Seeing The Pet Shop Boys

For the Pet Shop Boys she bought a pint of Heineken like all the other maids, but also two Jameson doubles, one of which she concealed in her purse for the intermission; she knew she could wedge it perfectly, upright. She still had to guzzle the pint though. She showed up perfectly on time for the show even though she hadn’t had a time. 

“The show began with a big big screen that covered the entire stage. Near the climax they actually resorted to an old trip, they actually used flashlight feedback, my brother’s forte, but where he was years ago. They just added some digitized effects to the loop, but it was the same. (I could even see the flashlight.) My joy at being visually stimulated (like at home even) was at an all-time high. (Well as high as you can get on music, visuals, and a bloody pint.) Nostalgia. I was as usual, primed and open, completely cognizant, and completely swept by the tailored specific song. The song was come on girl, come fly with me, and made inference to forgetting her pain. So I did. I feel like an old hand by now. I was utterly blissed out and gave myself to the opening. Happiness is an option, Touché.”

And then it was “Vampire” which sent her off on a total tangent. It was not like she believed they were linked, it was simply accessing that sensibility in the moment in flowing with it. Which sometimes can go to strange places, for very little did it take to trigger the interior geometry, and inside the interior geometry was where she absorbed it, altered thus:

“You’re a vampire [sister], I’m a vampire too”

“Let’s hear it for the blood drinkers. (I suppose that’s the only way you can join in identity, and still think you’re cool.) Even this doesn’t disturb me, as I can give it this tact: as per ritual, Christianity is the sole religion based around the ceremonial imbibing of someone’s blood. (Especially if you’re Catholic, then you believe in transubstantiation.) Vampirism is just a cultural inversion on the common religion. I can vibe right out on this with a sense of identity and not be concerned. Now, I realize this flies completely in the face of my work, namely, “We’ll forever be beholden to Christ’s Grace but perhaps no longer need to drink his blood, see?” and Edward K’s “Voodoo Lady” response. How can I accept both tacts? Well, you see, having formed an evolved state of the Christian faith that graduates beyond ritual and is based on identity (they don’t even know that it’s Christianity yet), you can say I’ve taken faith to a stage where they (the apostate heathen) can identify with it for the first time. Hence their first crack at being “blood drinkers”.

This runs deeper. Christmas had been rather harrowing for me, things have run their course, the finality of rejection, etc. It came down to one thing, see, and one thing alone, why I wouldn’t just end myself, having been completely stripped of everyone that mattered to me, I cared about, or believed in. And I cried out (with the brace of a challenge (to Bono)), “Do you know how I survived you?” This winter? I’ll tell you.” At which I growled, “I fed on myself. Wanna know how I did that?” (The same way I survived my father. No one has hurt me more than the men God sent.)

You see I’ve known for years that when I reached this space in time, in awareness, I’d prefer to kill myself and that logically there would be nothing to hold me back. (What, my family? After this past fall, there’s no going back.)

I’d have lost everything you see. Absolutely. Awareness would be agony. With Bono’s abandonment, the circle of abandonment would be complete and total, all my hopes and revived expectations (What right, I shouted to the ceiling, do You have to revive my expectations, if only to destroy them, AGAIN! Wasn’t once through that agony enough? Granted I did it the first time.) Not that you’ll ever comprehend this, but with Bono’s rejection, it would all be completely destroyed. Wanna know how I countered that projection, ahead of time? I cut him off and vanished over the threshold of perception, fell beyond the depths, and accepted that I would rise again, naturally, only if I was in fact a true source of love and goodness. Because my awareness would naturally affect those souls who regarded themselves as fallen, the ones predisposed to revival who were trapped and could not see a way back. BY the presence of my awareness they would see, and those who were trapped would consciously be affected to seek revival, their own conscious choice, based on their awareness of my love. Then they themselves would catch me in my fall. The transubstantiation, into other people, of my own love. (Amazing what conclusions you can come to, and act upon, on acid, and lightning fast too.)

Yup. That was the theory.

So now I’m facing this dude who affected my whole existence (probably without even knowing it, i.e., he doesn’t even give a f***), who made the offer of a universal union, the premise on which I based everything that followed (and likely he won’t even read the content, or care, not until he realized after that it had cause my suicide and may be on that count, just the desperation of my situation alone, he should have lifted his g**d***ed finger), and logically his ignorance of his impact, and total lack of concern, dismantles everything. Better yet it cuts off my moorings and leaves me permanently adrift, emotionally isolated on the sea. (Because if he can’t recognize me, then logically none of the rest will. But my position is too strong, now, for me to abandon it.) It leaves me with no future. (I will never find my love.) Heavy f***ing ultimatums of mortal f***ing pain, you will never know.

