12

Celebrating the Agony of Life

ERIN E. FLYNN

 

 

 

 

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

—RAINER MARIA RILKE

 

[In 1975 we were] more into staying in our rooms and reading Nietzsche.

—ROBERT PLANT

 

The image most commonly associated with Led Zeppelin is probably the logo of Swan Song Records, the label they launched in 1974. You know the one: a nude, winged male aloft in a blood orange sky above a body of water, head thrown back in a halo of light, arms raised and wings outstretched.

A modification of an 1869–70 painting by the American artist William Rimmer, entitled Evening, or The Fall of Day, the figure is ambiguous. Is he exultant or agonized? In the Rimmer original, he is supposed to be Apollo, a Greek god associated with the light and the sun, and who as Apollo Helios came to be identified with Helios, god of the sun. The fall of day is therefore Apollo’s fall, the sun’s fall into the water, a moment of transition between the clear light of day and the shapeless dark of night. Just as a swan song is sung at death, the image is of anguish or exuberance at the moment of destruction.

Zeppelin’s logo mirrors the aesthetic theory Friedrich Nietzsche presents in his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Nietzsche thought there are two fundamental artistic impulses, which in tandem account for the emergence of Greek tragedy. The first is the Apollonian, named after Apollo. Apollonian art is characterized by order and symmetry, by a “measured limitation.” It presents individuals as stable, permanent, even eternal. The grace of classical sculpture is probably for Nietzsche its highest accomplishment.

Yet the Apollo of the Swan Song logo is hardly measured or calm. This is perhaps one reason he is not immediately recognizable as Apollo. Indeed, he is sometimes taken to be a different heavenly figure, one also associated with light and one more commonly thought to have endured a great fall, namely, Lucifer. To think of Apollo in this way is to think of the god of light and order falling into chaos, just as Lucifer falls from the order of heaven into the sea of fire and the chaos of hell.

Nietzsche associates Apollonian art with dreams. Nietzsche thought the order of Apollonian art was a kind of mirage, a veil covering over the fact that reality is a chaotic play of force, which creates individuals only to tear them apart again, like so many suites in the Riot House of the cosmos. Apollonian art expresses our faith that we as individuals are real. But when the dream-image flickers and our faith wavers, then we are shaken in horror and in ecstasy, to the point of complete self-forgetting. This might be represented as a fall into the shapeless chaos of a night without dreams. In “Achilles’ Last Stand,” Plant sings: “the mighty arms of Atlas hold the heavens from the earth,” suggesting that the measure and order of the cosmos always threatens to come tumbling down. Only a titanic effort keeps things in their place. But Plant would have known, I think, that the Titans, Atlas among them, were vanquished by the Olympian Zeus, father of Apollo. Hence the burden that Atlas bears is a cost of defeat, as though order is maintained only by turning the titanic forces of nature against themselves. Envisioning the order of the cosmos this way, it is an artificial imposition on the chaotic nature of reality, which is forever bearing down on us.

The other artistic impulse, the Dionysian, named after the Greek god Dionysus, courts this fall into chaos and self-forgetting. It acknowledges that, far from being real, our individuation is a temporary appearance and the source of our suffering. Whereas the Apollonian copes with this knowledge by creating the dream image of a real self, the Dionysian copes with it by creating a pleasurable representation of the self’s dissolution, a plunge into the elements, such as Lucifer’s descent into fire or Apollo’s into water. Later in his career Nietzsche identified Dionysus as an Anti-Christ. For Nietzsche the depth of all Greek art is rooted in Dionysian wisdom: that the very best thing for humans would be not to have been born at all, and the next best thing would be to die as soon as possible. This Dionysian sensitivity to the suffering of individuals at nature’s hand is reflected in the anguish of a god of light extinguished by the darkness of the sea.

Yet according to legend, though a swan song is sung at death, it is also achingly beautiful. Alfred Lord Tennyson, for instance, writes of its “awful jubilant voice . . . as when a mighty people rejoice.” The swan song is not simply a song of anguish, but a kind of joyous lament. Indeed, perhaps the most significant modification of Rimmer’s image seems to reflect this fact. In the original, the figure’s left arm is tucked behind his head, as if cradling or clutching it in anguish.

In the logo, the left arm, like the right, is stretched skyward. To my mind, this accentuates the ambiguity of the figure, reinforcing the aspect of exultation.

