Author Archives: Satis

Music I Love: “Crimson”, Sentenced (2000)

I first wrote about this album five years ago here, but I’ve been going through a brief resurgence of depression over the past few days, and there is no album that better summarizes those feelings for me than Crimson, by Finnish goth metal band Sentenced.

Sentenced’s career (now a decade over) started as a fairly traditional death metal band, before growing their singer’s melody from a guttural growl, and for many people their breakthrough album was Amok, released in 1995. Their lyrics have been filled with loathing and depression from the outset, but for me their peak was with 2000’s Crimson. The previous two albums, Down and Frozen have some gems, such as The Suicider, but for me Crimson was the first time that Sentenced truly abandoned their death metal roots entirely for a more pop-goth metal sound, never heard better than on their (Finnish) chart-topping Killing Me Killing You.

This album resonated deeply for me in my youth, for the lyrics seemed to perfectly encompass the bleak despair and misery that I lived through every day:

And yet in some twisted way
I enjoy my misery
And in some strange way
I have grown together with my agony

—Home in Despair, Crimson (2000)

Now, seventeen years later, it brings back powerful memories of darkness and despair, and has ever been the soundtrack to depression throughout my ever-changing mental illnesses. Sentenced deliberately broke up in 2005 after releasing their final album, The Funeral Album, and although both it and 2002’s The Cold White Light were phenomenal monuments of bleak despair, nothing will ever top Crimson for its utter, devastating depression.

 

 

Why must we foist our beliefs on others?

Let me preface this by acknowledging the hypocrisy of writing a post asking people to stop asking people to believe what they believe, but even my normally liberal, cat-friendly Facebook feed is slowly being infected by the belligerent views of the political right-wing, and I can’t stand it any longer.

I’m growing increasingly weary of hearing about the insanely fascist policies our president is signing into law, but almost more exhausted of the left’s incessant attempts to prove the right wrong at every turn. It’s like watching an exercise in futility, and it boils down to one thing: confirmation bias.

At this point, it should be clear to anyone—even living under a political rock, like myself—that Donald Trump is essentially bullet-proof. He has said and done things, both leading up to his presidency and beyond, that would have been career suicide for any other politician, and yet it serves only to bolster his popularity with his proponents. And all the while, those calling for his resignation or impeachment are being sidelined, belittled and silenced by the man himself.

… he is enabling people with deep-rooted prejudices to act out their misinformed biases and hatreds.

And under the umbrella of this dictatorial leadership, views and opinions that for decades were slowly being extinguished have been reignited, from misogyny and racism to xenophobia and sexual prejudices. It hardly seems like three years ago that gay marriage was celebrated in New Jersey for the first time in our history. The very notion of federally-funded scientific organizations are being systematically silenced is a hallmark of fascism, but the fact that there are people who believe it’s right is even more terrifying.

But by far the worst of this is not necessarily that our president is pushing right-wing and outright propagandist policies, but that he is enabling people with deep-rooted prejudices to act out their misinformed biases and hatreds. Our entire civilization, which ought to be founded on a base of acceptance and love, is now at risk.

Just today I saw a friend on Facebook like a post about a pro-life march in Washington D.C. The article claimed that our society is the most pro-life since Roe vs. Wade. The fact that this person liked the article didn’t necessarily surprise me, knowing the person for who she is, but the post comments were what got to me. People shouting for the defunding of Planned Parenthood, or that adoption is what not having an abortion looks like.

This is confirmation bias at its strongest. Because Planned Parenthood offers abortions—which is, clearly, something a lot of people think is wrong—it stands to reason that abortion is all they’re good for. As it turns out, roughly 3% of Planned Parenthood’s services are abortions. That’s right: 97% of what they do has nothing to do with ending premature lives.

Even so, considering the issue of abortion, it becomes vital to recognize the social importance of sex in the first place. Many pro-life supporters would argue that abstention is the best way to prevent unwanted pregnancies, but not only is this impractical, it outright contradicts what both physical and mental health professionals have been learning for centuries. Clearly pregnancy is a potential consequence of sex, but in today’s society the social value of sex far outweighs the reproductive value. Education and contraception play their part, but so does the opportunity to correct a mistake.

