April 28, 2008
A sort of “moment” I had a few months back: I was listening to “Dear God” by XTC on my headphones. I’d heard the song many times before (and many times since then) but this time was entirely different. For the first couple of minutes it was like any other time—I hummed along, knowing the words by heart. But when I got to the instrumental bridge—a sing-songy little patch in the music-hall tradition, a tuba lurching through a mist of electronic strings—past, present, and future rubbed elbows with each other (the Beatles with synthesizers, essentially) and I was overcome with an intense feeling I couldn’t shake.
It was like a rock split cleanly in half, revealing its geological life-story, only what I saw in the song was a cross-section of the history of the English race, between Cromwell and Thatcher, condensed in a single moment, a single point. Balfour and Bertrand Russell, Admiral Nelson, the Battle of Waterloo, and Goodbye to All That, Keats’ name writ in water, Aldous Huxley and Oliver Twist, “Penny Lane” and Graham Greene, Churchill, the Ministry of Silly Walks, and housewives collecting old biscuit tins to fight against the Blitz—all this and a good deal more was compressed into a single moment, a single feeling that ran up my spine like lightning, gave me goosebumps.
The sense one gets of England from the history books (the American ones, at least) is of a calm, cool, rational, methodical people bent on “civilizing” the rest of the world, making it sensible for all time. They saved the world from Napoleon, from Hitler, out of duty, because it fell in their laps, with all the righteousness of someone taking their recycling out to the curb. The story about the apple falling on Newton’s head is patently apocryphal: he himself said that everything he accomplished he did by setting up a problem beforehand and thinking about it for a very long time—what we call “inspiration” is not one of the traditional English traits—or so I thought. In a moment that notion was out the window.
The song’s lyrics resemble nothing so much as one of Lord Russell’s polemics against religious doctrine and, filtered through the medium of the song, revealed something there I hadn’t noticed before: namely, passion. Russell’s arguments against religion tend to rest on logical grounds, a pacifist worldview with no small amount of that utilitarian calculus of “the greatest good for the greatest number of people”. (Oddly enough, these are much the same grounds many of C.S. Lewis’ arguments for Christianity rest on.) The XTC song seems to begin in much the same way, but takes a sudden turn at the bridge, and what had once seemed to be a logical attack against God is revealed to be something more substantial by far: a personal attack against God. Andy Partridge shrieks a litany of transgressions “God” has committed (or allowed to go unpunished) against his flock. “Even though I don’t believe in you,” the song seems to say, “I have a problem with you nonetheless. Why,” it asks, “do all our best efforts and intentions, our toil, lead to naught? To what end? You’re supposed to be all-knowing—why?” A righteous indignation comes across in the song that reveals as much about Jeremy Bentham, Bertrand Russell, and Britannia as it does about Andy Partridge’s beliefs. A desperate shout into the void—an utterance one rarely hears with an English accent—and a moving one at that. The song ended, and naturally I hit repeat. And naturally, I could not come close to recreating the feeling I’d just experienced…
April 29, 2008 at 4:51 am
Batter my heart, three-personed God: for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
–John Donne
April 29, 2008 at 6:30 am
About a month ago, I too reflected on this song. My housemate, Colin, was playing it. I was molesting his cat in his doorway, making violent love to it, tossing him on the ground and sliding my hands up and down his muscular stomach and chest with rough quick strokes, ruffling his fur in the wrong way, and then smoothing him down with long, hard, undulous strokes when showed signs of annoyance and making him purr in spite of himself, with his ears still back. I remarked to Colin that this might be the only song in existence in which the singer’s voice is more cheesey than the gimmick of using a child’s voice in a rock song. He sings in a way that makes me want to tell him, “Look, if God doesn’t care about stupid little humans, he especially doesn’t give a shit about you, you whiny, chinless noodge.” His accusatory tone insists that there is a God and he’s some bureaucrat doing a very lousy job. He presumes that his moral value system is superior to the supreme being’s, not that he might lack perspective on it. By blaming God for wars about God he exculpates the people who fight them, the people perpetuating the fiction he’s debating. He is more pathetic than the tenant of Plato’s cave throwing spears at his HD flatscreen tv. He insists that God is a fiction and then blames him for being absent, as though a fictional non-entity would care. But I suppose this criticism is a little naive of me. I might have let this pasty goober’s obnoxious nasal drone fool me into believing he is retarded. Really, this ironic apostraphe is to let people know that he is sharper and more keenly perceptive than us stupid believers AND wiser than our fictional God. His attitude toward the Bible is like a contributor to Cineaste assigned to review Happy Feet, only more dismissive. How dare you put this asshole aside Graham Greene, a brilliant Catholic who struggled with belief; or Lewis Carroll, who did not consider himself worthy of priesthood? And how dare you refer to this retard by his name, as though I’d have to know it to be culturally literate.
And if you want British passion:
Batter my heart, three-personed God: for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
–John Donne
April 29, 2008 at 6:30 am
About a month ago, I too reflected on this song. My housemate, Colin, was playing it. I was molesting his cat in his doorway, making violent love to it, tossing him on the ground and sliding my hands up and down his muscular stomach and chest with rough quick strokes, ruffling his fur in the wrong way, and then smoothing him down with long, hard, undulous strokes when showed signs of annoyance and making him purr in spite of himself, with his ears still back. I remarked to Colin that this might be the only song in existence in which the singer’s voice is more cheesey than the gimmick of using a child’s voice in a rock song. He sings in a way that makes me want to tell him, “Look, if God doesn’t care about stupid little humans, he especially doesn’t give a shit about you, you whiny, chinless noodge.” His accusatory tone insists that there is a God and he’s some bureaucrat doing a very lousy job. He presumes that his moral value system is superior to the supreme being’s, not that he might lack perspective on it. By blaming God for wars about God he exculpates the people who fight them, the people perpetuating the fiction he’s debating. He is more pathetic than the tenant of Plato’s cave throwing spears at his HD flatscreen tv. He insists that God is a fiction and then blames him for being absent, as though a fictional non-entity would care. But I suppose this criticism is a little naive of me. I might have let this pasty goober’s obnoxious nasal drone fool me into believing he is retarded. Really, this ironic apostraphe is to let people know that he is sharper and more keenly perceptive than us stupid believers AND wiser than our fictional God. His attitude toward the Bible is like a contributor to Cineaste assigned to review Happy Feet, only more dismissive. How dare you put this asshole aside Graham Greene, a brilliant Catholic who struggled with belief; or Lewis Carroll, who did not consider himself worthy of priesthood? And how dare you refer to this retard by his name, as though I’d have to know it to be culturally literate. And if you want British passion:
Batter my heart, three-personed God: for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
–John Donne
May 15, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Why did my response divide and multiply? Could you do something about that? It looks like I have some uncategorized neurological defect.