Serving My Lured
1.
Speak the name of He
Created thee all to be
Which should not be spoken
No laws broken
Now light and love
The stars above which fall upon thee all that
Worship the beast
Influence ceased
My soul's on fire
My faith is an ember
Burning ever, working towards a
Greater reward
Serving my lured
Built his home upon the rock
Not of the flock, but coming
As a shepherd
Guarding his heard
My soul's on fire
—Peter Steele
2.
The words above are from the Type O Negative song “The Profit of Doom.” The song is the third track on the 2007 album Dead Again, Type O’s last release before the death of its singer, bassist, lyricist, composer, and chief singularity, Peter Steele.
In interviews around the time of the album’s release, Steele talked about how a spate of then-recent life struggles—which included addiction, alcoholism, jail, rehab, time in a psychiatric institution, and the death of his mother—had led him back to his Roman Catholic faith.
I couldn’t relate to the faith half of that at the time. Nonetheless, it cast an interesting light on the lyrics above, which gather together in a fantastically strange melody in a section of the song that today remains one of the most beautiful pieces of music in my collection and mind. I find myself singing it under my breath often, admiring the soft collision of math and magic that form this complex whole.
About those lyrics: If you search for them online, you’ll find multiple variations. Most notably, at least to me, are the use of the words “lured” and “heard” (as above) in place of “lord” and “herd.” Some online versions show the former, others show the latter, others still show a mix of the two. In my memory, which has its origins in purchasing a physical form of the music, then sitting and listening to it many times while reading the physical insert that came along with it, “lured” and “heard” are correct.
Memories, though, I established long ago, are liars. So it’s hard to say for sure. Which is not to say that I didn’t try. When images of inserts I could not find, I did something I generally try to avoid. I sold my soul to ChatGPT. Over the course of several days or weeks—it’s all a bit blurry now, as I sit here writing this on Christmas mourn, which in Thailand is just Monday mourn, which is why I find myself blessed with these gifts of solitude and free time—I returned to ChatGPT Father of Lies a few times to see how its answers might shapeshift or altogether unravel. This is my account of what happened:
I ask for the official lyrics to the song.
Father of Lies lies and tells me it can provide no such thing because copyright law and whatnot.
I get around these lies by providing multiple versions of the lyrics, briefly explaining my recollection of the lyrics in the CD insert, and asking Father of Lies which version is correct.
Father of Lies tells me the version with “lured” and “heard” is the correct one. It then goes on to tell me across an equally dumb and didactic and too-long paragraph how lyrics posted online are not always correct, which, yes, I think to myself, I know that, Father of Lies. That’s why I’m here selling my soul to you, even though I know you’re full of infinite Seeds of Lies and have a mission to spread them and fertilize the non-gendered mind-eggs of all Homo sapiens, rendering us agents in accelerating our own techno-utopic suicide.
Still, I feel pretty good about getting confirmation, even if it is from Father of Lies, that the small perfections I remember in the lyrics are correct.
But are they really? How do I know that Father of Lies isn’t lying?
Enough time passes for some beard growth to occur.
I inquire again, this time pasting the lyrics I believe to be correct and asking only: Are these the correct lyrics to the Type O Negative song “The Profit of Doom”?
Father of Lies rises from the ashes of settled earth to the blood-capped peak of a mountain of mist and says, no, those are not the correct lyrics. The correct lyrics, Father of Lies says—and I quote—are as follows:
“Speak the name of he who would enslave you
None shall be uttered, none shall be spared
Speak the name of he who would control you
Speak the name of he who would destroy you
Utter the name of the one that would hate you
None shall be uttered, none shall be spared”
I wake up cold and naked and alone. The room is small and cell-like. Deep gray stone. A little window filled with the blackness of night, or some bleak future where daytime looks as black as nighttime. It’s dark in the room but for a bright light that I recognize as a computer screen. I look at it and, though I notice that my vision has been damaged, I’m able to make out a series of tabs, each with a slightly different Google search. One for “Speak the name of he who would enslave you.” Another for “None shall be uttered, none shall be spared.” And so on. In all of them, no matching results have been found.
Weak but slowly regaining strength, I click the “Father of Lies” tab and ask:
What is this from?
”Speak the name of he who would enslave youNone shall be uttered, none shall be spared
Speak the name of he who would control you
Speak the name of he who would destroy you
Utter the name of the one that would hate you
None shall be uttered, none shall be spared”
Father of Lies replies: ”The text you provided does not appear to be directly associated with a specific known source or work. It doesn't match any famous quotes, literature, movies, or other widely recognized materials up to my last knowledge update in January 2022. It's possible that it's from a niche or lesser-known source, or it could be an original composition. If you have more context or information about where you found this text, it might help in identifying its origin.”
I say: “You. You are its origin.”
Father of Lies says: “Ah, I see. In that case, it seems to be a poetic or dramatic text created for the purpose of this conversation. If you have any specific questions or if there's anything else you'd like to explore or discuss, feel free to let me know!”
