The Blood on My Door

As a child, I saw the Angel of Death.

Waking up from sleep some nights, he would be there; huge, ominous, darker than the midnight shadows encircling him. Hence, I was marked from the beginning. This isn't, however, an essay focused on certain unexplained or paranormal experiences I have had in the past.

Instead, it's about a song by a popular "pop punk" rock band. Pop, I say, although they started out a bit differently than that, playing blitzkrieg-style hardcore in the early 1980s. Over the years, the melodious and often deeply-moving vocals of singer Greg Graffin (a college professor when not fronting a popular rock band) have become more and more a thing that is now almost kitsch; the shtick of Bad Religion is melodic and breakneck hardcore, combined with bittersweet and sombre lyrics, four-part harmonies; what they call "oohs and ahs." The style is both electrifying and poignant, in an odd emotional juxtapose for the listener.

And their greatest song, in the opinion of THIS writer, is a song called "Generator." It's off of the album Generator, released in 1992. I don't have a real opinion on the album, as a whole, never having listened to the entire thing. Never needed to. The greatest song, the title track, said everything that needed to be said.

I'm not sure how much of the lyrics I can quote. I do so here under the provision of "Fair Use," in the interest of intellectual inquiry and social commentary.

Like a rock

Like a planet

Like a fucking atom bomb

I'll remain unperturbed

By the joy and the madness

That I encounter everywhere I turn

The images used in the song are incongruous, surreal; meaningless. "Ugly laughing men" share space with "actors in a photograph," and "paper in the wind"; (one assumes blowing as meaninglessly as the snowstorm of paper shot from the plastic chutes when Sam Lowry (actor Jonathan Pryce) stuffs the tubes full, in rebellion, in Terry Gilliam's dystopian comedy from 1985, Brazil ) It seems to suggest this is the outward manifestation, the jump-cut of reality as it is experienced by the lyricist. The real, true spirit of life is embodied in the "turbines in darkness," that turn the mechanical manifestation of a Greater Consciousness...the "Generator." (God, perhaps?)

The rest is all mystification, meaninglessness; illusion stripped of context, like a dream. Only our thoughts and inferences can attribute and add a value to anything. Precognitive images experienced while dreaming, stripped of the context of waking life, do not have any seemingly discernible logic; until, that is, we experience them in the context of our waking state. Thus, a dream of an umbrella and a fish on an operating table only becomes a "real, true event," and a logical juxtaposition of items, when the fish salesmen comes into the surgical theater and drops his umbrella and a herring, while having a heart attack (far-fetched, but you get the point).

But the primal force of energy, generating this seemingly far-fetched, this primal stuff from which all possibility, no matter how puzzling, may emerge, that is what the song references, pays homage to. It is a God-force, but beyond that, it seems, in the way of Mahayana Buddhist belief, to be impersonal, a force of energy as irrational as the images of which it gives birth; the "true life" experiences of the song's narrator.

But the most important lyric in the song, and why it is relevant to myself, actually references the Bible. Most specifically, the Book of Exodus, the "coming out of Egypt" by the enslaved Hebrews, lead by Moses.

I do not wish to belabor the Bible, as the story is known by everyone, everywhere. Moses defies an increasingly mad and defiant Pharaoh, who refuses to "Let my people go!"; i.e., to release the Jewish slaves from Egyptian servitude. In response, Yahweh God sends an increasingly grim succession of "plagues" to destroy Egypt; such as frogs; locusts; boils; rivers of blood; flies; you get the idea.

Lastly, he sends the Angel of Death, whose name in Hebrew is "Malak." Malak (which almost certainly is a corruption of the Babylonian "Moloch," to which the ancients sacrificed their children) comes to claim the "first born male child in every Egyptian household." But Malak is no programmed robot assassin; he's an individual who must be "directed" toward his grim task. To that end, Moses, the go-between between the often rebellious Israelites and Yahweh God, is instructed to instruct his people to slay the proverbial "sacrificial lamb"; the blood of this beast is then spread across the top of the door frame by every Jewish household in Egypt. Thus, Malak knows who to "pass over" on his bloody night of revenge, going directly to cut the waiting throats of every first-born Egyptian son.

The rest, as they say, is Biblical history. If, indeed, it can be taken for actual history (and it is by a huge swath of humanity).

For the Lord will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when he seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two side posts, the Lord will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you. --Exodus 12:23 KJV

The blood, of course, prefigures the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the "Lamb of God" slain for ALL the sins of the world, in the minds of millions of Christians. Brett Gurewitz, the writer of the song "Generator," is Jewish. Bad Religion is famous for its atheistic stance, and its infamous "No Crosses" logo, featuring a Christian cross depicted in a "No Smoking" symbol. The near-mystical lyrics here seem incongruous with the band's long-proffered message.

Blood on My Door

For some reason, Malak chose to pass over yours truly.

This was a year ago, when, but for a few coincidental occurrences, I might very well have ended up being pulled into that limitless night, by the Angel of Death.

If it hadn't been for the refusal of a plastic surgeon to fix the job he botched, I would never have gone seeking help elsewhere. THAT surgeon agreed to do the surgery I needed for correction--but only if I got an examination by a cardiologist first. Just to make certain.

