Heresy: An Entry for Lalita

I swear I must be the most ridiculous person ever when I'm in love. Because I can't just leave you alone for a second, can I? Even when you're asleep! Please excuse me.
 

I've been listening to Roll the Bones since I sent you that last email and when the album got to "Heresy," it struck a new chord with me. I love how my love and understanding of Rush's music grows as I grow. I really want to share this with you too. Among everything else today. It's just that now the gates are open again, and wider than ever before, all this stuff is flooding out of me and I realize again how I had been dying to share so much more with you when we weren't talking. I literally can't stop. We're open to each other again, and I don't want to miss an opportunity.

All those precious wasted years

"Heresy" is the seventh song on Roll the Bones, which Rush recorded in 1991. So that makes it older than you. It's also the basis of my name on this blog: The Heretic of the Temples of Syrinx.

It's a reflection on the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Peart's lyrics discuss not only the tearful reunification of Europe, but they also question the triumph of capitalism:

All around that dull gray world

Of ideology

People storm the marketplace

And buy up fantasy

The counter-revolution

At the counter of a store

People buy the things they want

And borrow for a little more

All those wasted years

All those precious, wasted years

Who will pay?

I definitely get an image of how the NATO countries, especially America, gloried in the fall of the Soviet Union by consuming. Consumers doing their patriotic duty. Kind of creepy, isn't it? I'm getting those White Noise feelings again. The counter-revolution at the counter of a store seems rather cheap when it's compared to "the counter-revolution" in which "people [are] smiling through their tears." Because the debt that those families torn apart by the Berlin Wall can never truly pay in full is one that is real. Like the emotional debt that escalated with the years of time-debt accrued during the romance of Siri and Merin in "Remembering Siri" from Hyperion. It just makes monetary debt, the control that capitalism exerts over us, seem all the more arbitrary. The next part of the song really hit me more than it ever has, especially in light of how you reentered my life.

All around this great, big world

All the crap we have to take

Bombs and basement fallout shelters

All our lives at stake

The bloody revolution

All the warheads in its wake

All the fear and suffering

All a big mistake

Do we have to be forgiving at last?

What else can we do?

Do we have to say goodbye to the past?

Yes, I guess we do

These lines hold so much meaning for me. They obviously focus on the emotional stress the world suffered under the paranoiac headspace of the Cold War. That time encompassed two whole generations. The Russians and the Americans glared at each other across the planet, from miles under the ocean, and far above in orbit. The sticks and rocks got bigger, uglier, more elaborate, and more numerous. It's no small wonder that this time saw a huge boom in post-apocalyptic literature. After the crushing shame that the lyrics reveal about that time in history, you can really feel how drained the world must have been in the stanza above. It's a relief that no one ever expected. As far as anyone in the world knew, the Cold War might have lasted for centuries...as long as no bombs exploded. The feeling of sudden, unexpected freedom from that "fear and suffering" is so confusing that the world has to ask itself: "Do we have to be forgiving at last? What else can we do? Do we have to say goodbye to the past?" "Yes, I guess we do," perfectly encapsulates that weary and yet hopeful acceptance of a brighter and different future. Alex Lifeson's beautiful guitar interlude at 3:41 is a strong, almost blinding ray of sunlight streaming through a window whose shutters have been torn away.

When I hated and resented you last year, I really was fighting a cold war of my own against you and my feelings for you. Of course, I didn't spy on you from space, threaten you at nuclear summits, or send fully armed submarines to patrol your coastline. That would have been a little much, I think. But I did carry around my anger for you. I thought I had to recriminate you endlessly in my head so I could somehow move forward. Instead of moving on, my world darkened and emptied. Some days all I could feel was how mad I was at you. The more I spat your name, I sounded emptier to myself. I wasn't just railing against you; I was railing against myself. I was resisting my love for you. I might as well have attempted to tie a plastic bag around my head. We both know that could never happen.

Hand cannot erase this love

So when you reached out over 1,298 miles to me and I answered, we knocked down our own Berlin Wall. We reunited like those tearful families that had been separated for nearly fifty years. Though only a little over a year passed during our radio silence, it felt so much longer. The whole Cold War seems ridiculous to me because, for all the ideological and socioeconomic differences NATO and the Warsaw Pact shoved in each other's faces, they forgot that they were still human. And that they were still sharing a planet that they were less than an inch from blasting into extinction. I forgot that my love for you is a significant part of what makes me who I am. I forgot that and that seems ridiculous to me. In those moments before we finally reopened communications between us, I asked myself: "Do I have to be forgiving at last? What else can I do? Do I have to say goodbye to the past?"

Yes, I guess I do. In fact, I know I do.

No more "bombs and basement fallout shelters." The iron cross I dragged through the dreary days of 2015 has disappeared, but the strength I built up remains and now I'm putting it to much better and healthier use. So now, I think you can understand a little more why it's so weird for me to contemplate our future and to fully accept that, yes, we are in love, and that we're finally together, after all these years. But no part of those years was ever wasted. Not even the time we spent apart, as much as it may seem so.

You can never break the chain
There is never love without pain 

If my love for Roll the Bones and "Heresy" has grown out of this intensely personal experience, my love for you has grown exponentially and beyond the scope of even my love for music in general. Our relationship has endured the worst life has thrown at it so far and my confidence in us grows every single day. Every single time you tell me that you love me. You're helping me fill in the lines, colors, shapes, and details of my vision of the future we're going to share. This is why I say that I haven't experienced a joy like this before in my life. It's perfect that the next song on the album is "Ghost of a Chance."

Even the title of the song prompts me to think about what a heresy love is when you set it against the insanity of the world. Being in love with you is heresy against what I thought was law in my life. What I used to think was immutable and irrefutable. The existence of our polyamorous love is heresy against the heteronormative, monogamous narrative enforced upon our society. Approaching the world's problems with love is heresy. And love is a heresy against the most implacable forces of the universe. Entropy, even with its inevitable victory over the existence of matter itself, has no rebuttal against the far greater power of love. Entropy can attempt to snipe love with pain, but it only makes love stronger. It is my greatest hope and my greatest power. And with it, you and I can face anything.

A love like this
Makes us strong