Dylan Desmond

This is the first in a series: interviews with great readers. Great readers can be, and often are, writers, book makers, musicians, factory workers (myself), and/or anything else. I want to leave the door open to not limit exploration. I want these conversations to relate back to the person’s experience and creative output while also addressing bigger literary ideas/themes, which is why I am so happy that Dylan Desmond (Bell Witch, Stygian Bough, Je Est Un Autre, Pyrkagion) agreed to be the first in this interview series. We’ve been friends via the music scene for some time, and over the years I realized that, like me, he is also deeply invested in literature and literary expression. He is also one of the modern masters of melody and an incredibly creative person, an inspiration to many including myself. If you are unfamiliar with his work as a musician, I strongly urge you to change that now.

In this interview we talk about the ritual of reading, the importance and impact of surrealism, the influence of prose on lyric writing, the limits of the Lacanian system, and how to find transcendence via artistic expression. He also gives some great recommendations for things you might want to read. There is a ton that we did not explore, from his experience of getting an MFA to Bataille (which would have probably taken over the entire scope of the interview) to the implications of Satanic expression (whether via literature or music) as glorification of God, so consider this part one of a dialogue that I hope to pick up again as time moves on.

There’s so much to reading: the ritual of it (sitting in a specific spot, in a particular environment, at a time of day, and on and on). Do you have any rituals around reading?

DD: Yes, I see exactly what you mean about the ritual. But maybe the ritual can be circumstantial? For example, I usually end up reading on my couch. But sometimes I want to hear a droning noise in the background like Eliana Radigue. Maybe I prefer that when what I’m reading is unnerving and eerie. If the book is something atmospheric that fills me with a sense of wonder, I probably want to listen to William Basinski. If it is something overly analytical and dry, I’ll prefer silence. Other times, I go to a bar and read a story with a linear plotline. That is probably a cliché, but sometimes my house gets stuffy and I want a fresh environment that keeps me on [my] toes.

The best experience at a bar was when I was reading Jean Cocteau’s Holy Terrors and the bartender just so happened to have a tattoo of some Cocteau artwork. He gave me a lot of direction of other Cocteau books to check out after Holy Terrors. Obviously, that was a cool bar and even cooler bartender! An awkward experience was finishing Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille and two younger kids asked what the book was about. I probably said “a priest” and ran home to take a shower.

Is there a “finding literature” moment that you want to speak about, or was it just a natural unfurling of an enjoyment of reading?

DD: I grew up reading heavily and, like a lot of people, fell off that habit when I got a demanding job as an adult. I really used the pandemic lock-down period to get myself back up to speed and I’ve read over 100 books every year since 2020. It wasn’t exactly “a moment” but more of a slow realization; I was losing my business of 10 years to the quarantine and needed to remember the things I still had in the world. Perhaps we all have less than we think and our time is filled with things that are much less permanent than we realize in the calm passing of time. Literature is timeless though. Be it poetry, fiction, memoir or whatever else, the intangible experiences and uncanniness of our lives have something universal and unshakable when observed through these lenses. The world is so much smaller and so much larger depending on how one approaches it.

You seem to read quite a bit of French surrealist works (or things in that wheelhouse), which I am also a big fan of. Is there a specific connection there/sympathetic thought patterns?

DD: Yes! That is my favorite stuff! I love the way surrealist art makes me think about different perceptions in my own life and question my own foundations therein. It is constantly humbling to think that the rational world we all look into while wandering through our lives is merely a fraction of what we can and do perceive. It’s like our rational mind is simply louder than its irrational twin, which is perceiving all the same information simultaneously. And we all have it in our own unique minds. I can’t help to wonder what that speaks to about humanity at large and what we are missing by not listening to our more irrational, dreamlike tendencies as a species.  

I love that ambiguity is of the essence in surrealism; it champions subjectivity. I might find a meaning in a surrealist poem, but that is not to say the poet intended that. The poet might not even believe there is a meaning. In a world so focused on scientific evidence, proof, meanings etc, surrealism instead champions the irrational, the absurd, the chaotic, the subconscious, the dreamworld we spend so much time in but never give credit to. Dreams and irrational thoughts are every bit of our reality as the cars we drive to work, the suit we wear to a funeral, the words we say to the bus driver. Perhaps they are more difficult or even impossible to interpret, but I think that is a positive attribute. Perhaps interpretation itself is overvalued in our world?