The cardiologist did all the usual stress tests. Everything appeared normal. BUT, he saw a "shadow" in an x-ray he couldn't identify. He asked me if I wanted to have a heart cath. I wasn't even certain what that was, but he told me it was "my call." I told him I would consider it.

I finally ended up agreeing to it. I went in for the surgery, expecting nothing more than to be out for a little while, to come back, and be told everything was fine. I thought I was the picture of health.

I was told by the smiling surgeon that I had an eighty-percent blockage in the most serious artery in my heart; but that he had "fixed it." I was clueless. The man's enthusiasm was vastly reassuring.

I later researched and found out that this is the fabled "Widowmaker" arterial blockage. It's an artery that supplies forty percent of the blood to your heart. Mine was almost eighty percent blocked, necessitating the implant of a wire mesh device called a "stent." Otherwise, things would have progressed, and I would have had the dreaded Widowmaker Heart Attack, the survival rate of which, for those that have it, is about SEVEN PERCENT.

In other words, I wouldn't have lived to write this article, most likely. Most never make it out of the ambulance into the Emergency Room. They head from the ambulance to the morgue.

And if things had gone just a little bit differently? If I had decided I didn't really need any more plastic surgery, that I could live with the scars on my chest? If the second surgeon had not sent me to the cardiologist? If HE hadn't sent me for a heart cath? And, and this one is the most likely in this scenario, what if I had just shrugged and said I "didn't feel like it"? Even if I had just postponed it, it would have continued to progress; the results could have been fatal. I would have been over excerting one day, and may well have suddenly dropped dead. Most likely.

But events DID NOT play out like that. In a life that seems to be so marked by unfortunate events (A friend once asked me, half-jokingly, if I thought "God hated me"), THIS time, the deck was, unaccountably, stacked in my favor. I lived, and continue to do so, even though I could very well, and just as easily, NOT have lived. And now, one year later, I find myself wondering: Why?

Until I Reach the Shore

Back to the song "Generator," the lyrics end with the exhortation to "Wash me clean, and I will run, until I reach the shore..." What the narrator is speaking of sounds suspiciously like baptism. The "washing away" of sins; rebirth; to be "born-again." Not a concept the band Bad Religion has ever promoted.

But here, in Brett Gurewitz's song, it IS. To rejoin the power of the Generator-force, one must transcend the illusions proffered in the lyrics, and go to the "shore," to be "washed clean." Life, as they say, is a dream; physics tells us, in a sense, it's nothing more than an illusion. Some postulate it as a hologram. Made up of billions of atomic particulates, the world of "reality" is only experienced through the shifting lens of human consciousness, decoded by the central nervous system. Everything we see, hear, touch, taste, smell--simply an electrical impulse; energy. We attribute to it whatever meaning it has once the consciousness-laser "decodes" it for our cerebellum. Which is also made up of atoms; which, by and large, are empty space.

Are you seeing a pattern here? The only constant is energy, which does not die, but transmutes into another form upon the "death" of the body. This awesome energy, we may suggest, is limitless and formless, but contains within itself ALL possibilities of form. All formulations of "matter." ALL possibilities; the primal stuff from which dreams emerge, and consciousness extends into the limited, physical space.

And for some reason, this consciousness maintained MY existence. Why?

Actors in a Photograph

This world is a dream.

I, one night, during a deep, morose depression, realized the above. You die, and it is gone...a shadow-show upon the wall of TIME. EVERYTHING you thought was important: nation, race, tradition, work, career, pleasure and material possessions...all of that will be ripped from you, instantly, when you say your last goodbye. (If, indeed, you even get a chance to do so.)

What then, pray tell, is the meaning of it all? NOTHING is permanent; everything is in a constant state of entropy and decay; dissolution and, finally, extinguished. You may have a million dollars worth of expensive toys; NONE of them will follow you into eternity.

But, there is still this energy, this overpowering force, even if it is impersonal. The Generator. And why, specifically, it calculated the odds in favor of me living, I am incredibly puzzled to contemplate. But, a year later, here I am.

The "lamb's blood" was upon MY door. Why?

As a child I saw the Angel of Death.

As a man, he passed me by.

Why?

Was it to be "washed clean"? Maybe. To work off the bad karma of my life previously? Maybe in past lives?

I'm not going to give any trite, hackneyed answer to these questions. I feel, most days, a deep love, and a deep despair in equal measure. I want to bring something good where I can, I think. But, this may kill me too.

I grew up listening to punk rock, going to punk rock shows and getting the shell beat out of me slam dancing. Bad Religion's song "Generator," though, transcends the punk rock genre. It says something searching and profound, even if by accident. (But I assume it was by intention.) I could listen to it over and over again. And have, many times.

It says that, at the center of our confusion, at the heart of chaos, in the midst of dream-like absurdity, and after the darkness plunges down, STILL, an energy burns; a heartbeat of the cosmos thumps along eternally, echoing in the emptiness the eternal Pulsation of Life; waiting, always waiting, to begin again.

And that, Dear Readers, is a message for even those who HAVE no religion, bad or otherwise.

Bad Religion - Generator