By way of (I think) Black Metal Theory, Notes from the Vomitorium, The Whim, coming to my attention around the time I heard of Dayal Patterson’s Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult, and acquired also earlier this year, the strange and oddly poetic work of Lieutenant Nab Saheb of Kashmir, with a preface by Denys X. Abaris, O.S.L, Bergmetal: Oro-emblems of the Musical Beyond, sits near Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia in an unnamed field of philosophy, theory, fiction, fantasy. It’s a little book, not even 100 pages, with small illustrations of mountaineers plunging to their doom high on a storm-wrapped mountain, covers of black metal albums, more pictures of mountains, chapter titles swinging between black metal and Werner Herzog films (that’d be Scream of Stone). I’m not sure I understand what I’m reading, but I like it; it appeals to me in a non-verbal way, drawing the aesthetic and philosophy of black metal towards the corporeal experience of climbing and mountains – also a philosophy. It’s a book that sits well near Michel Serres, who also loves mountains, and who understands bodies and thoughts in a way that for the moment seems lost or dismissed.