Was out most of the day, so here's something on a few of the song lyrics that are most meaningful to me. Random introspective blather, really, rather than writing, but it's the best thing I wrote all day.


I offer grace, I offer blood, I offer everything 'til my heart is crystal clear. -Sacrifice Theory

The words I lived by, passionately, until around the beginning of 2006. Then I realized that endless self-sacrifice in search of purity was completely destroying me, and wasn't doing nearly enough in terms of making other people happy or bettering the world to justify that. It was a strange revelation and has led to a complete change in the way I live, one I'm still dealing with. Paradoxically, it takes a lot to stop trying to give everything. It took a lot to convince myself that a heart isn't supposed to be crystal clear, it's supposed to be hot and red and messy and alive. But that line from Sacrifice Theory still haunts me because it is the best wording I've ever found of the beautiful illusion that pushed and pulled me in the wrong direction long before I'd ever heard the song.

Your sins into me, oh my beautiful one. -Silver and Cold

If one song is my universe, Silver and Cold is it. I can't even come close to describing what that song, and this lyric in particular, does to me. It's... it's about being strong enough to carry another person's soul in the palm of one's hand and centered enough to take all their wrongnesses without becoming poisoned. It's the satisfaction of the need I tried to fill in the Sacrifice Theory way, but healthier and, in the end, more beautiful: one doesn't purify oneself by taking on other people's burdens, one is purified by having one's burdens taken. No one should have to carry everything on their own, so people hold each other, take each other's burdens. (Before I die, I am finding my Silver-and-Cold person: someone strong enough to carry everything I picked up over all the years of trying to be pure. Not that I would make them carry it all-- I just have to find them. Make sense? Not really? Thought not, but I'll keep looking anyway.)

Am I the star beneath the stairs? -Morningstar

It's "my" lyric in the sense that I've appropriated it: I "am" the star beneath the stairs sort of like I "am" Scarlett. It's something I identified with, picked up, and twisted into my identity because I had space for it and it fit. I have a friend who is the ghost upon the stage. (...) Stars and spirals are two of the most important pieces of my "symbolism" (it's difficult to explain... somewhere between a metaphysics and a language) and this line always gives me an image of a star beneath a spiral staircase that does interesting things in the symbolism. I'm currently in the process of appropriating "Can you tell me what stopped the rain?" in a similar way. (...)