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Subject: "does the protagonist of "heaven is 10 zillion light yrs away" believe?" Previous topic | Next topic
Joe Corn Mo
Member since Aug 29th 2010
15139 posts
Sat Oct-25-14 02:45 PM

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"does the protagonist of "heaven is 10 zillion light yrs away" believe?"
Sat Oct-25-14 10:43 AM by Joe Corn Mo

  

          

so this morning, i cranked up "fulfillingnesses first finale" for the first time
in many, many years.

this album is one of the greatest of all time,
but for some reason i never listen to it.
i won't go so far as to say it's depressing.
but it's... heavy. "boggle on regae woman" aside,
there's not a single song i can listen to casually.


anyway, the song i wanna talk about is "heaven is 10 zillion light years away."
what's interesting is that when i still believed,
i assumed this song was a warm hearted middle finger
to those who don't believe.


but as i grew skeptical of certain things, i listened to the song again
and the lyrics still seemed to fit.

i almost feel that the song can be interpreted in more than one way.
one interpretation says there definitely is a god.
one interpretation says that the question of whether there is a god or not is irrelevant
because the concept that ppl are talking about when they invoke the name of god
lives inside of me, and that's all that matters.

i know AFKAP made a post about this, but i couldn't find it in the archives
and anyway, i wasn't posting then and i wanna talk about it now.




so the song starts, "they say that heaven is 10 zillion light years away.
and just the pure at heart will walk its righteous streets someday."

the use of the word "they", i think, may be significant.
because it implies a distance between stevie and the group of ppl he's talking about.
(i.e if i said that "THEY did something, i am implying that *I* am not a part of that group.
if i identified with the group, i'd say "WE did something." not they)

only stevie doesn't distance himself from the group completely.

because when stevie is asked by his friends, "where is your god,"
stevie says "it's taking him so long because we've got so far to come."


so where is stevie at on the question of whether
heaven is actually 10 zillion light years away?

on the next verse, instead of answering, he asks another question.
"why can't they say that hate is 10 zillion light years away?"
then he list various evils in the world, and asks why can't we focus on eliminating that
instead of trying to question the validity of religious beliefs of
the world's citizens.

but then stevie comes back to the original question of
whether heaven is actually 10 zillion light yeard away.

he and the gospel choir admits, "I can FEEL it. i can feel His spirit."
i used to think that line was the answer to the question in my OP.
stevie can feel it, therefore it exist.

only now i'm not so sure.
because when heaven is described as 10 zillion light years away,
that implies heaven is a physicial location, a great distance away from earth.
but FEELING something doesn't necessarily mean that this physical place is there.

stevie even states as much in the next line when he says
"I can't say that heaven is 10 zillion light years away."
but that shouldn't matter because we should all be good to each other anyway.



so maybe there's my answer.
the protagonist believes that the question of whether
heaven exists as a physical place is irrelevant.
maybe the messages are mixed because stevie does not know or care
whether heaven is 10 zillion light years away.

what matters is that some kind of god archetype lives inside of stevie wonder,
and he would rather you just "let him be" and not ask
questions that don't really do anything to affect the very real problems we have here on earth.



i could accept that as the final answer,
but I still think there is more to unpackage.
an since i am writing about "fulfillingnesses first finale,"
for all intents and purposes, i am writing an exegesis.

and that means it's worth parsing things out a bit more.
i want to know why stevie used the word "they" in the first line of this song.
it's worth noting that, to my knowledge, stevie doesn't make any
explicit references to Jesus Christ being his Lord an Savior in his songs.

even when he's talking about god.
even when he's using a black baptist gospel choir,
he doesn't ever say Jesus walked the earth and that God is his father
and that believing that is essential to walk the streets of heaven.

i wonder if this fact has ever gotten stevie some flack
from ppl that believe that professing one's belief publicly
is essential to being a good and decent person.

i wonder if Stevie's opening line of this song is
an agnostic person that is being skeptical of Christians,
and if the line that says "it's taking Him so long because
we've got so far to come" is Stevie's slightly sarcastic response
to evangelicals telling him that he MUST believe.

i wonder if Stevie changing the subject in the second verse
is stevie challenging evangelicals to focus on actual problems
in the world instead of trying to save individual souls.

i wonder if the line "where is your god?" is actually
about an evangelical challenging stevie to prove his faith,
and Stevie's response that "he lives inside, please let him be"
as a polite plea for the evangelical to drop the subject.

maybe, this song is more like John Lennon's "imagine"
than i thought.

i really don't know.

this song is either an affirmation of Stevie's faith
or plea for us to look beyond the lines we've drawn to see ourselves
as different from one another, because theoretically,
god's light, if it exist, should shine on all of us,
whether we believe or not.


i have no idea.





discuss.






  

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