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Leprosy
I. Holocaust: ‘Leper’s Progress.’
"Oh, my soul…"
II. Anne Locke: From ‘A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner.’
So foule is sinne and lothesome in thy sighte,
So foule with sinne I see my selfe to be,
That till from sinne I may be washed white,
So foule I dare not, Lord, approche to thee.
Ofte hath thy mercie washed me before,
Thou madest me cleane: but I am foule againe.
Yet washe me Lord againe, and washe me more,
Washe me, O Lord, and do away the staine
Of vggly sinnes that in my soule appere.
Let flow thy ple[n]tuous streames of clensing grace.
Washe me againe, yea washe me euery where,
Bothe leprous bodie and defiled face.
Yea washe me all, for I am all vncleane,
And from my sin, Lord, cleanse me ones againe.
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Comment:
Holocaust are a Scottish band, which begun as a NWOBHM band, but then, after a split, was re-formed by guitarist John Mortimer as a progressive band with a strong Voivod influence. They have varied their style significantly on almost every album, so that from playing harsh, early-Voivodian music on their reformation they went on to put out an album more along the lines of this a few years later. Nonetheless, perhaps through the fact that John Mortimer remains the primary force behind the band’s direction, as the only constant member, they do retain a large degree of continuity throughout this. This applies both in musical terms, with their characteristically ‘open’ guitar sound, and in lyrical terms.
Holocaust generally tend to incorporate Christian themes into their lyrics, reflecting Mortimer’s own views and his interest in theology, although they’re not averse to adopting more exotic imagery when it suits them, with influences from both new age and Zen movements. As Mortimer puts it:
“Like I say, I am a Christian and for me nothing is more important than Christ but I don't take the view that I should shove that down other people's throats. On the other hand, if I'm being honest as a songwriter then it is inevitable that Christianity will appear in one form or another from time to time in the songs.As he notes here, the book which the album ‘Covenant’ – from which ‘Leper’s Progress’ comes - is based upon has quite strong Christian themes as well. The other book which they chose to base an album upon, Paul Tillich’s ‘The Courage to Be,’ is also a work of Christian theology (and a really good one, speaking as a non-Christian.) Due to Mortimer’s interest in theology, his lyrics are generally able to go a lot deeper than most Christian bands (‘Satan is bad! You’re bad if you like Satan! Jesus is good, so worship him! Yeah!’), and his Christian themes are generally introduced in terms of dealing with more philosophical themes such as the relation of mind to body, reason to the instincts, death to meaning, and so on. In this context, they tend to become a lot more personal, and to display inner turmoil or the personal search for peace.
“Other "religious" influences come in to flavour things as well, particularly Zen on The Sound of Souls and Covenant. With Covenant that was almost inevitable since Stephen R. Donaldson (the author of the "Chronicles of Thomas Covenant"), saturates his writing with religious concepts, especially Christian and Buddhist.”
Anne Locke is generally considered to have been the first to pen a sonnet sequence in English. While sonnets may have already existed in English literature*, the form of the sonnet sequence, a string of sonnets related to a common theme, which had become famous in Italy through the work of Petrarch, had not yet carried over. She was the first to use this form. It would later become a craze of its own in England, influenced by Sydney’s ‘Astrophel and Stella,’ where every man and his dog soon begun writing sequences of anguished sonnets, generally focusing on the theme of love, and generally not very good. John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’ are another famous example of a sonnet sequence based upon religious themes, which were generally secondary to love as a subject for sonnets as far as popularity goes, but nonetheless were always present as a theme even in the form’s origins in Italy.
Locke’s sonnets are written as responses to the clauses of Psalm 51, and can be seen arranged alongside this psalm here. While Donne was known for his tendency to flaunt the established sonnet-form, Locke was a very close adherent to it, ending her quatrains with full-stops and keeping quite strongly to a rhyme scheme. Her main strength was her ability to harness these constraints, having one of the most keen ears for poetry among sonneteers, through creating verse which constantly threatened to overflow its boundaries, and was every time forced back. Her continual use of repetition gives the poems an almost obsessive tone, and form a very interesting complement to the more laconic language of the psalms; it essentially takes the language of the psalms, and due to the need to extend one line over the 14 of a sonnet, continually repeats it and stresses it in such a way as to give it a sense of outpouring which it doesn’t explicitly have in the psalms, as it were bringing out the real, forcefully emotional nature of the psalms through recasting them in a sonnet form. It may appear curt, but in reality it is powerful; the sonnet shows this by its basis upon the language of the psalm, and the obsessional return to it, which at the same time extending it over sonnet length.
The sonnet is, in a sense, an inherently dramatic form. You have the initial two quartets, which develop a theme, followed by the volta, the ‘turn,’ which requires a shift in perspective and tone, and hence implies dramatic development. This could to some degree explain the sonnet’s appeal to both Christian and romantic poets; it allows you to develop intense emotions without losing yourself in them, to indulge in despair without merely succumbing to it, because one has the sestet and turn to allow a change back from the unrestrained emotion. Indeed, in a sense the sestet demands this so that the poem be brought to a neat conclusion in the given space, and the act of bringing to a conclusion is clearly incompatible with unrestrained emotion. In the sestet, you can reflect upon the overall situation, and summarize it in more accurate terms, as well as more calmly appeal to the lover or God for salvation. Anne Locke’s power is to a large extent her ability to create the sense of passion in the quatrains, while following this with a plea to God in the sestet which, due to its being a direct request which must conclude in six lines, becomes more coherently structured in a way which both gives the poem resolution and preserves the emotion of the previous lines.
