Tori Amos

“I feel like I’m in a dream, I’m in some crazy dream, boy. I feel like I’ve made a movie with my baby, with my baby. We were, we were riding through the mountains. Then we found some rocks, and then you told me, ‘look closer baby. You’re a diamond. You’re a diamond, just like this rock could be.’

“You’re a diamond to me.” (11/18/07, Melbourne, Fl.)

Surrender. Then start your engines. Have we all got the bends? Am I really sinking this low?

We’re past her deal with the devil now. She knows just what she gave up to get here. And she knows that this is madness.

When she couldn’t sustain the spark she retreated to the opposite element: she tried to hold the entire sea inside herself. If the sea is in her and she is in the sea there’s no pressure – it’s easy to be an underwater thing. She will grow her own fins and dance the Sufis alone.

Underneath the waves she has discovered her first mistake: you cannot live alone within a single element. She tried to embody Pele, but no woman can be aflame all the time. And now she wants to live in the deep, just liquid diamonds of light trickling in from the faraway surface to remind her of solid ground.

But she cannot be that mermaid she once imagined. Can he bring me his jeans, with her name still on them? She sees now what she was really asking: “Bobby, bring me those chains.”

That watery bass, half sink and half swim. Coming up for air, slowly, after sublimating every single hope.

“I would close my eyes when he would appear. And I would follow him. And he would say things like, ‘come here…’ And I would go.” (VH1 Storytellers)

We are at the nadir.

Take your ease, and your happiness, and your country, and your god. Leave me alone to wail into the emptiness.

This is a lament for every child lost. Skeeter with her heart on a tree. That bat-winged boy, harbinger of death in every town, but Tori believes he is going to save her if she just follows him.

She will follow him to bottom of herself. Into Mordor. He is Lucifer, so sane, building a world out of flame. You don’t need the light on to guide you through the southern lands.

Is it really as easy as saying yes? If she burns it all down can she learn their ease? Or, is she still stuck with the beauty of her pain, screaming in the cathedral.

Sweet Jean. Not every redhead is a phoenix.

“If I had a different sensibility, then you know I think I could, you know, really fulfill someone down there, where a lot of men in their lives don’t. And eating pussy is a metaphor, too – it’s about crawling in there, being with their juices, really being with them.” (Unknown, from Here. In My Head)

This has so many edges. Tart and prickly, raspberries are.

Raspberry Swirl is about flavor. Raining flavor. What does it look like? Depth. Sweet ginger. Sweat. Damp moss. Yummy candy. The South Pacific.

Ripe fruit.

The hilarity of Tori obliquely saying, “you have to lick it before you kick it.”

But where does it fit in this narrative? Already it is clear that we’ve lost something – a spark, a voice, a way home. Is she even a woman anymore? She is not your senorita, but she’s still not part of your patriarchal tribe.

Berdache, they called the bodies that contained the masculine and the feminine spirit at once.

She’s telling her Beenie, “I know he can’t do it for you. And you need it. And if he can’t – won’t – I will be there. Everybody knows I’m her friend. Everybody knows I’m her man.”

Yes, Tori. But have you forgotten how to be yourself?

“I see a black dove. I see its face clearly. The dove is transparent, like it is made of ice. I can see my hand through it.” (Die Zeit, November 11, 1999)

She is so small inside of her blanket fort, telling a fairytale to herself.

We are eavesdroppers. Fly, she coos. You don’t need a spaceship. The galaxy will guide you back to the source. Find the center. Find the spark.

Every time the song dilates for a chorus it never quite recedes back to its previous size. The world expands, the voice gets surer.

She will not be the devil, but she will lie with the snakes, her sisters.

Does she really feel that cold? She never let on how insane it was in that tiny, kinda scary house. The stars she is following, they have already died.

On the other side of the galaxy.