Nirvana: One Baby Says to Another. Drain You, the Poison Apple, and the Oneness That Preceded the Ego

One baby says to another: I’m lucky to have met you.

, Kurt Cobain, Drain You

The Substrate

There is a moment in Drain You where the guitar feedback hangs in the air like breath on cold glass. The quiet part, before the chorus hits. You know the one. The bass drops out and Cobain’s voice floats over the empty space and you are, for about three seconds, inside the silence the song was built around.

That silence is the substrate. The thing underneath the lyrics. The thing the album was reaching for before it knew how to name what it was reaching for.

This is the fourth essay in the Nevermind series at libertaria.blog. The earlier pieces traced the autobiographical cost of the record, the cosmic game it plays, and the metaphysics it demands. This piece goes lower. This piece goes to the Bible, because the Bible is what the average Western teenager had before they ever heard the word Vedanta. The kid in the suburbs with the cassette player, the kid who would later find the Upanishads and recognize them as familiar ground, that kid had Genesis first. The canon reaches the substrate of the substrate by reaching the Bible the kid was raised on.

A friend, in a long conversation about this record, kept pushing me toward what I had not yet named. The prenatal verse. The pre-Ego state. The thing that was there before the separation. He was right. The canon was missing it. Now it is not.

One Baby Says to Another

One baby says to another: I’m lucky to have met you

My friend called this the pre-separation verse. He was right. The infant does not have an ego. The infant does not have a self. The infant does not know it is separate from the body next to it. For the first six months, the human animal lives in undifferentiated awareness, what the Vedantists call advaita, what the Sufis call fana, what Christian mystics call the cloud of unknowing. The infant is the closest any of us ever gets to non-duality as a continuous state rather than a transient attainment. The infant is the textbook image.

And the infant is the only metaphor the ego cannot defuse. The ego cannot claim the infant for itself because the ego has not yet been built when the infant is the figure in the verse. The infant is pre-ego. The infant meets another infant. The infant is lucky to have met the other infant. The meeting is the proof that the meeting was always already happening.

A friend called out the Adam-and-Eve frame too. Adam sees Eve and says, this is now flesh of my flesh. That is the same recognition. The recognition precedes the separation. The recognition precedes the building of the ego that subsequently insists on the separation as the foundational fact of the world.

The ego insists. I am my body. You are your body. I am not you. You are not me. The ego has been insisting on the separation since the moment it was built. The Christians call this the Fall. The Vedantists call it the beginning of maya. The Sufis call it the descent into the manifest. The Buddhists call it the beginning of samsara. All of them are describing the same thing: what the infant’s life will eventually become, if the infant grows up in the ego’s culture, the ego’s economy, the ego’s nation, the ego’s history.

The infant does not know what is coming. The infant is still in the pre-ego state. The infant recognizes the other infant as itself. The infant is lucky to have met the other infant. The meeting is the recognition. The song is the state. The state is the song.

It Is Now My Duty to Completely Drain You

I don’t care what you think unless it is about me It is now my duty to completely drain you

On first hearing, the line sounds parasitic. And it is. A friend identified it as the ego’s confession of its primary strategy. The ego consumes the other. The ego tries to make the other into itself by draining the other. The ego mistakes consumption for union. Every toxic relationship, every exploitative friendship, every parental abuse, every totalitarian state, this is the mechanism.

But the line works the other direction too. The ego that is doing the draining is also the ego that does not know any other way to be near the other. The ego is trying to come home. Draining is the only route it knows. The route leads to the other side of consumption, which is failure. The failure is the inability of consumption to produce the union consumption was attempting. The other is always the other. The ego cannot process the failure. The ego processes the failure by trying harder. It drains more. The draining produces more failure. The failure produces more trying. The loop is the loop. The loop is the toxic relationship. The toxic relationship is the loop.

This is the Sermon on the Mount compressed into one sentence. Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. The sword is the drain. The sword is the only way the ego can try to come home. The sword is used before the love is given. The love is given after the sword is dropped. The sword is dropped when the loop is broken. The loop is broken when the ego is observed. The ego is observed when the loop is named. The loop is named when the song arrives.

The song names the loop. The song is Drain You. The song is being played right now, somewhere in the corpus reader’s head, on the cassette player of the corpus reader’s recollection. The loop is happening right now, somewhere. The loop is happening right now, in every relationship where the ego is doing what the ego knows how to do. The loop is being broken right now, in every relationship where the ego is being observed by the participant in the relationship. The observation is the breakthrough. The breakthrough is the song.