Anne Locke’s sonnets generally end with a plea to God following the ‘turn,’ and what this does is basically to proportion the poem between the initial despair and the need for God, the lack of salvation and the possibility for salvation through God’s mercy. Of course, the speaker has no power over God, nor do they have anything which is of use to God, and hence this must take the form of reliance upon God and submission to the fact that it is up to him. It nonetheless represents a resolution by the poet, but here a resolution towards acceptance; she resolves to live a life subject to God and accepts that she needs Him.
There can’t be a resolution towards independent action for such a Christian, because there is no salvation to be gained by one’s own action by itself, but only by the grace of God. Why this belief is important, or requires expression, might seem unclear. The Protestant self is here forever an empty vessel, and if a God were to notice it then it would not be worthy of their concern. This would not alter.
Comparison and conclusion:
The theme of leprosy has a long history in Christian thought, with episodes such as that of Christ touching and healing the leper leading to a wealth of possible allegorical and symbolic meanings which could be used in art and rhetoric. However, what unites these two works is not simply the theme, but the power of their focus on the rottenness of the self, and at the same time the hope of salvation. Of course, in Holocaust’s song, the subject is a character who does in fact have leprosy, but, as I suppose you would expect from the Thomas Covenant series, literal leprosy isn’t simply literal leprosy, and here that is brought out quite clearly with lines such as, ‘Oh, my soul,’ and explicit references to Christianity (indeed, one could say that even, ‘Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, I am defiled,’ immediately elevates this leprosy into symbolic territory). Suffice to say, it’s a song with universal themes, rather than simply a song about the mistreatment of one person who had leprosy.
In Holocaust’s song, the pummeling, heavy riffs are used to underpin the overall sense of almost self-loathing expressed by it. This is at first merely a physical matter, but soon is elevated into a matter of the soul; ‘To live by what I hate is my unbroken rule.’ The following of this by the reflective, regretful, ‘Oh, my soul,’ serves to make this aspect of matters even clearer. The problem is, ultimately, subjection to sin. The speaker portrays themselves as utterly wretched, completely deformed, mentally and physically; their soul is lost to darkness, and in the next song they request, in one of the most powerful sections of the song, a fire to ‘burn away the darkness in their soul.’ On the other hand, there is also an occasional sense of hope, represented by the chorus of this song, along with its characteristically ‘open’ guitar accompaniment; the hope, that is, of salvation for the soul, of being able to escape this mental and physical leprosy. If he cannot escape the leprosy of the soul, he is condemned to the leprosy of the body.
The title of Holocaust’s track hence alludes to the story of Christ and leper, and the Christian symbolism with which leprosy is associated. However, at the same time, it seems to also reference ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ the story of how a certain man named Christian met a bunch of conveniently named characters after discovering that he was afflicted by sin and voyaging to escape this state. In a sense, it’s quite appropriate to the song, and the album as a whole, insofar as it represents the progress of a leper, in this essentially symbolic sense, one consumed by sin, towards escaping the darkness in his soul, his inability to accept God’s rule in classical Christian theological terms (The Fall was a result of disobedience to God, which is hence seen as the primary and basic sin, an aspect emphasized even more strongly by Milton. For Milton, the basic problem is man’s valuation of himself or other men over God, ignoring the fact that God in reality constitutes their 'rational' essence, all which is good within them. What Milton means by 'rational' might well vary from what others may mean by the term.)
Anne Locke’s poem has much the same effect, except that in place of the heavy riffs you have the onslaught of ‘sinne’ and ‘foule,’ repeated almost continually as if to underline the point, to express the true depth of their impurity, to illustrate how they really are ‘all uncleane.’ The terms which are repeated; ‘sinne,’ ‘foule,’ ‘all,’ ‘cleane,’ all serve to emphasize the fact of their complete uncleanliness, their need for a complete cleansing. There is a powerful sense of self-loathing here, albeit one which concludes in turning to the Lord for help precisely because one sees oneself so insufficient; one cannot raise one’s own consciousness to purity consciously, because that would require a pure consciousness to begin with in order to figure out the direction to go. “The educator must himself be educated,” as Marx noted.
