"Heretic Pride" (Mountain Goats Week part I)

“You could call this song a persecution fantasy, but really, who can say the word ‘fantasy’ without flinching? Not me, and I have a stronger stomach than most. SPOILER ALERT: The main character will not live long after he gets done lauding his imminent demise.”

-John Darnielle, Heretic Pride press release

OK, so I'm declaring this week to be Mountain Goats week here at William Writes. I don't have a well-developed plan, but I will probably pick five songs from the new album and write about them, from now until Friday. You don't like it? Too bad. It's my blog. I get confrontational when I listen to the Mountain Goats.

“Heretic Pride,” as the Pitchfork review pointed out, bears a remarkable similarity to the song “If You See Light,” from Get Lonely. You can't quite call it a sequel, as the narrator of “If You See Light” may have been imagining his persecution (“Waiting for the front door to splinter, / waiting all winter”), whereas the narrator of “Heretic Pride” is being buried alive by the end of the song. But in both songs, you have one man against the hostile villagers.

These two songs tells you all you need to know about the difference between Get Lonely and Heretic Pride. If you listened to Get Lonely, you know that it was something like the Distilled Essence of Post-Breakup Existential Drifting Ending in Suicide, and took you to some weird headspace. Get Lonely's protagonist was at a place where, completely drained of hope, he recoiled from all human contact:

When the villagers come to my door
I'll be all tucked away with my face to the floor
and my eyes closed.

And no one knows how to keep secrets 'round here.
They tell everyone everything, soon as they know.
And then where is there left for poor sinners to go?

But the characters in Heretic Pride have recovered that not-entirely-sane conviction common to so many of John Darnielle's best songs. Remember Cyrus and Jeff from All Hail West Texas? Or “Going to Georgia”? Or “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me!”? Well, here's the narrator of “Heretic Pride”:

Well they come and pull me from my house,
and they drag my body through the streets.
And the sun's so hot I think I'll catch fire
and burn up in the summer air so moist and sweet.

And the people all come out to cheer.
Rocks in the pathway break my skin.
And there's honeysuckle on the faint breeze today
with every breath I'm drawing in.

I want to cry out, but I don't scream and I don't shout.
And I feel so proud to be alive.
And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives!

Crowds grow denser by the second
as we near the center of the town.
And they dig a trench right in the main square right there,
and they pick me up and throw me down.

But I start laughing like a child
and I mark their faces one by one.
Transfiguration's gonna come for me at last
and I will burn hotter than the sun.

I waited so long, and now I taste jasmine on my tongue.
And I feel so proud to be alive.
And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives!

Yes! This is the first song that has ever made me want to espouse some terrible belief for the sole purpose of getting myself executed. Sure, the impartial observer might see this guy as a pathetic, wriggling sociopath, but that doesn't make any difference to the martyr. There is something fascinating, even noble, about the truly independent heretic. (Heresy loses all luster when it gains a large following.) Is this radical individualism? Glorification of mere non-conformity? Well, I suppose that for a fuller consideration of the issue, it might be better to know the particular heresy at stake, as well as the nature of the society that he finds so objectionable. But in the abstract, this is one of the better apologies against orthodoxy that I've seen. Take that, Chesterton.

edit: Evidently I didn't take the line about a “reckoning” quite seriously enough. According to John Darnielle, this character may be embracing his own guilt.