Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' "Ghosteen"

Spinning Song

"spinning song" - I listened to "Lady with the Spinning Head" in my car the week before I first heard Ghosteen. I do not have this U2 song in my collection, -it was given to me. I haven't been able to listen to U2 practically at all since 2013. This song was the first thing. (Yes, boys and girls, we call that coincidence.)

This song is archetypes, but for me they're real. I know it's Elvis, but I have my own king who crashed Vegas in the same year (1987) he put out the songs that would completely alter our destinies by articulating a spiritual quest that would end up having its meeting in me. Then he distilled every rock star burn out alive or dead in his alt persona of The Fly in 1992 (when he was at his most heavily overweight), and that was that. I identified him as such by calling him "king B" when I gate-crashed reality on Billy Corgan's SP forum. The "queen" appelation is already in the book (p. 601, 604, 1016, 1146, 1157, 1797, 2174) though naturally I've avoided it. For example, I skipped when my father said both my (biblical) names occurred with the term "queen" (all are three letter consonant words in Hebrew) as a triplicate crossword matrix over 600 times in The Bible Code. (This happened in the "Thief in the Night" period; it was an attempt at re-entrapment.) I confided about it to Billy though. The garden tree happened in the same period, (search "everlasting tree" and "Elcrys", p. 921, 924) and actually it integrated into my awareness as symbolism that really meant something because of hearing The Boatman's Call in that period and reviewing Nick Cave's catalogue entire for the first time, even though it was borne out of a personal experience years earlier (search "Mother Tree", p. 437, 825, 923 - you'll notice the conceptualization was attached to the incipient notion of the collective consciousness from the beginning). The names for the Holy Spirit in Hebrew were "the Wind" or "the Breath". As such it becomes code for universal inspiration in this book, which is the construct of a God Proof in the feminine in precisely this circumstance, that of transcendent inspiration happening universally among songwriters. In particular you can see p. 961 for PJ Harvey's Catherine in "The Wind", and at p. 1562 the same reference brings you, the reader, to the garden and how it came about in my lexicon, complete with a bird feather, if you happen to know the video I'm referencing, by Coldplay. The song that grounded "the garden" in my personal symbolism was Bono's "Wild Honey" (p. 1462, and boy did he ever, -p. 1527). -Not to eclipse yours truly (this is linked in the book at p. 1749) and PJ Harvey (p. 969). 

Bright Horses

Horses have been my favourite animal my entire life. I only mention this once because of "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" (p. 423) -This song was the tipping point in that it launched the equivocation of the river or the sea with the universal unconscious sea in my mind. And that's where imagination launched and began to achieve the transcendence that is so well described here. This song is like answering the question Bono wrote almost thirty years ago directly (last verse) because no one has ever done this. (Closest would be "Behold! The Nightmare" which means something else.) As an amusement, when I met Cave in real life, I did meet a horse and a donkey the same night (and there I am, spinning again). It was a dream too.

I did say the existent potential of this book is that it is a functioning God proof. 

The little white shape went from being a dream to having some actuality with thanks to a september dream (p. 903) and what Nick Cave wrote about a white robe and September. ("White robe" appears on p. 408. 600, 930-31,1325, 1428, 2160 -Danced professionally in college, -yes. p. 828, -this link was about my second silhouette dancing job (p. 988), -which was the best!) The white robe gains reality in the feedback thanks to it being introduced in a dream with Michael Stipe as one of the Machina Mysteries I used to take over the SP Forum. (The whole video for "Stand inside Your Love" was a depiction of my existential circumstances at that time, with Yelena robed all in white, p. 1283.) Michael Stipe and R.E.M. in turn end up being one of the strongest indicators to Billy that I am "June" and "June" is real, thanks to the existing feedback loop. The album was Reveal, "The Chorus and the Ring" in particular (p. 1677). By "Tarantula" Billy has ascribed me in white as an existing person by using that album to respond personally to my courier letters. This ends the book (p. 2153, 2157).

