Pleasures of The Highest Sense

Techno music is seldom experienced as technological, but as a modern gateway to hedonism and transcendence.

After Ben and I got back from the party at around ten in the morning, I lay awake in bed, still coming down from MDMA, and thought about my grandmother for the first time in a while. There was no clear reason why she should have been on my mind, except that it was hot, dry hot, the way it was in LA the summer before she died. I thought of her as she was during the later years of her life, sitting in her red wheelchair, impeccably dressed, with her hair done like Queen Elizabeth. This was a woman who understood that respect was a matter of character as well as aesthetic. Often, she’d wear dark colors, like rock candy, or the Pacific Ocean—colors that could take her far from her house in Covina where she lived with her three daughters after the whole family immigrated here in the seventies.

I rarely ever saw her outside that house with its four empty beds, where my aunts and my mother used to sleep before they married and moved away. They tell me they spent their lives afraid of her, as she was caustic and difficult, and had the tendency to deliver terrifying judgments on one’s character that were brisk and decisive. Yet when I was a child, she was the woman who sang to my siblings and me stories about secret dynasties on the moon and made us egg tarts and shrimp chips, before kneading the dough eventually became too hard on her hands.

In the months before she died, I was living at my parents house, where I slept at ten, reread James Joyce, and swam regularly in the backyard pool as the fires swept the hills that summer and every summer since. On the weekends, we saw the Chinese gardens at the Huntington Library, and had lunch at the clubhouse with caviar and tea steeped in rose petals. We couldn’t talk much when we ate, and towards the end of summer, my mother began packing her meals in Tupperware to spend the night with my aunt and my grandmother at the house in Covina.

Towards the end, sitting up became too difficult for her, and she couldn’t leave her bed. She drank mashed-up vegetables from a straw, and whenever she needed to piss, my aunt and mother had to hoist her onto a yellow bucket beside her bed. When my father and I visited, I sometimes brought my cello and played the Bach Suites until the sound became too harsh on her ears. Mostly, we sat there and waited as she—what else?—woke up, ate, then fell back asleep.

One afternoon, my father sat beside her bed during the sort of ten-minute slots we took turns rotating. When he asked how he could pray for her, she looked at him and said, “I want to die.”

*

This was still on my mind by the time Ben and I got to Berghain, some six hours later. At the time, the club became for me what the Paris Opera had been for Proust. It hosted a ritualized gathering of the veterans of a globalized underground as Byzantine as Hollywood or New York publishing, and the kids of Europe’s demimonde, who were too interesting for what their futures had to offer. A typical Sunday produced a reliable cast of “types”—porn stars, drug dealers, PhD candidates, and Turkish exiles. In the summer when the garden opened up, you’d see, for instance, a gummi-fetishist walk in with a Balenciaga model, or a drag queen in stripper heels with a dancer from the Staatsballett.

That Sunday, by the time Ben and I arrived, the main hall of the club was full, dark because it had no windows, and humid because of a military-grade fog machine and other people’s sweat. At the entrance by the stairs stood a massive white statue of Dionysus, a stand-in for bodily hedonism in dialectic with the technological severity of the club’s mechanistic aesthetic, itself a disused power plant in Neoclassical drag. Adam X was playing, opening with the usual four/four beat associated with Techno, looped in perpetuity: one, two, one two, one two, one two. The foreground of the set was textured and repetitive, which pushed the mind to focus on subtle variations happening in the background: a drone, or a barely perceivable hi-hat. In fact, during the first ten minutes of the set, I was under the impression that nothing was changing, a fairly typical experience when first acclimating to the sound.

Techno is often identified by a rhythmic system at 120BPM, into which changes and revolutions are gradually introduced by a modification of individual components. If successful, it can enact a dramatic mobilization of sounds and bodies on the dance floor. Since its origins in Detroit in the late eighties, it remains the genre’s most resilient paradox that Techno is seldom experienced as technological, but rather as a gateway to bodily hedonism and spiritual transcendence.

Much of the genre’s appeal goes back to core tenets of Modernism, ever exemplified by the grid or lattice. In the rigidity of its structure, the grid leaves no room for the personal, in fact, crowds it out. In such a way, Modernists have always been eager to position their art as not “about” anything other than itself; as if by eliding, eschewing, or transcending representation and specificity, art arrives at an autonomous aesthetic. In The Sacred Wood, T.S. Eliot wrote, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

Yet, if Modernism professes to be an autonomous aesthetic, it’s really not the way people ever seem to talk about it. It’s usually its most devoted practitioners who lapse into notions that approach the metaphysical: Mind, Transcendence. “To approach the spiritual in art,” wrote Mondrian, “one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual.” Malevich: “It is from zero, that the true movement of being begins.” Suddenly, we’re not talking about the canvas or linguistics or systems aesthetics, but of God, of saints in the desert on a journey to the Over-Soul, not at all “modern” by any definition, but therein lies the paradox.

That the strictest of constraints can yield the most inaccessible of pleasures is, by now, a cliché familiar to BDSM practices as well as High Modernist painting. The endurance it demands makes it even more so attractive, as if the severity of the challenge guaranteed a rarefied ecstasy by the effort alone. At Berghain, a closing Techno set can run up to fifteen hours, soliciting considerable human effort that outpaces even some of the durational compositions by Minimalist and Fluxus composers in 1970s New York. Yet Techno is also exponentially more popular, itself a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide. To some of the most prominent Techno DJs I know, a set that lasts for one hour is considered “light,” two hours “enough to work with,” four hours “standard,” and eight to fourteen merely “a challenge” but curiously not “unreasonable.”

