Document Type
Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Born out of awe for Heavy Metal's bottomless significance and the conviction that intellectual understanding, however precise, is only a shadow of the real understanding of direct conscious experience, this essay draws form and inspiration from the essentially phenomenological methods of the medieval gloss. Whereas much contemporary intellectual discourse says so much that it silences the thing itself and whereas much contemporary artistic representation says so little that it becomes merely and mutely a thing, the medieval gloss both preserves the independence of the thing it speaks about and creates itself as an independently speaking thing. This balance between text and context, subject and object, derives from the essentially relational nature of the gloss. The gloss does not come at you like a monolithic thesis or sword-Logos born from a sperm whale's forehead. The gloss comes towards you like a human being, hypothetical, curious, speaking your language. Formed of the accumulated impressions of innumerable actions and reactions to the text, the gloss accomplishes nothing and so becomes capable of everything. As waves are to the stones that caused them, the gloss is to what it glosses, spreading out in unending uniqueness from the page's unmarkable center, giving witness to depths the undisturbed surface cannot.
Repository Citation
Masciandaro, Nicola. "Black Sabbath’s "Black Sabbath": A Gloss on Heavy Metal’s Originary Song." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 9, no. 2, 2009, pp. 1–17. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol9/iss2/8