The train really blows my mind because it's a pattern throughout the book after I met Bono in person; what he wrote on a piece of paper with a drawn stop sign was, "Just waiting for the train to come in" (p. 1103, 1135, 1633, 1652, 1739, 1870, 1901, 1917, 1961-62). It's symbolism that had a passage (with R.E.M. as well), -that was more or less missed by both Bono and Billy, and I pointed this out, though I didn't reference "5:15 the Angels have Gone" by David Bowie on Heathen (a train song) in the book, -just in Billy's courier I think (the book's beyond excessive already). I'm more circumspect and used Nick Cave's train songs on both Bono and Billy (p. 1901). David Bowie's 1, 2, punch of Heathen and Reality were perhaps the strongest hitting albums for Billy in my proof exercise to him. Heathen starts on p. 1785. Depeche Mode happened to repatriate the train on Spirit, but with Cave, it's arrived. 

OK, so I did reference this song off of David Bowie's Reality to indicate to Billy in the courier letters I sent him that he'd missed me in the real world (p. 1840). The moon was our meeting place metaphysically, as per Billy's song, "Bye June". Daniel Ash had caught this miss as well, with "queen" being on the moon alone (p. 1797). Tom Petty had predicted the conjunction with her being picked up by man in a Cadillac with "Swingin'" from the album Echo (p. 1036), which contextualized the conjunction between Billy and me from end to end before it even happened. The only car in my mind's memory is on p. 933, -that was special. Also, with "No Girl So Sweet" PJ Harvey had the meeting taking place with a car pick up too (present tense), -and that was where she put every question that had ever circulated in my mind that I wanted to ask in person if ever I met Bono in quote lines, and had "him" answer for the first time.... Again this is repatriating contextual symbolism that both Billy and Bono missed, that was articulated to Billy as having been missed. It was not only missed by him in the book, but in the end he missed it by choice. (His next two girlfriends of choice were both, it so happens, named Jessica, and in his everything from here to there.com blog he troubled himself with disclosing to me personally, (before Jessica #1 hit the fan), that "Jack" had been cheating on "Jill" with "Mary" in a four part series. What I'm getting at was that Bowie's track also turned out the be a little uncannily prescient where the disillusionment was concerned. So this song is a reversal on one of the most painful things to ever happen to me that curiously repatriates the context.

Waiting for You

My hair has been long and wild all my adult life, my strongest feature (p. 1170).

So. I hope this is what Cave's been waiting for. Like I said, I approached all three men in person and spoke to three of all three with a delivery package in less than a year. That is the center of the book. Cave turned out to be the second, August 1999. The other two, Bono and Billy Corgan, are still songwriting about it.

If you want to know what a little faith can do, read my book.

Night Raid

The reason this to me is titled "Night Raid" has to do with the Thief in the Night. This enters the book after the advent of The Boatman's Call; -searching that title will show what it meant to me and how (p. 952, 954, 956 -also on p. 1580), as will searching the album title on how that happened (p. 906). Hence we have Jesus starting the song in a picture above on the wall. 

"snow > > >" was a sub thread I had on the SP Forum recording an epiphany of sorts I thought had to do with Billy first appearing, -meaning I thought it was practically the first time he descended online to interact with me, if anonymously, and it had a mental accompaniment of sorts where I was in the real world. Since I could not be sure of this and the book is far too detailed as it is, it's one of the things that never made it. I was snow obsessed as a child because it hardly ever snowed where I lived even though it was in Canada, and could pray snow well enough I quit (p. 53). Since the online situation coincided with a real snowfall, I documented it. I'd say that was the moment it annexed my insides. And unbeknownst to us both at the time, precisely when I was resurrected mentally by the context that the potential Lover might actually be real and I was supposed to be with him (thanks to Nick Cave, but then it turned out Cave responded to me that I was deluded), this is how Billy performed "X.Y.U." live in real time for the first time (which means I wasn't deluded, I just had the wrong guy in mind). Billy, in turned out, was the one who shifted in real time at the moment I was awakened by this (-not Cave, it turned out; -though it sure looked like it in the moment, he met his wife within five months, before I even left to find out); -but that whole conjunction between Billy and me boiled down to his free will choice; -of course I had no choice but to let it do this, and he in the end (2009) chose to dump me (and ultimately mate with a girl less than half his age). "X.Y.U." was the song that had targeted me as object most personally (if then accidentally) on Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, a song which had my middle name as its working title with no explanation (even though it was supposedly about his ex, Chris). -Part of that real time live shift in "X.Y.U."'s lyrics where the object of the song became his object as lover? "It began to snow inside her; she took a razor and cut the snow out."

