#27 Born Again, Dead Again

Leeds Corn Exchange. Two things you think you'd assume from the name is:

1. You'd be able to buy food,
2. Said food will be sold at wholesale prices.

Until recently, you'd be wrong about the first point. You were not able to buy food at Leeds Corn Exchange unless you ate it in the cafe. The place was a rough and ready youth-centred shopping arcade, selling jokey t-shirts, canvas prints and humorous postcards. To compliment this an increasingly large group of Goths used to hang around outside, trying to summon up the courage to go in and ask for a t-shirt that said "Nobody Known I'm a Plebian" or "The Penguins are not responsible for my Sanity" or indeed anything you could get on a t-shirt that Sandi Thom hadn't stolen and make crap by association.

Then the bankers came along and turned the Corn Exchange into a food emporium. This means the food is not cheap at all. They turfed out the current tenants and convinced most of the Goths to go away and leave them to tuck into their steak tartare in peace. Thus a large, migratory group of mostly wholesome young people set about finding somewhere they could hang without formality. This became challenge of practically biblical proportions, when the Goths found that no-one else wanted them. Indeed, at only one location was hanging around outside in large numbers acceptable to the other people nearby. That place was the Family Planning Clinic.

When the latter-day wanders arrived they were greeted by cheers, handed placards and ginger cake and asked to sign about 40 petitions. They did this with glee and gamely held the placards whilst maintaining their normal activities of talking, playing unamplified electric guitar and smoking roll-ups.

Eventually though, they had to justify to themselves why they were standing outside an abortion clinic. They were lucky to have one of the best Goth philosophers in all Christendom with them. Darkcartes took three gruelling weeks to graft pro-life sensibilities onto Goth's overriding philosophy. His argument started with the lemma that the goal of existence for Goths was to choose to feel suffering.

§ Choosing to embrace rather than repudiate suffering sets the Goths apart from other people.
§ Suffering at it's most extreme is represented by the thought of hell.
§ The ultimate Goth ambition is to embrace the suffering of hell.
§ Physical pain and cruelty cannot in-themselves create suffering.
§ Pain, death and other forms of physical intervention relieve suffering rather than continue it.

Conclusion 1: Goths prefer life to death.

§ Life includes talking, thinking, holding and maintaining the concept of physical pain and death.
§ One cannot be a Goth until you have chosen to embrace suffering and the thought of pain.
§ You cannot decide whether to embrace suffering until you have been born.

Conclusion 2: Foetuses cannot be Goths.

§ A person needs to choose whether they embrace suffering in order to have successfully lived.

Conclusion 3: Foetuses should not be denied the choice to be Goths.

Conclusion 4: Abortion prevents the choice of conclusion 3 and is therefore wrong.

Darkcartes also stated that "If you wake up one day and you have a tennis player attached to you, and the doctors tell you it's going to last for 9 months, then think how much suffering that's going to cause. Their going to go on and on about their backhand and how much training they're going to have to do and whether they'll ever be good enough for their overbearing father and on and on and bleeding well on. Well, you can just imagine the suffering you're going to go through for 9 months. Lucky guy!"

Now what the heck does this have to with bands? Well, 4 of the assorted dark-rockers took the philosophy of Darkcartes and put it to music. The resulting album "Darkness of the Womb" was a moderate success amongst their friends. It's unfair to call it drone metal; they just didn't know how to turn the amplifiers down.