The Fall of Christianity by Dr. Joanne
Listen: you hear a drum loop. Not too fast. Not too slow. It loops, around and around, swirling and diving, always reconnecting perfectly to the same point. A guitar echoing in symmetry. Then the bass. It comes in waves. Now watch: a pair of hips, gently swaying in time, slide into focus. Moving in melody, her arms orchestrate the sound and rhythm. Her. Then the snare kicks in. Purple and blue, red and black, she moves the rhythm. Like it was written for her. Like she wrote it. Like she is writing it now, at this very instant, her movements creating the notes as she moves.
Chapter 6
"Love is a friendship set to music."
- Jospeh Campbell.
Press play.
Valentine's Day, 2002
A nightclub. Dancers, ravers, maniacs, their bloodstreams awash with chemicals and rhythm. Bodies heaving, alcohol flowing. Do you want another? No, I'm too high. Water? Have you got any water? Voices chattering, laughing. The infinite variety of the human condition, beautiful, vicious, horny, in love, scared shitless, high as a fucking kite, low as a kerb-crawling predator, jostling, bragging, cajoling, pleading, standing on the shoulders of giants, as vulnerable as infants.
On the third floor, high above the throng and the heaving beat two men appear. One moment they aren't there. The next they are. A master and an apprentice. One to guide, one to learn. One to be patient, one to push. Why here the younger one asks. Because she's here. Who, the other asks, his heart rate quickening. Her. The other one. The one that makes two of you. The younger one looks around, peering through the dry ice and a sea of skin.
When are we, he asks his mentor. Six months after she made her first jump. She's 26 years old. She doesn't know who you are. She has no idea who she really is. Or what she's capable of. But she's about to find out.
Why here he asks again. Why this place. Because, the older one explains, this is the only definite location in space and time where we know she was. Everything after that is simply rumour and legend. She doesn't obey our rules Michael. She obeys none. She has her own. She doesn't work for us. She doesn't even work for them. But we know she's here. Now, before it's too late, you need to find her. Why? You'll know why when you find her. One last thing; they're coming for her Michael. There are two of them here, looking for her. Right now.
How are we supposed to see her in here he asks. You don't need to see her. Close your eyes and you'll find her. He does. He opens his head. Wait Michael, he says. Be careful. Michael nods, closes his eyes again. He probes. Looks through the sound and the noise, using his breath to push through. A flood of words come at him. He resists, filtering, screening, seeking her out. Voices, desires clamber to drag him in. He holds them off, selecting a voice, rejecting it as fast. A click. A connection. A girl. Dancing. Dancing. Lost in the sound, her mind causing ripples around her, space bending to fit the way she moves. Making love to the whole world, being the song inside her head. And then, just like that, he is inside her. Inside her every thought and breath.
Listen: you hear a drum loop. It gets louder. Not too fast. Not too slow. Just the right side of an unquantifiable border where you start tapping your foot to the beat, moving your foot to the loop. And loop is the word. It loops, around and around, swirling and diving, always reconnecting perfectly to the same point. A shimmering, warm sound keeps time. A guitar, far away, echoing in symmetry, sings a melody. Then the bass. Walloping and juddering, thumping and rolling. It comes in waves. Your head begins to bob along. You don't know why, but you know that you like it. Now watch: a pair of hips, gently swaying in time, slide into focus. Moving in melody, her arms orchestrate the sound and rhythm. Her.
Then the snare kicks in. Like the most obvious thing in the world. You realise that the musician has been teasing you. Like the way she does as she starts to dance, her body moving in infinity figure-eight loops. Purple and blue, red and black, she moves the rhythm. Like it was written for her. Like she wrote it. Like she is writing it now, at this very instant, her gyrations creating the notes as she moves. She is the rabbit-hole, an ocean of memory, death and birth, Lupercalia, the bones of St. Valentine.