The star theme is omnipresent in this book from beginning to end and made mention in the context of "Are You the One that I've Been Waiting For?" by Nick Cave (search the title for it in the book). -I did a listing of "star" page references here in paragraph three: once is enough. It is "her" symbol alongside the moon and devolves into being about all of the children, i.e., all of the unknowing participants in the transcendent awareness. 

"A room in the Royal hotel
With sea facing views
A man with a suitcase
Full of things he doesn't need" - "Walk to the Water"

This song only entered the lexicon in the actual writing of the book. If you understand what Bono did with it live in launching Songs of Experience, a launch which he used to integrate elements of my book draft (and understand why he did that), you understand he made it live in real time (but of course he didn't actually sing it). BTW when U2 took song requests for the IE Tour I requested this one. What this song does then, is actually sing it for the first time for real.  

The throbbing fountain of creativity has to do with what "Walk to the Water" actually means in terms of the book, which is the universal unconscious sea, which is another unending theme in the book that is omnipresent. The hair I've already mentioned. 

"Room 33" has to do with Billy. Billy was the closest this ever came to integrating with a real person in the real world, meaning he was as close as this ever got to becoming lovers in the real world. The song "Thirty-Three" is on p. 702. I posted the song entire on top of the Chapter where I landed on his SP Forum to prove myself to him (p. 1570). I did this, not to be obvious, because the age he was when I did this to him was age 33. (Bono happened to be 32 when he hit the fan with "The Fly".) With Billy's Machina/Machines of God, which was his artist's answer to my mind's asking, I became his object as the eternal lover. The whole correlation arose purely from his songwriting (think "I of the Mourning", p. 1363), and because "she" is what the songs are about as object, and that is the magic, they are the songs he pulls out from under her, because they are the substance of the seduction with her as object, -nothing more, nothing less. It is in that sense that where this met was literally 33. (When I summarized the linkages on the album to me I came up with 30.) But the real vein of the hotel room was plumbed thanks to PJ Harvey's "A Perfect Day, Elise", which you can search by title to find out what happened with that. This was part of the book's significant "geometry" revision I refer to in the second paragraph to follow below. Incidentally, after he met me personally, Bono/U2's next album cover had Gate 33:3 in the background, (photoshopped), connoting the verse in Jeremiah (p. 1434). This was the album where he appeared to begin deliberately incorporating all the elements I'd revealed to him, -if in a circumspect way, -an experiment. 

Sun Forest

This is the real forest in the book, the Walbran Valley, which means you get to watch them destroy it as I did. It is Eden in the sense that it is virgin forest. On the island where I come from, there is virtually none of it left, and clearcut logging ransacked all the salmon spawning tributaries. Chapter 7 is dedicated to the Walbran Valley. When I was in this valley, "Salome" and its company were written. "Sun Forest" - p. 974 and PJ Harvey's "The River". This is the crux of the savage past and the abandonment of it. If you read on, eventually you'll find I describe how Bono successfully and purposefully transmuted this sun symbolism; -after incorporating it, he adopted it ("A Man and a Woman" p. 1902).

When I was writing the book two key events happened. One predisposed me and put me in the frame of mind the embark on Chapter 9 and everything that follows. The second was a combined event; I realized I wasn't approaching "In A Little While" honestly, -for very good reason, -but I realized I had to do it. What triggered me to feel "safe" enough to do it was that I happened to hear "Goldeneye" sung by Bono for the first time, and for the first time understood its intention (April Fools, 2012). This completely restructured the geometry of the book; Chapter 17 was completely rewritten while I rewrote the section for "In a Little While", meaning I delved into the tracks I thought it tracked back to. In 1998 I only saw the lyrics to the B-sides to The Joshua Tree. I did get the singles release then but missing from that were "Deep in the Heart", 'Walk to the Water" and their various company. This was when I actually heard them for the first time. "Deep in the Heart" takes place in the primeval dark in a cedar forest, -which the Walbran happens to be. So if you understand what happens in these chapters with these songs you understand how central this forest setting is. It was "Goldeneye" that gained their entry into the book, including "Walk to the Water", which I'd refused to touch. Put another way, it was at this moment the book became not a record, but art in the sense that Bono's capable of using it (and Cave is too).

