Hemispheres

Sometimes good old-fashioned, pretentious pomp-rock can put its finger on the pulse of the human psyche* in a way that mere religion, psychoanalysis or science can’t.

Take, for example, that overblown shrink-fest of a mythological album, Rush’s “Hemispheres”. The story of the terrifying warfare that breaks out between Dionysus and Apollo – respectively representing the emotional and logical sides of the human personality – the right and left “hemispheres” of the title. And then Cygnus, the smug little god of balance, gets everyone into a cool groove. Well, three cheers for Cygnus. Well done you. Now get the Middle East sorted and everyone can go home.

The battle continues – in the arts, in the sciences, in the heart – Romantic vs Classical. Roundhead vs Cavalier. Rapier vs broadsword. Damien Hirst vs Colleen Roonie. And here in Husborne Crawley we have much the same dividing line on which to balance**. Do we embrace the cool, rational, clear thought of a Richard Dawkins Forumite – or do we crash screaming into the right-brained miasma*** of emotional religion? We must choose – as the metaphysically-minded of the 19th century would have told us – between the sublime and the ridiculous. Sorry, not the ridiculous. That other thing. The beautiful. That’s it.

There’s a certain enjoyment in a well-calculated maths equation. Of that there is no doubt, for how could there be any doubt? It’s what it is. And yet there’s a wild abandon in just seizing the moment and howling at the moon, knowing it’s just a lump of rock, not a deity, but going with it for the heck of it.

So we sit in the Moping Room late at night, and hear the sound of the Gabble Ratchets going overhead. And we know that they’re really geese on their way to Furzton, there to be eaten by the Duckman – but on the other hand, maybe Gabriel really is chasing the souls of the lost ones across the sky. You just don’t know.

When the last ounce of mystery has been squeezed from the last crack of ignorance by the last smirking atheist, I suspect we’ll be the poorer. So it’s important we make fun of them now, living as they still do with their parents, with their duffel coats and their B.O. and their lack of friends, to try to stop them smirking.

So walk the woods and let every shadow be a Shuck – they’re safer than the motor-cycle-stealing hoodies that they are in reality. Let every strange noise be the music of the Goblin Dance from the bronze-age burial mound that is in fact just what’s left of the old toolshed when it fell down. Let the wall of unreason stand firm against the tide of rationality that seeks to drown us. Light the tea lights to scare away the darkness of certainty. And let Enya’s soothing harmonies replace concrete concerns with wimbling touchy-feeliness. You’ll feel better for it, and that’s what’s important.

And remember – whatever horrible things you can dream of in the unimaginable supernatural – a human being is capable of worse****.

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* Yes I know. A human psyche probably has no pulse, being unequipped – as far as we’re aware – with veins. This may well be a mixed metaphor, but I’ve no way of confirming this as I can’t take the pulse of a human psyche to check.
** Another poor metaphor, I know. “Tightrope” would be better. But talking about tightropes just makes me think of that Clown Mass and I don’t want to go there. In any sense.
*** You can’t really crash into a miasma. By definition you’d go through it. Unless it were obscuring a brick wall. However in that case it’s not the miasma you’d be crashing into, it’s the brick wall.
**** Obviously you can’t dream of it if it’s unimaginable. Or, if you can dream of it, it’s imaginable. Either way – that’s my point exactly.