Halloween

We're launching on Halloween with a Halloween post.

I said I’d lead off with Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres. Then there was a surprise before that, and so the policy has become to lead with music in the order it appeared. Tears for Fears’ “The Tipping Point” music video was released before Coldplay’s album, so here it is:

This was an astonishing video, with Tears for Fears gaining the summit of musical heights that were always innate. Their 30th anniversary performance and the like showed their musical prowess was wonderfully present and enduring. The emotional background for the song's creation is here, dealing with the ordeal of Roland Orzabal's wife's death, titled, (amusingly), “If there is a God, this is what [H]e put us on Earth to do”. Obviously I am not trying to override its origins. The song (and album's) name is from a title by Malcom Gladwell, basically developing viral before it became viral, (which would be nice if it proved true in this moment). 

Coincidentally (or not) the last time I tried this experiment publicly twenty-one years ago, the first release that implied anything (in ultracolour spades) was a song written about the songwriter's mother speaking about the afterlife after her recent death, where he uncannily felt he was being reached from the afterlife and offered the song from her where she told him what it was like, a song that arrived in full form in fifteen minutes. With that initial understanding of what happened with the former track twenty-one years ago, in terms of how it fit the context of the encounter between WPC and me at the time to the point of naming me in terms of WPC's femina "June" conjuncting with his ruling planet (astrological sign) before appearing in that namesake on earth (which is what I'd just done online, iBook p. 1652), kindly bear with me in considering this video, which in the same token expands the song's interpretation and is equally interprative in the context I have already presented, to the extent of its basic fundamentals fitting my proposal quite perfectly. Here are the lyrics. 

The video in summary: -at 1:15 is the first fleeting appearance of the man, with the woman as primary subject. At 1:34 there is snow in the room with the woman; the man appears in the room at 1:39 after the snow/woman. At 1:52 "Dorothy's" house starts rising in the tornado after the rose vase has settled its landing, and that's when you get, "who's that ghost" and the door bursting off in light. After that, "Dorothy's" astralling in the sky, out the window to "where the sunlight splits the I". Then we get the shadow of the man over the fallen vase and him transiting the room, following through the window. After that, he descends from the sky with the preternatural ability of mini lightning shooting from his hand (3:20), and then the preternatural door knock, and then the preternatural notion of resurrecting from the ground, with the third signification of light blowing out the room where the door blew out. The video ends with preternatural man and woman conjuncting in the sky, who he has obviously come to retrieve. 

On the one hand we have the song sourcing of a spouse's demise and five year descent to death due to dementia. The vase of dying roses slowly shifting off the table connotes death on both counts.

The plot line I've presented is about the appearance of a male preternatural ghost to a mentally astralling "Dorothy", who while at home is definitely not, talking about her first person encounter as the ghost assumes control of her reality through her mind (and possibly elsewhere). Some funny plot factors about that: the first appearance of said ghost was in 2001 (no really, there's a male ghost snuck into this video, holding the woman from behind; the video was released May 2001). Like the video, back then it was just a perhaps. Thankfully this is in the iBook (p.1020) because I did not archive this page and it appears I should have, but said page was sent to the songwriter (of the album GHOSTEEN) October 2019. The song analysis for GHOSTEEN prompted mention of an exclusive live variation of "X.Y.U." by The Smashing Pumpkins, which happened in the same month (October 1998) that Nick Cave's prior album, The Boatman's Call, had the same impact on our female subject as this later release.

This song was the live alteration of the only track that nascently named her by her real name in The Smashing Pumpkins catalogue, if only accidentally. It only got mentioned because of "Night Raid"'s line, "you were a runaway flake of snow". What this means is that the snow allusion with the woman is invoking resurrection, and this has occurred twice over, and is now replicating in the music feedback. Did I archive this on time? Yes I did (October 5th). It's way down where I mention what the attributes associated with male/female arch-types are going to be. I predicted "snow" would be one of her associative symbols.