When I was finishing this rewrite epiphany Radiohead appeared live at Coachella (and there I was dancing my circle again). Radiohead commenced their concert with Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" (you need to check the lyrics as they're not the same, and I've put them there for you) seguing into "Everything in its Right Place". Thom Yorke describes the children flying to a new home in the sun. Now what was really amazing about this particular bit of timing was that it was the exact sort of integration Thom Yorke/Radiohead had performed with Kid A in 2000, which started with "yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon" and announced "the first of the children". This album is in the book in depth for this reason (p. 1431). Kid A appeared right before I gate crashed The Smashing Pumpkins' online forum as June herself. It was Thom Yorke who introduced the rendering of this becoming a generational awareness, meaning you have the concept of progeny. I'm very clear on how this develops. To my mind the real impact was that Kid A (2000) was the moment this became a real thing in terms of having a real object in the mind of the man who wrote "Lemon" in the first place (because that was when I told him). You attain a mutual awareness; that is how a common awareness begins, -and it was marked that way in the moment by Thom Yorke as "first of the children". 

But we're not there yet, in terms of Cave in Verse 2. This verse accords a little too well with how I described Nick Cave in my Prologue as one of my Golgotha three (from my perspective this is where he's been standing, in terms of a lack of awareness, the entire time), except that Cave explicates it, - in the book my epiphany of Christ is making the transition from Christ on the cross to Christ getting to live (p. 720). This is coloured with Cave's references ("Rivertentum", p. 924), and the expiring star of "Are You The One That I've Been Waiting For" (p. 910, p. 971-2). The stars are now multiple and multiply expiring because this is a common awareness not just a mutual awareness. (Three identified in the book have literally died in less than a two year span.) This album may perhaps be the crux of where this begins, -where this transits to where Nick Cave gets to become mutually aware for the first time (if he reads this), and that affects all the stars by giving the potential of common awareness for the first time. And look, Cave closes with the trasncendent awareness I attributed to him in 2000 (p. 1585), -meaning it's not him. Or maybe it is just what necessarily needed to be said. 

I come from the Pacific Northwest, -from Canada. We will come to think of this as the north that burned first. My sister was fortunate two years ago that her wedding missed by less than a month when the air became smoke due to the now routine wildfires, an unbreathable haze every summer.

I think "green eyes" is also a deliberate reference meant to anchor the song in an object, -the same feminine object that was the subject of The Boatman's Call in its entirety, as that is where the original track resides. 

Galleon Ship

There is nothing more precious to me than this song, "Galleon Ship". This was my dream of the galleon ships. The rising sun (Ian Brown p. 1883 -Ian Brown is going to surprise you). The universal city (p. 1228) which reverberated p. 1662-6. This is where the city actually rises.... (p. 1951) So many riders, indeed, "the moon and all her sister stars" (p. 1553). Just before I gatecrashed the SP Forum, I had a sunset to remind me. (Nick Cave bookended this album so well in terms of the sunrise/sunset and Jesus with his mother Mary in a picture on the wall.) 

"What you got they can't steal it
No they can't even feel it
Walk on, walk on...
Stay safe tonight

You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been
A place that has to be believed to be seen" - "Walk On" - U2, All That You Can't Leave Behind

To be the object in that context is the most gratifying thing in the world.  

Ghosteen Speaks

"Ghosteen Speaks" to the epiphany I had when I took over the SP Forum. Nick Cave precipitated that, because Nick Cave was the one out of the "Golgotha three" who had no conscious awareness of my existing and personally made the conclusion (to me) that I was deluded. Therefore the inspiration had to come from somewhere else. (I've already page referenced that moment above.)

I am going to put it succinctly because while the book does say this, it pays to spell it out. If you believe the Bible and Christ and understand the meaning of the Bridegroom and the Bride, you understand that the Bride is earthly. The Groom is transcendent. And that actually, is where I think "Ghosteen Speaks" is speaking from, the male side. Ghosteen is a wandering spirit, but with this album Cave's depicted both a male and female spirit. And actually as depicted in the chapter "The 'June' contest", this was exactly what the dance between "June" and "Glass" amounted to, the same transcendent Spirit expressing in a male/female duality. -Looks like I forgot- -But now all are assembled, singing to be free. Because this book can't get published, it is never going to be free. Nick Cave might be its last chance. Because maybe the Ghosteen is just poor little invisible me, and it's me they're gathered 'round, singing to be free. 

