The Talk of Creatures

The Good Friday Agreement had been signed in 1985. By 1999 the Agreement was beginning to fundamentally change the relationship between the Islands. A date of May 2000 was set for total disarmament of all paramilitary groups. This, however, remains an ongoing project. It will take sixty years: History does not happen overnight. What had happened was much more Free Movement between the Islands and right across Europe as a continent. It was possible to travel to work in two dozen countries. In many senses we had put on the spectacles and were awakened to a new and exciting existence. Like a continent of Mister X Indeed. The signing of the Good Friday Agreement had been at Hillsborough Castle. Much like Mister X Indeed, I would be happy for anybody to draw meaningful inferences from that. Perhaps there is simply a shortage of good names in the world.

The only thing that had really happened, in the intervening years, is that everybody had become Mister X: projecting a narrative that obscures the underlying truth. In a sense, we have all submitted to manipulation by the Twins. In retrospect, listening to God In Three Persons after the events of September 2001, the Twins could be seen to have been a prescient understanding of how the world would be in the future; but, in 1998 and 1999, I discovered that I preferred the Instrumental version. As though, somehow, distance between myself and the narrative salves the knowledge that I am capable of truly horrific behaviour. The knowledge that I am capable of indifference to suffering.

Which is the real apotheosis that Mister X achieves: knowing that he is irredeemably capable of indifference to suffering. Yet, Mister X never ceases to strive towards understanding.

But I see the strings extending
up and down and never ending
as we dance around ourselves and jerk
to all the tunes that only we hear
and the voices only we fear
each inside an island all alone.

Which has the quality of Arminianism and of the Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and severall steps in my Sicknes by John Donne. In particular the words of Meditation XVII from where comes the paraphrase:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Despite the words of Mister X, he knows, having worn the spectacles, that nothing is as simple as he portrays it. In my mind, Mister X has always had the appearance of The Bearded Man in They Live. Ranting about the inequities of our world:

Bearded Man: They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.

Which is exactly what happened to my friends. East Germany to Hungary was fine. But, when your passions are things like The Beatles and pop culture, the thing to do is to get to the magical The West - the mythical land of opportunity. Like innocent children they had assumed that the important things like healthcare would be free. Like me, they had taken to travelling. More globally. Some time in the 1990's they were in America and discovered how free market medicine works. They discovered how being a qualified doctor did not really qualify them to make medical decisions in a free market. They travelled back to Europe. Eventually becoming visible at the home of a different friend. Dying of chronic illnesses and a decade or so of itinerant life. Nostalgic for their old German existence. Utterly devastated by The West.

And the most heart rending part of it all: they would do it all again. All of it. The suffering and loss and the early death. All of it. Which is what God In Three Persons is a soundtrack for. Turning down the sound on the reality of the world and watching the images go by. If you pay too much attention it will tear you apart and leave you incapable of knowing that you are not an island. Like a shadow of Mister X Indeed:

their bond is made of leather not the flesh and blood it used to be.

Which is why God In Three Persons is so incredibly sad. The music is not relentless sadness. The words are not relentlessly downbeat. The sadness is in the World. Peel away the soundtrack while watching live television and eventually you will see a new world. A world in which the identity of the sadness is revealed as being us. We. Everybody. Not someone lacking identity through calculated acts of obscurity but people whose identity is purloined and sold back to them. Like the holy union of the Twins. Their alchemical marriage taking them beyond the relatively naive characters of Arf and Omega or even the Children of The King And Eye. God In Three Persons takes the bonds of your world and shatters them only to return them. It is the soundtrack of a film that does not exist.

Nada: Don't wear them glasses too long. Starts to feel like a knife turnin' in your skull.

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The word r a p e was replaced by ravishment to avoid the automated censor of the forum.