The rumor was that someone had booked the wrong place for my all-girls Catholic high school class retreat. We were in the desert, hours away from home, in a monastery laden with the goriest images of Christ available. The statuary was tucked in corners, hallway niches, bleeding over doorways. We were to be quiet. We had to remain locked in our individual cells and were told that monks would be patrolling the hallways to make sure we didn’t visit each other.

In my cell, with only a Bible and my overnight bag, I sat nervously on a little cot. This was hostile territory, so I didn’t take off my clothes or shoes. I lay down, gingerly, and looked at the mid-blue curtain covering the window. I couldn’t hear any scuffling outside, any giggles or sounds of doors opening or closing. It was completely quiet. Everyone was clearly just putting the night-peeing on hold. We had no cell phones, no computers, no way at all of communicating “Help! We’re being held in the desert by insane blood-focused monks!” There was only silence.

The Catholic Church used to run a spiritual and educational monopoly, guaranteeing an almost seamless cradle-to-grave Catholic experience. We wore uniforms to school, marched in lines to masses, prepared for sacraments, and learned many, many songs in the process. That Catholic bubble only really lasted for a few decades. What with the fall-off of the American nun population (which did most of the teaching for free), and the rise of mass media, and moms going to work, faith’s most dedicated soldiers—women—had other things to do than to keep it alive. The bubble burst.

But those of us who experienced a full twelve years of Catholic education bear its marks forever. Some of us return to the faith. Some of us return and leave time and time again. Some of us search in vain for something to replace it, or reject the notion of God altogether, since what they told us, and insisted was absolutely true, was so ludicrous as to be absolutely laughable if you actually paused to consider the contradictions inherent in their tales—which you weren’t really supposed to do, since at some point, everything depended on these “mysteries” of faith.

Our class retreats usually involved having to be in camp-like situations with bunk beds and horrible “bonding” sessions involving passing candles and/or bags of M & M’s and girls being moved to tears about what great friends we all were—so there was that to be grateful for, I supposed. I was hungry ‘cause the dinner seemed like Contrition Food and I didn’t eat much. It was the wateriest, limpest “spaghetti” I’d ever encountered, and, being the youngest of six children at the tail-end of the large-family Catholic boom, my palate wasn’t demanding in the least. I liked plain food. I had never eaten such oddities as bagels or hummus until I went to college.

I opened my eyes from a light sleep to the sound of pounding on the door. We girls were rounded up by robed monks and led on a moonlight hike through the monastery graveyard and surrounding hillside. I was fully-clothed and wearing shoes, but most were in their Lanz nightgowns or pajama sets with their Keds or flats thrown on, sweatshirts and cardigans protecting Southern Californian skin against the desert chill. I concentrated on the ground in front of me, which was glowing softly in the silvery night. I thought, “They’re trying to scare us but it’s not really working.” Then, “Maybe it is.” Then, “Okay, this is fairly terrifying. These people are nuts.” Then, “All I have to do is keep my mouth shut and watch where I’m stepping and I’ll be home soon. It’s really not that different from anything else.”

A lot of us young people no longer just accepted everything our elders told us. The religion was obsessed with sinning and salvation, but we no longer felt that we needed to be saved. We were told that Jesus died for our sins, but we wondered, “Why on earth would someone need to do that? We’ve never done anything that bad!” What sort of God would do such a thing in the first place, and why would anyone want to sing “His” praises? The beauty of ritual was no longer enough for lots of us, who couldn’t get over the actual content contained therein. Reenacting the Last Supper of a sacrificial God-Man, whose dying body was the focal point of our rituals, never got any less weird, and the host never seemed magical in my mouth, only dry and gluey.

One could feel the frustration of lay teachers and clergy trying to impart this sacred knowledge to us, test us on it, make us understand and believe it. To which they were greeted with mostly blank stares and “Is this going to be on the test?”

