Diane cluck, ethel cain, and other inspiring things

03/24/26

Still in a cooldown period from my egregious rant in the last post (though i do stand by my statements), i thought i'd share a shorter and more casual entry and just recount my fun last couple of days.
I saw diane cluck perform live this weekend, which was a rare and exciting treat since she and jessica pratt are my two biggest inspirations for my own little folk songs and, until now, i assumed (rather naively) that she was relinquished to the ether of the bygone 2000s folk underground with jesca hoop and kimya dawson. All of the above still release albums/singles consistently each year; and the most exciting part is that, if you still care to listen, you can hear that the revelations of the creative and sensitive lead ever-evolving lives independent of observation. You know, i produced a full-length album for someone last year who intentionally declined to share their album anywhere or with anyone, and the mere concept of working on something just so it can exist in private, unseen by anyone but you and God, is something that i still admire and contemplate a lot. Hell, i've technically dedicated years of my life to some musical works that might never be "officially released", but their personal impact on me will stay with me forever. They become intertwined with your own soul and the way you conduct your life, and in this way, they make themselves known while remaining free of the craving for acclaim or legacy. That, of course, is about me though, and not diane cluck.
Diane performed a beautifully light set in the corner of a bar where seats had been placed in tight rows like an oddly narrow microcinema. Two babies were in attendance. I walked in to telepathic desert (i had unforunately missed the opener, a gainesville band called wax wings), which was one of only three songs from her most-acclaimed release oh vanille/ova nil; many of the songs she played were never released anywhere. One was about river otters; one included an arabic prayer; the other was a gorgeous piano piece about love without domination (that made me tear up). I realized that most all her compositions were deceptively simple. She encouraged us to participate in call-and-response sections and group harmonies, which actually produced really gorgeous moments, since everyone was very open and eager to share in an environment that made me feel quite vulnerable. She seemed to be deciding intuitively what to play, and when she played a kind of forlorn short piano piece, she noted it had made her feel heavy and she wanted to play something happier, since we've already established that we all feel weight in this societal moment and it's more important now (revolutionary even) to express lightness. Wild deer, my favorite track of hers(!!!), was her closer, a perfect lullaby. My partner and i burned a split mixtape for diane of some unreleased demos we've made (to demonstrate her positive influence in our creative lives), and she graciously accepted it, which felt like some kind of spontaneous unwritten bucket list moment.

Diane's seasoned intuition and unencumberedness was very inspiring. For all the times oh vanille has sat with me in moments of anguished mourning, her insistence on this shared gentle hopefulness made me really contemplate the possibility of a future in my own creative works that goes beyond the grief, that keeps living after the death. I guess i was thinking about that for the whole next day, without realizing it (i was hideously sleep deprived because we had driven 2.5 hours to see her and then got up for work at 6 am the next day - worth it).
I ended up sitting at home watching ethel cain's video about her paranormal experiences, which was really exciting and eye opening because, despite having never really listened to ethel cain's music, i share very intimately with her the experience of having grown up in florida trailer parks. When she talks about palmetto bug-infested tin sheds and how uncomfortable it is to live as a big family in a single-wide trailer, she is literally recalling vivid memories of my own childhood (and recalls it with the exact same Southern phonetic particularities of my family!). I also share with her a haunted childhood - at least three of the many places i lived in are described by my family as haunted. I actually just recently wrote an entry in my memory journal about this, but i'm conflicted on whether to share it here, because my views on spirits are conflicted: there is a very blurry line between what of it was a sustained, shared unexplainable phenomenon and what of it was a creative manifestation of a deep familial grief-induced insanity. And i don't think that line can or should ever be discerned; there is a reason why humans across time and history, no matter how far science and psychology advances, preserve a space in our memories for unspeakable and unexplainable sensations and perceptions of the numinous. Reason falls short of describing their naked, wild profundity; language threatens to dishonor what feels like such an immensity to us that it still, to this day, evokes the same chills and paranoia. Sometimes i think that being "susceptible" to the "spirit world" just means you're living in a state of hypervigilance, wherein your mind continually weaves elaborate patterns out of minutia just to keep you aware of potential threats, and this sense i have that i've lost my connection to this world (which is honestly very devastating to me) just means i'm finally in a stable environment where hypervigilance is no longer necessary. Maybe that's true, but it still doesn't feel right. It doesn't honor what was deeply felt, and it doesn't sufficiently explain the way some of those feelings were shared and corroborated by other people.
Much like ethel's, my mom was highly "susceptible", often had premonitory dreams, and often believed that we were living among dark forces. Hell, that could be true metaphorically, psychotically, and literally. There are specific entities that her, my siblings, and i have each had our own independent experiences with: the spirit in my dad's old house which i saw in my bedroom at probably three years old; the bride who my ever-skeptical step-dad insisted he saw while out working in his shed, who has had a sustained presence over the many years he has lived there, who threw a pillow at my sister, who took up residence in my brother's closet, who rummages in the kitchen and sneaks around barefoot at night; and then there are the spirits of the blue house, rather poltergeist-like, who struck terror into every one of us until we had to sleep together on pallets in mom's bedroom every night. To describe the familial subtext of these apparitions would be both too personal and too dismissive. Maybe it's like how ethel's mom described to her, that "chaos spirits" will attach themselves to the emotionally volatile, that they will enter wherever invited or wherever a vulnerability is opened. Maybe this is an artful description of hypervigilance and psychosis. Maybe there was black mold in the house (also plausible). The best part is, we'll literally never know for sure. And as much as my mind has a habit of rabidly, voraciously intellectualizing things, scientifically researching each of my own vulnerabilities in order to solve them (case in point: my obsession with theology and psychoanalysis), i think i owe it to myself to leave at least some things to the realm of unexplainability, of poetry and body-sense, because they were just that somatically intense and bewildering - sometimes, even, they were at their most bewildering when they were completely mundane and unanticipated, coming and going with no fanfare at all, just a small "what the hell was that?" moment.

