The time to do a mixtape reflection on the very theme of this blog has come. For this time, I will scream into the abyss about the abyss. “Tales from the Masked Bard” was the original name of the blog, named for a character in my unpublished fantasy book series, but that name harkens back to a time in my 20s, when I had such impossible dreams and aspirations. Before reality slapped me in the face. Now that I have realized that, even if I somehow did achieve fame (a zillion to one chance), the day will come that even the most famous person in history will be forgotten. The act of creating art is really screaming into an abyss. That’s all you can do with the abyss, either scream or gaze. You can’t fight it or escape it. One day the voice of everyone who has ever screamed into the abyss, from Shakespeare to Edgar Allen Poe, will be silenced forever.
First, a quote:
My interpretation of the abyss, is that it is the darkness that encompasses the entire universe. It is that which will swallow us all, and make us forgotten. It is death, oblivion. One day trillions of years from now it will swallow the entire universe. I had a vision once; everyone alive is falling into an abyss, the abyss of death. Being alive is like falling into an abyss, we are all rushing towards its pitch blackness at terminal velocity but we look away from it and pretend it doesn’t exist, and we pretend we aren’t even falling. But as my body ages I know it to be true. I don’t know if I’m making much sense, it’s hard to put into words, you see. But I think I have gazed long into the abyss.
I finally made a mixtape about it, because that is how I like to organize my thoughts and philosophies. And I used a lot of voice clips, and even a spoken word poem, along with music. I allowed songs about voids too, because a void is kind of the same thing as an abyss. Or perhaps the abyss is more of an idea, while a void exists physically.
Follow along with my YouTube playlist if you wish. It has most of what’s on the tape, although you may have to skip through a couple of the voice samples. With the first one, I stopped the tape when the quote was finished.
First we have a clip from the anime Blue Exorcist, where Nietzsche’s quote is spoken. I have never watched this anime, but I liked the clip when I found it. We then go into songs I’ve known for a long time, since my teens; “The Abyss” by Stratovarius is one of the band’s darker songs, although it’s not entirely dark. I think it makes for a good beginning to the tape though. Then, there’s “The Chasm”, the 2002 remade version by The Kovenant. I could have gone with the original, but I think the remade version fit the vibe better. Pretty Addicted’s song “Blue Cage” is really about the cruelty of making whales perform in front of audiences, but I feel like it still fits the mood if you take the lyrics at face value. It’s a song about being ripped from everything you know and being placed in a cage and mistreated. It reminds me of what I went through in school, although to a far less severe degree. I was ripped from my innocence and plunged into a cruel dystopian world, hurdling toward oblivion. This is what eventually led me to gaze into the abyss. It mentions the abyss multiple times, that’s why the song is here. And it’s a good transitionary song between the metal intro to the tape going into the more goth songs.
We then come to our second voice clip, from the trailer for the English dub of the anime Made in Abyss. This is my favorite anime now. A very dark tale about a young girl and her half-robot boyfriend descending into a deep abyss to find her mother, encountering unspeakable horrors. I only included the beginning lines. For those of you following along on the playlist, skip after the opening line. “In the abyss, there is nothing as impartial as death. And soon we realize, in this cruel and indifferent world, it’s just the way we like it.” The abyss is likened to an inevitable death, and if the world is cruel and indifferent, it is how we designed it. We don’t have to build a society based on hierarchies, imaginary numbers deciding who lives and dies. We could collectively decide right now that money, nationalities, genders, countries, don’t exist. But enough people consent to it. So it goes on, crushing the unlucky underfoot. Did we create the Abyss ourselves?
The next couple of songs are a bit of a buffer, but they mention voids and the abyss. The next great song that captures the essence of the abyss is Tango Mangalore’s “Son of Adam”, which you may remember from my top songs of the month blog for March. “Let us stare in the abyss” is repeated throughout the song, and the mood it creates is exactly what I was going for with this mix.
The next part that really gets to the point of the mix, is something I was unable to find on YouTube. To get it on the tape I had to play the Made in Abyss DVD on my laptop and hook it into my boombox with an aux cord. A technical marvel, I know. This speech comes from a scene where the two protagonists of the anime meet Ozen the Immovable, an elder woman who has lived in the abyss for decades. She first appears to be a villain, but when she fights the protagonists it is revealed that she did so to see if they were able to handle going further down into the abyss. She deems them worthy and ends up helping them.
