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Introduction
Steven Wilson’s solo albums thus far have shied away from the narrative-based concept albums which characterized Porcupine Tree’s final few albums, which have allowed Steven to develop his sonic palate in ways previously unseen. This proved especially true with the plethora of sounds explored in Grace for Drowning and the 70’s prog revivalism of The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories). As for a concept, Hand. Cannot. Erase. is a full-fledged concept album with a storyline loosely inspired by the lamentable fate of Joyce Carol Vincent—an English woman who died alone in her apartment on Christmas Eve and had her body left undiscovered for three years. The term ‘loosely’ remains apt because Hand. Cannot. Erase. deviates (especially towards the end) from the real-life events of Joyce Carol Vincent, but the real-life events do influence a reading of the album’s lyrics.
Another notable thing about Hand. Cannot. Erase. comes from how Steven thoroughly embraced outlets aside from the music itself to convey information about the plot. That doesn’t diminish the album’s importance. Instead, it makes analysis of Hand. Cannot. Erase. into a scenario akin to Deadwing in that there’s more to analyze than just the album. In the case of Hand. Cannot. Erase., Steven conveys information via the album, the music videos (to “Perfect Life,” the title track, “Transience,” “Happy Returns,” and especially “Routine,” whose music video accompanies live performances), a blog whose entries are written from the perspective of the album’s protagonist, and cryptic materials reserved in the deluxe edition (which were photocopied to me via a Discord server, without which this analysis wouldn’t have been possible). The last of which include a list of coordinates leading to the sites of various tragedies in England, an elaborate cryptogram known as the “Key of Skeleton,” a massive 120-page booklet containing loads of symbolic artwork (some of it relevant to the story), copies of H’s (woman who’s the album’s protagonist) school report/birth certificate/childhood drawings/notebook, and newspaper cuttings of fictional missing persons. Most of which supplements the album in some shape or fashion.
In more ways than one, this is the densest and most mind-screwy album that Steven’s done in any project. This is by far the most analytical work I’ve had to do for any piece so far. Simply because there’s so much to take in. If I didn’t love this album as much as I did (it’s the finest album that Steven’s recorded in any project), I’d grow sick of the album fast. But that idea of repeated plays resulting in albums growing on the listener has always been a defining characteristic of Prog and nowhere is that truer in Steven’s entire catalog than on Hand. Cannot. Erase. This album is one which I declared an instant classic when I first heard it in 2015 and delving into the ridiculous amount of thought Steven put into every nook and cranny has made my appreciation for the album grow with time. It’s his best solo album so far, on par with (if not exceeding) prior classics like In Absentia and Fear of a Blank Planet, and a potential Album of the Decade candidate (along with Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly). That being said, despite this album’s complexity to fully unpack, one can appreciate this album even without divulging every aspect of it—I did back in February of 2015.
Since I’ve stated before that Steven Wilson (in his solo career) hasn’t made the same album twice, that entails that Hand. Cannot. Erase. takes its sonic inspiration from a different source than Steven’s prior albums. In press releases in the lead-up to the album’s release, Steven mentioned that one album which held a heavy influence on the music of Hand. Cannot. Erase. was The Dreaming by Kate Bush. With this in mind, the musical palate of Hand. Cannot. Erase. feels colder and more electronics-heavy than The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories)—an update of the sounds of 80s progressive-pop into a darker, grittier, realistic vein that grips listeners as potently as anything Steven’s done before.
Because of the amount of content to analyze for Hand. Cannot. Erase., the structure of this review will be quite different from anyone before this. Lyrics will be covered last, but there’s a lot to cover before taking a look at the lyrics. First, there’s a simple summary of the concept of Hand. Cannot. Erase. along with a definition of the album’s title. Second, there’s the in-character blog and passages which develop the central character of the album, H. Third, there’s the detail of the fictional missing persons and how they thematically connect to H, along with the content included in the book included with Deluxe Edition of the album—which is relevant in understanding H and the missing persons. Fifth, the complicated scenario regarding three factors (the coordinates, the Key of Skeleton, and the numbers embedded within “Regret #9” and “Ancestral”) will be elaborated upon—but may not be solved. Finally, there’s a hypothesis on the Visitors and the final fate of H which the lyrics may bear out. Only then will there be a complete lyrical analysis.
Summary of Concept + Meaning of Title
Hand. Cannot. Erase. concerns a secluded young woman in her thirties named H living in modern-day London. H is haunted by visions of her sister (named J) who disappeared when H was thirteen years old. H is a painter (reflected in the album artwork) who finds some solace in her art, but sabotages all personal connections because they can’t seem to live up to J. This includes potential romantic relationships (“Hand Cannot Erase”) and familial bonds (“Happy Returns”). This only gets compounded once social media and technology are brought into the picture (“Home Invasion”).
