Kurt Cobain in the Orgone Box
Imagine a sexual energy permeating everything; an erotic elan vital pulsating through the whole cosmos; like if the “force” in star wars were made out of pure horniness…
Renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, railing against the mystics for being repressed and undersexed, would become something of a mystic himself when he began to theorize ambient orgasm energy. While C. G. Jung wanted to replace sexual libido with an antiseptic Jedi-like mystical force, Reich, who likewise studied under Freud, reversed this move and dumped erotogenic libido into the whole universe—an idea not so different, in fact, from Deleuze & Guattari’s later metaphysical notion (following Lacan) of cosmic desire.
Freud, for his part, who coined libido, would have found all of this a bit much; his libido is absolutely sexual and pervades nowhere but inside the individual body—induced, of course, by the “primordial unforgettable person” that is the parent. “We call by that name the energy…of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word ‘love.’” It is also helpful to admit that Freud’s electrical libido is a metaphor, “a mythology,” perhaps even a heuristic device; a means to think of psyche in economic terms.
Anyways, Reich the hard materialist came to view cosmic libido as real enough to accumulate, able to be caught and collected in the body before it flew across the galaxy. He called it Orgone and made a special box to sit in called the Orgone Accumulator. This device, like the opposite of a faraday cage, would attract ambient libido and accumulate it through the alternating metallic layers of its construction. Sitting in the box would irradiate the body with orgasm energy, thus improving heath, vitality and orgasms.
It is one of the oddities of 20th century history that Reich’s zonked-out sex mysticism caught on. It is no great stretch to give him credit for nothing less than the “sexual revolution” of the post-war generation—he gave it the name after all. According to Reich, sexual liberation, especially for women, was the only way to defeat fascism. Liberation via libido would in time became the very zeitgeist—at least during the sixties. But the U.S. food and drug administration, getting wind of Reich’s sexual foment, would finally arrest him. He died in prison in 1957.
In the meantime a great many personalities and celebrities became interested in orgone and the orgone box. Not least among them was one William S. Burroughs whose own fictional works are permeated with Reichian psychology and paranoid energies. What remains captivating and disturbing about his work is precisely this claustrophobic quality of pervasion; of being invaded, or drained, by outside and uncontrollable forces. Language, for Burroughs, is a virus from outer space—kind of like a paranoid version of the movie Arrival (spoiler alert: language is the real orgone). Burroughs fell for Reich and his orgone so hard that he acquired his own orgone box. This box would make an appearance in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; Kerouac called it a “mystical outhouse.”
Kurt Cobain read William Burroughs in high school and would carry a copy of Naked Lunch on tour. It was in a Burroughs interview that Kurt Cobain would discover Leadbelly, whose song “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” he would later cover on MTV Unplugged to great fanfare: “These new rock’n’roll kids should just throw away their guitars and listen to something with real soul, like Leadbelly.”
Kurt wrote Burroughs a letter in 1992, asking him to collaborate and Burroughs responded by sending a recording of him reading a story about a junkie trying to score on Christmas eve: Kurt put the track to music and you can find it today under the title The “Priest” They Called Him. In 1993, on a break from tour, Kurt would visit Burroughs at his home in Lawrence, Kansas and would sit down in the famous orgone box for a photograph. When Kurt left that day, Burroughs remarked to his assistant: “There’s something wrong with that boy; he frowns for no good reason.”
While it is unlikely that Kurt ever gave cosmic orgone too much thought, before or after that moment, it is perhaps no coincidence that he had already rhymed “a mosquito” with “my libido” in the hit song Smells Like Teen Spirit…*
Kurt Cobain in the Orgone Box, October 1993
see also:
Kurt Cobain’s imaginary friend in The Imaginal Elf
