The Marionettes - Rise (LP)

I live across the road from a church. It is on the same side of the road as my house but there is a road between us. The road might as well be an ocean as, in the 6 years I have lived here, I have never set foot inside the church. I have walked around the graveyard quite happily, especially when we first moved here and my daughter was little. We would walk and read the stones and see who had flowers and who did not. A closeness to mortality spent in the company of a small child seems somehow to make it both more and less tangible at the same time. I was aware that I desperately wanted my daughter to outlive me and that she would continue my small contribution to the gene pool. While at the same time I desperately wanted to live forever, to somehow freeze time at that point: my daughter and I walking among the headstones - and yet continue beyond my natural death and see her life lived through.

I do not believe we are anything more than a happy, but random, collection of molecules. That our particular brain functions allow us to even contemplate life, the universe and everything should make us grateful enough - we do not need a Higher Power explanation. Let us be thankful for what we have.

But yearning for what we can not possibly have, and couching it in sentiment, seems entirely human to me. More, it is intrinsically human. What other animal is capable of nostalgia? What other animal walks among it's own dead whose lives have been carved into stone? That the church captures the emotion and utilises our own deep inquisitiveness against us by providing 'answers' is unsurprising. It represents the imposition of a standard explanation, dependent upon your particular flavour of religion of course, upon the human experience. It is stifling.

To walk through a graveyard with your child is to experience creation - a life you created thrust against the death about you. If I didn't know better I would swear I was getting spiritual.


The Marionettes - Rise (LP) (Diversity Recordings BACCYCD005 1995)

1. Rise
2. Monster
3. Sickness
4. Temptation
5. Fall
6. Absolution
7. One At A Time
8. I
9. Death Of A Friend
10. Speed
11. Rise (Remix)

Rise - pwd: c4ctusm0uth