My Page: Blitzen Trapper’s Eric Earley ‘A Gateway to Cosmic Humility’
In the cold early months of 2019, I had a conversion. I guess that’s a little dramatic—maybe more like a shift in my internal landscape that would precipitate both a new record and a new occupation. But like most things, the minutiae of life kept the process hidden because, in life, details are everything.
Speaking of details, what started the whole thing was a quote from that cranky German, Schopenhauer. To paraphrase: “Every life viewed as a whole in general, when emphasizing the important bits, is a tragedy; but gone through in detail, hidden[1]camera style, our lives are really just knee-slapping comedies.” It was droll but entirely accurate.
In late 2008, I started working at a homeless shelter in northeast Portland, pulling an all-night shift as a glorified hall monitor in an enormous 100-year-old haunted church. I’d stopped touring for the year and I decided to pick up some side work; I landed the job on a fluke through a friend. When I say the place was haunted, I mean multiple co-workers had multiple encounters with paranormal weirdness in various parts of the church—candles lighting themselves, doors opening on their own, voices, footsteps. One co-worker swore the entire third floor was inhabited by ghosts and refused to go there even though the bathrooms up there were the cleanest.
We had the cots down in the basement. The folks that slept there nightly were a motley, unruly crew who were impossible to stereotype—artists, thugs, addicts and veterans. Nearly everyone suffered from some sort of long-standing PTSD; many of them pushed shopping carts and Frankenstein bikes. Some were well spoken while others merely grunted.
Nearly everything that happened at the shelter invariably showcased the worst of humanity’s foibles, always deeply tragic yet unerringly comic. Not to be glib, but there’s an undeniable hilarity in trying to help an old homeless veteran—who is both mute and handicapped—get changed in the shelter’s TV room after he has soiled himself while a jittery VHS of Caddyshack plays in the background.
By the way, I stumbled upon that Schopenhauer quote on the first page of In the Dust of This Planet, a peppy little philosophy booklet dedicated to showing humans how to face their own extinction via horror movies, horror books, black metal, etc. The author, Eugene Thacker, sees humans as incapable of conceptualizing a world without us. And when we try, it gives rise to horror in the general sense, a deep dread of what he calls “unhuman” reality, where we don’t exist. I started to see his dark jaunt into the nether regions of horror as a gateway to what I like to call “cosmic humility.” This kind of humility sees mankind as peripheral—simply one of millions of species and, ultimately, a transitional one that will ultimately disappear, either through extinction or evolution.
Some might see this idea as fatalistic but, for me, it’s a good way to maintain perspective. Humanity is not the center of some cosmic narrative. Our overblown importance exists in our own minds. This should affect how we interact with the environment we’ve evolved from and how we interact with each other.
At a certain point, I started to see myself in the faces of those unruly denizens of the shelter, so beaten down by desire and addiction, victims and perpetrators entombed in their own traumas. As humans, we hang onto those experiences and other things— dreams, ambitions, religions, gods, idols—as though they are everything to us and we are everything in the world. But we are not everything; we are one small thing. I started to see my own obsessive ambitions and self-centered attachments as no different than the essentially meaningless addictions of those at the shelter.
And so enter the Bar Do Thos Grol (otherwise known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead), which translates to “the Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State.” Grol, meaning “liberation,” is synonymous with “extinction” or “blowing out.” (My entry to this text was somewhat lighthearted, via George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, which would later morph into a track that appears on the new Blitzen Trapper record as “Dead Billie Jean.”)
But the Book of the Dead is an afterlife narrative where the dead are prompted to realize their own death, accept it and let go of all that attaches them to mortal life. If they refuse, then they drop through successive levels of bardo until they are cycled back into one of several wombs and reenter the world once again. It’s wacky stuff, but it’s a text that cries for us to detach, to gain perspective.
I titled the album that would follow this experience Holy Smokes Future Jokes because I knew that everything that I now see as sacred, including identity and ambition, will ultimately be seen as comically ridiculous in due time.
I wanted the record to avoid humanity’s tendency to make excessive noise. I think what I really wanted was to offer the sonic equivalent of that eerie, uncanny calm I would feel in the shelter basement in the middle of the night while I waited for shit to hit the fan.
I’m still working at getting folks off the streets—hanging out and problem-solving with strangers who, like all people everywhere, eventually become less strange and more akin to beautifully cracked avatars of some higher race.
Eric Earley is the frontman for the Portland, Ore.-based band Blitzen Trapper. They released their latest LP, Holy Smokes Future Jokes, this past fall via Yep Roc.
