Souls in The Heads of Corpses: A Psychological Review of Allegaeon’s “Fragments of Form and Function”

Few people realize that the recent Allegaeon album “Fragments of Form and Function” is a doorway to a separate dimension.  Even if it hadn’t turned my body into a giant alpha wave and projected me into the substratum of the upper atmosphere, I’d have thought it was an entirely captivating record.  At first, my ears began to shoot orange beams from them.  My children noticed this and were immediately frightened.  Eventually, they got used to it and my daughter continued talking to my toes and trying to feed them milk.  As the solo from the song The God Particle came through my cheap 9-dollar Sony headphones, I became a bundle of pure light energy and bounced from wall to wall.  I had the right headphone in my left ear and vice versa, which caused my body to carom with on a strange, knuckleball like trajectory.   And then…..a universe without dimension……

Freud once posited that original sin was actually a strange response to witnessing a patricide.  After all, the divine sacrifice wouldn’t be called for unless it was in response to a murder.  A universe that avenges theft with murder or lust with murder or greed with murder would be the most unjust possible universe.  But why would this idea bother us so much?  Maybe it is the idea that what creates life also “owes its death to the universe” that fills us with such dread and wills us to punish ourselves over and over.  When you are hurdling through the universe at light speed, it all seems irrelevant.  The human conception of justice cannot be understood at this speed.  All actions happen simultaneously.  From above, it’s all the same.

As the stirring stillness of the post-script guitar solo in “Biomech –Vals No. 666” began to well up in my consciousness I became vaguely aware of the illuminated bits of human spiritual form in these bodies of light that surrounded me.   Then, the whole ride came to a screeching halt.  I realized that I was, in fact, deliriously spinning into some weird new age fantasy that had no baring on anything and would be useless to anyone unfortunate enough to read it.  People don’t devolve into sweetness and light, they lumber along in these fleshy tombs for what qualifies as eternity (or about 76.8 years, depending on where you live).  We are not spiritual beings on some wondrous journey.  We are getting deader by the hour.  There is nothing poetic about a corpse that isn’t aware enough of itself to begin rotting.  Trapped in this dying form and making up stories about interconnection and light and love and beauty and meaning.  Charming.

WHO ARE YOU TO DESIGN THE LIFE WE LIVE?!?!?!?!!?!!

A Cosmic Question.  Don’t bother.  Don’t bother with any of it.  “What defines reality?  What defines a soul?”  That’s your problem, pal.  I’m just decay with a bit of personality.  Apatheism is the only answer that allows my monstrous form any solace.  Yet…I want to know as well.  Do I suffer because I want to know or do I suffer because I cannot dream?  Descartes went around trying to find souls in the heads of dissected corpses.  (Come out with your hands in the air!!!!!!! Put the soul on the ground next to you and don’t make any quick moves!!!!!  Up against the wall, Descartes!!!!!)  I’d take it over pretending knowledge I do not have or seeking knowledge I cannot gain.  I prefer the ever-quickening pace of the double bass in “From Seed To Throne” to any rational explanation of what I am or to anything else this moment can offer.  There is that much for now.