Stranded: Talk Talk- Spirit of Eden

Nick Southall

I have stood atop the cliff with this record in my ears and I have felt at once my insignificance and substance in the countenance of awe, the wind in my face, the expanse of the sea that leases us the land stretched endlessly before my eyes, an aspect of divinity within me. For the moment I am nothing and my place is all.


In the end it all comes down to God. Culture is our means of understanding, celebrating and refuting God, our means of explanation and expression. Life is about God and music is about life. I stand here as an atheist who is desperate to believe but who cannot. My head and my guts tell me we are alone. Theists invoking cosmology would have us believe that each thing has a cause and that the first cause is God, but they have no evidence, there is no reason for their conceit, no justification for the predicate that the first cause must by necessity be God. There is no justification for the existence of a first cause at all, no stance that could deny infinite causal regression or deny a theoretical origin in chaos. The ontological argument claims that the mere notion of God must necessarily instantiate the existence of God; if there can be an omnipotent, omniscient creator then there must be. If we can imagine God then God must exist. But we can also imagine time travel, and yet if time travel were to be possible in the future then it would also be possible now, because we are in time and would therefore be reachable were it possible to reach to any time but now. But it is not. There are more things between heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy; and yet more things dreamt of in our philosophy than are between heaven and earth. I refute the free-will defence, I refute the teleological argument. I scorn the unfaithful faithful who congregate and obfuscate the truth behind their theism, the ones who take the second path to God that is not faith but is rather fear, the mothers “numb to and devout to”. The only true origin of faith is the sensation of divinity within your soul, the ignorant perception of the potential for Godmanhood. I understand this, but I cannot feel it. God is dead; I stand with Nietzsche, with Dawkins, with Gautama and Tzu, with Heidegger and Sartre, with Pullman! Even if it means standing alone in purgatory, in eternity.


And yet this record inspires in me feelings of such power and sensation that from the moment it begins, nascent strings and gossamer brass like the whisper of beautiful rain to come, until the moment it quietly dies amid pleas for a divine love to come withdraw us from the curse of freedom, that I almost could believe.


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