The night of the abduction, I looked down at the glowing rocky soil and thought about other things. Things I liked, like men in leather miniskirts, and colors of hair dye, and cookies. Years of Catholic education had prepared me well for this kind of thing. I was very good at keeping my mouth shut and sending my soul elsewhere; it’s what I did every day of my life. I stared down the monks’ moonlight walk of terror and I did not flinch. I strapped on my imaginary Walkman and listened to some imaginary Depeche Mode, whose dreary synth-heavy dirges reflected my worldview to a T. I trudged on. They did not break me or cause me to ask Jesus for mercy. I knew that, despite the fact that we were being held captive in the desert, it would end.

On the bus ride back I showed my (real) Walkman to my seatmate. It was a rare one my dad had brought back from a golf tournament that had two outputs for headphones. I also said that I had a Depeche Mode tape. She plugged her headphones in next to mine. We sat, grateful that we could listen together but did not have to speak. The album was A Broken Frame. To this day, the song “Leave in Silence”—a minor masterpiece, to me, anyway—always evokes an odd sense of desert-y, moonlight-ish monasticism, and defiance in the face of institutional hostage-taking.

The problem is, I got so good at packing off my soul for long stretches of time that I now struggle to remain in the moment, so to speak. I’m still daydreaming my way out of life even though I have long-since been freed from the institutions that made me wear polyester-blend uniforms and do strange things like eat my God and tell my secrets to strange men in small cubicles. I’m like a caged wild animal, who, once freed, still paces a 12×12 foot space. In some ways, I remain the most Catholic of people. Death-obsessed? Check. Guilty? Check. Ever-hopeful and believing in fresh starts and trying to see the best in others and myself? Also, check. But it’s hard for me to get over the Catholic fixation on Jesus’ death and suffering for “our sins,” resurrection and eventual return. It has been over 2,000 years since he promised to come back; if someone doesn’t call you back after that long, you can reasonably guess that they just aren’t that into you. Humanity, I hate to say it, but: I just don’t think Jesus is coming.

As an adult, I mostly feel for the monks. We were probably their least-favorite kind of retreatants—spoiled teenage girls—hence their dour demeanor, short words and scare-tactics. I still retain some fantasies about a cloistered existence and communing with God in pure silence, and I might even be happy to take another crack at that desert retreat. A few days in a cell and silent moonlight hikes sound fairly dreamy at this point. I’ve always wanted to know that God is there. I’m available any time you want to make yourself known, God. I am here, waiting for you, just as I have always been.

Comparatively speaking, 1998 was a rather dead time to be alive. In the three quarters of a century that American youth has lived its life through the soundtrack of popular music and masqueraded in the styles that go with it, never has a subculture had so little affect as indie rock. Neither dramatically decadent nor morbid, indie rockers were, by and large, simply muted and flat, unmovable. There was resistance in this reticence, a savvy After-Adorno suspicion of the saccharine earnestness of stadium rock and the illusory sentiment conjured in stagecraft’s glare. That is to say that like all identities, indie rock was an identity of opposition. And yet, its resentment suffered sorely from the lack of a suitable object. These were white kids, disproportionately. Reagan was gone, the Cold War was over, and the economy was strong. Without anything to get too worked up over, indie rockers adopted the posture of satisfied bemusement, and the conviction, above all else, to not be fooled again. Read in its own terms (which were essentially those of historical materialism) the languid understatement of indie rock makes all sorts of sense. And yet, the oddity must be stressed: here was a musical subculture whose music knew no dance.

Indie rock had its zealots: earnest makers of sound and taste who circulated in back-to-culture networks of artistic production and appreciation. Based in Denver with a satellite on the hallowed ground of Athens, Georgia, the Elephant 6 collective was one such clique. Contrary to the dominant mood, these people were in no way cool. Perhaps none was less so than Neutral Milk Hotel’s romantic genius of a front man, Jeff Mangum. For those who knew him—and only too soon, those who didn’t—Mangum was a tamer of inspiration, a channeler of visions, an oracle.

