As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.
- Psalm 42:1
Recording an album by yourself is weird, and it is obvious that the bedroom pop / “solo artist” phenomenon is going to be looked on by future historians as a pitiful blip in the timeline. It always looks like this: You’re hunched over your computer, spending all day mulling over small pieces of audio for a song you’ve already been working on for two months, and you think to yourself, shouldn’t I just be playing piano for my family in the front of the fireplace after a warm supper? Didn’t God tell me in a dream that listening to / making music during the day is wrong, that it should only be enjoyed only on weekend evenings? What happened to music? Why is the musician “special” now when in past eons every man, woman and child could play an instrument and sing hymns with their families and churches? Does any of this even matter?
Of course, all of this matters — it just never matters in the way you expect when you start. When I began recording “Apiary,” my second full-length album as The Carmelittles, I wanted to express what I call the “sacramental frustration” of incarnate living — especially in matters of love and infatuation — expressed through a prism of pop music forms: rock, folk, disco, and so on. And let me tell you, my own sacramental frustration peaked during the seemingly endless process of constructing this record, a process that began all the way in 2020 shortly after releasing my first album “Wreath”. The creation of the record was so profoundly unsatisfying that I decided to write this long-winded and exhaustive essay in hopes of finding a sort of baptismal renewal which will hopefully transform what can appear to be a self-indulgent and trite pop album into an expression of deep theological struggle. Here we go…
First, let’s return to what I said about my term “sacramental frustration” — it is similar to sexual frustration, but expanded much further to the realm of desire in itself — in short, it is St. Augustine’s frustration expressed in his Confessions, that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. In the sacramental worldview, erotic frustration must be one with spiritual frustration, not as two parallel paths (this always risks descending into natura pura, Cartesian, and even Gnostic heresies) but as one being, spirit and body as one, despite our perceptions that they are separate and/or parallel — this is what is meant by “sacramental.”1
The condition of sacramental frustration is expressed on “Apiary” with a story more archetypal and mythic than is commonly thought. I say this because it’s the structure of nearly every “queer” story up until recently,2 although it’s important to note that I believe this archetypal story goes far beyond theories of sexual orientation, and that I don’t believe the concept of sexual orientation is useful or relevant except in secular ideologies which are alien to me.3 With songs from Apiary as markers, it goes something like this: two adolescent boys share an incredible bond and friendship, something like the fraternity shared in Heaven (“Epithalamion”). The narrator-singer loves his friend for his beauty and goodness (“The Disco Song”), but their love quickly becomes corrupted as it is sexualized (“Anemone”) — the friendship ends at the peak of the friendship’s sacramental desire. The desire’s peak is also, of course, its death (we’ll get to this later!). The other boy, the beloved one sung of by the narrator, moves on with his life, and grows into a well-adjusted, married man — the narrator, who I sing as on the record, does not, and lives with the unresolved brokenness forever (“Dummy”).
Most stories of this type end here — but on Side B of the record — I wanted to give this myth a fresh ending, and instead of having the narrator commit suicide4, give the narrator a surrealistic yet aimless adulthood. The narrator spends much time in a bizarre dream state (“Let’s Throw Our Phones Into The Lake”), seemingly catatonic in his bed, slipping in and out of a subconscious stupor that is both fantastical (“Groundhog Day”) and masturbatory (“I’m Done”). His pitiful condition peaks on “I’m Done”, when his sinful ways have grown so powerful they’ve created a serpentine feedback loop he’s unable to escape from. He only has one option, to say “no” to everything, even his own life (“The Deer In The Waterbrook”). He sings to himself:
I made it wrong it give it a name, I drew a dream in the sand so the serpent is tamed… I felt the stream approach like a tide, but when it came it fell from my claw…
The oasis lied.
The desert is the law.5
The desert is where the three holy vows (obedience, poverty, and chastity) are made. The desert is in fact the topological symbol of the three vows. The desert is also a magnet for those who find themselves under the grace of the three vows. Think the Desert Fathers, who didn’t simply travel to the desert as a getaway from civilization, but had some sort of magnetic attraction to the desert. And of course there is Jesus Christ himself — as Valentin Tomberg explains in Meditations on the Tarot6, Christ’s three temptations in the desert as depicted in Matthew 4 correspond to the three holy vows: the temptation to change loaves of bread corresponds to the vow of poverty; the temptation to “throw yourself from the temple” corresponds to the vow of chastity7, and the temptation to be given “all the kingdoms of the world” corresponds to the vow of obedience.