So, how did I survive it? By forcing myself to be beholden to my own moral culpabilities. Beyond this individual, even if he is an ingrate, the possibility still exists, the union may exist via the vehicle of redemption. (In other words, the man was a device, not conscious of his machinations, but they still serve a purpose. [Same as dear Dad, though dear Dad’s machinations were diabolical.]) You see, at the precise point in time I am being put through the agony of the consequence of his complete inaction (WHAT VALUE DOES IT HAVE, THEN!!!), I have made myself morally culpable to the possibility, now there’s the others. The others have come in tandem with these responses:

Edward K.’s – “You’ve got to live” – Feel the Quiet River Rage

Eurythmics “Please let it stay” – I Saved the World Today

Trent Reznor’s “I won’t let you fall apart” – The Fragile

Tom Petty – “I promise you this winter I will worship you like gold, and ride your train forever, electric fortunes to be told.” Echo

It came down to this, ladies and gents. (In the context of the songs they came from, and overall body of work, of course.)

(I could have even predict that entering this context would force me to live, there’s too much at stake. It was in a sense, the most appalling future of all.) You see, I’ve passed the point where I can let go. I have generated the response I anticipated, and I am beholden to it. I have survived through the redemptive awareness. They have caught me. Trent successfully denied me the possibility of killing myself (or any form of self-destruction).  So I survived through a transubstantiation of my own love.  They in turn respond to keep me alive in the face of nothingness. (Whether this form of survival may ever achieve happiness, ever, is open to debate, but then that’s the whole irony of Echo, isn’t it? In Echo she never does. The point is that he still says, in the context of Echo, he promises “this winter” “I will worship you like gold”, this winter being the darkest vantage of my unhappiness and pain, which feels like it will be with me for all time. (This can be supported in argument.) And it was this frail straw I grasped, empty except for my own perceived essence. (If he can still find me worth of adoration (Christ!) during this unholy all-encompassing low, maybe you’re still worth something.) Having made a short and simple story very long, the conversation I thought of ensuing (I can only think them, as there is no one to talk to) was in fact brief, resuming at “I fed on myself.”

                “Want to know how I did that? –I put my awareness into other people, and it converted them, so that they in turn responded to save me as I fell into oblivion. Their response is based on my own essence, what I gave despite everything. It is the same, in essence, as dining on your own blood. That is how I survived you.”

Can’t see my connection? C’Mon! Given that I performed this whole act while my father was crucifying me inside my own mind, and my awareness (anything pertaining to my religious belief, the union, spiritual connection, The Kingdom, anything beyond the material) was completely destroyed (I died). What better analogy is there? It’s blood of the spirit. It’s a spiritual death. And it’s the same “death” Bono’s putting me through now, nice and slow this time. I’m surviving on what I myself gave. (I suppose the meager nature of the feast is to my own account.) I successfully gave love to myself, in a way that’s true. I am responsible for my own existence. I drank my own blood, received it from these others. I gave myself life, the validity to exist.

You see it had to come down to this, go this far. I have to live through the consequences of Bono abandoning me. Because it is then I bite the bullet, that the circle finally becomes complete. It is then that Trent saves me, you see, and that validation is his access to Grace. Because there is inherent value in saving my existence that he can’t find in saving his own. But he gains access through my blood, my complete abandonment, and the fact that my complete recovery is based in part, in himself. (Bono destroys me, and so it’s him who’s still holding me together.

Which in analogy, makes us a circle of blood drinkers, doesn’t it? It’s never been more than an analogy through all of history. I’m sorry Catholics, but it’s just bread and wine, and your allusion was spiritual, wasn’t it? You claim it represents spiritual restoration in Christ. [Well, Christ showed up too.] Well, I hate to rain on your parade, but what about encountering an existence, or existences, where this literally occurred as fact, and may, perhaps, be proven? Mine is comparatively real, whereas yours is relatively subjective. Not all of Christendom could have done a thing for Trent’s soul, but I did. I am that transmutation, that becoming of the bodies of other people. So in that context, it is more honest then, for members of this common identity to consider themselves a true society of blood drinkers, isn’t it? Hence an allusion to vampires? For indeed they are the monster that literally achieves eternal life through the consumption of blood. And so we shall live, (with narry a drop having graced our lips, but the same analogy). However, we are the successfully the inverse of the monster, for no one was sacrificed, and no one was lost to another to sustain us. In the beginning, I fed on myself. Trent gave to me. The circle is complete. I would hardly expect someone else to recognize such a distinction. The hairsplitting is my department. But seeing as I know where the hair splitting lies, I can vibe out on a song like “I’m a vampire and you’re a vampire too” with total identity and total impunity, and emerge unscathed.

I gave Barbara the merest inkling of insight into this by stating how the vampire myth was the inverse of the communion ritual. She responded, “You read too much.”

The point of the vampire invocation is that it is a literalized variant on the Christian on the Christian communion ritual [inverted by its exclusion of Grace and Divinity]. The point is that we graduated to the true sense of the communion ritual [in a sense becoming a literalized variant on the vampire analogy with none of its perversions by having accessed self-sufficiency while simultaneously accessing Christ as Grace]. I’d challenge you, from the point of a sense of common identity, to find anything that would articulate such a subtle shift so succinctly. (Not that anyone’s being that clever, but how else, as an unbeliever, would you put it? If all you were working from was a sense of common identity, which the song attempts to affirm?) Of course, probably the Pet Shop Boys themselves, and certainly audience members are assuming the dark attributes.  They’ll base their common identity on that.  In so doing, they will define themselves as preferentially evil according to their own true colours. That’s the other gambit to this game that keeps arising, how it tricks people into defining themselves.