One could argue that music is a distilled version of language, removing the need for the Lacanian “sign”. Yet we often feel the need to be grounded by words, to have words contextualize the abstract experience of music. Do you feel that these frameworks constrain us?

DD: I would agree with that argument but say it can both constrain us and not constrain us depending on the application. There are some songs that the words heighten the effect of the overall picture. An example would be folk music; often, not always, but often the music serves as an accompaniment to the story in the song. To my ears, there is something in the rhythm that makes the story more poignant and memorable. This is identical to a lot of poetry and I think one could also make the argument that mythology lives in this exact realm in all corners of the world. But for the occasion one wants to communicate something in a way that isn’t reliant on the restraints of their spoken language, music is brilliant. An example is Time Machines by Coil. Every song is constructed to communicate the experience of a certain type of drug. We’ve all tried to use words to describe those feelings, but they can only go so far in their effectiveness without taking the specific drug and literally recreating the experience. But then how does one communicate that? Coil manage to do so with hypnotic pulsing and zero words. It might be strange at first, but by the time any track ends anyone who was paying attention understands the drug differently by contextualizing the abstractness of the experience better than words could have. 

Kind of on the same theme…

There is an emptiness, coldness, struggling to place the self and meaning, a grappling with entropy, a reflection, distance, and also unity with the elements (fire, water, stone, air) in your lyrics (for Bell Witch). How do these things (lyrics) come to you? 

DD: It’s interesting to consider this in the same theme as the last question because I never consider that anyone can understand what I’m saying or really care to read it. Maybe that makes it easier to write down! But from the perspective of Bell Witch, I think lyrics are less important that the tension and melodies. If anything, they are more so a delivery system of the sung vocal line itself as an instrument to work with the tension. I think a lot of heavy metal is this way in these days when screaming and growling have become commonplace. But that aside, in Bell Witch the words themselves are written after the music and are generally reflective of what I think is happening in the song from an objective perspective. That might be important to mention in this context- Bell Witch isn’t supposed to be a personalized account but more of an objective purgatory.

As part of that writing process, either lyrically or personally, what role does literature play? Can you provide a specific example?

DD: Personally, I find I write about things that are going through my mind and if I’m wrapped up in a book there is probably a lot of that coming out. It could be a predicament in a story that has a poetic spark, an anthropological concept that connects all of humanity, a series of surreal images that leave me dumbfounded, or a lack of words that somehow aid to describe something profound perfectly. I’ve been reading Paul Celan a lot lately and he is the master of communicating things beyond our rational minds with very few words. When I read Paul Celan I’ll often experience an urge to regurgitate something I might not even be able to imagine; a sense of utter mystery, confusion, intangibility. It is something primal and unlearned and that is the good shit in this life! Our lives (I think I can speak for anyone reading this here?) are filled with so many distractions from our inner thoughts and feelings. Be it our phones, street lights, traffic, city noise etc. we are enmeshed in distractions. Perhaps that is part of all life since its beginning? Either way, to glimpse into an emotion so primal feels elevated from the tangible world I’m sitting in right now and I think it’s incredibly special. Here is a Celan poem that disorients me more each time I read it-

Whitegray of
shafted, steep
feeling.

Landinward, hither
drifted sea-oats blow
sand patterns over
the smoke of wellchants.

An ear, severed, listens.

An eye, cut in strips,
does justice to all this.

Great music and great sentences kind of stop us in our tracks and force us to reconsider existence in a new, slightly different framework, allowing us to transcend/recontextualize the mundane, necessities of existence. There tends to be an artistic ability to translate emotion into something that deeply resonates with another person. How do you find (what elements do you look for) transcendence in literature? If you want to add, how do you create this in music?

DD: I guess a simple answer is that I find transcendence in something that is beautiful. To me beauty often looks so human it inspires a feeling of awe and momentary timelessness. Perhaps something so human that it feels unobtainable and impossible but with a pang of familiarity. Conversely it might be something inhuman; wind through tall grass, leaves falling onto water. The inhuman elements intersecting with the human elements are where a special magic happens also. But that can be so different in music because the language can be wordless. Chopin’s Nocturnes are a great example- the music isn’t communicating something with words but the emotion it invokes transcends the world we’re all positioned in right now and touches something so deeply human that we cannot help but feel the awe. And maybe the absence of words makes it feel inhuman all at once?