"I try to forget

To remember that nothing is something, when something is meant to be"

Daniel Ash, when he wrote "Ghostwriter" and "Walk on the Moon" wrote "Mastermind". And that was when I told Billy about this concept and how it had arisen between me and him. I explained to him how the gamble of choosing him individually was a completely invisible thing that seemed like nothing, that all of my choices as per the common awareness seemed like nothing, -but it was only if you chose correctly that this didn't disappear, (I told him had I settled on Nick Cave for instance, if I had rested on his conclusion being the verdict and sought his conclusion for that reason, the entire thing would have disappeared, -because my belief in the common awareness would have disappeared due to him). But I didn't start and end with Cave. (I didn't trust it because what Cave represented was the respository of my wants, literally all I wanted.) I started and ended with Bono and Billy, in that order (but laughably in my first missive to Bono, asked, "What if it takes three of you to catch me [if I fall]?"  -and by the three, I meant all three of the "Golgotha three", and -here we are).

And when I started my proof exercise with Billy, Daniel Ash shouted "THAT'S THERE!" over and over again after singing "Mastermind", -depicting my interior gamble with the universe. I told Billy it appeared I'd been risking nothing at all, -when in fact I'd risked everything on him. It fails in the sense of depicting the circumstance without isolating the concept (and that's down at paragraph 20, I feel I wrote about this somewhere else and didn't put it in the book). The idea was that unless you believed, you weren't risking anything. If it was a delusion, you were risking nothing. "Nothing" was on the table, but to you, it was everything, the ultimate gamble, twice over with both of them. Actually the "nothing is everything" gambles began long before those two. 

Leviathan

When Billy was absolutely mum about the "Leviathan" under the water I was laughing on the interior. (Leviathan? -What leviathan? -And that was basically his modus operandi before and since.) It was so bloody obvious I didn't even point out the reasons for it in communication (that was the tail end of when he was ghosting my journal which only he could see and responding to it at times by utilizing rarified covers in live performance and retooling lyrics in real time; -then he created his Twitter account to use it to respond, -and then for a short span he used his blog as well). I mean I posted this to him in 2000 when I took over the SP Forum contest - it wasn't just the feedback analogy in the universal unconsious sea (a phrase that once explained is in the book over thirty times), it was literally my name. That, to my mind, is the root behind the title. 

The first time Billy ever responded to my livejournal only he could see in early 2008 was to say, "Oh My", -to a dream I had of him, -of a first "real world" encounter (which being a dream, it obviously wasn't). It didn't do what you'd likely expect of this, it just set up the moment, ended on a cliff. But the description of the moment was so charged it elicited that reaction. 

So whenever I returned the phrase and lobbed it back at him in the months to follow it signified how he'd elicited the same reaction in me, or something very close to it. It became code, used very selectively only on special occasions. 

So again, this acts as a (most curious) repatriation of where that moment was going when it never did. The car analogy in the music feedback framed the encounter with Billy (before and after), and had him never showing up. It was my only plea. He never did. (A "car crash" was also the context my soul death was framed in the first time it happened, and yes of course W.P.C. knows, he coined phrase himself, also this.) Now he's talking about the car ride as his own suicide; -the ride where he left his "sister" for dead in "Cotillion" was tantamount to killing himself. "Sister" was Billy's term for me the first time he ever recognized me in the real world (the day of the striped shirt, (p. 1690), and he used the moniker more than once lyric wise to target me after that, as in "sister can't you spell" p. 2155, also p. 2174)). He probably coined it thanks to "Sister Rose" in Machina Mystery 5.   

Ghosteen

Now you’re at the other end of the telescope 
Seven billion stars in her eyes - Nick Cave's talking like Bono now. But Bono's was after he received a draft where I described the many, many artists who were participants in the feedback loop beneath the universal unconscious sea (and how it was slowly rising into consciousness), -on the same album where he writes a song about reading it. After he discovered a world that took hundreds of pages to illustrate it. "This world is beautiful, held within its stars" braodens this into its true interpretation as the "we are stars" songwriting artists who all express as facets in the potential universal consciousness, a reality only she witnesses and only she sees. 