Nietzsche thinks all good Dionysian art expresses the “jubilation of nature,” a strange, even contradictory mixture of agony and ecstasy, cruelty and sexuality. In Dionysian art, pain awakens pleasure, while joy elicits cries of agony. In songs like “In My Time of Dying” and “When the Levee Breaks,” Zeppelin masters this contradictory mixture. Like the best of the blues tradition they appropriate, in such songs the heartrending lament is oddly exultant, while the joy is never without deep mournful yearning, as if over “some irredeemable loss” (Birth of Tragedy, §2). This is the core of the aesthetic experience of Dionysian art. Early in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche offers an explanation of this Dionysian aesthetic. The yearning lament, he says, is nature’s own agony, and nature’s irredeemable loss is “its dismemberment into individuals,” which creates the conditions of want and strife in the natural world. The same aesthetic experience, and the same wisdom, characterizes the music of Led Zeppelin, helping to explain why the Swan Song logo is so apt.

Kashmir: The Metaphysics of Homesickness

For the young Nietzsche the riddle of the Dionysian mixture of suffering and bliss has a metaphysical solution. Individuation is separation, and separation is pain. The human condition is homesickness. As individuals we are bound to yearn and to strive for what we don’t have and can’t control. Bonzo’s indulgent, violent outbursts, attributed by many to his literal homesickness and longing for his family, reflect this in the extreme. In the face of isolation we long to forget ourselves, even if it means destroying ourselves.

And if reunited, what awaits us? We’re still limited, merely temporary manifestations of deeper forces. Returning home should be sweet, but even there we suffer separation. Ultimately, home can’t protect us. In “Celebration Day,” Plant refers to “new ways to protect the home” which nevertheless prove ineffective when “they break down the door.” Perhaps we ache so much being away from home because we know at any moment home itself may suffer, as when a child dies. We then yearn for reunion with nature, so that our strife might cease. But to be reunited with those deeper forces is the end of the individual, our own terrible destruction.

“Kashmir” is a majestic, spectacular song of homelessness. Sung by “a traveler of both time and space” it pictures our condition as perpetual wandering “across the sea of years” and “along the straits of fear.” In it Plant imagines being caught in a sandstorm. “All I see turns to brown, as the sun burns the ground / And my eyes fill with sand, as I scan this wasted land / Trying to find, trying to find where I’ve been.” Here the forces of nature, through the wind, sand, and sun, lay waste to everything, obliterating all differentiation and individuation. The traveler himself is engulfed by the storm and is lost. The forces of nature sweep away everything. To reunite with nature is to lose oneself.

The sandstorm is a fitting image of what the young Nietzsche thinks of reality: an eternally suffering, contradictory, primordial unity (Birth of Tragedy, § 4). Following Schopenhauer, his first great philosophical influence, Nietzsche identifies this underlying unity as the will or drive to manifest itself as the empirical world of individuals. Out of the desert of the real the winds of nature form individuals, separate, yearning, and wandering. But these individuals are bound for destruction by the very winds that formed them. What exists is a driving storm of integration, disintegration, reintegration, and so forth. Musically, “Kashmir” captures this perfectly in the powerful, driving riff which relentlessly ascends and falls in a punishing, pounding cycle, infinitely repeated. Echoing the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, Nietzsche calls this storm of contradiction the father of all things.

For Nietzsche, the artistic impulse is reality’s need for release from agonized individuation and redemption in a pleasurable, even ecstatic vision. In Apollonian art the master concept of this redemptive vision is the calm individual, since in remaining one and the same the individual appears to resist contradiction. But the Dionysian artist finds a way to take pleasure in the excess of nature, the play of force that overwhelms each individual. Indeed, in spite of its terrible image, listening to “Kashmir” is not terrifying. On the contrary, the song conjures an exhilarating sense of riding along with the forces of nature. Just as on “All My Love,” when “the cup is raised, the toast is made yet again” to a force that is forever spinning the cloth of the universe, a force at whose hands we will lose the things most precious to us, so “Kashmir” celebrates “the dust that floats high and clear.”¹²³

I’m Gonna Crawl: The Eternal Longing of Nature

Because the Dionysian musician speaks from out of this storm of nature, Nietzsche says the “lyric poet needs all the stirrings of passion, from the whisper of inclination to the fury of madness .. . he understands the whole of nature, including himself, to be nothing but that which eternally wills, desires, longs” (Birth of Tragedy, §6). In blues lyrics, for instance, one of the common images of such longing is walking or traveling. The traveling blues represents the singer as spurred by desire, often sexual or romantic, so that he is forever on the road, sure enough a rolling stone.