A tentative sidebar on the spiritual: even and especially for those hungry American souls that can remember a time before when, rifling one day through the attic, they stumbled upon the faded telegraph report bearing the unfortunate news that God was dead, the irruption that Mircea Eliade dubbed hierophany retains an antecedence in experience. In nature, in love, and perhaps most frequently, in the intimate solitude of recorded music, a moment in time has the capacity to explode with exuberance, devastation, or in a wash of meaningfulness without name. And as the silly theory goes, in the wake of such explosions, grooves of significance are cut in the score of time. And so, for periods of days or weeks of even years before repetition goes stale and our attention is pulled in the direction of further novelty, a path through the woods becomes a discipline, pillow talk becomes a catechism, and an album becomes a liturgy to be hollered at the top of our lungs as the interstate flies by.

So it has been for many with the revelation pressed in plastic as Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. That those first undone by the album were predominantly disaffected ironists calls to mind midrashic meditations over the characterization in Genesis of Noah as a righteous man in his generation. What work, the rabbis ask, does the temporal qualifier—in his generation—perform? Does it accentuate or mitigate the degree of Noah’s righteousness? The same might be asked of Aeroplane. It might well be the case that 1969 saw the release of ten records with such savage spirituality and that my testimony is merely the travelogue of a rationalist blinded by only the dim light of the cave’s mouth. Or, perhaps, the fact that this force of an album emerged from such a wasteland is precisely what makes it a reasonable bet that the children of my children’s children will know it to some degree.

Here, where I strain to describe the album so as to make it available to the uninitiated reader is where things can only go awry. Nevertheless, let me try and fail to share with you something awesome.

In sound, the album is a circus: punk gives way to folk, which dissolves into a sonic mess and congeals back into rock ‘n roll. Slowed down, the title track’s simple GCDG chord progression could well be reinterpreted as doo-wop. At the core of the album’s instrumentation one can surely pinpoint a rock band, but these elements are wholly enmeshed in a melee of organ, banjo, saws, assorted white noise makers, and a Salvation Army Christmas band horn section, all of which warble collectively from frenzy to dirge. Time and again, the arrangement dissipates and we find ourselves with only Mangum’s voice, rough and raw if not unpretty, alone save for a guitar and a four-track recorder.

The album sets its scene in an American landscape replete with broken families, surreptitious couplings and, presumably, the sorts of winged phonographs one finds aloft over an industrial cityscape on the back of the liner notes and as printed on the CD itself. Its tone is part Chitty Chitty Bang Bang surrealism and part Walker Evans photojournalism, at once jubilantly surreal and brutally ethnographic. As is true of our own world, the world where the album takes place is one of intense wonder and horror. Going on a decade ago I tried to graph the incidence of the album’s recurring tropes. A partial list of that effort reads as follows: death, trailer trash, suicide, I-thou love, domestic violence, incest, the miraculous, music, ghosts, sex, nature, destruction, eyes, mouths, Jesus Christ, abandonment, fetuses, birth, third-person love, shared hatred, carnivals, life as seen from the outside, semen and other bodily discharges, nostalgia, myself, flesh, sister, angels, wings, spines, faces, dreams and speakers.

As a fragment in the genealogy of spirituality, special attention is due to the recurring theme of the two-headed boy. Unmasked on the album’s fourth track as an undead laboratory curiosity, the two-headed boy is the exception that proves the existential rule that, as Aristophanes dubiously reports it in the Symposium, we are, each of us, the divided half of a broken human union. It is the myth that has inspired a thousand movies, a million pop songs and, at one time or another, everyone I know. Aeroplane’s version of this myth goes like this: before we are born, when we are in utero with our unborn twins, we are whole. After we are dead, when we meet on a cloud and laugh out loud with everyone we see, we are together again. In between, for the duration that we are thrown into the world, we fumble toward one another like adolescent lovers who have not yet mastered their body parts. Not always, however, is our differentiation unbridgeable. By making beautiful things—love, children, music—we may find fullness even as we live, united with one another and with God.