When i get tempted to rationalize numinous perceptions, which are highly somatic and rich with sensations of an indescribable level, i often recall the time i drowned in a river. Supposedly, my heart really stopped, but i theorize that my soul was too tethered to my body to actually leave it yet, and this was why i can't recall having "seen" anything from "beyond" (although, when i came to, i had a strange notion that i had been at a party or a gathering with a lot of people, and it was disorienting to realize i was actually being carried through a forest). But this certainly didn't make me an atheist. Part of this was because of the sensations i felt, which to this day are the most unique thing i have ever experienced. My mom had near-death experiences and she described death as a sort of bubble or invisible film that imperceptibly draws nearer to you, enveloping your body with this weightless vibration; this is an interesting interpretation of what i felt, which i personally describe as my entire body being covered in tv static, almost lifted weightlessly by the static. And when i say body, i don't even mean my physical body, because i rather abruptly lost sensation in all of my limbs, but i maintained a conscious mental shape of where my body was supposed to be as i was trying to get my limbs to move. And this mental shape, which could have even been the shape of my soul, that's what was enveloped by this static, stripped of weight, removed from light and space. Of course, all of these words are mere approximations with infinite potential re-descriptions - it could be a bubble, it could be static, it could be a light at the end of a tunnel, it could be an unbearable heat. It's something rare and unspeakable. It doesn't need to be grandiose or paradisiacal to be extraordinary. And yeah, one could say something something brain chemicals endorphins whatever; i don't think giving it a scientific name or even a scientific origin strips it of its immensity as a phenomenon of the natural world. You could call the birth and death of a star "supernova", a converging of "hydrogen" and "nitrogen" and "oxygen", but that classification doesn't make it any less the product of God's hand. And i bring this up because yes, i think this kind of experience is of the exact same nature and origin as the numinous and paranormal. In order to describe terror, hysteria, psychosis, paralysis, death, we have no choice but to return to non-language, "primitive" notions, poetry and formless sound.

I'm reading a book right now - a book i've been really excited to get my hands on since i found it on archive dot org - the incorruptible flesh: bodily mutation and mortification in religion and folklore, which is a sort of anthropological exploration of the bizarre hysterical perceptions of those medieval ancestors who had nothing but Catholic terminology to describe what they could not explain of their commonly horrific lives. The author, Camporesi, does not explicitly use modern science to cleverly debunk every one of their assertions; rather, he observes them with oppenness and acknowledges the fact that their experiences were highly bodily, immediate to death, and immediate to nature in a way that is foreign to us today. Sure, they did all the same things we did: they went insane, they grew old and senile, they did drugs, they lost loved ones, they got sick and went hungry and lost sleep, all of which have the potential to induce numinous experiences, but they did all of these things on a level that we describe today as traumatic because it is rare to us now, because it is an extraordinary pain to us, because it's that much harder to talk about and share it now. Because it was commonplace to them, shared, even formally recognized in religious practices and rhetoric, it allowed them space to create elaborate language for the numinous, structures that gave the unexplainable form and purpose, which ultimately saved them from their terror and allowed them to coexist alongside death and decay, to cherish death and decay in a way that we can't anymore.
The closest thing we have to this today is the highly elaborate paranormal folklore of Appalachia and the indigenous desert regions, the eccentric practices of the primitive and charismatic churches who still engage in shared hysteria and religious ecstasy, and the exciting culture of paranormal storytelling online. Some things today are still untouched by reason. And thank God for it. Because if we dissected every extraordinary sensation we felt, we would rob ourselves of the ability to feel. We would rob ourselves of the ability to cope with the unspeakable. Lil ugly mane (musician who i really like) once shared a werner herzog quote on instagram that actually inspired me to pursue nearly everything i'm pursuing now: "If you harshly light every corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It's like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become 'uninhabitable'." This quote is a criticism against psychoanalysis and it actually inspired me to commit the next several years of my life to a deep-dive into psychoanalysis, to finally understand what's the big deal with all of it. In all my searching - through psychoanalytic history, through theology, and through anthropological study of these many hysterical religious populations - i've come to agree with at least part of Don Carveth's position on the irrationality of belief. If Freud said that faith is essentially insanity, and Klein maintains that insanity is just a feeling-state of polarization (called the "paranoid-schizoid position") that can be reframed and tamed through ambivalence (the "depressive/reparative position"), then it's possible that faith can exist in both these feeling-states, and that that is its nature and purpose. That it is even healthy to participate in this feeling-state, whether you truly "believe" or not, in order to recognize that the irrational is a lifelong instinctual part of you that lives alongside the rational. That you don't have to destroy one in favor of the other - it won't allow you to, and you aren't supposed to. I think it's possible to agree with herzog's quote and also accept the wealth of inner knowledge psychoanalysis has to offer. In the same way that you can accept the simple tumultuousness of your childhood without explaining away all its ghosts; in the same way that you can be both an artist and an academic, and you can share mournful poetry without restricting its meanings or purposes, and you can create art that has its own life and presence whether or not it's observed; in the same way that you can live a mortal and worldly life and still acknowledge and invite God as a presence alongside it.

Folks, i don't think a "shorter and more casual entry" is possible for me. Hopefully you don't mind.