God isn't dead. God is death.

Every time I listen to "This Celluloid Dream," I feel this knot in my chest that is my novel aching to be unraveled, written, born. It fucking hurts.

On God:

I called myself an atheist for twenty years and then realized that I'm the most spiritual person I know. I just never called what I worship a "god." What I worship is the silence, truth, beauty- the absolute that can never be reached. God is unattainable. The unattainable is god.

To avoid the discourse of "God," which makes it sound like a person, which is my problem with it altogether, I'm going to call it "Beauty."

Throughout my teen years, Beauty remained rather formless. If anything, it was the world, nature, the universe, that cosmic stuff. And I was fairly happy.

Davey Havok, why did you have to go and change things?

Okay, back up, let's examine the levels of irony here. Davey has himself expressed on nuuuuuumerous occasions and songs the dangers of pinning Beauty to one figure. It's just wrong. It never works. It leads to great disappointment. It fucks life up.

So identifying one object or person as Beauty (..."God," remember?) necessarily makes that person not Beauty. The label poisons it. The word stains it. It can't be God if it's called God.

Beauty is only unattainable. The unattainable only is Beauty.

But Davey...Davey comes so close. In the best of moments, he IS Beauty, without being adulterated by the word. The word doesn't exist, because the moment only occurs fleetingly in my mind, with his voice against my ears. I transcend the headphones, forget the disc, the middlemen; I forget my own skin. Davey is Beauty, and that is all there is. It is absolute.

But the ephemeral moment lasts an instant, and then he is only a God- a necessarily false God.

Percy Shelley (in my vague terms and very imaginative understanding) believed in this absolute silence that cannot be reached. The truest God is the least vocal, the darkest, the least perceptible, the most ephemeral. Anything that claims to be God is a false idol. Anything that claims to be God is necessarily not God.

But he believed that poetry could "lift the veil." Poetry has the potential...no- Poetry is the potential to truly capture Beauty. Poetry is the hope that the most perfectly chosen set of words can be darkness, be Beauty.

But poetry runs the risk of creating an imperfect set of words, and to therefore harden into a false idol.

Poetry can be, for an instant, Beauty. But poetry can become, after that instant, a false idol.

Davey Havok, poet supreme, is my Beauty.

Davey Havok is my false idol.

And he knows it, too. Don't you, Davey?

So the thing is, when nature, unpersonified, was my Beauty, I was happy. I could pretty much be with Beauty whenever I wanted to. Sure, the system sometimes showed its imperfection as worship of a particular image, a favoring of one tree over its brother. But there were no moments when I ached with despair at never being able to be with Beauty. It was all around me.

Then I realized that nature wasn't all that Beautiful. It was quiet, and wasn't hardened into a false idol, but neither did it get close enough to Beauty to actually be Beauty. It was no longer intense enough for me.

Davey's words were more intense, more Beautiful, closer to the absolute than nature ever was. The ephemeral moments of "Holy shit that's Beauty!" come more frequently, I realized, in listening to AFI than in any other activity.

But now I feel the pain of having Beauty within a person. Davey Havok is a breathing, moving being, who is utterly unattainable, but has skin that can be touched, and a voice that can physically hit my ear drums. And he has a presence of the world that I envy; I see the way he lives, and I want it to be the way I live. I see the shape of him, the outline of his impact on the world, and it solidifies into a shape I worship- and a shape I miss.

Ideally, my song would go like this: "To Beauty, I beg, 'May I cut in?' And Beauty draws me into its dark silence."

Often, it goes like this: "To Beauty, I beg, 'May I cut in?' But it never stops playing his song."

See? I can't even forge a sentence without casting it in His form.

And that is why Davey Havok is God, why God is bad, and why Davey Havok is the purest good possible.

It is also why you'll see me shift frequently among the terms Beauty, Imagination, Truth, Silence, Darkness, Love, Absolution, Innocence. If I made any one of these terms the defined substitute for "God," it would become an idol. Better to shift among them freely. It confuses people, though. Truth always does.

Beauty always does.



Oh, and by the way, I'm not named after Percy. I'm named after my cat. I've got a lot of fond memories of that cat.