June 6th, 1999 – She went to the Red Box (the Pod) for the first time, for DJ’s from both Underworld and Prodigy (Darren Emerson and Liam Howlett), and danced all night. (-Literally.) "It was the first night out dancing where I really enjoyed myself." Keith Flint, the vocalist from The Prodigy crept and bobbed his way out onto the dance floor until he was near to her. He kept his head low and wouldn’t look up, but he watched her for what seemed a long time (half an hour or so); he was shy. She was dancing surrounded by a ring of eight men give or take, and having to maintain a hair line balance between all. There was one leering sort with too much drink she had to keep in line; she let him know to back off her space by deliberately shooting an elbow within hairs of his nose, because nothing else would give him the drift. Keith was dancing tentatively on the outside of the ring, and she treated him like anyone else; the main focus was dancing. He disappeared, came back trailed by his girlfriend, pushed though the barrier and danced beside her for several minutes; his footwork was really fast.
June 8th, 1999 – Sinead O’ Connor walked into Tambuli dressed in all black with a priest’s collar and a gold chain with a gold cross nearly three inches long and said to the sales rep, “You were so still and silent I thought you were a statue.” Saw her the following day sitting down to breakfast with what appeared to be a journalist at Blooms Hotel.
June 10th, 1999 – Asha pulled a surprise Good-bye party for her friend Sabine from Austria, starting at Il Baccaro’s and ending up in house above the “Darling Buds of May”. Cormac was there and then Eoin arrived, and from the intent in the glance Rahab knew he was there to see her even though they barely looked at each other. She ignored it and continued her conversations with Gabriello, Andrew, Valentina, only to feel a hand working down her back. She had no need to turn and discover. He whispered in her ear, “I have to keep reminding myself that you are human.” Rahab guided the last shipment of bodies to the flat, (a party of about fifteen), to an already full house where Emily and Peter were in a mild state of shock. In her kitten-y best brogue she gave them her broadest grin and smilingly said, “Well look what the cat dragged in!”
Great in house party, a portent of good-bye to Asha, the last good note, soon it would be hello Maria (Finnish). Ray put on the feedback cassette of her brother’s that night for an in-house party, which put Peter of the Irish BFF pair of Peter and Paul who were there that night into such awe he put his hands together in a prayer supplication. It was Cormac who was the very last to leave; he stayed until 5:30 in the morning to see what made her tick, despite being duly warned. As he started the delving on a religious tact (a Christian studying engineering), she warmed easily to the subject, despite him pulling up his chair immediately, which made her think disparagingly of a therapist. The discussion touched upon Biblical law and ethics in relation to sexual disease cycles. One upshot of the conversation was developing boundaries; she decided that personal revelation in her case was more intimate perhaps than sexuality, feeling that whomever learned “everything” would probably love her more deeply than that already anyway…because he’d know the inside of her already. She recognized that what accessed her erotically in a deep way had more to do with a meeting of the minds; she was accessed by communication more than she was by being put upon physically.
June 20th, 1999 – Bono lives across the street from the residence for the Canadian Ambassador. -Right there. The reason she learned its location was because Ciara had lived there when her father was the Ambassador.
She spent a lovely day circuiting all over Killiney Hill, taking in all the views, listening to music, sat at the summit (that brings back memories!) watching the ocean and the sky, and wondered about him and if he could sense her being “here”, her only companionship/existence inside her headphones/nature, wondering if it was really just all about reaching out inside her own head, to potentially all of them, -how she was supposed to do that. “You have to give love” –How? She made peace inside her own head. It was the first day she felt like a successful tourist and was content about it.
June 23rd, 1999 – She realized the four proofs had four levels that were easily categorized, the first being the structure or circumstance (the God proof), the second the content in that structure (the conjunction of the symbols/religious circumstance), the third being the process associated with the content (the marriage Bride/Groom pattern), the fourth being involvement in that process (indication of it happening between the two of them). She managed to make it sound dry. On the one hand she realized that all that really mattered was the structure proof, and if she approached it that way she’d protect Bono’s privacy and not overstep if she approached it from this level and ended up being wrong about it all. But what sprung to mind was remembering Marshal McLuhan’s repeated carping that it was the structure itself that bore the implications; the content really had no comparative impacts on individuals; it wasn’t the ideas. In this context, he was dead right, for it was the structure that carried the implication there was a God. In this context, the content level was nigh irrelevant, the conjunction of religious symbols that had started it, -which for her was a big relief, to drop all that by the wayside, her father’s religious claims and associations especially, what it had invoked for her even more than that. But what she realized about herself was that all that mattered to her was the level she had dubbed “the process”; that there was mutual involvement in that process was paramount, and for resolution on that count, she was prepared to wait a long time. It was, depending on the start point she began from, either 7 or 12 years, and counting. What’s a year or two in that context? “We’ve waited this long and we’re still here.”