Of course, the most explicit traveling blues Zeppelin ever recorded was their exuberant version of Robert Johnson’s “Traveling Riverside Blues.” Nietzsche says Dionysian artists bring bliss and suffering together in a strange mixture. This is just the kind of thing we experience on “Traveling Riverside Blues.” Sometimes the singer laments his condition. “If you see my baby, tell her hurry home / I ain’t had no lovin’ since my baby been gone.” Yet a mood of almost manic joy infuses these very lines. Other times the singer celebrates his satisfaction. “Squeeze my lemon ’til the juice runs down my leg / Squeeze it so hard I fall right out of bed.” Plant sings the lines with just a note of pain, which is reflected in the subtle violence of the image. Nature’s longing for reunion, manifest in us most explicitly as sexual longing, depends on nature having been dismembered.

Plant’s other use of the “squeeze my lemon” lyric occurs on “The Lemon Song,” Zeppelin’s version of “Killing Floor.” That song ends with the ominous line, “I’m gonna leave my children down on this killing floor.”¹²⁴ Such a declaration, which seems to have many meanings, underscores the violence, futility, and endlessness of sexual longing. First, if the juice runs down his leg, then it yields no progeny, no life. His semen dries on the killing floor. Second, if sexual union is fruitful, it yields children, more mortals to endure life down on this killing floor. Third, in “The Lemon Song” (as in “Killing Floor”) the singer is plagued by a lover he should have left a long time ago. Here sexual union is the curse, and so the singer contemplates leaving his family and his children to this despair, this killing floor. On “Traveling Riverside Blues,” Plant asks in an aside: “I wonder do you know what I’m talking about?” This at first seems a not-so-subtle reference to the fact that his “lemon” is not really a lemon. But when you tie the line to the various themes of “Traveling Riverside Blues” and “Killing Floor,” it gets to something much deeper about the relentlessness of sexual longing and the ambivalence of sexual union.

This paradox of nature’s longing is clarified in another Zeppelin take on the traveling blues: “I’m Gonna Crawl.” There, a man has found his true love. He no longer needs to wander, it seems. Yet what’s his frame of mind? He dwells on the thought that she might leave. He knows he’ll crawl in pursuit of her until he dies, or perhaps worse, has to start again. She might make him a fool and an outlaw, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to crawl, but knows he will, and he’s happy about it! What he tells us about the woman he loves is a fury of madness. The luxurious anguish of the song reveals that even the greatest joy is desperate. If you’ve been hopelessly in love, you know this undercurrent of misery. Our condition is helpless, yet somehow it makes us feel wonderfully, fully redeemed.

What’s at play here isn’t the joy of love as opposed to the sorrow of longing. It’s rather a release into and redemption of love’s longing, a celebration of our helpless, hopeless striving. Even when love works, especially when it works, it’s agonizing, tenuous, and doomed, like all our projects. It’s doomed by the simple fact that love is a relation between individuals. To be an individual implies that one has limits. The lover’s joy depends necessarily on the beloved, who is beyond oneself, out of one’s control. Love strives to be one with another, yet true oneness would destroy the very possibility of love since each individual would dissolve in the union. The best we can hope is to die before love ends. So speaks Dionysus.

Some people are so afflicted that they have to restage the drama of seduction all their lives. They separate from one person, so that they may set the stage for coming together with another. But when they find the condition of love remains a paradoxical longing, they separate again to find another. We sometimes scorn, sometimes pity, sometimes envy those people. But the truth is, we too restage the drama of seduction, even if with the same person. The wonderful thing about Zeppelin’s staging of this drama is that, like all great Dionysian art, it makes this painful paradox of eternal longing seem exhilarating, so that we celebrate it! This is what Nietzsche means by the redemption of our primordial suffering.

In My Time of Dying: Words Bleed into Music

By expressing this eternal longing, Nietzsche would say Zeppelin speak out of the abyss of pure being, the primordial unity of nature. But he wouldn’t say they express nature’s primordial unity by capturing it in words. On the contrary, Nietzsche thinks lyrics struggle against the limits of language in order to imitate music (Birth of Tragedy, §6). Language, after all, defines aspects of the world, including individual things, and distinguishes them from each other. But the spirit of music expresses the primordial unity of things, where such distinctions dissolve. So the Dionysian lyric uses words against their own differentiating tendency, as a mode of the music. Plant, an excellent Dionysian singer, uses his voice as an instrument, and is less concerned to enunciate his words precisely than to use them to pronounce the mood of the song. The lyric serves its melody, as though the melody itself, in strophe after strophe, produces the lyric, and creates language. For the lyricist, as Plant reminds us in “Houses of the Holy,” the music is the master.