No-one notices, but the DJ has nothing to do with it - nothing to do with what is happening, what people are hearing. The music is not coming from him. It's coming from her. Every note of every song ever written at once. Every rhythm, every chord, every beat and blip. From the sound of the first rocks banged together on an African plain to the snarling techno in a German warehouse as a wall comes down, it all pours through her. She dances alone, in the middle of the floor, the crowd oblivious to what she does.
Every kick of a bass drum, every melody, every tune, every breakbeat, every broken howl of loss, every shout of new love, every moment in time and sound. A syncopated beat, swirling in space, the voice of a man screaming from the bottom of a whiskey bottle. The cry of a child that may never be born. The death-rattle of a civilisation. The scream of an empire collapsing. She calls it all down and plays with it like a child shifting sand through her fingers. Light and sound are sucked into ripples in the space near her skin.
There's no-one else in the club. They're all gone, leaving her in a perfect moment in time. Faster, faster, the sweat sheeting her back, coming up, getting closer. She sees the threads connecting every moment, place and person and with one flick of her head, pulls the weave apart. An infinite number of worlds, times, places, peoples unravel open into a roadmap of the universe.
Behind her, two wraiths move through the throng, unseen, unspeaking, sniffing and hissing, closing in on her, getting closer, getting ready to pounce. He sees them nearing her, tries to say something. He can't speak, overwhelmed by the torrent.
He sees everything she has ever seen, feels everything she has ever felt, everyone who ever hurt her, kicked her, pushed her back. He sees her dance through them like air, sweeping them aside. He feels everything she wants, everything she fears. He sees a flood of possible realities: them never meeting, him answering a door to her in the future, taking her into his arms, their bodies close together, them making love, kissing like their lives depended on it, leaving and losing each other, lost in time and space, lost in each other, arguing, fighting, fucking, screaming, crying and laughing until their faces hurt, scaring each other so much they can't breathe or think.
They close in, claws bared, teeth glistening in the strobe lights, ready, ready to kill, so near they can smell her. And then, without warning, she opens her eyes, tilts her head back, looks at him and smiles. It's just a game, she says. You're not alone, he tells her, reaching out. Yes I am, she says.
And then, just like that, she's gone.
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So what I now know is this:
You are essentially a survival machine for your genes. Your genes built your brain and programmed it to react to given situations in certain ways in order to ensure your’s and consequently your gene’s survival. Your genes will outlive you by a good few million years. Consciousness evolved merely as a bi-product of the fact that your brain uses simulations to evaluate risk. And it needs to take itself into account in these simulations. Ergo self awareness.
The reason you die is because, once you have passed the age of reproduction, you are no longer of any value to your genes. As a survival machine you have served your purpose since identical copies of the genes have jumped ship to a new survival machine; your offspring. It’s at this point that things like cancer become more likely. This is because your genes no longer root out and destroy cancerous cells. You are, in effect, no more than an abandoned car.
Let me add another thought on to that. You are DNA, your body nothing more than a 'flesh suit' which carries your DNA around. Problem is, these 'flesh suits' get corroded as they pass through space/time. We just don't see it, because it's happening at a speed we can't visually see. If you were to speed time up, everyone of us would appear as a tentacled streak, moving in a blur, with the suit rotting and falling apart as it moves - cells in an orgamism, in a dish. From a different place in space/time and a different scale, we're just a set of manky cells clinging to a ball floating in space, like molluscs clinging to a rock in an ocean. Puts all this 'rights of the individual' crap in it's place I tell ya.
Now. I'm off to see my shrink.
Valentine was killed while helping others escape from a brutal Roman prison. Green
I can normally ignore the nauseating pile of knobcheese that is Valentine's day when it falls on a weekday, but it's on a weekend this time. I'll be at a birthday party tonight, surrounded by canoodling couples and loved-up fucktards smelling of big horny orgasms and a general joy for life. I may actually puke. In someone's face.
The Bones of St. Valentine are held in the Carmelite Church, on Whitefriar Street, Dublin