June 24th, 1999 – She recalled Wings of Desire, recognizing it in an entirely new way when it came to the “Stay (Faraway, So Close)” video from Zooropa. 1) both “her” men were intrinsically tied into it, and 2) she now considered it analogous to her existence. Nick performed in it at precisely the moment the two tangibly met (who had only before mutually encountered one another as souls, on that basis knowing one another immediately), but Bono had adopted the role of the angel himself. “Does the implication lie then, that what he is here [on earth] for, is to achieve that meeting, whether or not he intended that implication in his performance? Everything he has performed implies he is here for the girl. And they thought he was just being a big ego, assuming too much. He’s not even doing it for himself. He’s here to find her.” This surfaced thanks to the film being shown at Meeting House Square that night, though she missed it. She’d discovered Market Day in Market House square, relying on it for herb/sundried tomato harvest bread, olives and actual (Irish) Brie.
June 25th, 1999 – Damien took her out to Human Traffic. F***, yeah. “Who is the queen?”
This led to their talking again. –Turned out he thought himself to be a large scale prophet, just based on how he perceived one passage in the Bible. That would purely be his own assumption, which she viewed as nuts, and he had the audacity to challenge her with her father was “false”. (What an insult this was after she’d watched her father develop his position biblically for fifteen years.) Astonishingly Damien declared he was put on earth to provide an antidote to what the lyricists were saying; to show the people the truth to which they would never listen. She laughed in his face. If he was there to provide the antidote, well then he’d better shoot her, right now. He presented his rictus grin as he piddled his line in the sand. He tried to draw her into some form of claim, priestess or whatever, purely for the sake of finding accusation, find some digression he could label heresy, and claimed intellectualism to be the greatest evil, which she only took as the insinuation to accuse intelligence. He said the lyricists were getting off on the mystery. He then accused her of creating the unfathomable mystery, another false Church as mass opiate, to him, always the whore. This amused her even further as her interior goal was to flick the switch in a way that ended the mystery for good. (Her interior rejoinder she didn’t think it too safe to utter was, “Well I’ll put an end to that!”)
Another true Christian bastard, who vaunted his ego projection on Biblical prophecy as celestial knowledge…making the exact accusation she’d expected from her father, knowing what the next would be if there arose any credence. The stunning speed with which the reflexes of the professing religious worked to protect their buttresses of the self left her stunned. It was a challenge she’d always known, the future foremost in fact.
What of the Biblical prophecies of the Church’s restoration then, to her true place? That was her retort. –It got no response.
Then he had the gall to ask for a second movie date? (!?!)
The night held two really hideous nightmares, one about her father, where he had one of her siblings in what was once their bedroom and was torturing him for daring to challenge his authority. He was collecting his blood in a small basin that was coming from a hole in his head; he was strapped to the ceiling. In the dream she substituted herself in the sacrificial position, shifted the parry completely to between her and him (the most frightening thing she could do), and in doing so shifted the context to one wherein it was a battle rather than outright victimization; she knew she’d established a context wherein she had a level of control. She possessed an inner certainty that whatever horrors or sufferings may be visited upon her, she would still survive.
June 27th, 1999 – “I need to be with my own people. I need that more than anything.” This is the day she arrived at the crux of why finding accord with Bono was essential based on the question of whether there’d been a Divine command that was somehow mutual, later developed for Courier #1 (you’ll find out what that is, don’t worry). It was not simply the question of the Injunction and if/whether it came from, it was the fact that they were both reacting based on an invisible externality of Higher Authority, i.e., they already believed and were acting on an external basis other than themselves.
“It’s the only way to come through, because it’s the only indication, veritably, of there being mutual consciousness, if he himself believes and is acting on an injunction.” They had a common belief about an external guiding force; therefore to address him about it did not constitute infringement on his own parameters of consciousness, and conversely it meant that unless she could establish a mutual connect in this context (unless it turned out they arrived at an understanding that the injunction possessed something in common with respects to the other), no other point of commonality could ever be established in terms of the entire spectrum of what was taking place that could place it over and above common synchronicity. It either made it or broke it, because of how she perceived it as having begun. If she couldn’t arrive at confirmation on this one count, nothing beyond it could be established either.
“Also it is my only choice; if this cannot be established by God, I don’t see the point in establishing it at all.”
