The Talk of Creatures

The song Double Shot (of my baby's love) was banned on many radio stations, due to drinking and sexual references: it was the worst hangover I ever had and she loved me so hard. The Residents first used Double Shot on Third Reich And Roll - and it became a leitmotiv of the God In Three Persons - it leads from overture to epiphany. It is one of the consolations of philosophy - that an epiphanic moment is a universal good.

It might have been assumed that Snakefinger would provide guitar parts; he had performed with on the 13th Anniversary Tour in 1986. Snakefinger died - Linz 1987 - of a heart attack just as There's No Justice in Life was released. In 1988 God In Three Persons was released and in 1989 I listened, for about three months, before putting God In Three Persons away for a decade. The late 1980's had become a graveyard of cultures.

They Live is a strangely appropriate film. Not that the plot of They Live had much in common with the plot of God In Three Persons. They Live came from a short story called Eight O'Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson. Eight O'Clock in the Morning was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in November 1963. Making it as old as at least one Resident. By June 1989, They Live was being understood as a critique of Reaganomics. It was, a bit late - but not as late as The People Under The Stairs. They Live is a world that is, predominantly our own yet slightly different. Technically a theologian, Nelson worked with Michael Moorcock smuggling banned Henry Miller books out of France, which simply adds chiaroscuro to an already obtuse paragraph.

God In Three Persons is a film with an absent visualisation. Unlike Vileness Flats, the unfinished element of God In Three Persons is the unfinished lives. Anybody can speculate as to what Snakefinger might have done had he not died in Linz. In truth it is crass to do so. That does not prevent even the most well intentioned from doing so.

They Live has a five minute or so fight scene. In which the two characters, Nada and Frank, beat the crap out of each other. The motivation: Nada has sunglasses that let you see the world as it really is. When Frank, finally, wears the glasses he sees the world without illusion. Without Maya: the power manifesting the universe giving rise to the illusion or appearance of the phenomenal world. In san serif font, tens of feet high, there are the instructions of existence. Single word injunctions. The distillation of the self help mantras:

   
Which is a masterstroke of world building. Which is where They Live and God In Three Persons become the same thing: the zeitgeist.

Both speculate on a future, once you wear the spectacles. In many senses, both become  "capital accumulated to the point of becoming images" - the spectacular of Debord. The san serif mantras of They Live are, like the logos of God In Three Persons something of the underlying reality. Without the booklet, the music is simply a competent orchestration and arrangement of  Double Shot (of my baby's love). The conceptualism that characterises The Residents was reaching a crescendo and, in many respects, a caesura that appeared as The King and Eye. Without any apparent effort, the Residents accumulated sounds to the point of becoming a self sustaining story. This was the mythopoetic strand that appeared in their early works and continued, developing and maturing using the foils of obscurity and anonymity to drive the prima materia of popular culture into becoming something enduring.

God In Three Persons is a film soundtrack without a film imagetrack. The only way in which to approximate an understanding of the story occured to me to be to adopt the practice of watching television with the sound turned down. In an era where Television has become the whim of demand led pseudoconsumption of intellectual property, the irreproducable nature of watching television with the sound turned down has less conceptual power. It has less impact. It is something from History. It is not, generally, part of making your own entertainment. It is something I stopped doing when I watched the Hillsborough Disaster live. With the sound turned down.

By the time I had seen real dead people being made on television, I had got to Devotion. The way the Hillsborough Disaster unfolded for the next few decades, really ought to have given me some kind of insight into how callous it is possible to be. It was an unedifying moment: real life disaster had, in my mind, ruined my preferred mode of experiencing God In Three Persons. It is like remembering what you were writing when Kennedy got shot. I had never been fond of football. It had been the bane of my childhood that every boy in Liverpool wanted to be a footballer. I wanted to do things like Science. Not kicking a ball about. The only reason I saw football on television was the sound was turned down and music was playing. Watching people die while I entertained myself did not stop me entertaining myself.

somethings coming but not real soon

In 1999, about a decade after I stopped listening to God In Three Persons I was with a friend. His father, a deaf artilleryman, had been at Hillsborough. When he returned and was first asked about Hillsborough he would narrate the match, naming people and what they did to the ball. His narrative ended abruptly when the Referee blew the whistle six minutes in. He never referred to anything but those six minutes. It was then, my friend's mother knew, for certain that he was autistic. He never talked about Hillsborough. People, like me, who were never there, talk about it and have all sorts of opinions on the matter. The truth may be that it was a disaster that transformed a city with the powers of mythopoesis.

For pain and pleasure are the twins
That slightly out of focus spin
Around us till we finally understand
That every thing that gives us pleasure
Also gives us pain to measure

Back in 1989 It was May and I was still listening to God In Three Persons the Hungarian Border had changed. This, for me, was more significant than the Berlin Wall coming down. That would be November 1989 - after the man with his shopping bags faced down a tank on Tianamen Square, the Ayatollah Khomeini's first funeral ended in a riot, Mandela and Botha meeting,  after 300,000 Siberian coal miners went on strike, after Poland got a non-communist prime minister and refugees began pouring into Hungary from the German Democratic Republic. Between May and September I lost contact with friends I had in the Democratic Republic. It was only decades later, in 2006, I found out what happened.

Television Host The feeling is definitely there. It's a new morning in America... fresh, vital. The old cynicism is gone. We have faith in our leaders. We're optimistic as to what becomes of it all. It really boils down to our ability to accept. We don't need pessimism. There are no limits.
They Live

1989 was the year that the Soviet Union collapsed and the endless Cold War was declared over and officially won. In total I listened to God In Three Persons from late February to mid May. Watching the disaster of Hillsborough did not stop me from turning the sound down and playing music. But it was the beginning of the end of watching television and of that transient way of listening to things. Something clicked into place and, somehow, I realised that the media is constructed and not constructed by me.

