REDRESS
http://soundcloud.com/synthyte/redress (spoken word version)
I do not suffer from depression, nor have I ever. The only malady I am aware I may have is an unusually short attention span that can hinder my learning something I don’t care for. I don’t know that it’s really a mental flaw as many seem to imply; I just have a hard time concentrating on what has no hold over me.
I have, however, seriously considered suicide.
When I was thirteen, I pissed blood. It terrified me. I was so mortified, I didn’t have to say a word to my parents. They could see the fear on my face. Developing a serious kidney infection at such an age is irregular. It usually indicates some underlying cause that is more threatening. My parents knew this and when it was confirmed that I had a kidney infection, their fear didn’t go unnoticed. When they used a sonogram machine to visually confirm the infection, it was all I could do not to bolt from the bed when the cold scanner was jabbed into my side. As they studied the monitor, I remember the confusion of the attendant.
After another, more unpleasant imaging procedure (voiding cystourthrogram), we were given a verdict; duplex kidneys. The vesicoureteral reflux caused by the duplex kidneys was severe; surgery was recommended to fix it and halt the infection.
My life was turned upside down. I can’t describe how scared I was. I was not brave. My parents’ relationship was already falling apart. I knew, even at that age, that this would test them further. But more frightening was the unreasonable concern on my part for my life. It didn’t matter that I knew nothing about the surgery or that the chances of complications were slim. I was panicked when I had no right to be.
And I knew it. Everyone around me knew it, they told me over and over; “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” I wasn’t scared of other things; insects were my friends, Ray Bradbury’s stories of horror were my playground. But this…
What was worse was the weeks after. The feelings of loneliness, not wanting pity or gifts, just to go home. I remember, after finally being mobile after a week of tubes coming out of me, going to try and play Super Mario World on the hospital’s only SNES. I couldn’t even manage that.
I have never forgotten what that month was like. I know that my struggle was nothing compared to real trauma. It doesn’t matter. It changed me anyway.
Years later my unwed parents had split up and I was sharing a bedroom with my two step-brothers in their mother’s home. I considered slitting my wrists one evening. I was unhappy with what had happened in my life and what my future looked like from there. I was, I thought, at rock bottom. I had a knife. What was I afraid of? I was, in fact, worried that I might simply maim myself, making everything even worse. The risk of a botched suicide (more likely than otherwise) was too great.
So I didn’t do it. Because I was afraid. But not of death. I was afraid of living. Life was (and is) something to be ended.
Years after my surgery and recovery, my grandparents took me to my first and only Easter mass (an attempt to take me to Christmas mass prior was disrupted by my vomiting in the van on the way there). I remember the sermon on sin and how, only if we repented, would we join Jesus and God in Heaven, our souls immortal. There was nothing said of Hell, or of the nature of death. Outside of the topical “God bless the troops” (Operation Enduring Freedom) and a slight against homosexuals, the sermon was insubstantial. Empty. It said everything I needed to know about Christ, God and religion; it was about the fear of death, ultimately.
Life, at that time, my worst enemy. When your body is built to kill you, it changes your attitude about an imaginary being who designed you in his image. Near-sighted, to add insult to injury (not to mention the full set of wisdom teeth later down the road). It wasn’t anger I felt at a God I didn’t believe in that failed me but more loathing at the stupidity of conceiving just such a thing.
But I didn’t live in an atheist’s world. I would be confronted constantly with God. He was everywhere. It became frustrating, angering.
Deathconsciousness was the closest I’ve ever had to a revelation. It was fiction, which immediately freed me from needing to reason with it. It rang true because it was so false; it was malleable; Antiochus was the perfect anti-Christ, confirming that someone else believed what I believed; death was the end, the whole of being, the truth and the only meaning to life was accepting it. It didn’t hurt that the music was incredible.
So, Giles Corey then.
I don’t believe in ghosts. But the concept behind the Spectral Goal is irresistible. Specters aren’t immaterial dead people; they’re the reverberations of all of our deaths. If our lives are the notes played, our corpses the strings stilled, ghosts are the bookmarks memories make in the minds of those still alive to imagine they can still hear us until the day we all cease to exist and the song is no longer.
When I think about death, I think about suicide. I think about the suicide I was going to commit and I used to be angry about how stupid I was. Giles Corey alleviates, to an extent, that anger. It hollows out the disgust I felt at a privileged, white, perfectly fine young man with a full head of hair, no terminal illnesses, no immediate relatives dead, brown eyes, brown hair, not overweight, not underweight, not depressed, not unique in any way.
Giles Corey lets me forgive myself. I need that.
Deathconsciousness was beautiful because it was a religion I didn’t need to believe in, the music an escape. The narrative of Giles Corey is, in every sense of the word, catharsis for me. The music is a revelation buoyed by the folk sound that warms my Midwestern soul. Almost the opposite of Deathconsciousness, songs such as Sleeping Heart and Spectral Bride are like hymns, telling me that I’m not alone, I’m not suffering alone. They aren’t an escape, they’re reminders I need. If Dan’s not a spectral bride yet, if he’s still rousing sleeping hearts, then hallelujah, praise Narl. Deathconsciousness is my not-religion, a text I can pretend to believe more viscerally than any real religion. Giles Corey is my not-savior, not dying so that I can be alive and all right.