That night she was going to try the movies again but was too late, knew that Damien would be there and so avoided it. Instead she happened upon Eoin (a painter who was half-Spanish, half Irish) and a friend of his named Ross at the Joy of Coffee; eventually they went out drinking together at The Globe on Georges Street. That evening another Bono mimic breezed in, even more uncanny perhaps, than the first, not because the physical similarity was more exacting; it was something else. The betrayer was that he was too beautiful and too young. She intuited he was Irish. It had more impact than she would have expected. To her mind he’d quite deliberately styled himself to the period when “In the Name of the Father” had been released, impeccably so. It made her distinctly uncomfortable to realize that 1) she’d not been forced to recognize physical attraction until it accosted her visually in the real world in the form of an aesthetically beatific version, bringing back that this had been when he was the most attractive, to her, 2), her own reaction to the mimic forced her to reckon that this mattered; she felt completely overwhelmed, and 3) it was a belated discovery that even just a visual echo invoking the memory in the real world set her off like a soundless set of chimes; the moment so pivotal she was totally keyed into the look without ever having known it.
What she found even more disturbing was that the mimic picked up on her as soon as he settled; it was as if he could sense her reaction. His attention was caught the instant they made eye contact; she knew he was scoping her even though she studiously avoided. That was just plain unfair, to have that accessed, to feel overwhelmed just by appearance. -Eyes to blow the mind. She didn’t want to enjoy contemplation because it was tempting, and swirled out in her full length grey denim long coat, feeling sure he absorbed her departure as she steadfastly concentrated her eyes on the way out.
Anything else would have just been too weird. There was no way she’d let him get his rocks off on her brand of supplication, not fair to grant on the basis of appearance. Predictably she dreamed of him that night, the real one. They were past introductions; he’d already intuited her nationality.
June 28th, 1999 – Gimmee a roof, any roof. The following day was “a head ride in deflation”, given she’d closed the evening the night before absorbing “Mysterious Ways” in such a state of awe of the song her felt implication was “this could have never found fulfillment in any association to me, I was in no way worthy. (How could you dare to believe?)”
Delivering the letter to The Studio wasn’t enough; “a letter dumped into a morass of such” didn’t let her know. “-Stonewalled again.” In June she’d handed the letter to Sam at the door, only to be deflected with the response that there were hundreds upon hundreds of such, and it would be months upon months until, and that was if he ever even caught a glimpse of it at all.
“Damn, as I stand in its face, what do I say? Let me through, and I may prove the existence of God?”
“Today I made a profound realization about Bono’s continued allusion to her being underground, and having to come (or him actively drawing her) back to the surface.”
“Aside from the death allusion (how he lately treated it), the spiritual allusion (which is how I’ve regarded it, a fallen, concealed and unhappy state), it may be regarded as purely structural, as all I am exists below the creative surface, from which the artists draw their creative inspiration, and yet I’m a complete unknown. In terms of the unconscious, I’m underground and they’re on the surface looking down, but not actually seeing. So surfacing, then, is joining the real world, bringing it out via communication, because the inspirational pattern is such that I’ll never surface that way, and that’s due to structure. I concluded it wouldn’t surface through the unconscious a long time ago.
A structural perspective on this is nice, devoid of any association with guilt. It’s the way it’s feeding into them that makes me underground, not necessarily the harrow of the inversion, the pain of my life, or the death cycle I went through.
I am not to blame for the failure to connect, it is impossible for me to be conscious of them in my position. I do not know, for example, that PJ Harvey “held” me, unless she says so.”
“On one of these nights Mila had a party and I ended up dancing to the cheesy music in the stairwell with the big window. Three guys outside sat down in café chairs [across the street] and watched.”
July 5th, 1999 – Ross was outrageously plat-forming his intellect for a pair of young, very American material girls at Joy of Coffee. The girls mentioned how a young Spanish woman had come in the other day with the announcement that she was looking for Bono because she had a message from God for him, which she had refused to disclose to anyone else. How delightful to be among the marginalized insane as her own intention was actually worse than that.
July 6th, 1999 – ascended the hill at Howth just following the incline, finding the footpaths. -Encountered two black horses and a grey on the way up. She’d wanted to see horses, and saw five on the ascent and descent. The natural foray was relief from the fact that she’d walked past the studio ending up at the end of the Grand Canal, where all she could do was cry.
“It seems to me like the major advents in my life have all been comprised of realizing my worst possible fears, things that to me were incomprehensible.”
She listed them; they were too harrowing to bear transcribing a second time. She ended on, “walking off the edge of the world on sheer faith”.
To this she added a new one.
“-Marriage to a void. Never finding or meeting it. –That I never would have imagined though. The rest had to be my worst fears in this life. I’ve lived through all of them, so let’s hope the last one isn’t true as well.”
The evening was spent on the shore at Dalkey; she sat on the quay. She threw Asha’s ring into the ocean. That night, “I think my heart is completely broken.” -A cascade of tears as she recounted all the ways. Had her first temptation to graffiti The Studio’s park bench anchored in cement: “But you wouldn’t know if I was standing at your front door, would you?” –signed, the five point star bottom left to the crescent.