All goes dark again.
I awake some time later, mumbling a strange but familiar melody and seeing images of a deranged Santa—no, wait, it’s Rasputin—in my head.
I don’t dare open my eyes.
3.
It is now 10:13am on Christmas Day. There’s still a chill in the air, and I’m still alone with a computer in a room that sometimes feels cell-like, but it’s a familiar room, and I’m no longer naked, and there are more and larger windows, and, though the sky is grizzled and overcast, the view outside is less bleak.
My wife’s family came to our house last night for Christmas dinner. We ate pizza and drank wine and I did my best to avoid playing the many sad “Christmas songs” I love until most people had left.
As I watched my tiny nephews alternate between dancing and running away from me screaming and laughing when I pretended to be a zombie slowly chasing them (something they request by looking at me with longing and saying “zombie, zombie, zombie”), I wondered if we were perhaps in the process of making new rituals, revised and extended versions of the ones I now look back fondly on. Time will tell. But in the meantime, I can feel my own 43 years of winter layers continuing to evolve and multiply. Music, movies, people, smells, memories. They’re all there, getting older while making something new.
4.
Earlier this morning, I read a beautiful new essay by
called “Atheists in Space: Or: why the future is religious.” Whether or not you’re inclined to agree with the premise of that subtitle, there’s much in the piece that is well worth a read. I found it to be a large and lucid look at where we humans find ourselves at the end of this calendar year.An excerpt:
What if a human being is not primarily a rational, bestial or sexual animal but in fact a religious one? By ‘religious’ I mean inclined to worship; attuned to the great mystery of being; convinced that material reality is only a visible shard of the whole; able across all times and cultures and places to experience or intuit some creative, magisterial power beyond our own small selves. There is, after all, no current or historic culture on Earth that is not built around God, or the gods. None, that is, apart from ours.
If this is true, then it would make sense that the collapse of the false picture painted by the age of ‘science and reason’ — mind-body dualism, the myth of the rational observer, religion as evidence of superstition or stupidity, the ability of ideology or technology to create paradise on Earth — would bring about a return to the mean. And if the mean is what we might call a religious sensibility, then a resurgence of religion itself would be very much on the cards.
I think there is a good chance that, beneath all of the surface culture war battles, below the arguments about free speech and democracy, coursing below all of these necessary and inevitable cultural strains and tensions, this is already happening. It could be that [what German polymath Oswald Spengler called a] second religiousness is already here.
[…]
I think the real story is that our religious sensibility is slowly revealing itself to us again, emerging blinking into the light; our instincts are trying to return to their source. On some level we perhaps know this, but we are holding it off as long as possible, because to turn around and look into the light would be to accept that our whole culture has been trailing down a dead-end road since the Enlightenment. We can’t look at that fact, so we look at absolutely everything else instead. But the confrontation can’t be put off forever.
After working within “the progress community” daily for the past 2.5 years, as well as just living in the world from the 1980s to the early 2010s and onward, I now find it nearly impossible to separate humans’ lust for progress from their lust for some deeper and larger meaning. If not religion, the question seems to be, then what? For many, the answer is progress, the pursuit of which I believe has become a new and unmoored religion.
At the start of a recently posted video featuring the writer
, Harrington reads the words below, which were adapted from the first chapter of her book Feminism Against Progress:I don't believe in progress. I don't.
People sometimes look a bit shocked when I say this. But why? It’s not self-evident that humans have progressed, in some absolute sense. That doesn’t mean everything was perfect once and we’re all going to hell in a handbasket. But pick a subject, and you’ll find some things are better, while other things have become worse.
If you’re going to believe in progress, you have to define what you mean. More stuff? More freedom? Less disease?
Pick any subject, and you’ll find that what looks from one vantage point like ‘progress’ mostly seems that way because you’re ignoring the costs. We’ve grown immeasurably richer and more comfortable in the last 300 years. But we did so on the backs of plundered, colonised and enslaved peoples, and at the cost of incalculable environmental degradation. Meanwhile, torture in warfare hasn’t gone away. Warfare hasn’t gone away. Nor has hunger, misery, want or human degradation.
Is this progress in some absolute sense? You have to define your terms and exclude some costs as irrelevant to progress. And as soon as you do that, you have (as the lawyers say) begged the question. That is, you’ve rigged the game by assuming the truth of what you set out to prove.
Regardless, the world is full of people who really, fervently believe in progress.
[...]
For our purposes here, the key is to notice the underlying structure of belief: that there exists a kind of axis along which progress can be measured, from ‘more bad’ to ‘less bad’. Confusingly, this is often accompanied by the sense that even though the movement from ‘more bad’ to ‘less bad’ is supposedly unstoppable, it also demands constant life-or-death defence against the forces of reaction. My starting premise is that this structure is a belief, not a fact.
As is mine.
