WE - Arcade Fire

Age of Anxiety I

As mentioned, the only music video I spent sixteen pages on as a part of an analysis in order to present what happened with David Bowie as per Bono's silence of omission in MG's 2020 letter was "Reflektor", which this verse clearly casts back to directly. The mirror ball man appears in the video, and unquestionably has Bono's profile, besides being the televangelist persona he adopted in ZOOTV. In "Reflektor" the connection only exists on breakable media, CDs and music materials. Here it's an untouchable 'ghost" and that's the part that "hurts us [collectively] the most". Seeing as this is the aspect I am wanting to change, I'm in full agreement.

The key to "Reflektor" as a song/video is that arriving at a point source in the music, Bono in perticular, is no diffferent than arriving at a reflection of the essence of something they can't find, which is precisely what I'm trying to put on exhibit here by alleging that this is a universally derived inspirational music feedback in an array of artists that doesn't happen consciously, something that can be isolated and depicted if you have a prior awareness of the object. And in fact this time the isolation is one of a "ghost". So literally what I'm going to depict is a "hologram of a ghost", to whom I ascribed an Identity prior, and my grand bet was whether that Identity would appear in the universal musical feedback, additionally in context. He did, btw. Even on this album. But the isolation doesn't work just on appearance. I said He would appear in a completely unique hithertoo "in flagrante" state (in the sense of being considered heretical), that the appearance would be one of consummation. That's happened too, fulminating in WILD GOD, but there were more than just Nick Cave. 

The outro is a cogent paradox on the infliction of self magnification of social media (highlighted on rock genius), but it is also the paradox of being an object in a universally inspired musical feedback loop, -especially if what you've arrived at is that it's really about the isolation of the Inspirer, as opposed to defining the object of that collective inspiration.

Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)

Again as mentioned, the foray in video analysis on "Reflektor" was described in the letter as a "rabbit hole", and subsequently every footnote in the letter was a "Rabbit Hole" in numerical order. -What are the odds that the band described by song as " a rabbit hole" (as a literary device to signal a divergence from the overall topic) would pull that one out of the proverbial hat-? But there's more to it, starting with the introduction of heaven being contextualized in the trinitarian identity with God the Father, referenced as cold and uninviting with a Father who's asleep, but a Christian identification of heaven nonetheless. Then there's the second verse:

Dad built a labyrinth, and we were born in it, Blowing on the cartridge, Of Kid Icarus, Born into the abyss, New phone, who's this?, A silver thread, a French kiss, Arcadia apocalypse

This introduces the plot of the iBook, under the book's title, as being one of a labyrinth. Kid Icarus is a double entendre in terms of meaning, a video game timestamping upbringing to the '80s (correct) while introducing the context of the myth simultaneously. The labyrinth from the book's standpoint is being born to a father with a messianic complex who modelled his children from birth in order to spawn personal disciples. In effect he set about breeding his own personal cult optimizing his throughput by gettting control of individuals from conception onwards, with the mechanism of religion and the constant threat of eternal damnation as a form of control. Worse yet, the programmed personal ambitions had to do with complete sublimation in service to God, but only if subordinated wholly to the messiah complex, otherwise you were facing down total personal obliteration. To sum it up, you do not get laid with a worse labyrinth from birth than this one, and the entire personal complex of the parent was designed expressly for this one purpose.

As it so happens, Icarus' personal ambition killed him consequent to diverging from his father's admonition and instruction that the wings were not for aspiring to the heavens, but purely for escape purposes. He also built a purportedly unsolvable labyrinth beneath a palace for the Minotaur, upon which King Minos imprisoned the inventor, theortetically so the labyrinth would remain such. To escape the inventor creates wings for his son and himself, but Icarus flies too close to the sun over open sea escaping Crete and plunges to his death. 

In the iBook the father acculterated his offspring with psychedelic drug use comingled with Christianity in order to attain a perpetual state of heaven on earth, but only within conditions that orbited his messianic complex, where any perceived divergence was met with the threat not only of eternal damnation, but Armegeddon itself. Hence we have "Arcadia apocalypse" ("Arcadia" equating in Greek mythology with "Utopia"). It was an entire life model for seven offspring as a psychedelic "rabbit hole", and that was the labyrinth. It is also the sum of what this song describes, and unique in terms of how it was designed to access the infinite in ordinary life, meaning no one is normally subject situationally to conditions where these aspirations are literal in normal life.That this is a psychedelic labyrinth is involved by the very nature of the song, with its veiled allusion to "White Rabbit" and "Alice in Wonderland". Additionally as per the "plastic soul" reference, not only is this presumably in reference to David Bowie, but the album Surrealistic Pillow has the track "Plastic Fantastic Lover", so "rabbit hole" as a veiled psychedelic equivocation to "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane is likely fully deliberate.