This also has to do with the theme of January, which came out with Tori Amos' "Black Dove (January)" May 1998 (iBook p. 1012). January was the month the protagonist experienced Christ in 1996. Tori Amos' song is the only one in the pantheon to have a second possible allusion to "Dorothy" in terms of giving away her "blue dress" (after having astralled so far she transited the galaxy), with a location shift of state from Kansas to Texas, part of the transport of the narrative concept into something of similitude but more significant. Without being too explicit, the song captured what happened to the book's protagonist in a challenge over the future nature of eternity and eternal damnation, an existential contest between the protagonist and her father in 1995 (iBook, Chapter, "The Car Crash"), which took place in a cabin deep in the virgin rainforest, where her mother had seen her father as the Devil for the first time.

January had a prolonged pattern of occurence that played out between WPC and the book's female protagonist (a dream in January (p. 981), first encounter in London, website launch (p. 1631), dream of the unicorn during break up). All this occurred with the songwriter who altered the song "X.Y.U." live in real time by saying she released the snow from her body in defeat of “the Jackal", a creative analogy which later manifest as "Glass & the Ghost Children". This deliberate merger of elements indicates the same creative (feminine) object on WPC's part, which encompasses several albums and all four songs.  ("X.Y.U." live on Halloween 1998 was a mash up with "Candy", which was a depiction of her former deliberate descent into Hell.) The analogy of the Jackal's defeat in this one live rendition of "X.Y.U." was the same as Tori Amos' description of the cabin in the woods being the place where the lion became a mouse, equating this with the month of January, which was when (shortly after for the protagonist) Christ appeared, with Christ being the ghost in this particular scenario (who started manifesting in the feedback loop in the same period leading up to 2001).

Now onto "The Tipping Point"'s lyrics, which are really basic, but again, let's examine them in the lens of this particular plot line, as opposed to the album's general plotline.

First of all, the song is winter themed by two separate verses, the "them" appearing in the song's lyrics is associated with an advent that connotes the passage of winter: 

Silver tongue, they'll soon be gone

When the sunlight hits the room

Lay down with them if you want

Watch their breath and feel the cold

____________________________

Winter done, they'll soon be gone

From this unforgiving place

To that vague and distant void

Where the sunlight splits the I

Whoever "they" are, they are not the singular ghost. In the context of this interpretation they are the songwriter artists inspired with common transcendent inspiration in the musical feedback loop, who attached winter symbolism to the reality in the first place. The following refers to the dilemma of revealing the potential connective consciousness to them, and whether failing to attempt is missing "the tipping point":

Will you let them out?

Will you let them in?

Will you ever know when it's the tipping point

the tipping point?

The other predominant theme in the song is the preternatural ghost, depicted in the video as male, and it's the male’s statement, meaning it's Orzabal speaking to his wife as originally written, but also, as written, the reply of the ghost: 

So who's that ghost knocking at my door?

You know that I can't love you more

What's that shape climbing over my wall?

You know that I can't love you more

What isolates this successfully? It's if you have a synthesis of specific deviations or characteristics that  occur over time with the arch-types, because they're observably occurring, and you've written what they will be beforehand. Here it's happening with a band I didn't even list.

We also have the specificity game already occurring with just the album cover. By "game" I mean that this happens without any artistic intention on the parts of the creators and would normally be ascribed to chance. This is what, it so happens, is going on with the album cover: it fits our family structure exactly, meaning a single parent household with a mom and two young adults, a son and a daughter.

How exact exactly? There is the mother, the firstborn son in a computer/business magnet program, and the androgynous presenting, dark haired daughter with the shag cut, who's in a magnet visual arts programme. When the protagonist (Mom) went through her proverbial resurrection this time (involuntarily brought back consciousness), which was what the Ghosteen album did (October 2019), -the day after listening to the album the family's beloved second cat (rescue adoption) died due to a veterinary accident. As a long haired Balinese snowshoe he looked like a cloud splashed on a layered mocha coffee. The first rescue was an American shorthair tuxedo, (the queen), who's been with the family for ten years. Our third kitten rescue last May is a shorthair grey with underlying tabby stripes. Even the cats' behavioural dynamics are represented in the image (including the one who appears furthest at the edge being the newcomer to the scene), and they are/were our only pets. The black backed queen was inclined to my son, the grey male was for my daughter after the loss of the first one Mom gave her, the coffee cloud who was abandoned so badly at birth he identified the family Mom as his mother. 

As per policy this post is archived here.

Happy Halloween!