Christ, our model for the perfect spiritual life, shows us that every soul, on his path towards God, at some point ends up in the desert. The desert, therefore, is a law of the spiritual life. This moment of spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical dryness, all aligned as one sacramental dryness, is both a time of great suffering and a significant turning point in a person’s spiritual life. For Christ, it was the turning point that preceded his ministry. When the soul ends up in the desert — which he should if he is on the correct path — there is only one way out of the desert that won’t lead to his destruction, and that is renunciation, which in Christ’s case is the renunciation of the three temptations, purified from evil through their respective three sacred vows.
In the case of the “narrator” of Apiary — as is the case for many in modern world — our temptations, unmediated by the desert, have been allowed to grow into desire, which then is allowed to solidify into identity. One of the problems with this is that temptations are highly correlated with specific periods in a person’s life, whereas the development of identity ought to have the end-goal of permanence. Christ’s temptations in the desert don’t occur in his childhood or in his twenties, they occur at a specific time, and being the prescient Son of God he prepares for them by fasting and praying in the desert. But we do not share these preparations, and so the temptations which arise in certain periods of our lives are not nipped-in-the-bud through renunciation. Therefore, they stick around and fester like ghosts, in the form of unresolved desire, and we spend our adult lives walking around with an overall nostalgic temperament. Adolescence is the period of time-specific desire that is most easily solidified into identity, because desires from that time are both more weighted and more unresolved, especially due to the erotic nature of adolescent desire which by nature cannot be resolved8. These unresolved desires therefore undergo a period of romanticization through the nostalgic impulse which is then solidified into identity. This doesn’t generally happen with a small child’s temptation/desire to eat candy, because the child's desire for candy is less weighted and more easily resolved, nor, for a similar reason, does this happen with an adult's temptation/desire to have all his contingencies covered by insurance plans.
The narrator of “Apiary” falls into the dangerous, yet culturally common trap of basing one’s personhood on their seemingly short-lived and unresolved adolescence. The beauty of his relationship with his beloved friend as depicted in tracks 2-5 is completely undeniable, and this beauty is due to its novelty and naïvety. I would go as far as to say the beauty of the relationship is irreplaceable, and perhaps even the emotional peak of the narrator’s life. But by what logic can we assign value to “novelty,” “naïvety,” “irreplaceability,” and “emotional peaks” as things worthy of being carried into adulthood when their very beauty is that they appear without warning at the appropriate time in a person’s life (adolescence), just in the same way that their matured corollaries “refinement,” “wisdom,” “eternity,” and “emotional humility” appear in beauty and without warning in the same person’s adulthood?
The logic that assigns value to these adolescent phenomena over their mature counterparts is of course the logic of the devil/tempter/serpent in the desert, who promises a revival of the dead ghosts of memory without Grace. If you keep circling in place, he hisses, you will be given the oasis, your dreams will come true and you will be like gods. The narrator of Apiary, a puer aeternus and also an everyman of the contemporary Western world, for many years trusts the serpent.
But the serpent is a liar. There is no oasis. There is no going back. There is no reviving the loved ones who have died. There is no joy that isn’t tainted in heartbreak. There is nowhere to rest our heads. There is no true emotional, sexual, or mental satisfaction. There is no truly loving another person or being loved in a complete and selfless way. There is no meaning that doesn’t pass through us like the wind. There is no hope for a utopia. There is no way to truly live in the moment. There is no manifesto that will save us. There are no superheroes. There is no resolution to our desire. There are none of these things — as long as we remain poor banished children of Eve, on this earth, in this valley of tears.
The purpose of renunciation, and of asceticism generally, is based on the principle that this endless stream of apparent black-pills listed above is, in some mysterious way, the secret to our life. That is, if we were to theoretically “achieve” our desires, it would either look like full communion in Heaven or complete disappearance in the void — in other words, a form of death. But we are in between these things, therefore we are very much living, even and especially in all of our little deaths, sufferings, and moments of indifference and dryness. Common sense tells us that living is good, since those who say otherwise are mentally ill, demonically possessed, imbalanced in humors and/or lacking in reason. Therefore, suffering must also be good. The rational-moral solution towards this condition of life is an ora et labora towards full communion with God in Heaven, which is only achievable through complete renunciation: renouncing not only your desires for sex, possessions and freedom but also your very life, as modeled by Christ, who renounced his earthly life so that he could find heavenly life through his Resurrection and Ascension.