You collaborate quite a bit and work across various mediums (film, poetry, music). It’s undeniable how these mediums bleed into one another/inspire each other. Yet, in literature collaboration is pretty rare. Can you talk about the nature of collaboration, for you, and about working with different forms of expression? Why do you think literature is such a mostly solitary endeavor?

DD: I never thought about that! Literature really is a solo venture! Well, maybe an argument could be made that someone writing is pulling from ideas they encountered in other literature or art or a conversation etc. In that regard literature could be said to be conversational, which is kind of a collaboration with all the things that went into the thought as it was written down, edited, printed etc. I’m probably twisting the meaning of your point though.

My experience with collaborative albums is that one person generally starts out with something. It could be one note played over and over. Or a droning noise. Anything. It usually sounds naked and exposed and maybe even uninspiring. But the fun part is changing that and writing something on and around it to flesh it into something that becomes inspiring. That process can go back and forth as many times as needed until its finished.

Maybe another point of argument about the solitariness of literature could be made in the way a character in a story is almost outside the author. Sometimes it could be the author, of course, but I think this is not often the case. The character might be part of the author and two other people the author knew years before. Then there is the mythical figure of a muse to consider. Rimbaud described this by saying “Je est un autre” or “I is another.” Calling that “The Muse” is an oversimplification but I think in the same direction of his meaning. As a painter, pianist, or architect might all confess, there is a sense of the piece having a will of its own. Sometimes when writing a song it seems like it is already written but the parts simply need reassembled from silence. The notes need placed in the right spots. Or the stones might need set in a pattern that seems inherent at a certain point in the process of designing and building a house. In some sense our minds get into a flow when creating things and there seems to be a director operating outside ourselves. I think this is very true of literature. That doesn’t make it “collaborative” per say…

What’s one book that you found randomly that blew your mind? What’s one book that was recommended by a friend that blew your mind? And lastly, what book would recommend to those reading this right now?

DD: 

Randomly: Against Nature by JK Huysmans. There is a quick mention of this book in The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde. I loved Dorian Grey and figure anything he read was something I wanted to read. In conjunction with this book and another by him called Down Below Huysmans portrays sadism and Satanism, as we know them today and he knew them in the 19th century, as twisted but dedicated offshoots of ultra-devout Catholicism. Supposedly he attended black masses in 19th century Paris that had child sacrifices, cannibalism, and bizarre orgies to conduct research in what he believed was a twisted method of Catholic clergy to get closer to God through blasphemy. The logic he explains is that God pays closer attention according to the intensity of the sin being committed. Thus, if one wants God to notice them the easiest way is to commit heinous sins, such as cannibalizing children, eating shit etc. and then ask for forgiveness through means of self-mutilation and disfigurement. As a fan of weird heavy metal, I found this incredibly interesting in the way the musical genre, maybe even “rock and roll” in the greater sense, is obsessed with themes of Christian “sin.”  I’m not calling rock and roll Catholic, but I do think the implications Huysmans makes of the 19th century Parisian clergy and aristocracy are interestingly parallel with the (generally fictional) presentation of the satanism element in heavy metal.

Recommended by a friend: Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq was recommended to me by an old roommate. I had little frame of reference other than the back cover description but HOLY SHIT it was amazing. An amazing story of what could be called “surrealism” mixed with memoir. It is an amazing book that everyone should read right now.

I recommend: Determined by Robert Sapolsky. We might think we’re choosing our actions in life and making decisions based on our free will, but after reading this book I look at that so differently. It is not overly complicated or difficult to read but there are moments that I had to set it down to consider the implications. If the electrical charges in our minds start to react to actions nanoseconds before said actions take place, then we are not making “choices” but rather reacting to things before they’ve even occurred. This is not free will; this is something closer to puppetry. And this is happening in our brains right now! If Dr Robert Sapolsky, an esteemed neuroscientist, is correct in his assessment of human brains then our understanding of time and existence could use a healthy reassessment.