This album is such a capture, -the ghosteen is indeed dancing in Nick Cave's hand. It's true that she does. 

Bono is my moonlit man with a suitcase in his hand (p. 792, p. 1454) The moon in this book is literally Bono's creation as object (he started with a feminine Holy Spirit as the personification of the Moon with "Mysterious Ways", meaning he made it mean something else entirely from an astrol rock in the sky, and then he devolved it to have a mundane, fallible object. When I met him in 1999 I confessed that I thought he'd devolved his object so it objectified a real person in the real world (with that person being me), and I asked him if this was possible to him or not. And of course I explained to him in writing exactly why I thought this. The song, "Walk to the Water" where Bono alludes to himself as carrying a suitcase (only place) is the one that allowed me to realize he'd contextualized the release of Songs of Experience to signify awareness of me and my book (thanks to his snippeting it live on BBC), because let's face it, snippeting a song out of the blue from 30 years ago that nails the first thought in your head when you met him and the street you walked down to meet him that day is a little too refined for chance. 

The little boat that goes to the moon. It wasn't just my dream, it was Bono's analogy for riding on the universal unconscious sea in "Summer Rain", which was the song where he acknowledged, "you let me be your enemy" (paragraph 6). But again, the true locale is Thom Yorke's, the one who announced "the first of the children", with the creative overflow from Kid A that was Amnesiac. (And then Thom Yorke did this, and people think the end locale is a bear cave.) On Amnesiac Thom Yorke again broadened what was an au pair allusion in Bono's hands and turned it into a universal allusion of "we". And that is when it becomes the children in a rowboat sailing to the moon with "Pyramid Song" (which happens to be when the shift happened due to my appearing before Bono as a real person; -I offically became Bono's object for the lyrics he would write in terms of the "moon"/feminine that followed the encounter; -this is when the shift took place in Bono's own mind, hence, the moon became). When Bono devolved his object as the moon, he created the universal awareness, -in me. -It exists solely in my perspective/perception. But I was able to show it to Billy occurring live in real time. That is what made him my sole witness. And it is that past that anchors the future.

There's nothing wrong with loving an object you haven't met, -who you're never going to be with, apart from in spirit. (The whole book is a justification of this. If it did not matter, I wouldn't have written it.)

The utter randomness of this existent connectivity and how we barely understand one another at all at that.  

Fireflies 

"Jesus lying in His mother's arms" transposes the context of "Night Raid" with "Fireflies" by starting with the same allusion. This reverts back to "Deep in the Heart". Only if you read it will you find what that means, but to be succinct, the deep in the forest analogy and the hotel room analogy have always represented the same thing to me -consummation, with the forest as the primeval root, though they both occured at the same time in history - 1987. That was one of the lived songs I only heard when writing in April 2012. Bono then resurrected the lyric that was key in it, "you can't return to where you never left" in the same verse he resurrected a line from "Salome" for "Cedarwood Road" on Songs of Innocence. This was after this song was added to the book and after I rewrote the entire chapter dealing with "Salome" (Chapter 17) -the only song that took the bulk of a chapter. Meeting under the cherry tree is meeting at the Rowen's house on Cedarwood Road. It was a Rowen who led me to the secret studio where I met Bono. That was in Bono's personal draft of this book.

Jesus is a dying star as was the feminine object of "Are You the One That I've Been Waiting For"; -the closest we've got to an eternal light is a dead light.

This song is the encapsulation of the reality of a permanent existence lived out in the knowledge of a total connection existing between one another in the universal unconscious that has never once inhabited the same room, -and won't for a lifetime, -but it already inhabited each other. That is my reality. 

Oh. Fireflies. With ANIMA it turns out Thom Yorke is doing something that, from my vantage, he has always done, -which is getting completely inside the pain of what it's like to be rendered utterly invisible by the indifference consequent of encountering the "other side" live in the real world; -namely what it's been like to be victimized by the utter indifference of the "male side" in this existent situation.... -that was the strongest thrust of Kid A. It made its presence known enough on Hail to the Thief as to make a lasting impression on Billy Corgan. Thank God for friends (if of a removed unknown nature where they might not even know that's what they are to you)....