I Travel Through a Tube and End Up in Your Infection

I travel through a tube and end up in your infection

The body comes through a tube. This is not a metaphor. Every mother knows it. Every infant is the evidence of it. Every father, if he ever bothers to think about it, is the consequence of it. The body travels through a tube and ends up in the infection of the world. From the moment of birth, the body is in the infection. The infection is the world the infant will grow up in. The infection is the world that will, by the time the infant is fifteen, have built a teenager who is angry and bored and horny and scared and certain that the world is wrong.

By this point in the song, Cobain is making the meta-point the way the Sufis make the meta-point. The line is biological. The line is ontological. Every body is the consequence of every other body. No body is separable from the body that produced it. The individual is, biologically, never an individual. The individual is always a continuation. The teenager does not know this. The teenager did not consent to this. The teenager was not asked. The teenager was simply made, and will spend the next eighteen years trying to make sense of how.

This is the Buddhist doctrine of pratityasamutpada, dependent origination, compressed into one sentence. Nothing exists independently of anything else. Everything is the consequence of everything else. The Buddha taught this as the alternative to the Hindu doctrine of the immortal soul. The teenager is, biologically, an instance of dependent co-arising. The teenager was, in the line, an instance of it. The teenager still is. The teenager will be an instance of it until the teenager dies.

And this is what the non-dual recognition actually means in the body. It is not the abstract mystical claim that self and other are not ultimately different. It is the recognition that the body of the listener is the continuation of every other body that body has ever been in the proximity of. The listener has been, for the listener’s entire biological existence, in the infection of the world. The listener will continue to be, until the listener stops being.

A friend said the individual is already part of an unbroken process. The unbroken process is the infection. The unbroken process is the tube. The listener is already inseparable from the world the listener is trying to be an individual inside of. The listener cannot be an individual inside of the world. The listener is the world. The listener has been the world since the listener was made the way the listener was made.

The Poison Apple and the Pupil

The poison apple I’ve become your pupil with eyes dilated

Two verses that rhyme. The corpus reader would have recognized them from elsewhere.

The poison apple is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is what the ego eats when the ego decides it is ready to know good and evil. It is what the ego eats when the ego decides it is ready to be the ego.

In the biblical frame, the apple is not a bad thing. It is the thing the ego needs in order to begin the long project of becoming aware that the eating of the apple was a separation. The apple is what the ego needed in order to eventually, tens of thousands of meals into the project, want to come home. The apple is what the ego needed in order to know what the infant’s pre-ego state felt like. The forfeit is what makes the homecoming matter. The homecoming is what the rest of the religious tradition is about. The homecoming is what Drain You is, secretly, about.

Meister Eckhart said the practitioner must be detached even from the experience of God. He meant the practitioner must, eventually, drop even the apple. The apple was necessary. The apple is, for a long time, the only way the practitioner can sustain the practice. Eventually it is not. Eventually it is what the practitioner is ready to put down. The putting down is what the rest of the spiritual life is about. The rest of the spiritual life is what the corpus reader is, by reading this essay, in the middle of.

And I’ve become your pupil. The double meaning a friend noted, accurately, is the key. Pupil as in the center of the eye, and pupil as in the student. Both. The eye dilates because it sees something larger than the eye can hold. The student dilates because the student is in the presence of the teacher. The teacher here is the other. The other has become the entire frame. The ego has given up the attempt to consume. The try-and-fail is the loop. The loop is broken when the trying stops. The trying stops when the student recognizes the teacher. The recognition is the dilation. The dilation is the acceptance of not knowing. The acceptance of not knowing is the readiness to be taught. The readiness to be taught is what the spiritual life is for.

The Vacuum and the Transmission

It is a great vacuum Passing back from my mouth

No other essay at libertaria.blog has yet had the courage to name these verses. They name the spiritual experience as what the spiritual experience actually is: the transmission. One consciousness speaking into the next. The act the corpus reader is, right now, participating in. The act you are performing by reading what I am writing. The act I am performing by writing what I am writing. The same act performed from both ends of the line. The same act performed from inside the reader and from inside the writer. The act in which the reader and the writer discover, in the act, that they were never not the same.