This helps explain why even great lyricists come off badly as poets, and why words that seem so profound in their musical context often strike us as ridiculous outside it. Lyricists aren’t really attempting poetry. They’re attempting music. What’s remarkable about a good lyric isn’t that its meaning translates well to the page or to conversation, but the way its words and meanings fuse with the melody and rhythm. The lyric in isolation can never quite quite convey the Dionysian truth about the original pain of the primordial unity. When we just read the lyrics alone on a page, we often wonder how they managed to move us in the first place.

Plant’s lyrics not only “heed the master’s call” by serving the melody he sings, they often turn from words into non-words. “In My Time of Dying” is one of many songs in which Page’s guitar and Plant’s vocal line mimic each other (in particular on the “die easy” part of the refrain). Here the words are bleeding into music. There’s also a wonderful vocal moment toward the end of the song (beginning at 10:07), in which Plant seems to slip into a death moan (even though the song begins, “In my time of dying / Don’t want nobody to moan”) that is itself indistinguishable from a moan of sexual ecstasy. Here the minor death of orgasm stands in for the major death, and death itself induces a kind of ecstasy. The individual’s greatest satisfaction is his undoing. So contradictory is our individuation that our most intense pleasure can be confused with our deepest misery. (I leave it to the reader to determine which is which.)

At such moments, even the individual singer slips from view, fusing with the drive of nature, here expressed in the moan of Page’s haunting slide. Nature’s drive treats all individuals as unreal, temporary manifestations of its own power. To hear this is exhilarating and terrifying. It is to disintegrate just a touch, to feel the seductive pull of oblivion, and to take such pleasure in it that the nagging anxiety of the finite individual is redeemed. The suffering is redeemed not by a myth of happiness or stability, but by embracing the ultimate contradiction: that happiness is underpinned by an abysmal tumult that will undo it.

Whole Lotta Love: The Transgressing Will

For Nietzsche, Greek tragedy expresses this same contradiction of individuation through the strife of the tragic hero. The heroes of Greek tragedy break the norms that set boundaries for individuals and so reveal that the individual is inevitably undone. Transgression defines Oedipus’s very existence as an incestuous parricide, for example, and Prometheus not only transgresses against the Olympian gods by stealing fire and giving it to humans, he also teaches them the civilizing arts. Prometheus, the transgressor, humanizes us. Our human origin is marked by transgression and strife. Though heroes such as Oedipus and Prometheus end up miserable, tragedy presents their striving also as a heroic glimmer of light shining out of the dark abyss. The pain of our own strife and separation is redeemed in that heroic image.

Though we don’t find full-blown tragic heroes in Zeppelin, in songs like “Whole Lotta Love” we do find the transgressing voice of the will. The opening riff, probably Page’s most famous, is as aggressively erotic as anything he wrote. It drives relentlessly through the song, like the surging blood of the will, which Plant’s lyrics image as explicitly carnal. “Way down inside, honey you need it / I’m gonna give you my love / Ohhh, wanna whole lotta love.” The subject matter is yearning, both the singer’s own (“baby, I been yearnin’”) and what he insists is the yearning of his would-be lover. Something separates them; they’re in need. Sexual desire bids them to cross the borders of the self.

From start to finish “Whole Lotta Love” gives voice to a sexual drive that not only crosses physical boundaries, but normative ones. Plant leaves no room for doubt about what kind of love he’s planning to give, a love that can be measured in inches. But it’s also a kind of education (“I’m gonna send you back to schoolin’”), a lesson he has to teach his would-be lover, who evidently learns it. This lesson is a kind of taming (“You need coolin’, baby I’m not foolin’”). Hence the rule against force is broken. What keeps this transgression from being sinister is the fact that, in learning the lesson, the lover supposedly discovers her own deepest needs.

After the first two verses promise these lessons in sex ed, the song turns to the bridge, which begins like the swirling of libidinal energies. Page’s guitars pan severely from channel to channel and Plant’s voice mimics breathless sexual arousal. Eventually Page is scratching his strings under such heavy effects that his guitar sounds like the voice of a sexual demon, and Plant simply cries out “love!” By the time Bonham rolls into the break, the rocking thumpthump and the guitar solo, we’re back into the heavy pulse of sex.

Just as the song begins with an image of transgression, so it ends with perhaps the most famous of all blues transgressions (“Shake for me girl / I wanna be your backdoor man”). Here the literal boundary, the backdoor, notoriously marks two normative boundaries, against adultery and against anal sex. The lover is shaken, or called upon to shake, as though the transgressing demons of the verse would dissolve in orgasm all her boundaries, normative and otherwise.