You can view it in the manga online, although it isn’t the best translation. In the anime, she says:
“Do you have any conception of God, boy? All of those who decide to stay down here, they don’t believe in any kind of almighty deity. Instead they have something else to believe in. The Truth. It’s stronger than God, because it is the Abyss itself. And since its end is unknown, that fear becomes their almighty.”
You see, I think she’s right. The Abyss is God. It is The Truth. As Carl Sagan once said, it made a lot of sense for humans to worship the Sun. The Sun gave us life. We are a part of the Sun. Our body and soul come from the Sun, and the other stars. The Sun, however, is a local God. And it is mortal. The Abyss is stronger than the Sun, and stronger than the galaxy it inhabits. One day, the Abyss will consume even that. The Abyss is indifferent. It us not good or evil. It is the Great Cosmic Indifference. I think out of everyone in the anime, I relate closest to Ozen, who inhabits not the deepest part of the abyss, but deep enough to see the truth about it. She is about where I am, philosophically, on the scales of jadedness and darkness.
If you were to have a humanoid personification of the Abyss, I think it would be something like Satan in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, or how he appeared in the claymation adaptation from The Adventures of Mark Twain. Far from the biblical Satan, this entity inhabits an empty void, and creates and destroys civilizations on a whim, without a shred of sympathy. But, as far as this mixtape is concerned, I have already used plenty of voice clips from that film on multiple tapes, especially “Nothing exists but empty space, and you. And you, are but a thought.” Solipsism, now there is a scary thought. Am I the only conscious being that exists, floating in an endless abyss while hallucinating reality? Or is it you? We don’t know. We can’t know. Maybe everyone is trapped in their own separate universe.
We continue to Side B. A couple more songs about voids, and we get to the next voice clip. It’s from a game called Dragon Age, which I have never played. I only found this clip when searching for more abyss/void songs for the mix. It’s a hopeful quote from an old woman, who says that when the world plunges into the abyss, don’t be afraid to jump, for it is the only way to know if you can fly. I suppose my pessimistic and cynical retort is that nothing can fly forever, but I digress. It’s basically about not living with regret, which I can agree with, it just uses the Abyss as a metaphor.
After this Tango Mangalore returns, with a song that is also about the Abyss. The dreary mood it creates brings you back down after that last voice clip, perhaps, but I find the transition relaxing and smooth. Now the Gothic Archies have two songs mentioning the Abyss, and I regret having to put them so close together but that’s just how it worked out. And after one of my favorite songs from Diary of Dreams (“see me drown in this abyss”) we have an actual spoken word poem that I found on YouTube, which I have to say is a first for my mixtapes since starting them in 1999. This poem likens the Abyss to depression. It’s about when you reach a level where you no longer struggle against the Abyss, but just let it consume you. You want to fall, you want to disappear into the Abyss. To lose your pain within the silence forevermore. I’ve been to dark places like this. I don’t know how I’ve ever managed to pull myself up again. But life just goes on, and so do I. I keep eating, trying to take care of my body, trying to tell my stories while I still have time to do so, playing this game called “life” that I never chose to play, even though it’s all absurd and meaningless. I’m going to get consumed by the Abyss one day regardless, why rush things? Might as well try to enjoy myself.
Gothic Archie’s song “Dreary, Dreary” is the perfect song to come on after this poem. It manages to pull you up again somehow, while being a dreary song itself. It’s a song mostly about losing your close loved one, losing them to “a black and bleak abyss”. By that they are either referring to her death or just that she disappeared. The rest of the songs from here all relate again to the abyss/void in different ways. We return to Stratovarius with “Abyss of your Eyes”. Read the lyrics, it fits the theme well enough despite the genre shift. References to drowning, pain, losing your mind, these are all feelings associated with the Abyss. And appropriately enough the final song is “Final Abyss” by Your Funeral (great band name). The true final Abyss will be the Heat Death of the Universe, long after all of the stars burn out and die, black holes consume the universe until they too disperse, and soon not even atoms and particles remain. Maybe from here another Big Bang happens? But with something finally reduced to nothing I don’t see how that can happen. These are my thoughts by the end of the tape. What will be, at the end of everything? To think, not even the stars in the sky are safe from the Abyss. Nothing is forever, except for the Abyss. The Abyss is eternity. Infinite. The nature of the abyss is reflected in how unjust and indifferent this universe is. When you reflect on that, you gaze into the abyss.
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