As it so happens, "White Rabbit" makes the end of the iBook as well (p.2292), because William P. Corgan deliberately covered and altered the song inside a new version of "Heavy Metal Machine" (3:08), which was deliberately designed to resurrect the protagonist's connective awareness ("resurrection machine" in the song is self referential), a second live salvo invoking "Glass" and a rather retooled "Alice", after tooling some of the lyrics on Zeitgeist (07/07/07) in deliberate response to the protagonist's personal couriers to WPC after the first run of this experiment for him personally in real time in 2000 appeared to produce no result or response. This was incidentally the same live set that was the premiere performance of the heavy metal steamroller "Superchrist", with the sole lyric of "Revolution is solution, rise, One solution, one, takes you beyond, it's love, Am I, For I, need time". (That makes three inadvertent linkages to WPC on this album, with one each in Lightning I, II.)

In effect this means that the protagonist's life goal was to access these things in a real aspiration to the heavens in an attempt to escape the goldfish bowl (and psychedelic) circumstances that attempted to force these conditions purely and wholly into her father's personal orbit. In other words, it was a paradox to truly attain the father's aspirations absent his total destruction of them, which was an inbuilt aternative to total sublimation within his personal ego by design.

Potentially since this is still ongoing, that escape into "The Raydiant Labyrinth" as opposed to the entrapping one with the monster, was actually acheived as a life course, re, the idea of this book is one in which Icarus manages to survive irrespecitive of the entrapping goldfish bowl contrived personal parental labyrinth. The life ambition of this book and this "blog" (public experiment), is to delineate the true one-ness of humanity in terms of the first occurring universal identity to ever occur in humanity that can be mapped through the universal unconscious sea absent material contact, arriving at a beginning definition defining humanity as o/One body irrespective of ideology or creed in a true common identity defined by Love, i.e., the "silver thread" that presents as an alternate course is described as a "french kiss".

Interesting question, that.

The End of Empire IV (Sagittarius A*)

We have a second Christ reference on this album, the first being an almost leftt field declaration of Jesus in the first verse of Lightning II, with an inferential second reference to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way as a feminine second incarnation, as well as reference to the levels of paradise, heaven, purgatory and hell as the format of the afterlife with Virgil of Dante's Inferno. I actually wanted to defer comment on this in any way whatsoever because it's a really bad idea, let's say about 95% of the takeaways you could make of this are bad ones and the bad ones will be automatically assumed. It's the sort of thing you can only discuss with some Bible literacy in person, so I am leaving it at that. The only thing I will put out there is, -is there any potential this describes the vesica pisces on a cosmological level (where it's "diamonds" in lieu of the usual stars)? Because it's not just an album cover anymore. (I need to find the band video credit for this image btw.) Additionally introduced by the song's object being human because they are subject to self prescribed algorythm induced dreams, is whether this symbolism is also human in object?

Also note that the name includes an asterisk, or star, which was the first symbolism to arise in the iBook as per the feminine object in the universal music feedback. This was reviewed in depth on the "★" page, "where 'star' was a symbol in various places but so was the notion of an astral body that blocked out the sun (one or the other of this varietal appears on pages 560-1, p. 584, p. 592-3, p. 601, p. 620, p. 684, p. 696, p. 710, p. 834, p. 916, p. 950, p. 993, p. 1032, p. 1043, p. 1084, p. 1089, p. 1151, p. 1159, p. 1219, p. 1318, p. 1467, p. 1516, p. 1565, p. 1633, p. 1655, p. 1733, p. 1737, p. 1781, p. 1784, p. 1787, p. 1791, p. 1796, p. 1798, p. 1804-5 ("black star" itself comes up), p. 1831, p. 1839, p. 1875, p. 1887, p. 1966, p. 1987, p. 2017 (hyperlink), p. 2143-4, p. 2146, p. 2159-6161)." So this is already the most extensive symbolisim in the iBook. The "★" page was created December 2015.

