Mewithoutyou and Splattered Anatomy

Ben left a mewithoutyou disc out a couple of months ago and I played it while I made pancakes. I keep using the same expression for my reaction to it: my head exploded. I refer to them as "thermonuclear emo."

I got to see them live in September. Wow. Hugely evocative of… of something. So here is my attempt to say why I like them so much and what they seem to be about.

James Dean only made 3 movies. I've only seen one, plus footage of the others in a special or two. But watching him is just astonishing. The intensity of emotion hardly seems like acting. I concluded that he wasn't acting when he was on screen. He was acting all the rest of the time. On-screen, he could finally stop acting, drop the facade, and let all the real stuff out.

She watched the day pass, not hour by hour

But pain by pain

Mewithoutyou sounds like that, and live, they looked like that. Aaron Weiss wandered disconsolately around the stage. Sometimes he just lost hope and sat down for awhile. Once he went behind the drummer, grabbed two sticks, and started beating the floor tom. After a bit he dropped a stick so continued with one. He dropped the other. He turned around and sat down and put his head in his hands. Was it a performance? Seemed like if he manages to function and get through the day, THAT would be performing. When he's on stage he's doing what comes naturally.

My life is a cup of sugar I borrowed before time began

And forgot to return

And what's with the music? Incredible metaphors strung together and charging at you in an endless stream of chaos, lack of control, pain, confusion. He doesn't really sing. He kind of howls in agony.

Why burn poor and lonely under a bowl

Under a lampshade or on the shelf beside the bed

Where at night you lay turning like a door on its hinges

I was floating in a peaceful sea

Rescued by a sinking ship

He dances around, flapping his arms in some kind of trance, head bobbing and legs waving, if that's possible. He seems to be possessed by something really really big. Something too much to deal with. Something grave and formidable.

However much I strut around, however loud I sing

The shining one inside me won't say anything.

This is Christian? This is centered around salvation, good news, redemption? How can that be??

To me, this is so powerfully Christian. You just have to recall that at the center of the good news, in the very middle of the redemption and the love, there is a crushed broken man, an innocent man, nailed to huge planks, hanging from his wounds, bleeding to death. How much more rough, crude, violent and tragic can the good news be?

Have you ever considered it ironic somehow that your standard saved Christian is going to be virtually God-like, judge angels, rule for eternity, and still has to poop? Has headaches? Has a gut hanging over his belt? Flat feet? A crown of glory?

My every medicine caused more illness

And a hard rain's gonna fall but

Until I let you go I didn't know

You were never mine at all

Look around at the suffering and pain of the world. This is the crucible, the furnace, where God is forging his saints. The glory of it is matched by the agony. The specifics of being refined in fire are nasty to think about and horrible to experience. And there is no better place to be.

I'm on the sad side of a nowhere town

But sister, I'm all you got

What greater worship is there than to yield to God's refining fire? Would that happen with a smile, or a grimace? Or both somehow? Christ calls it dying. Nothing too chirpy and cheerful about that.

I always said I could see so now I'm going blind.

It was a matter of miserable time

But I heard somewhere there was a cure for useless eyes?

Aaron Weiss is wrapped in a body of death. It is very very real, especially to him. The contrast with what is promised, with what is to come, is too great to grasp. It is wonderful, but the wonder is so terrible that we quake, we rejoice, we weep, all at once. Can flesh bear this? No, it can't.

Come quick, you light that knows no evening-

Come, alone to the alone! There are a thousand

Sanities worth leaving to take your madness home.

You dance inside my chest where no one sees you

But sometimes I see you.

When he sings- or shouts- or whatever he does- and his drummer is pounding away in some kind of organic connection with him and the words and the pain--- anyway, when they are doing whatever it is they do, they are suspended between the glory/promise of the future and the pain/humility of now. These things are too great to contemplate at the same time. And Jesus is in both of them. God almighty down here with the bag ladies and hemorrhoid cream. It almost unhinges him.

If I didn't have you as my guide I'd still be wandering lost in Sinai or down by the tracks watching trains go by to remind me: there are places that aren't here.

If there was no way into god I would never have lain in this grave of a body for so long.

Right around here my head explodes. God doesn't fit in it. If your head doesn't explode it's a waste of a good head.

A wick to fit the wax, wood to fit the wire

You strike the match- why not be utterly changed to fire?

To sacrifice the shadow and mist of a brief life you never much liked?

We have all our beliefs, but we don't want our beliefs, God of peace.

We want you.

The agony and pain of the world- everything from traffic delays to dead children—is absolutely shot through with luminous glory- God in it, God using it, God's purposes so great that even this stuff has a role. Try and grasp them both at once.

KABOOM!