For all its cocksure posturing about delivering the goods, “Whole Lotta Love” is a little scary. Much of Page’s guitar work lashes us, and Plant’s sexual wailing is as tortured as it is insistent. The lead riff is the ride of sexual demons, to which Plant gives voice. The song celebrates their power, but under their influence the singer cries out in need. Even his satisfaction leaves him exposed and vulnerable. As the blues wisdom would have it: “I can’t never be satisfied.” What keeps the song from egoistic fantasy is that its heroic celebration of sexual ecstasy is coupled with an awareness of this contradiction. The song remains sensitive to the suffering that accompanies our transgressions.

When the Levee Breaks: Excess as Truth

For Nietzsche, Dionysian music reveals excess as the truth of nature: “excess revealed itself as the truth; contradiction, bliss born of pain, spoke of itself from out of the heart of nature” (Birth of Tragedy, §4). By nature’s excess, Nietzsche means that which, from within or without, bursts the individual’s boundaries, overwhelming and consuming the individual. Songs that reveal excess as truth, render our striving heroic, and redeem our suffering are worthy of inclusion in the pantheon of Dionysian art. “When the Levee Breaks” does all this and more.

The opening of “When the Levee Breaks” is Bonham distilled: titanic thunder and sense of song. He’s the steady pulsing swell of water against the levee, and to hear him shakes us. He announces the song’s twin themes: that the excess of nature will inevitably overwhelm our artificial barriers and scatter us, and that this excess also builds from within, until the dams of the self burst, and in striving we are undone. As with almost everything Led Zeppelin does well, the rhythm is aggressively erotic. “If it keeps on raining,” Plant moans, “the levee is going to break.” But Bonham reveals the truth: the levee is going to break.

Although the wanderer is sometimes presented as a model of freedom, he’s also often driven out and compelled to leave, even if by some inner urge he can’t understand or master. The line “When the levee breaks, we’ll have no place to stay” reminds us that we’re transient beings driven beyond our borders by rising rivers, internal and external. The first lines of “When the Levee Breaks” signal the rising of nature, and sexual desire in particular, which like the river can drive us away from home. It declares our struggle for self-control futile. Yet while the song is a vision of our destruction, it’s also exhilarating. It celebrates nature’s power. Being overcome by it, we also get to try it on, as when we succumb to lust.

As individuals, we’re neither stable nor secure behind our borders. ¹²⁵ Instead, nature pounds relentlessly against them, always threatening to burst through. We reside at these boundaries, just trying to keep it together. “All last night, I sat on the levee and moaned / Thinking ’bout my baby and my happy home.” If the water is the rising of desire, then spending the night on the levee is spending it in the throes of longing, which may be mournful, but also guilty. As Plant later sings, “I’m going to Chicago / Sorry, but I can’t take you.” The outer excess that overwhelms us parallels the inner excess that drives us away from our happy home. It is, after all, his lover he can’t take to Chicago. I invite the reader to consider the many reasons this might be. Nature breaks us up.

It’s not incidental that Plant ends the song with “I’m going down / I’m going down now / I’m going down.” Down into what, we might ask? Perhaps, as with the Apollo of the Swan Song logo, down into the water. The swirling of the musical elements against Plant’s languishing voice suggests a kind of drowning. Or perhaps, as with Lucifer, down into a sea of fire, down into hell, which may be Chicago—an urban den of iniquity—but is likely a more personal descent. In German one can speak of annihilation as “going to the ground.” So the singer may just be dying, going down into the earth. Then again, “going down” has a well-known sexual meaning. Water, fire, and earth are elements, so in going down the singer is being dissolved again into nature, returned to the ground of the primordial unity.

While “When the Levee Breaks” is overwhelmingly about the lamentable truth that excess will shatter us, that the home of the self is propped on unstable ground, we take pleasure in the very image. It acts as a promise of ecstatic release and reunion. The song serves as a fantasy of being broken apart, forgetting oneself entirely, and dissolving into the primordial ground. I might go so far as to say that it makes the striving heroic, since it is a levee worker’s song, the song of one struggling to erect the very structure that will allow him to live, temporarily, by the river whose rising waters will destroy him. This is the song’s lament. Just as the god of nature unifies us all, so we are exhilarated when the levee breaks. This is the song’s jubilation.

Our individuation, though it appears so real, is a temporary and excruciating manifestation of forces that outstrip us. Such is the Dionysian wisdom Nietzsche finds expressed in all art. Good Dionysian art redeems this lamentable fate by celebrating our struggle against and ultimate release into the very forces that undo us. Rather than a flight into hedonism, Dionysian art is steeped in the awareness of our painful, contradictory condition. Led Zeppelin gives ecstatic expression to this wisdom and so something like Nietzsche’s Dionysian metaphysics of the self: that we are temporary manifestations of nature’s endlessly transformative power.¹²⁶