Incidentally, the enabler mother of the protagonist in the iBook is a Sagittarius, although this was never mentioned, and as "Lightning I" mentions the collective being born under the "micro-age of Gemini", the present astrological age, which is the protagonist's birth sign, there are two correlating solar signs between the iBook and this album.

Unconditional Love Part II (Race & Religion)

This is the entire goal of the iBook, the public experiment substack, and the existential nature of the transcendent relationship itself (-doubled), where "Race and religion" are expressed as terms of transcendent identity, -not an abolishment of these terms, but the understanding that the conference of co-identity is as fundamental as we identify these terms, but it is a transcendent identity, both at once stronger than these physical and belief system references, but as fundamental as our self conception of them in terms of sourcing "our" identity, sourcing a "we" co-identity. The reason these are sourcing transcendentally is implicit in the nature of the offer itself, because the exchange or relationship transaction in the chorus can otherwise be said as, if you are willing to be the being I inhabit materially and spiritually, I will confer you a connective identity at the level of strength of being itself, at the level of strength or essence you feel in an understanding of these terms to create "us", i.e., the most fundamental division of humanity into three races on appearance (material nature), and the nature of belief (spiritual nature), or arguably the most fundamental and basic identifying compartmentalizations of human selfhood are the level being negotiated to predicate this ensuing unity. That's the nature of the  transctional trade being expressed as "I'll be yours, You can be mine, Love unites".

Breaking as the light divides into the color of your eyes

The third verse confers this potential co-identity to the sensory faculty of vision and the perceptual idenitification of the difraction of light into sight. It can even be analyzed in terms of the structure of the preceived feedback loop itself. In other words it is a potential unity conferred by perceptual observation. The first two verses confer this at the level of mental perception that begins inside the mind (or a mind connection, -how'd it get there?), a "doors of perception" access to the divine, and the nature of taking communion, be it religious or human communal or both. It's also a fine line to tread in the "end times", a choice at a crossroads. Dancing is included in rythm sense as being part of this communal human nature, again, a door to the divine.

The light arrives from the past
Hits your eyes before it divides into colors
You and me could be we
Could be we
Are the light you can't see and we
Are the roots of the tree
And we’ve got one life
No time for division
New vision
Be my race and religion

The light arriving from the past is the existential nature of a perceived feedback loop because the observer is looking for delination of events that occurred solely inside the mind and waiting to see if mind's events will be observable as universal inspiration. The invisible roots of the tree then, are these iterations in the universal music feedback by the music artists, which renders them observable. This makes the artists the roots, and the feedback's object who is the functional observer the root as well, but arguably the Source, whatever that or Who it is, it is the cause that makes the inspiration universal (which is neither the artists nor the observer, all of whom are human with human limitations) that is the real invisible root.This is the doubling effect of the artists' being universally inspired, because it is their common inspiration that isolates that there is an Inspirer behind it, whatever you may argue that may be.

The light becomes multifaceted in colours the instant it hits the observer's eye, because it is only observable as multifaceted in an array of artists in the functional observation of the object of the universal inspirational feedback loop. Before that individual observes it as a unified perception, it has no unity, nor is it multifaceted. Before being apprised in the observation of the universal feedback loop's object, it is invisible. The unifying function is perceptual observation in one individual, the feedback's object, her sight based on her informed perspective. It is this vision that unites the artists in hitherto unknown common identity, but that's only if we ever arrive at a common threshold where the functional observation becomes mutually conscious between the artists as well as the observer. To shift this into mutuality by multiplying the function of observational capacity is precisely the goal of this public experiment, with the goal of arriving at common identity in unity at the level the song describes, and otherwise describes as the light of the moon (an equally longstanding symbol) on an explosive device.

WE

It is well worth reading Win Butler's segment in the "About" section on the inspiration for this song.

Next station

The song enforces arriving at a unified identification of people as "WE" as opposed to dispirate individuals, as described in "Unconditional Love Part II (Race & Religion)". It's about the liberation of the entire thing from the limitations of the ride we are culturally on. 

Again, the goal of this substack, this book, and what it's describing and delineating in the first place. This is the aspect Win wants a "do over" on in a conscious way.

With the inclusion of "The Lightning I" and II, this has covered seven songs out of the nine (with lyrics) on the album.