It’s perhaps by this logic that Techno makes people “lose their minds” at the rave, in the sense that the phrase is also used to mean maniacal. Like any marathon sport, submitting to such terms requires an agreement not to run away from repetition, exhaustion, boredom. It’s a choice, instead, to immerse yourself into it. After spending upwards of twenty hours in a single club, a combination of sustained sleep deprivation, drugs, and exhaustion from having not eaten contributes to a sophisticated delirium. As if in a meditative state, the conscious mind recedes. In the absence of conscious thought, the mind becomes vacant to receive the unknown. Here, it is possible to fall into multiple states of consciousness at once, like sleepwalking through a lucid dream. Only after the repeated breakdown and exhaustion of one’s restrictive faculties—what might be considered bodily system-failure—can the imagined life be permitted to flourish, completely uninhibited, at ten in the morning of some basement or club or warehouse scheduled for demolition, beyond dehydrated, skin slicked smooth by the salt of your sweat, glancing around to see if anyone else witnessed what had just taken place.

*

Admittedly, I didn’t go to these raves looking to find the materiality of sound returned back to itself along a syncopated system. I wanted transcendence. Between the years 2012 to 2018, I traveled the world looking for raves the way some surfers chase waves. Midnight in Hong Kong, Unter in New York, Concrete in Paris, Berghain in Berlin. I started running into the same people in different cities around the world, not unlike the tour schedules of DJs I saw most those years: Regis, Rødhåd, Ben Klock, Aurora Halal. To most of my friends, it became a curious eccentricity of mine, one which I felt reluctant to explain, which is to say it was personal. Over time, Techno came to embody both the ladder to the divine as well as a sanctuary from it—a “split” aesthetic I came to associate with Modernism, which mirrored the later years of my twenties when my mind started to split into territories that were increasingly irreconcilable, another thing I’m reluctant to explain except to the people who were there.

I thought frequently of Agnes Martin, who suffered from schizophrenia, which caused long interruptions to her painting career during which she abandoned New York for the desert of New Mexico. Her style, perhaps more than any painter of her generation, can be typified by lines and grids, though her practice deviates from her contemporaries by her insistence to draw each grid painstakingly by hand. Perhaps more idiosyncratically, Martin is also known for the expressiveness of her titles, such as “Friendship” or “Loving Love,” which could be taken as sentimental were it not for the sheer rigor of her practice.

For instance, a painting of blue stripes on white canvas is titled, “I Love The Whole World.” When I saw this painting for the first time in New York, I stood for almost an hour asking myself, What does she see that I can’t see? What does she know that I don’t know? Nothing in Martin’s practice would suggest this title to be ironic. Though other than the placid blue color used, nothing in the painting appears to signify love, or any of the most common notions associated with it. Rather, like a paranoid schizophrenic, the viewer can’t help but draw connections between the painting and its title, things that actually have nothing to do with each other unless you insist. The longer one stands in front of it, the more they start to merge, effortlessly, compulsively. The mind makes connections. Hallucinated structures arrive as revelation.

What does she see that I can’t see? What does she know that I don’t know?

*

As a writer, who doesn’t identify at all with the Modernist project, I work in narratives. I am always looking for the beginning before the middle to see how it got to the end. I often wrote stories that were only about love insofar as they could detail its absence. Love itself I understood to be hostile to the story, to narrative itself. Because where the story is interested in moments of change, love is a constant. Love doesn’t have a causal trajectory over a three-act structure. Love, necessarily unconditional, superimposes itself onto objects that don’t warrant it. Love exists and wants only to exist, depends on nothing for its existence, and repeats itself endlessly as though looped in perpetuity.

During the summer before my grandmother died, I visited her weekly. Most of that time was spent sitting across from her as she slept, and because she had no teeth, her lips inflated and deflated like tarps. Towards the end, when her mind began to fail, she would tell me the same stories over and over again. I grew bored, restless, and impatient, and am ashamed of my boredom now that she is gone.

In the chapel that held my grandmother’s funeral, my family screamed. I remember when my aunt first saw the coffin, she reached for her sister and dug her nails into her shoulders, howling. It was the sound we made because we could not accept death. Though it wasn’t death that made us love her more. Death is a violence that makes love visible where it previously had not been. I loved this woman all my life, but I would visit her maybe once or twice a year and would not think of her when I was gone. Such is the nature about love: that it is forgettable, boring, taken for granted, and made demonstrably true for all these reasons.

During the years I lived in Berlin, I spent thousands of hours at Berghain listening to Techno. Because it was boring. Because it didn’t change. It just repeated itself, all nights a variation of the same night, that night for me in August when Adam X was playing. I remember standing by the speakers as the bass grew harder, pounding at a relentless force and speed. There, I would think of every beat as the sound of a person who had been loved, a person no longer here, and it was precisely their absence that brought back their presence, in memories turned over in the mind, repeated in our thoughts to bring back those who are gone. Because one of the great secrets death reveals is that life is a finite resource, but love is not. All the people I have ever loved I still love, and all the people I’ve ever lost are still with me. And I felt them there, standing in that great hall while the music pounded on as if a thousand pounds of steel and concrete were crashing down multiple levels, dismantling in midair and crushing to the floor, sliding, grinding, screeching across the pavement, and deep in the background I could hear a blank drone that I could only decipher when standing next to the speakers, blank like the afternoon light that came into the window of my grandmother’s bedroom. There were no photos on the wall, the calendar taken down to cover up the counting of days, so it was just the blankness of the eggshell white with the sharp summer light cutting diagonally across the surface. It was an LA summer, and there wasn’t any breeze from the window. I was checking my watch to see how much time had passed, and it was never as much as I’d thought, and the fan was still going, and my grandmother was still sleeping in front of me, hands folded over her chest, and that to me now is what I think of when I think about love.

Decadence.