Serene calm can function as positive alienation rather than New Age self-discovery.

Evidence

But perhaps we can rescue the numinous from the religious. Otto delineates many variants of the numinous; the most familiar to us now would be ‘spasms and convulsions’ leading to ‘the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy’. But far more uncanny in the ultra-agitated, present is that mode of the numinous which ‘come(s) sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship.’ Foxx’s instrumental music – on Tiny Colour Movies and on the three Cathedral Oceans CDs, and with Harold Budd on the Transluscence and Drift Music LPs – has been eerily successful in rendering this alien tranquillity. On Transluscence in particular, where Budd’s limpid piano chords hang like dust subtly diffusing in sunlight, you can feel your nervous system slowing to a reptile placidity. This is not an inner but Outer calm; not a discovery of a cheap New Age ‘real’ self, but a positive alienation, in which the cold pastoral freezing into a tableau is experienced as a release from identity. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 359

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes ‘Outer calm’ — an alienating, positive estrangement — from the cheap interiority of New Age tranquillity.
• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the usual assumption that calm must be reassuring and debases estrangement as distress; proposes serenity as itself a mode of the uncanny and of release from self.
• XREF: connects to: The numinous can be decoupled from religion and experienced as alien tranquillity — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 359

Broader Connections

• The numinous can be decoupled from religion and experienced as alien tranquillity #expands (0.82) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 359