Yes, believe it or not: God. Bursting forth from an atmosphere of unformed reverb between the album’s first and second tracks, Mangum’s plaintive voice offers the most unanticipated praise:

I love you Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ I love you,
Yes I do

The voice repeats what it recognizes to be a truly shocking declaration. Whatever can this mean? In the unbroken block of prose of the liner notes, where the lyrics at times yield to second order reflection, an explanation is proffered.

…and now a song for jesus christ and since this seems to confuse people I’d like to simply say that I mean what I sing although the theme of endless endless on this album is not based on any religion but more on the belief that all things seem to contain a white light within them that I see as eternal…

A disavowal in no sense, to an audience that can only assume he must be joking, Mangum makes clear that as crazy at it may sound, he means what he says. And yet, as he translates for the godless, his love is meant without a shred of exclusivity. Not based in any one religion, Jesus Christ here is a metonymy for the endless endless, the seemingly eternal white light that animates all things. Mangum’s God is one that even a secularist can abide, just so long as she knows what it’s like to be a body in a state of unwilled differentiation. In the album’s penultimate stanza, where the two-headed boy bids sad farewell to his soon to be broken-off half, just as Mangum, himself, prepares to say goodbye to the beloved that he will soon bequeath to us, the listeners, this God is further fleshed out:

And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle
God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life

In my early years with the album, when I was still very much under Nietzsche’s spell, I made poor sense of Mangum’s faith by shoehorning into the first pair of these lines the intimation of the dissimulative character of the divine presence. God as a place where some holy spectacle lies: this would be something along the lines of God and not-God in an extra-theological sense. More recently, however, as my will to demystify has courted its other half, it has been the latter lyric in which I have found disclosed the fullness of the album’s theology, which is also to say, its anthropology. For in the play between “God is the place you will wait for / the rest of your life” and “God is the place you will wait / for the rest of your life,” we find a God at once transcendent and immanent, both achingly wanting and radically present. It is a God that presides over and resides in a world saturated in the beauty and horror of the sublime, which, even at its cruelest, always merits wonder. As the title track concludes in a declaration that comes as close as the album gets to prescription: “can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all.”

Ignoring for a moment this gentle model of righteous giddiness, I will conclude on a petty note, though one again germane to the genealogy at hand. For these very texts—the potently spiritual ones that inspire in us the impulse to proselytize—breed covetousness, a resentment in this case directed toward those over-readers who would restrict the bounteous spirit of this doctrine-less Word. From my jealous perspective, the emergent standard read of this cult album is just such a travesty. “An Anne Frank concept album,” is how one undergraduate characterized it for me to my dismay. “But,” I wanted to say, “Don’t you see? The album is about…everything!” Which I truly take it to be.

Fault for the Anne Frank reduction may be pinned on Mangum himself, who in an interview with a fleetingly influential magazine at the time of the album’s release identified the famous martyr as his muse and conversation partner. Shortly thereafter, the band broke up and Mangum vanished from the public view, not yet to reemerge. Because the prophet was now in occlusion, the interview—along with similar comments made by Mangum at the time—became the key for unlocking the album. This is to say that these texts became the key for defacing it. Beyond irresistible allusion, I won’t regale you with accounts of rock operas inspired by the album featuring high school children dressed as concentration camp inmates. The internet could provide that, if you like. Suffice it to say, the attempted sacrifice of Aeroplane to the Holocaust affirms a longstanding irritation of mine with the sundry transcendental signifiers of the secular, which dwell in its inner sanctum: the spiritual. As poisonous and stupid as God may have been for discourse—and He can well be—not by killing Him alone do we forego the analytic capabilities to violate the glories of creation.