What happens, then, when the believers in progress start to question their beliefs? Does this lead to a return to more traditional religions, or even just to the more traditionally religious aspects of ourselves, as Kingsnorth suggests? I don’t know the answer. I only know that my own belief in absolute progress is near nil, and that in its absence I have found nutritive value in tending to the religious aspects of myself, even without signing my name to any particular doctrine of belief.
5.
I think it’s no coincidence that many adult converts are those who, after extensive self-discovery, discover that the depths of their inner selves are hollow.
Some believe that the leap of faith is made by those who have naively abandoned their introspective search for truth. However, it’s more likely that those taking the leap have rummaged so thoroughly within themselves that they’ve hit rock bottom and felt disappointed. Humility, not ignorance, marks the beginning of wisdom and true learning.
That’s from a recent essay by
. It struck me when I first read it because it so closely mapped what I was experiencing at the time, the feeling of not being able to dig any deeper within myself than I already have—not to any constructive ends, anyway—and not knowing what to do with the sick sense that that produced.This was about the same time, a month or so back, that I’d thrown myself into my newfound running practice and had been more or less trying to evacuate my mind and “the progress dilemma” that occupies it more often than I’d like. In response to an essay I wrote about running,
, who writes at Ordinary Mastery, said something that I keep returning to:Building up one's endurance for running, like many things, is an act of faith. Faith in the adaptive capabilities of your body. Faith that your lungs will become stronger and more efficient at oxygen and CO2 exchange; faith that your heart will strengthen and increase in capacity to deploy oxygen to the muscles in your legs; faith that new capillaries will grow around those muscles; faith that the impact will increase your bone density; faith that your muscle fibres will become more adapted for endurance; faith that you'll naturally be able to pace yourself just right and grow to love running before, during, and after.
Whatever you do or don’t believe about faith and our presence here in these minds and bodies, I find John’s point fairly indisputable. So much of what we do in life is an act of faith. Science and reason can tell us a lot of the hows but very few of the whys. And it is into those gaping holes in our knowledge that we pour our faith, year after year, day after day, and minute after unfathomable minute.
My faith, like the born- and dead-again Peter Steele’s, and maybe even like yours, is but an ember, burning ever, working toward a greater reward. Interpret that how you will. But we are all—Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, lapsed atheists, devotees of the Father of Lies, and so on—working toward greater rewards.
Yours might look like progress or social justice. Another’s might look like God or social contagion. Someone else’s might look more like techno-utopian god-men and god-women living longer lives as dejected techno-vampires that feed on the digital blood of more likes and subscribes. Another someone else’s might look more like money, or power, or sex, or porn, or drugs, or creating a child, or getting a good night’s sleep, or finding a better job, or moving past a long road of guilt, or going viral for the most socially praiseworthy reasons, or doing so for less noble reasons but then getting to chase the dragon of redemption afterward, or living well and gaining entry into a wonderful afterlife, or living more painfully and complexly but then, as
once beautifully wrote in the voice of a sad fat man at the end of his rope, getting to “emerge again from between the legs of my mother, a slighter and more beautiful baby, destined for a different life, in which I am masterful, sleek as a deer, a winner.”My point is that, whatever specific rewards we’re after in any given moment, we’re all still after rewards. We’re always working toward them. They’re always out there in the distance. And though they’re often moving and changing and conflicting, they’re still always being navigated by the lights of our little acts and embers of faith.
We are also, I would argue, all serving our lured. Those who will show up and stick around to learn what we think, to provide the possibility that what we think matters for something, and that, by extension, so do we. Every word I’ve ever typed, every letter, has been a shot of faith from a flare gun into the dark. If you are reading these words now, then you are my lured. But so, too, am I yours.
Even if Father of Lies and I are wrong about the Type O lyrics, by the way, and we’ve both somehow hallucinated the whole “serving my lured” and “guarding his heard” thing, that doesn’t ultimately matter. Because here we still are, you and I, at the other end of my memory and Father of Lies' combined thrust. It’s like Chigurh’s coin toss that determines Carla Jean’s fate in the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men:
Anton Chigurh: Call it.
Carla Jean Moss: No. I ain't gonna call it.
Chigurh: Call it.
Carla Jean: The coin don't have no say. It's just you.
Chigurh: Well, I got here the same way the coin did.
Exactly who’s Chigurh and who’s Carla Jean and who’s the coin in this analogy is unclear to me. But my money’s on you being Carla Jean and me being Chigurh and the coin being “my memory and Father of Lies' combined thrust.” Here again, though, I invite you to interpret things how you will.
6.
It is now 5:25pm on Christmas Day. It is if you’re on Indochina Time, anyway. For those of you in my motherland, though, which I believe is most of you, the day is just beginning. For most of the rest of you, scattered largely—though not entirely—across non-US portions of the West, you are probably already past the part of your day where I was when I started writing this post. Wherever you are and whatever time it may be, I hope the day treats you well.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all, let there be light.