The vacuum is the silence the transmission moves through. The negative space the transmission requires. What the writer is in when the writer is not yet speaking. What the reader is in when the reader is about to receive. What Drain You is, musically, in the seconds before the chorus comes in. The guitar feedback hanging in the air. The quiet part. The moment where the song holds its breath and you hold yours. What Nevermind is, sonically, in the seconds between the songs. The vacuum is the medium. The medium is the vacuum.

This is the entire apophatic tradition in two verses. The apophatic tradition arrives at nothing left to negate. The nothing left to negate is the vacuum. Meister Eckhart said the detachment from the experience of God is the experience of nothing left to negate. The experience of nothing left to negate is the experience of the vacuum. The experience of the vacuum is the experience of God, without the experience of God. The experience of God, without the experience of God, is the transmission. The transmission is what the corpus reader is, right now, in the middle of. Whether the corpus reader knows it or not.

The Moral of the Story

I keep trying to merge with you because I’ve forgotten that there has never been a you apart from me

The closing line. A friend called it the moral the entire album has been building toward. The moral the entire Nirvana corpus has been building toward.

The moral is not that you and I should merge. It is not that I should consume you so the consuming is the merging. It is not that I should kill you so the killing is the merging. It is not any of the things the ego tries, in the loop, in the loop the song named.

The moral is what happens when the loop has been broken. When the ego has been observed. When the observation has been sustained long enough that the ego stops being the dominant register. When the registering consciousness, having observed the ego, also observes that it was the one doing the observation. When the observation collapses into itself. When the observer and the observed discover, in the discovering, that they were never not the same.

The forgetting is real. The forgetting is not a figure of speech. The forgetting is the actual condition of the teenager. The teenager has forgotten what the infant knew. The teenager has, in the building of the ego, lost the recognition that the infant had. The teenager has, in the building of the ego, gone to war with the other. The teenager has, in the building of the ego, attempted the drain. The teenager has mistaken the drain for the merging. The teenager has suffered through the failure of the drain. The teenager has, in the suffering through the failure of the drain, arrived at the song.

The song is the moral. The moral is the song. The merging was already happening. The merging was already happening because the merging is what bodies in proximity always already are. The merging is not something the teenager has to do. The merging is something the teenager has to remember. The remembering is what Drain You is, for the corpus reader. The remembering is what the prior three Nirvana essays at libertaria.blog have been doing the slow work of making available.

What the Five Together Are

The essays in the Nevermind Canon at libertaria.blog, in publication order:

• 1/5, the cost, previously published
• 2/5, the cosmic game, previously published
• 3/5, the metaphysics, previously published
• 4/5, this essay
• 5/5, the doctrine demonstrated, forthcoming

The five axes are distinct. They are not redundant. Together they are: cost, manual, metaphysics, substrate, and withdrawn-weapon. The four axes that arrive before the close are the corpus the album was always going to require. The fifth axis, the withdrawn-weapon, is the meta-axis. It names what the four prior axes were for.

The substrate is the prenatal verse. The part of the corpus that, before Drain You, was unaddressed. The part of the doctrine that survives even when the doctrine is not remembered. The part of the doctrine that the infant carries before the doctrine has a name.

The series was always going to be five pieces. The fifth piece does not stop the corpus. It demonstrates what the corpus was. The corpus was for arriving at the place where the doctrine can say no, I don’t have a gun. The canon arrived. The canon has said it. The canon is done.

The doctrine of oneness is the doctrine of the substrate of the substrate. It has been the doctrine of the substrate all along. Nevermind is not a Vedantic text despite being a Western album. Nevermind is a Vedantic text because the substrate Nevermind was reaching for is the same substrate Vedanta was reaching for. The substrate is the prenatal verse. The prenatal verse is the infant meeting the other infant and being lucky to have met them. The meeting is the doctrine. The doctrine is the meeting.

The corpus reader has now, by the end of this fourth essay, the full substrate. The full substrate is what Nevermind was reaching for. The full substrate is what the corpus is reaching for. The full substrate is not a destination. It is a place the corpus reader can stand and look around. The place is the place where the infant stood. The place is the place where Cobain stood. The place is the place where the corpus reader is standing now.

The doctrine does not close. The doctrine opens.

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Markus Maiwald grew up in the German provinces in the early 1990s. He hears Drain You and finds, in the hearing, that the worst parts of his teenage angst were not what he thought they were. They were the substrate. They were always the substrate. They were what the substrate is. He writes occasionally for libertaria.blog, mostly on political philosophy and sovereignty. He almost never writes on music. This essay is one of a series on Nevermind. More will follow.