Tori Amos

“I feel as if I’ve been able to try on many different archetypes. So much so that it feels like a Pandora’s box of archetypes sometimes. But not all of them figure in to my personal myths.” (Piece by Piece)

Pandora’s Aquarium was the first song to come after the bloodletting ended and the water cycle began, yet we discover it at the end of our journey.

It is in apposition to Spark. It’s about knowing how to float above a pool of things so frightening you cannot name them. Pandora’s aquarium.

The Lord of the Flies is the embodiment of those terrifying things, and he was diagnosed as sound. A paradox of sound. Just the ringing in your ears.

So don’t be afraid. We’ll all float on. Okay?

The moral is she hasn’t found her spark. But she has learned some things. She is not Persephone, that’s for sure – no fertile queen, but also done living in the underworld.

She has discarded her archetypes for just a moment, splayed carefully, face pressed against the surface. She is just going to float for a while. And the whole world can line up with complaints, but the only danger is that she loses the ability to open her mouth. To taste. To speak.

To breathe.

And we’ll all float on.

Okay?

Alright.

“This was a very dark time for me. I kept seeing all these children that had been separated from their mother. They seemed to be coming through the door with the songs ushering them in. I saw the songs shadowed by these children, and it appeared to me as this hotel with this choir ushering themselves in and out through doorless entrances.” (A Piano booklet)

Only now is she ready to admit some things about herself.

She was burnt out. A husk. Drinking anything to drown the flames – wine, men, blood. She drank it all in until she lost her spark. Almost brave, almost pregnant. Almost in love.

It doesn’t matter that this isn’t about Tori – that she was the perfect, precious, pristine, pre-natal-vitamin-taking willing vessel. Of course she wasn’t a playboy mommy.

The point is, she might as well have been, because she still feels the same blame. She could have just as well been a showgirl. She doesn’t know why she can’t hold the spark.

It doesn’t matter how many hosanna’s you sing; god sometimes just don’t come through.

She doesn’t know that it’s just protein deficiency, that Duncan can give her a shot in the leg ever day and she will be right as rain, that her spark returns in the future. She’s crying over church bells. She does not know about the protein yet, so she is making up another fairytale.

Anything.

“Imagine that you have been able to let yourself into this fascinating architectural space but you’re in only one room and you do not know how to get to the other rooms because as of now there are no doorways. It becomes like a sonic puzzle.” (Piece by Piece)

This is a song about being nowhere. A hotel beneath ground. A straggling man in the midst of her hotel of choirgirls.

This is a song that is like the inside of a black hole. Was this what was waiting on the other side of the galaxy all along? A naked singularity. A paradox of sound.

He was wild, once. She has to learn to let him crash down. This is important. She has to worry about holding up herself before holding up anyone else. Are they ever meant to meet again? Is she made of matter or antimatter?

A paradox of sound. She’ll meet him in King Solomon’s mines, if they even exist. And, even if they did, could we ever get there and back?

Exit 75, if we can drive that far. On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair. I had to find the passage back to the place I was before.

“I’m still alive,” she insists.

It’s a start.

“My heart goes out to where that song comes from. It’s very much about thinking you were loved for who you were, and realizing you weren’t and realizing maybe you don’t love yourself.” (uncredited, Here. In My Head)

Isn’t it interesting how the choirgirl hotel is suddenly about the men who have checked out?

He has always been sweeter than her, sugar to her wine. “If you could see me now.” Now that she’s been forged and drowned, like the sharpest sword.

The beauty of this song is the ambiguity. Girls have to know when a kiss in the rain is only romance because of the weather.

Just because you’re wet doesn’t mean you felt the spark.

And then you’re thinking, “Oh, god, could it be the weather?”

What if it’s not?

How will I know?

“When I use this term, the Dark Prince, this is my definition of a male essence that is able to shed light in darkness. … A lot of people around me at that time were turned on by cheap come-ons, drawn to thinking that the Dark Prince was somebody who would handcuff you and give you the orgasm of your life. Well, he doesn’t need to handcuff you. It’s boring. Go handcuff yourself.” (Piece by Piece)

“A lot of people think darkness is making somebody emotionally defecate on themselves. That’s baby demon stuff. … These baby demons can be wonderful in some ways. Wonderful in some ways, highly conscious in some ways, but until they’ve done their work on their shadow, they are more concerned with the power of seduction and the control over another Being than anything else.” (Lucifer, per Tori, Piece by Piece)

Finally, she emerges from her shell.

After visiting her personal nadir and coming back up for air everyone else’s aura is evident. Suddenly all the minor demons are plain as day, and she’s watching in mute horror as they eek out a living as ineffectual parasites.

Flukemen. Huge reptiles gnawing on a woman’s neck, the carpet a blood-soaked sponge.

Is it true that devils end up like you? Something safe for the picture frame? No longer devils, but simple symbiotes? Well guess what, fucker – the real prince of darkness isn’t defined – defamed – by his vampirism. Lucifer is more than a leech.

But you need the blood so bad you will do anything to get it. Change your life, your look, your heart rate and the way you breathe. That is the depth of your fear and loathing. She’s got your shaving your legs. Shimmy once and do it again.

“Bring your sister,” she chides, “if you can’t handle it.”

As if there is any question. Clearly you cannot handle it.

Tori is on the other side of the swirl now – more herself than ever before. Berdache, masculine and feminine. Kachina, corporeal and ethereal.

“Everybody knows that I’m her man,” she reminds you, “and I have a message for you: you don’t need one of these to let me inside of you. Getting fucked is not about physical penetration – it’s about emotional penetration. Either way, I can impale you.

“And for all of your animus, you just doesn’t have that power. So, how’s your jesus christ been hanging?”

Flaccid? It’s not the side effects of the cocaine.