It was also the title track. “Ava Adore” was truly perplexing, though the most perplexing line made sense to her; “you will always be my whore”; -because she was so judged, and because she was related to inside the universality universally on very intimate terms. To her it was simply a jibing remark that reflected on what was really happening. Besides she had even been named after one, her father saying he named her so because he’d had a sense of foresight, thinking she would be so misperceived in the world. Guess what? Here it was, and it was now how her father mis-perceived her. She didn’t avoid dressing coffins for souls either, from her perspective it had to do with how she been regarded, first as unleashing Armageddon through her consent, and secondly by becoming the “bomb” inside the “star”, the headache in the suitcase that would end the “sun”. She’d gotten the moniker either way. There was also the existent potentiality (from her perspective) of how going under had the ability to divide the wheat from the chaff by starting at the bottom. Even the seeming nonsense of “drinking mercury” had some coherence in her context; as a Gemini Mercury was her ruling planet.
Nearly all of the verse at the bridge had a deeply qualified meaning: she was “dirty” thanks to her dark past, the repository of the mind space that saw everyone as becoming a chain of stars or spiritual lights existed in the third revelation of the third aspect of the Trinity, which had the capacity to impart interior beauty to even the most self-perceived fallen; in her he could taste God because the connectivity that existed between them had been imparted and inspired by God (the realization of the God proof). To be hungry is to aspire; “in you I crash cars” linked into the most vitally linking song on the album, “Tear”, which expressed how she had been destroyed as death in a car crash, carrying out the portent Bono had first pronounced with “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car”. As with Bono’s “Mofo”, there was a query of very broad import asking whether she held spiritual discernment.
“Tear” described the moment of vanishing (her metaphysical death) as something instantaneous with the overtones of a crash, which had taken her heart away from him. She now knew that in the severance she was “Gone” to him, too. “Tear” laid the blame for this at the feet of “heaven”. To her mind this was accurate, for she had felt forced into an ultimatum by outer forces she had not wielded, and her existing circumstance in that seemed to have been hijacked by arch-types to do with ceremonial sacrifice of innocence, damnation and Grace, the access of Christ. She had woken into the heavenly collective awareness and it had been exterminated the moment she did, and so long as she preserved belief in her father’s calling in terms of ruler ship of heaven, well that was precisely who her destroyer had been.
The theme of this more spiritual, abstract death was reinforced by “Behold! The Nightmare”. While it seemed to invoke the a similar spiritual quality to that expressed in “Mofo”, the mother theme on this album was one she did not trust to have the same universal sensibility. She later learned that the songs had to do with the premature death of his mother that year, which effectively removed them, except she felt this one verse in “For Martha” signified something deeper:
but for the grace of love
I'd will the meaning of
heaven from above
Since she felt like a harbinger of so much and she’d disappeared but for the prospect of Grace, she felt like the key on what had been withheld and retained, withheld judgment. If you wanted to know what she was afraid she had the potential to do, Radiohead’s video for “Just (You Do It to Yourself)” managed to capture the notion well, if not circumstantially.
That “Behold, The Night Mare” was not related to Billy’s mother’s death was made clear by how he used the theme “digging for the feel of something new”, in the sense that it was a theme he would employ again, and that would be employed repeatedly by Bono as well. One of the analogies to do with her spiritual disappearance or death was burial and existing underground; here he was digging roses from her grave. He also implied it was the same as lingering “beyond the beyond”, which she felt she done when she expanded herself in a way that was vast, putting herself beyond everyone, and then reducing herself there. Saying he’d done everything to “please” her, he mentioned he’d “withstood the suitors quiet siege”. On this count she truly felt besieged, both in terms of the inside/universal consciousness and how men in the real world approached her all the time.
With the album being a sum of poetic imagery, a great deal of it was a perplexing sum of confusion, not having any bearing or reflection. Apart from the prominent themes of losing mother and mourning a death, it was summed up with a basic conflict, a polarity between the lover’s address in “Pug” with the abstract appeal “come and kiss me sweetly, ride the telephone,”… “I am yours alone, yours alone, on the telephone”. It was not a certainty how he was using the idea of meeting through the phone then, but it turned out her intuition that it meant something else entirely was right, next time. So “wrap myself in you” was not necessarily a sexual image, and never struck her that way; she thought song expressed being enveloped in her spirit, and that was what the abstract notion the telephone was invoking. (Given how he reached for the same imagery subsequently, it ended up being without question.)