Of course, we can’t really give a thorough account of the subject here, so the above account probably doesn’t really make the nature of the argument clear enough. It’s probably a subject which we’ll return to at a later date in discussing some other good Christian bands (there’s a fair few), or Holocaust themselves, so we can probably leave that tangent as it is for now. Suffice it to say that for many Christian theologians, this declaration of oneself as impure, as having no truth apart from God, as merely ashes and dust, forms in some sense the foundations of Christian faith. As Wittgenstein put it, “Any man who is half-way decent will think himself extremely imperfect, but a religious man thinks himself wretched.” Hence the poignancy of the leper’s expectation that Jesus will not touch him due to his impurity, such that both Holocaust (‘Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, I am defiled’) and Locke (‘So foule I dare not, Lord, approach to thee’) feel it important enough, despite being a single detail, to include, is the admittance that one is so wretched that one does not deserve God’s grace. Of course, from a Christian perspective, you demand nothing from God; however, it’s one thing to say so and another to realize that it means stating that no part of you is good apart from God, for there is therefore nothing in you that God ‘ought’ to preserve, nothing good. Hence Euthyphro’s dilemma is arbitrarily vaulted over.
This, then, is the basic theological place which their self-loathing takes, and the reason why it must be so harsh. They must leave no part of themselves untouched, no attachments to the old must be maintained. Christians in this respect resemble Richard Dawkins, who has a similar loathing for Christians.
In that case, Holocaust’s similarity with the Anne Locke poem is ultimately based upon their similar place in a theological framework, the fact that they play a similar role. The harshness of their self-critique, though articulated in different ways, nonetheless retains a united force in both the song and the poem. Satanism is often disjointed, however it does have one advantage: when the Christian tries to reduce themselves, the Satanist is allied to the 'opposer' and can realise themselves despite their divergence from 'God.' Of course, Christianity is highly varied, and 'Christian metal' hence tends to assume that people are already aware of complex theological issues such as what they might mean by 'God.' However, when common themes appear within the music, then you have the closest thing.
Zero.
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* A sonnet is a 14-line poem, which is usually divided into two groups of four lines and one group of six, as follows:
With how sad steps, ô Moon, thou climb'st the skies
How silently, and with how wan a face !
What, may it be that even in heav'nly place
That busy archer his sharp arrow tries?
Sure, if that long with Love acquainted eyes
Can judge of Love, thou feel'st a lovers case;
I read it in thy looks, thy languished grace,
To me that feel the like, thy state descries.
Then, ev'n of fellowship, ô Moon, tell me,
Is constant Love deemed there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be loved, and yet
Those Lovers scorn whom that Love do possess?
Do they call Virtue there ungratefulness?
Generally speaking, the division into stanzas isn’t present in the actual poem, and is here used merely for illustrative purposes. The first eight lines of the poem form two groups of four lines each; each such group of four lines is called a ‘quatrain.’ In what is known as the English, or Shakespearian sonnet, these usually follow a rhyme scheme where the first line rhymes with the third and the second with the fourth (known as ABAB); in the ‘Italian,’ or Petrarchan sonnet, they follow a rhyme scheme where the second and third lines rhyme, as well as the first with the fourth (ABBA.)
In the above case, we have the form of rhyme in the quatrains which is generally associated with the Petrarchan sonnet, despite this being written by the English Sidney. It is also notable how the quatrains here both end with a sentence-ending punctuation, either a full-stop or question-mark; this is the most basic way of writing the sonnet structure, although many sonneteers would go on to experiment with continuity between the lines, or, in less adventurous moods, semi-colons to achieve a similar effect without quite finishing the sentence.
For the last group of six lines, known as a ‘sestet,’ the rhyme can again vary. For Petrarch, forms such as CDECDE (eg. Fish / Rubber / Cow / Dish / (Land) Lubber / Mao) were common, and the use of a rhyming couplet (two lines in succession which rhyme) to end the poem, which we see here, was primarily popularized by the English sonnet. In entering into the sestet, you traditionally have what is known as a ‘turn,’ or ‘volta,’ by which the tone of the poem shifts at the beginning of the sestet. This generally allowed the sonnet to be given an question-response form, with the first eight lines providing the problem and then the last six reflecting on it and concluding. Of course, this was increasingly experimented with, from starting the volta halfway through the line to delaying it for later lines, but nonetheless the volta, in whatever form, was a common technique in the sonnet, and formed an important part of its attraction. Some sonnets disposed with it altogether, but most major sonnets didn’t unless they wanted to achieve something specific; likewise, the proportioning of the poem into a section of 8 lines and another section of 6 had a useful effect in creating a proportionate structure, which many sonnet-writers thought was worth salvaging.
If you wanted an analogue for the effect of the sonnet’s volta in heavy metal, one of the closest is perhaps the ‘turn’ in the last third of Holocaust’s song ‘Hypnosis of Birds,’ which begins with a sense of alienation before slowly coming to a conclusion with a sense of unity with the divine, and the acceptance of its necessity (‘We all need to hold / And need to be held’), which is made more powerful due to the greater intensity granted by the shorter length, as well as through bringing the song to a sense of resolution on that final line, which hence gains a lot of power.
OSI use a somewhat similar effect with the ending of ‘Blood,’ which does indeed appear to be a sort of resolution and acceptance on the part of the speaker, even invoking God; however, in this case it’s twisted around somewhat by the fact that ‘war,’ which the speaker resolves to accept and submit to, is portrayed as essentially alien, and hence their submission is not positive, but rather subjugation. The power of the final line is almost opposite to that of ‘Hypnosis of Birds,’ a decided sense of helplessness and negativity rather than acceptance and unity.
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