Hollywood 

For me is a capture of an emotional context Bono put in a song, -hidden under a time/place recollection: - "California". -It depicts where I was in reality with my broken heart (the mirror moment really happened, and I was lying down in a bed facing a mirror). And what he asked for - in a sense the transcendence this album presents may be the only context that might ever answer it. The wounding that took place before that album in 2013 and during it is practically impossible to describe. I'm not going to. There is no greater sense of abandonment than to feel you've been buried alive. 

I am a child of the Pacific Coast - Vancouver Island. I come from a place where so much clearcut logging took place in so short a time it drove the cougars into the city looking for food, -where they were shot and killed. The wildfire regime of California is the wildfire regime of the whole Pacific northwest. Like I mentioned, it was harrowing us long before it harrowed Californians. We have far more forest to be burned. "Hollywood opens by signifying Earth's natural destruction. The raging wildfires were razing my part of the world long before they were noticed in California. Lack of population means lack of attention. Part of a debate I had a few months ago: I ran into a "leftist" playwrite (a man who married a woman who appears far less than half his age to have children in his old age, -not only does he think he's entitled to her, he thinks they're entitled to summer/winter residences in two hemispheres (wintering in California), and glibly disrespects scientists when retorting to them that there's plenty of arable land left to convert to cropland. (-Go tell that to Indonesia when the USA re-allocated a tiny allotment of its food production for ethanol instead. With idiots like these who needs frenemies.) The playwrite's grist is that overpopulation is not a thing, but a bourgoisie/racist foist. I have one reply: "the combined biomass of the living 7.2 billion human beings, along with the few species of animal we have domesticated – dogs, cats, cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens – now constitutes at least 95% of the entire biomass of all extant terrestrial vertebrates on Earth". I want to know how any male homosapien can think this is sane, but they do, even, as it turns out, the professed lefties. (I think because the entire economic shitshow is predicated on their overriding sexual entitlement.) I view the earth in terms of the wholesale slaughter we glibly put down to "habitat destruction", -purely for the sake of the commodification of reproduction for profit. That's all the project of human life is at present. That is what you have when neoliberalism runs the world and mammon is your only god you believe dictates society and "culture", when it is the total evacuation of culture in exchange for barbarism, -which is what having an amoral economy running society is, -starting at the commodification of reproduction. The playwrite insists by the nature of his arguments, this is sane, while I try to point out this makes capitalist stooges out of leftists, because amoral capitalism is predicated on this, for this: “I will go so far as to say [that] capitalism itself may be dependent on a growing population,” writes billionaire capitalist blogger Bill Gross, Forbes magazine’s Bond King. “Our modern era of capitalism over the past several centuries has never known a period of time in which population declined or grew less than 1% a year.” That's no accident. And at this point this note is too long and the remainder got sequestered to a subpage you can hop to if you want.

The saga of Kisa - with the book you'll find Nick Cave latched more explicitly than anyone alive into my darkest, saddest secret, the outcome being a baby who died. I'm not giving you any clues for that. Cave knows well enough where in his own catalogue where the allusion(s) lie. How long was it for peace of mind after that? A very, very long time. 

"Darling your dreams are your greatest part
I carry them with me in my heart" - Nick Cave's just been presented with a book with an entire dream journal integrated into it, 45 of them all told. Some were prophetic. Others were true. Some were so potent they altered destiny. Some are still coming true today. You'd be very hard pressed to find anyone who lived a life so far in resonance they formed the very substance of her book. Of course it was what the dreams induced their subject to dream up that is the dream.... Nick Cave has been asked today (Sunday November 10th 2019) about what he might think of the correlations between this album and this book. 

I hope to God that this is it. I hope to God that with this, Nick Cave's time has come. 

I ended the book on the fear that what I was doing was wrong unless it had an outcome. I stopped everything at that moment, and only accepted it having value if at that threshold it became manifest in the real world, -and it did become manifest as I'd hoped, -for a time. It eventually did become manifest in Bono and Billy's integration of my existing reality into their artistic output (ever so slightly) which was a necessitated outcome for me not to otherwise conclude that I was deluded, -and have it all disappear as a result. But for me, this album is the transcendence that is the outcome. Twelve years is a long wait. I'd prefer not having to wait anymore.