“Please don't change, please don't change at all, bring your rain, bring your rain to fall” was an insight at this time that existed throughout the song writing, that it was a time of rain, the “sun” being gone or taken away, and it pervaded this album. To have the plea not to change in those circumstances was a vital appeal that didn’t dismiss her selfhood as errant or forsaken, rather valuing her no matter what -though under the circumstances, which especially included the quarter he came from, she couldn’t trust.
The basic conflict was that the album took the opposite tact of the lover’s approach at the same time, expressing detachment notable with “Blank Page”.
This was expressed as well in the closure of “Shame” in terms of a breaking - “Hello, good-bye, you know you made us cry”. (For her this was perversely reassuring in how it acknowledged the truth, for she felt overwhelming shame at her personal history. She knew with the severance, it was expected that everyone who had been connected to her via the universal unconscious would “cry” about it. Furthermore her father, who had subsumed and consumed every role in her life, had rejected her; now she walked alone. Besides, at the time it did so happen she was getting a wee bit drunk.) This breaking was also expressed with finality in “Crestfallen”, “you were never meant to belong to me”.
She knew she wasn’t “around”, because in her mind she’d terminated the connection in the universal consciousness. This sensibility was reinforced in her mind by the lyric “your life is not your own”, because in the sense that her life was being expressed universally by many people, it no longer belonged to her; -and since she’d entered this path, from her perspective, because she’d been commanded by God, her life had never been her own. The thing was she’d opted for “normality”; she was now trying to live a normal life, by going to college and accepting or seeking the prospect of a job. Her whole life with her family they had subsisted on circumstance, been open and subject to whatever God granted them. She had subjected herself to the same risks, and at times it had been a wild ride. She felt the last time she’d subjected herself to circumstance in a way that allowed Intervention to modify her and provide for her was on that trip to Tacoma. After that it had been gone for good. She wasn’t living by circumstance any longer; she was “normal” now; she’d shut down all those spiritual potentialities inside her mind, and wasn’t subjecting herself to God any longer when she broke the Divine command.
With “Daphne Descends” she could not help but think of Kevin.
“To Sheila” opened the album with a “blistered Avalon”, not an individual that had been burned, but a burned utopian vision descending into night, “into the uncertain divine, we scream into the last divide”, with the potential to transmute into an existing reality residing in the song’s feminine object, who was exhorted to appear. What struck her beyond the mysteries was, it meant the world to hold a bruising faith, but now it's just a matter of grace, because she sensed it was true. She had kept faith in her father to the bitter end in retaining her faith to God, but in stepping over the edge, had truly cast herself into the realm of Grace.
The next was “Perfect”, which was of key import because she really thought in terms of accessing forever and the collective awareness developing identity as perfect beings, by accessing past their existence beyond matter, by accessing pre-conception existence. But more than that, it invoked the paradoxical quality of having developed a sustained connection “so far, I still know who you are”, while recognizing his own interior transformation “but now, I wonder who I was”, while invoking the context of never having met yet.
The last of key import was “Appels and Oranjes” because of its invocation of absolutes, and how it qualified them, as if the questioning of absolutes bore equivalence to the questioning of one’s self, in the context of, “What if what is, isn’t true? What are you going to do? What if what is, isn’t you?” -Which incidentally was her interior question All the Time. Notably this was again equated with digging underground, “digging for the feel of something new”, and this line of questioning was deliberately intercepted by the rejoinder, “It came from your thoughts, your dreams and visions, ripped up from your weeks and indecisions”.
This was exactly what was happening in the process of the feedback with the artists reflecting and delving into her existing circumstance. It was coming out of her own mind, her existence, and in effect by using this lyric in both songs (here and “Behold! The Night Mare”), it was plausible they might be delving into the same context. The very last was “The Tale of Dusty and Pistol Pete” but that would only hit resonance over time, which became true for several aspects of this album. Incidentally “Annie-Dog” had never been in the running; based on what he later said about it, this became clearly obvious.