At the narrator’s rock bottom moment, his Saturn return, his moment in the desert, he realizes this as he utters his last words heard on the album:
If the deer finds the waterbrook it’ll drown
it must thirst all its life to be found
I can’t believe how long it took to admit it out loud
To have nothing is the answer
Having nothing is the answer
To why nothing ever answers back
The “hart panteth after the waterbrooks” (Ps 42:1) in the same way the psalmist panteth after God — but it is clear to me that, in mankind’s current place in spiritual history, we are not ready for God. We are still in shameful nakedness and would be obliterated if we were exposed to the heavenly light, like the ghosts in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. We need extensive preparation, which isn’t about fulfilling desire, but continuously stripping our needs until we’re left with the void in which can be filled with God, as Simone Weil pontificates. And a preparation of this kind can take a soul a thousand years to achieve. Who knows — but if we’re in the beginning of something, instead of at the last ropes of a futile struggle, which often seems to be the case — I will carry on with hope.
My album Apiary is available to stream for free whenever or wherever you want:
If you’d like to support me by purchasing the record for a price of your choosing, click here:
I would like to thank the following people for performing on the record and/or being great friends, colleagues, family members:
Sebastian Anton-Ojeda, Cicely Balston, Grace Barrington, Sam Buntz, Austin Connolly, Gabriel Connor, Emily Dorian, Matthew James Dougherty, Don Edwards, Henry Geraghty, Solomon John Groothuis, Ian Guen-Murray, Dave Herrero, Alicia Hurtado, Joey Keegin, Sasha Ongtengco, Nicolas Poilevey, Oliver Poilevey, Jessica Ricci, Josef Saunders, Bonnie Scott, Blake Smith, Pablo Toubes-Rieger.
O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, Hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed,
Deliver me, Jesus.
Another useful definition of “sacramental” is that it is the opposite of “mechanical”. See Meditations on the Tarot Pg. 215
Even in the past decade two of the most prominent “queer” films follow this basic myth: Moonlight (2016) and Call Me By Your Name (2017), however in the past 10-20 years there have also been attempts in the mainstream, for instance with shows like Glee and Modern Family, to make homosexual relationships/marriages appear identical to heterosexual ones. This was very uncommon before the 2000’s.
I’ve actually always believed this since I was a young teen, despite the world telling me otherwise. It wasn’t until I read Urban Hannon’s essays “Against Heterosexuality” and especially his response essay “Against Obsessive Sexuality” that my intuition was vindicated. It is not to mean that people don’t have innate attractions to one gender over another — rather it is rather that the seemingly intrinsic, fixed connection between same-sex attraction and certain types of repeated sexual behavior is actually a forced connection caused by post-Victorian modern society and compounded further by the Sexual Revolution and pornography. Also, same-sex attraction is historically something grown out of, for many have homosexual experiences in adolescence and get married in adulthood. Either way, it is fairly plain to me that a boy or man who is sufficiently sensitive, open, and attuned to the beauty of Creation will at some point in his life (even in childhood or old age) become attracted to someone of the same sex. The calling of this attraction is not sex, but friendship, the greatest of relationships, says both Thomas Aquinas; “There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.” — and Christ himself; “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)
This was actually my initial plan — to basically make Apiary a full album version of my 2020 song “The Letter”
From “The Deer In The Waterbrook”
from pages 140-144 in Meditations on the Tarot
This one can be a bit confusing, but basically Tomberg defines “chastity” beyond its typical definition of sexual behavior, or lack thereof. Being unchaste for Tomberg is essentially falling under the spell of the “struggle for existence” that comes from the curse of natural evolution set forth from the serpent of paradise. This struggle for existence inevitably leads to experimentation and trial, and as he goes on to write, “The trial is the very essence of what the Bible designates as ‘fornication.’” (MotT pg. 143) Therefore, Christ throwing himself down from the pinnacle of the temple to see if the angels will catch him would be akin to the type of trial-and-error of natural evolution of which sexual unchastity bears the same origin.
Anyone who thinks for a moment knows that sexual satisfaction is an illusion — it may cause a form of satisfaction that is only of a temporary and physical/mental nature, but the nature of the sexual orgasm, when interpreted with reason and honesty, is always a desire that dies right before it is resolved, or rather hides away for a day or so before returning to its pre-orgasm state.