has an obscene core which it publicly disavows, but we ought to be careful seeing this as a purely elite phenomenon. Obviously, Epstein’s money and connections shielded him from accountability. But the dark promise of our system is spread out pretty “democratically”. Just as anyone can drop in the MET, or fly in an airplane, today the public may also take part in the most venerable of aristocratic pastimes, obscene cruelty.

***

I am punished by her sober etiquette.

This insight is well understood in politics, where respectability acts as a kind of filter which forbids the expression of political truths, particularly in their proper emotional register. And one thing that maybe is not as well appreciated is the symmetry between that and the logic of abuse and of abuse within families in particular, that a prohibition on obscenity can in many ways act as a prohibition on the naming of abuse.

And so here, we have Christian and perhaps specifically Catholic purity culture exposed and implicated, and not simply parodied.

In Semen on the Mount, you have the kind of obscene core of Christian purity culture put on display,

Ejaculation is a waste of valuable resources.

This is about controlling reproduction. Familiar.

Now we’re launched into a series of culture war attacks, also familiar:

your kids are not safe from us homosexuals,

your kids are controlled by the intellectuals,

your kids will dabble in the devilish stuff.

This is standard fare for Christian attacks on the wider culture.

The last line,

they will dream about their teacher’s muff,

The very vocabulary here betrays the speaker’s own deep ambivalence towards sex and sexuality. The discourse that is nominally dedicated to preserving the innocence of children, is itself obviously eaten away with forbidden and suppressed desires. So, the obscenity is embedded in the purity discourse. The poetry of Yahweh or the Highway isn’t enacting violence, it’s diagnosing and naming it, while refusing to step outside of the way it feels.

They say I blew the neighborhood bully,

I just wanted to compare his leg to mine.

This brings me back to Epstein and this certain analysis that I think is recurring, this notion that the elite consistently need to find more and more extreme ways of acting out their desire for pleasure. But I think we really miss the point of modernity after Madison Avenue, is that the jouissance of the whole culture is on life support, for everyone, not just the elites. And perhaps this is a recipe for widespread cruelty and exploitation. But to the extent we start looking for it “out there” on some island somewhere, instead of “in here” - at church, school, and in the home, we (to invert a phrase) are shocked by the plumage but still love the bird. Our ever growing discomfort with obscenity blocks the kind of intimacy with reality necessary to see such things clearly.