Cheryl And Dante’s Bogus Journey

For those of you who don’t know, I recently had an existential crisis of beastly proportions. My dilemna was this: Is Metal essential to my nature, or is my obsession with the genre accidental, as Aristotle would say? It seemed bleak. After all, the genre has not always existed, therefore it could not possibly be the defining characteristic of any personality. I refuse to accept this. What am I, if not a Metalhead? Do I even have an essence, or just changeable characteristics? I was doubting the very nature of my being, and the conclusions were as fucked up as the questions. My experience was eerily identical to Dante’s descent into hell: “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” [Inferno, Canto I]  Fortunately, Dante survived his trials like a trooper, thus inspiring me to face my own demons. Dante and I embarked on a figurative sojourn, one that actually made sense after a few margaritas and this bottle of pills I found.

    In the wise words of Dio, Evil is great subject matter. Metalheads all over the world have always been aware of this fact, and of course Dante was the original hesher. We adorn our album covers and lyrics with monsters, corpses, scenes of gore and debauchery. So what could possibly be cooler than Hell itself? Turns out that Hell is interesting, but it’s Hell for a reason. There’s no fucking music. Even the corny image of angels strumming harps is indicative of inherent superiority to the Inferno. Sure, demon-torture and poetic justice can pique my curiosity, but the Inferno is still the obnoxious Black Metal of afterlives.

     If Hell is the Black Metal of afterlives, then Purgatory is the Prog Metal. It has its moments of awesomeness, and the general idea is to make some sort of progression (duh). But it’s not necessarily how I want to spend eternity. Again, I was reminded of my identity crisis. Think about your favorite Prog Rock song. It’s pretty good, right? You might even put it on repeat and listen to it for a really long time. But even my favorite jams get tedious after about an hour of hitting the replay button. So if you would get sick of the best music after an hour, how could you possibly endure an eternity of mediocrity? When I admit the possibility that I would ever hate Queensryche, I am clearly not a very good Metalhead. My love of Metal, as I feared, may be an Aristotelian accident. Son of a bitch.

That brings us into Heaven. So far we got Black Metal and Prog Rock, and now what subgenre is Paradise? Dante’s psychedelic account of Heaven is reminiscent of the trippy-ass melodic style that characterises bands such as Children Of Bodom… So, I dunno, let’s just call it Thrash. Now, we all know that Thrash Metal is anything but boring, yet for some reason no-one is all that intrigued by Heaven. We are more interested in the punishment of the wicked than in the rewards of virtue. I know evil is a great subject, but that’s still a little twisted. At any rate, Dante’s description of Heaven diminishes the hierarchal structure that had prevailed in both the Inferno and in Purgatory. In Paradise, the self is no longer defined by the position of the soul. I still don’t know if I could interpret that in my favor or not.

When describing the human encounter with the divine, Dante insists that “Least and greatest alike gaze into that mirror.” [Paradiso, Canto XV] This suggests that there are still personalites, some better and some worse, but they are all doing the same thing. Heaven is not devoid of structure, but it is more of a spectrum than a stage system. At any rate, the self is separated from the ego. My self is my essence, but my ego is the part of me that hates Queensryche after 8 hours of Operation: Mindcrime. When gazing into the mirror, the self you see reflected there is more commensurable with all the other souls in Heaven. You may still be a sentient being, in and of yourself, but you are like a mini-me of the entirety. In otherwords, it’s like headbanging in sync with all the other Metalheads at the Amon Amarth concert.

The divinity which individuals experience in paradise is one that necessitates sacrifice. Those who enjoy eternal bliss must be absorbed in something, and dissociate from themselves. Just as an individual can get lost in a favorite song, so can an individual get lost in heaven. Such a person would relinquish all sense of time to get absorbed in the music for as long as it lasts. However, since heaven is eternal, it would be tantamount to losing the self in a neverending song. The reason that people on earth get annoyed when their favorite song is played for 60 consecutive minutes, is that they don’t love it enough. The obnoxiousness of such an experience is internal, not intrinsic in the music. However, the self remains sentient in heaven, and the ego takes a secondary role, thus rendering boredom and annoyance obsolete. Paradise, therefore, embodies a song you would love enough to spend eternity lost in it… Somewhere lost in time, if you will.