And we finally realise
That all our lives we love illusion
Neatly caught between confusion
And the need to know we are alive.

The storyline of God In Three Persons is halfway between a film and a radio drama. Unlike the overt hörspiel Storytelling of Voice Of Midnight this is a reminiscence. The kind of story told in retrospect by someone whose experience has left them with an apotheosis that they do not, in reality, understand. The story is sad, terrifying, horrifying and engrossing. Mister X, Indeed" is not a nice person, but he is sympathetic. His role as Narrator against the female Chorus of Laurie Amat defines the story. His character seems to have been drawn from "Colonel Tom" Parker - who, coincidentally, worked for the Hillsborough County Humane Society. This gives no added sense of identifying with him, but coincidences colour existence. We overinterpret coincidence to ensure the world means something.

Mister X assures us that he discovered the conjoined twins whose fate narrates God In Three Persons, almost as a backdrop to the apotheosis that Mister X has. The Twins appear to be male and female, conjoined and miraculous. Devotion? suggests they should have parted almost as they met. By The Touch, parting was impossible. They had become a love story. A kind of ménage ŕ trois. Yet it is a story that the twins have no part in telling. Mister X quotes but nowhere does He or She actually speak. As though Mister X had lived a life with the sound turned down.

Lies can often give you power like a coffin filled with flowers gives life to the living, not the dead.

Despite imposing himself between the Audience and the Twins, both between the Audience within God In Three Persons and between the Twins and the Listening Audience, Mister X is never really clear if he knows what the story is that he is telling. He is never really clear if it was He was in control or if They. It seems that he experiences, during a violent ravishment that ends the conjoint nature of the Twins and also gives Them a voice:

We can't believe that you're so dumb
to think we needed anyone
to show us what we've known about for years.

In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes describes the origins of sexuality in a eulogy more absurd than funny. In primal times people had double bodies: spherical creatures, wheeling around like clowns doing cartwheels - faces and limbs turned away from each Other. These primal people were powerful and existed as three sexes: the children of the Sun, who were all male; the children of the Moon who were all female and the children of the Earth who were male and female. It seems that these Children planned to set upon the gods of Olympus and so were sliced in two by Zeus. Zeus could have destroyed them with lightning, but did not want to deprive himself of their devotions and offering and so decided to cripple them. These spherical people are the prima materia of an alchemical marriage that carries itself as a theme throughout the Residents' works.

Compressed into Kiss Of Flesh is the hubris of Zeus. Mister X, had no idea if these were the Children of the Sun, Moon or Earth. He had simply assumed - and more, he had assumed their sexuality was fixed just as he assumed his own was. In his desperation to have only his story told in a manner that suited him, he glossed over the parts that he did not want to reveal. Much the same as The Bunny Boy the core of the story takes place in a secret room. This is not the same kind of room as the Cave of the Apocalypse or Roger's Secret Room but more like the Watts Tower. Not so much secret as to space or place but secret as to purpose. It was where the Trinity retired to seek inspiration. Built by Mister X, inspired by the Twins, it is never really clear to Mister X if he is being manipulated. Even raping them he can never be certain of his own will. Mister X embodies the problem of Free Will and Determinism in his relationship to the Twins.

The text never resolves if the it was an act of will by Mister X or an act of submission to the Twins which creates, for a monotheistic audience, something a good deal more subtly blasphemous than any claims about Wormwood. There is no reason that a human mind could apprehend that any kind of Godhead would visit ravishment and mutilation upon itself. Yet, if the Twins had been in control all the time, that would seem to be what happened. Mister X was never really sure.The certainty of Mister X is a narrative of the finding of faith, which carries with it the danger of heresy. For Mister X the heresy is that he becomes incestuously part of the triune deity. A shocking, but subtle, matter that very much turns the reality of religious experience on the mixture of sexes - Sun, Moon, Earth - and where in that triangle Mister X fits.

Thousands of people left East Germany in 1989. They had, according to West German Law, a complete right to do so. They were not foreign. The official narrative of people in The West was that the the Wall Collapsed and thus was The World Saved. In truth, tens of thousands of people began shifting across the border into Hungary long before the Hungarians removed the barbed wires at the borders. Many managed to make the hairpin journey from East Germany to Hungary to Austria and then to West Germany. Some got lost. They were refugees.

Without the kind of Internet that exists now, without the constant connection of mobile telephones, people lost touch with each other more easily. It was the fax machine that destroyed the Soviet Union's grasp on intellectual property and so the ability to control what people thought. The fax machine could take an essay in Moscow and, effectively, publish it anywhere there was a telephone line. Like Mister X and the Aliens of They Live and Zeus, something had slipped beneath their attention. The World was not as they portrayed it.

A tingling in my tangled brain
was screaming that this was insane,
but it also told me, "touch it", too.
 "Stand aside", I told the masses,
and with that I made my passage
from the lonely to the only side.
Openly they smiled to greet me,
like they always knew they'd meet me
somewhere
walking up and down the road.

The last time, in 1989, that I listened to God In Three Persons it was just after my friends decided to leave. There was tension and a certain inevitability that something was about to change. History, does not really happen overnight. It takes time. Between 1989 and 2006, my friends became invisible. They had left in February and by May the were the invisible people. Almost two decades of inacessible existence. Much like Hillsborough, their absence was peripheral to me. Yet I considered we were friends. By about 1998 or 1999 I had forgotten why I had not listened to God In Three Persons in about a decade. So I did.