Table Of ContentBERGMETAL
Oro-Emblems of the Musical Beyond
by
Lieut. Nab Saheb of Kashmir
with
Introduction and Commentary
by
Denys X. Abaris, O.S.L.
HWORDE
Austin Ø New York
BERGMETAL: ORO-EMBLEMS OF THE MUSICAL
BEYOND BY LIEUT. NAB SAHEB OF KASHMIR,
WITH INTRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY BY
DENYS X. ABARIS, O.S.L.
© the authors and gnOme books
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HWORDE is an imprint of gnOme books
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Please address inquiries to:
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Cover image: “The Bard” by John Martin (1789-1854),
public domain (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:The_Bard.jpg)
ISBN-13: 978-1494907204
ISBN-10: 1494907208
Where does Mont Blanc end, and where do I
begin? That is the question which no meta-
physician has hitherto succeeded in
answering. But at least the connection is
close and intimate. He is a part of the great
machinery in which my physical frame is in-
extricably involved, and not the less
interesting because a part which I am unable
to subdue to my purposes. The whole uni-
verse, from the stars and the planets to the
mountains and the insects which creep about
their roots, is but a network of forces eternal-
ly acting and reacting upon each other. The
mind of man is a musical instrument upon
which all external objects are beating out in-
finitely complex harmonies and discords.
– Leslie Stephen
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction: On Bergmetal xv
Emblems
I. Enter the Mountain 1
II. No Way 8
III. Slumber Killed 20
IV. Occult Rock 37
V. Abandoned Mine 50
VI. Scream of Stone 63
VII. Never to Descend 77
Preface
By a way I came, but I went not by the way.
– Lal Ded
This book was sparked by an email message I received
ten weeks before my second deployment to Siachen
glacier, the highest altitude battlespace on the planet.
The message from came from Dr. Manabrata Guha of
the National Institute of Advanced Studies (Banga-
lore), whose writings on Indian military strategy and
the SIMAD I had studied with great interest. My first
deployment to Siachen had resulted in torturous phys-
ical depression and maddening psychic fatigue.
Thankfully, Dr. Guha’s delightfully abstract and theo-
retical writings helped me understand how this
traumatic experience was not really traumatic, not a
wounding from which I needed to recover, but rather a
structurally necessary and most natural participation
in a geo-military situation “in which strategy decom-
poses into pure tacticities and where combat has less
to do with destruction, and more to do with the al-
chemy of decay” (Guha, “Introduction to SIMADology:
Polemos in the 21st Century”). This sentence in partic-
ular encompasses for me the strange form of
exhaustive terror that had settled in my soul at Sia-
chen and left me wondering whether it would be
possible for me to return. For living and fighting so
deep and high in the mountains is not only an ardu-
ous task and venture, but a truly inhuman mode of
existence where, pinched between the eternal collapse
of the Himalaya and the self-fracturing stress of attri-
tional warfare, one’s life remains in a state of embering
frozen evaporation, as if the very forces responsible for
the consolidation and ordering of our material world
are way up there working against themselves to pro-
vii
PREFACE
duce a mode of being that is neither dead nor alive
and beyond both. Preparation for death is a relatively
easy matter, and I feel ready to die in whatever man-
ner God wills. But this scorched active existing as
something awfully in between, this in-existing as a
metaphysically exposed and blackened being, what
preparation can there be for that?
Dr. Guha, who is an ardent fan of Black Sabbath, re-
ferred in his communications to a blog entitled
Bergmetal, consisting of sound clips of mountain-
themed heavy metal songs and accompanying annota-
tions. My imagination was captured by images like the
Propagandhi album cover pictured above and the al-
viii
BERGMETAL
bum cover for a lost Bergmetal album showing the
desiccated corpse and skull of a dead mountaineer:
Exploring the site of Bergmetal spontaneously became
for me a kind of insensible preparatory meditation on
my imminent return to combat at Siachen, a way to re-
project myself victoriously into the inhuman martial
grinding of the sacred glacial spheres. It helped me to
grapple and mount towards my destiny, both as an
individual spiritual being bound for obliteration into
the infinity of Reality and as an historical entity, a lit-
tle man from Kashmir caught up in the oropolitical
carnage of this unheroic age. Contemplating the harsh
strains and concepts of Bergmetal restored my senses
to the ancient spiritual significance of warfare and the
ix
