[from an interview by Michael Goldberg with Thurston Moore of the band Sonic Youth in ADDICTED TO NOISE]
Moore: That was based on a very simple melody.
Lee Ranaldo: Inspired by the Neal Stephenson book, The Diamond Age, I
thought.
Moore: No, no. That song is very simple. That song is just basically
kind of a Buddhist tract.
ATN: A Buddhist tract?
Moore: Yeah, just sort of looking upon life as a never-ending ocean,
which is a very common theme within that
kind of religious thinking. Applying it to every next-door neighbor
lifestyle.... The lyrics are very elliptical. They
address some situation, [but] you're not quite sure what's going on.
"Throw all this trash away/ He's back to
stay." It's sort of about regeneration.
ATN: What inspired that?
Moore: Oh, I've been reading stuff on that, contemplating stuff like
that. I love writing about those themes
anyway. Those pseudo-neo-religious ideas, those kind of philosophical
ideas--but then applying them to
situations that they maybe don't cater to. But they automatically do
[cater to those situations] anyway just 'cause
[the situations] exist.
ATN: "The Diamond Sea," may be the longest song you've ever
recorded....Can you tell me about that piece and what inspired it?
Both Love and Cobain were intermittent Buddhists. (As she told Spin: "We prayed every night. We had some fucking dignity.") So the shotgun violence of Cobain's suicide laid down some very bad karma. Love decided to do something about it....
She knew of Namgyal [a monastery in Ithaca, New York, opened in 1992 as the western branch of the Dalai Lama's personal monastery] through her interest in Tibetan Buddhism. She contacted the monks, and they referred her to Losang Chogyen (aka Pema), a founding member of the monastery who was living in New York City.
She was very distressed and clearly in great pain, but funny, too, and smart. "What I did was I just stayed there and listened to her," [Pema] says. "I didn't speak much. I ended up staying there almost three hours. And I listened to her." Love wanted to chant with Pema, so he cut a deal with her. "Stop smoking," he said, "at least while I'm here. Then we can chant." She told him she really wanted to go to the monastery, but Pema put her off. "She was not in good shape. I think she was dozing off, but she was trying to stay as clean as possible." People at the monastery worried that she wasn't ready.
Pema went to see her again the next day. "She talked about [Kurt Cobain's] ashes. She wanted to know the proper Buddhist ritual to honor them. She was so sweet. She was saying how much she cared for the teenagers. And she was saying most people think she's doing terrible things to the kids, but she was saying, 'I really want to help them.' She was really interested in what happens when people die."
"In the way she walks and in her physical behavior, she seems very young, like a child," Palden [another monk] says. "She would fall asleep in the dining room, on the floor, and she would sleep really soundly. And even though it's not necessarily appropriate, it's okay. When she was sitting with the monks, she was like a baby. She was open. She was really there. But when she was taking a telephone call, she was like a different person. She had a chaotic thing going on, and it is so powerful, it keeps coming back."
Every morning, Love had sessions with the monks during which they chanted and prayed and conducted ceremonies as part of the ritual consecration of the ashes. The...monks emptied the ashes...onto a table. No Ziploc bag, no-yellow-and-blue-makes-green seal...Some of the ashes drifted up into the air. "We all inhaled a little bit of Kurt that day," says someone who was there. The ashes were brushed into a container and put onto the altar at the monastery....
[Later, a] member of the monastery comes down the old oak staircase, carrying a small brown cardboard box filled with 'tsatsas'--cone-shaped sculptures three inches tall and painted gold. A subtle design circles them; they're like tiny golden hills topped with minature melting snowcaps--pretty, like something you might see stacked in a holiday display at Crate & Barrel. Cobain's ashes have been made into tsatsas like these, and they are ready to go.
[from an article by Amy Dickinson in the February, 1996 Esquire]