On the title: “Ray” is the short of the protagonist’s names. What sets apart a memoir from a decidedly invisible figure in the public sphere?
This book travels not just abroad, and doesn’t simply witness the largest world paradigms of conflict that inflict the modern day at “ground zero” (the polarization of West vs. East, as in the Middle-East), or capture the extremity of our present polarization and real danger in the throes of “capitalism” vs. the Earth, its largest landscape is our own interior spiritual quest, how we define ourselves and how this may manifest, conveying that such priorities may have inestimable value.
It does so by exhibiting an entirely ordinary existence, that is, if it was unusual enough to include rainforest protests that toppled elections, living in the West Bank during the onset of the intifada, and a priority unto God that was developed and refined in an upbringing that sanctioned psychedelic drug use, introduced a feminine Holy Spirit, and included self-ordained prophets as church leaders concocting theological revolutions designed to topple the present tenets of Christianity, an isolated existence that fulminated in threats to one’s life and eternal soul for apostasy.
Alternatively considered as, have you ever survived upbringing by that rare breed of hippie hedonist/fundamentalists, and if so, come out with a fully coherent worldview? (–Or not?) By adulthood our protagonist is semi-immersed in underground Rave culture and gay bars (sans drugs), performing as a nightclub dancer while studying environmental technologies. Her real existence however is based on one interior quest it would be a death knell in her environment to utter. It is what no one knows that matters.
This book is the delineation of that unknown, for she is sitting on a circumstantial God proof, which purposefully delineates God in the feminine aspect. This is happening in full oblivion right in front of everyone’s faces in popular culture. It is based on a universal current of inspiration inside popular music that surfaces rather overtly in 1992, one that ever so gradually begins to succeed in observable attributes of common consciousness, –or appears to.
In reaching the particulars potentially involved in order to find out whether synchronicity or something else is at work, it lands in Dublin, London, and eventually Chicago, where it succeeds in contacting the primaries considered to be potentially involved through the providence of chance. As the information age begins to catch up, the effort goes virtual. The quest ends in meeting Bono, and an online blitzkrieg of a contest launched by Billy Corgan. It succeeds in the sense that what she presents proves powerful enough they assimilate and integrate her revelations within their creativity to the extent that it begins to develop as an interactive feedback loop inside art, which is precisely what she’d demonstrated was operating already. She succeeds by exhibiting the existing connectivity they possess with other artists of their caliber before their eyes by intercepting the already existing feedback loop, showing their inspiration to be universal. Pure observation is the means of argument. This book conveys how it was presented to the particulars in real time, and what came of it.