FAUSTUS: How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
MEPHISTOPHILIS: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
You might know it. This is how life works. Last week, we start reading The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, the story of a man who seeks supreme knowledge, who desires to be God or greater, and ends up in Hell.
You might know it. That very same week, I end up in Hell, or at least tasted a small slice of it. That's right, I chaperoned a rave.
I don't accept the concept of Hell. It strikes me as a contrivance to keep people, especially Catholics who get the most vivid depictions of it, in line. I simply don't believe that the benevolent God of the New Testament would put the human race in the ultimate logical fallacy--the either/or propostion. Either you're in Heaven or you're in Hell. I'm not buying it.
Or wasn't.
This was actually my second rave. Once, about 18 years ago, when my wife's niece was living with us, she and a friend didn't come home one night and after a series of phone calls, we figured out that they had gone to a rave at Soldiers and Sailors Auditorium. My wife stayed home with our baby and our 3-year old, while I drove down there at 3AM. At that time, I had no context for a rave. I didn't know what I was walking into. And when I did walk in, convincing the people at the gate that I had to find my niece, it truly felt like Hell or that mansion in the movie Underworld, where all of the other vampires besides Kate Beckinsale can barely gather the energy to do anything but wallow in their own decadence. Plus music. And drugs I didn't know about back then. I was allowed to walk all over the rave, looking for my wife's niece, but a 36-year old man drew some curious stares from those sprawled all over the large room.
Like Faustus, I ignored the infernal evidence before me; I went back in.
Last night was the same as 18 years ago, except that it was the exact opposite: a clean event (as far as I could tell), student DJs, students ravers who had smeared themselves with the innards of glow sticks and glow necklaces, and rather than lying around lethargically, they were revved up, especially when they could grind against each other in the middle of the throng of other students.
There are many visions of Hell. Certainly one of them is agreeing to put on a dance and then realizing that the students who talked you into it had little purpose beyond the chance to experience of the friction of their blue-jeaned penises against the asses of their girlfriends. Especially when you have entered into that agreement while music plays thunderously around you, music that you don't undertand, but music that all of the students seem to get, even get ecstatic over so much so that they jump and down and scream.
And all night was negotiation. A negotiation with your gung-ho chaperones who are standing on the stage next to the DJ, flashing their flashlights onto the students too close to each other while facing away from each other. A negotiation with students who want the lights lower, preferably off, and who will make public stage announcements against grinding in order to get that so that they can grind.
But really, it is the music, not the rehearsals of sex, that get me. Those repetitious sounds of tearing plastic, the electronic burps, the vocalist saying the same thing over and over again, all with an insistent beat that I thought was too fast for grinding. Alas, it was perfect for fast grinding. No slow jams here.
I call it a draw: those who wanted to do what they wanted to do probably did it; those who wanted to stop it made their presence known and stopped a lot of it.
What must Hell be, but a confused conglomeration of lost souls caught up in their own transparent desires, crawling all over each other and across a barren landscape in a reach for satisfaction that they can never grasp? That is how Dante saw it. Having spent three hours at a rave, I think he was right. Even those of us with unclear immediate sins who stand on chairs, looking down into the pit, thinking that we are above the melee, are nevertheless drawn into it and are reminded that we, too, are some portions of all of the twisting, grinding, jumping, screaming selves in that dark, cacophonous, macabre room.
MEPHISTOPHILIS: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
You might know it. This is how life works. Last week, we start reading The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus, the story of a man who seeks supreme knowledge, who desires to be God or greater, and ends up in Hell.You might know it. That very same week, I end up in Hell, or at least tasted a small slice of it. That's right, I chaperoned a rave.
I don't accept the concept of Hell. It strikes me as a contrivance to keep people, especially Catholics who get the most vivid depictions of it, in line. I simply don't believe that the benevolent God of the New Testament would put the human race in the ultimate logical fallacy--the either/or propostion. Either you're in Heaven or you're in Hell. I'm not buying it.
Or wasn't.
This was actually my second rave. Once, about 18 years ago, when my wife's niece was living with us, she and a friend didn't come home one night and after a series of phone calls, we figured out that they had gone to a rave at Soldiers and Sailors Auditorium. My wife stayed home with our baby and our 3-year old, while I drove down there at 3AM. At that time, I had no context for a rave. I didn't know what I was walking into. And when I did walk in, convincing the people at the gate that I had to find my niece, it truly felt like Hell or that mansion in the movie Underworld, where all of the other vampires besides Kate Beckinsale can barely gather the energy to do anything but wallow in their own decadence. Plus music. And drugs I didn't know about back then. I was allowed to walk all over the rave, looking for my wife's niece, but a 36-year old man drew some curious stares from those sprawled all over the large room.
Like Faustus, I ignored the infernal evidence before me; I went back in.
Last night was the same as 18 years ago, except that it was the exact opposite: a clean event (as far as I could tell), student DJs, students ravers who had smeared themselves with the innards of glow sticks and glow necklaces, and rather than lying around lethargically, they were revved up, especially when they could grind against each other in the middle of the throng of other students.There are many visions of Hell. Certainly one of them is agreeing to put on a dance and then realizing that the students who talked you into it had little purpose beyond the chance to experience of the friction of their blue-jeaned penises against the asses of their girlfriends. Especially when you have entered into that agreement while music plays thunderously around you, music that you don't undertand, but music that all of the students seem to get, even get ecstatic over so much so that they jump and down and scream.
And all night was negotiation. A negotiation with your gung-ho chaperones who are standing on the stage next to the DJ, flashing their flashlights onto the students too close to each other while facing away from each other. A negotiation with students who want the lights lower, preferably off, and who will make public stage announcements against grinding in order to get that so that they can grind.
But really, it is the music, not the rehearsals of sex, that get me. Those repetitious sounds of tearing plastic, the electronic burps, the vocalist saying the same thing over and over again, all with an insistent beat that I thought was too fast for grinding. Alas, it was perfect for fast grinding. No slow jams here.
I call it a draw: those who wanted to do what they wanted to do probably did it; those who wanted to stop it made their presence known and stopped a lot of it.
What must Hell be, but a confused conglomeration of lost souls caught up in their own transparent desires, crawling all over each other and across a barren landscape in a reach for satisfaction that they can never grasp? That is how Dante saw it. Having spent three hours at a rave, I think he was right. Even those of us with unclear immediate sins who stand on chairs, looking down into the pit, thinking that we are above the melee, are nevertheless drawn into it and are reminded that we, too, are some portions of all of the twisting, grinding, jumping, screaming selves in that dark, cacophonous, macabre room.
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