Perhaps women shouldn’t be given this opportunity. After all, if you made a mistake, surely you should be made to live with it. And while I can understand that point of view to an extent, it’s also dictatorial law at its worst: the personal beliefs of a few are deciding the fate of millions. Consider that the cabinet in power making the decisions to fund or not fund Planned Parenthood comprises entirely white men.

Herein lies the root of the problem: it is intolerably unfair for men to choose the fate of women on an issue that only affects women. This is an arena in which men, by nature, have no experience. Men cannot carry children: what right do they have to decide that women should be forced to?

I’ll give you an analogy. I once had a vegan friend over to the house. Very nice person, if very passionate about her beliefs. We were having a nice time, until we decided to order pizzas. At this point, it came to light that she didn’t want anyone to order meat or cheese on their pizzas—not just her. In other words, she wanted her beliefs to dictate the dinner choice of everyone.

Now, this was only dinner—but the concept extends to religion, to sex, to immigration—to anything you can imagine. People across the world hold, and have always held, strong beliefs about certain issues. But for thousands of years, it’s been in human nature to be unable to leave it at that: our need for self-confirmation has meant that we need to either convince everyone of our beliefs … or eradicate those who won’t be convinced. And if you think this is a modern-day problem, exposited by radical Muslim extremists, consider that a thousand years ago, the Christians of the western world were exterminating Muslims in their own homes, because they didn’t follow their beliefs.

As much as I think Richard Dawkins is a egocentric, intolerant jerk, he once made a very good point: simply because, by sheer happenstance, you were born in the western world and raised as a Christian, you believe that your interpretation of god is the only one. If you were born in India, you would have been raised Hindu, and believed in a polytheistic ideology. By deduction, therefore, god can only be as real as how you were raised … which doesn’t exactly promote the ‘truth’ of deities of any kind.

Yet people continue to believe that their god is the only one; their beliefs about abortion are the right ones; their views on animal cruelty put them above others. And this would be just fine—if they didn’t try to foist those beliefs on everyone around them. This is, perhaps, my only strong belief: that no one has the right to force their beliefs on others. That isn’t the basis of a free and tolerant society, and I have no desire to live in a society that is neither of these things.

Hate me if you like; disagree with me all you want. I don’t have to listen to you, and you don’t have to listen to me. But the moment you think that you have the right to dictate what I think is right and wrong, you’ve crossed a line. That is my belief; that is what I hold dear.

I don’t ask that you believe the same—but nor do I have to listen to you if you don’t.

Never take two years to write a book.

Since writing the last few pages of my third book, Ancients & Death, I’ve been spending the past few weeks reading through the book cover to cover, so to speak, to get a feel of the overall flow, structure and plot. As I expected, there are some significant problems that will need to be addressed, but what I was surprised by was, in some places, the utter lack of consistency between chapters.

I suppose I shouldn’t be taken aback, really, because it took me a significantly long time to write this book, compared to the previous two. Where I wrote the first book, Consolation, in less than five months, and the second, Exile, took around seven, this is the first time I took well over a year to complete a draft.

Ultimately, I’m proud of the manuscript … but there is a lesson to be learned here.

And it shows. Because of my depression, sabbatical and other interferences, I wasn’t able to consistently write this book every day, every week, or even every month. There were very long periods where I ignored its progress entirely, focusing instead on, in some cases, my own survival. And the result is that, by the time I came back to the book, I had almost forgotten what had happened previously.

Some things are small, and easily corrected: a character who started out as a king turned into a greatlord partway through, and fixing it is more or less a matter of search and replace. Other issues are greater though; for example, a character might have an important revelation in chapter five, only to have exactly the same idea ten chapters later. This will be harder, because I will need to identify these places, highlight them, and decide which one to keep and which to rewrite.

There is also an issue with timing in the plot. This book takes place over nearly ten years of time, and the passage of this time isn’t always clear. It’s important that the time passes as it does, but I also need to reconcile this with a disease that spreads insanely fast. Why isn’t the whole world destroyed in the time that passes? These are things to muse on.

Ultimately, I’m proud of the manuscript. I think it’s one of the best I’ve written so far, and the parts with Elven are, to me, particularly gripping. But there is a lesson to be learned here, because I’ve set myself up for a great deal of work: don’t ever write a book over the course of two years. Do it faster. Stephen King recommends a month. I don’t think that’s quite realistic, but don’t abandon it for great periods of time—your work will suffer as a result.