H also takes an interest in newspaper clippings of missing persons—believing that the people disappeared in order to make a new life. This comes to a head in “Routine,” a song that functions as a story-within-a-story told from the perspective of one of the missing persons in order to show what drove them to disappear. However, the further one delves into the album, the more one gets the sensation that H isn’t a mentally-stable person. There are numerous passages in both the album lyrics and the journals which suggest that H’s grip on reality grows more-and-more tenuous over time.
One sterling example of H’s potential insanity comes about via the presence of The Visitors, a set of aliens which H are responsible for the disappearances of J and the missing persons in the newspaper clippings. This could be chalked up to listeners of the album to H being a conspiracy theorist, but several passages of the in-character blog describe H having her thoughts intruded by The Visitors. Such a detail informs how one interprets the lyrics of later songs (especially “Ancestral”).
As the album winds to a close, H writes a letter to her brother (“Happy Returns”) in an effort to reach out to someone. However, the album’s final track (“Ascendant Here On…”) ends the album with H’s final fate left ambiguous—it’s unclear whether she dies, loses her last grasp of sanity, or is abducted by the Visitors.
Throughout the album, H has a tendency to want to erase elements of her own existence prior to her disappearance. But the title of the album itself undermines the possibility of this ever being successful. Sure, H could commit suicide in a way which her body would never be found, but records that she existed at all would still persist. In this respect, the work of one’s own hands cannot erase the evidence of one’s existence. Such a notion is reinforced by way of a visual metaphor in the album artwork—the messed-up pink paint which matches H’s hair appears to have had a hand smear the paint around: a literal instance of a hand being unable to destroy evidence.
Blog Connections
In the lead-up to the album, Steven wrote a blog at handcannoterase.com (site is dead, but accessible via Wayback Machine) through the perspective of H with a total of forty-five entries dated between 2008 and 2015. These entries run parallel to the events of the album, but provide insight into H’s character which isn’t present on the album. One may call this a cop-out for not putting this development on the album, but I believe that Steven intended for both the album and the blog to be used in-tandem with each other—one informs the other and vice-versa.
Entry 1 (8th October 2008):
30 years old today (Josef K was arrested on his 30th birthday).
On a surface level, this doesn’t tell a reader/listener much about H except for the fact that she was born on October 8th, 1978 (a date which doesn’t have much historical significance). However, the fact that H just hit thirty carries symbolic weight considering that that involves antiquated notions of her best years being behind her. Given that Steven once used this quote (circa 2017) that holds relevance:
There are exceptions, but most of the really great pop and rock musicians, whether it was The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, The Doors, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, The Who…almost all of them made their most important work before they got to 30. But in my case most of the music I made before I was 30 was very formative to me, and I feel like I’m getting better and better at what I do.
That’s an irony in the stark difference between Steven’s viewpoint on aging’s effect on art and that of H. In fact, the detached expression of H in the photograph reinforces the notion that they’re exact opposites. Steven’s age is one where he’s vibrant while H’s black-and-white stare indicates a forlorn quality.
But the meat-and-potatoes of analysis in this passage rests upon the allusion (allusions to low and high culture will become common in the blog) inherent to “Josef K was arrested on his 30th birthday.” For the unaware, the name “Josef K” is that of the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s 1925 (published posthumously) novel The Trial. Furthermore, in the novel, Josef K’s arrested and prosecuted by an inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime kept concealed from both him and the reader. In essence, this allusion serves to posit the modern-day mind of H as a Kafkaesque atmosphere—one that’s complex yet illogical (usually due to bureaucracy). But the nature of what makes H’s reality Kafkaesque is not the same as that of Josef K.
Entry 2 (15th October 2008):
Yesterday I found an old notebook of stories and poems I wrote when I was 9 or 10 years old. In the front of the notebook it said “In the event of me becoming famous this must not be published!”. I must have written that last part a few years later. So why didn’t I just throw it away then? (sentimental) One of the stories in the notebook is about a man who works in one of those giant construction cranes, and he doesn’t have a house so he lives there too, high in the sky above the city, but he’s really happy there, and he’s made the cabin into a nice home. Every night he looks down on the city and sees all the people and what they are doing, but he has no wish to join them. Then one day he’s looking down and he witnesses a murder in the street, and he knows that he should climb down from the crane and go to the police to tell them what he saw, but he just can’t bring himself to go back to the world below, so he keeps it to himself. I’ve seen some strange and violent things from my window gazing down on the city too. Last night when I looked out a man was on the ground being repeatedly kicked by 2 others at the bus stop. Afterwards he didn’t move for a long time, and no one else was around, so I was on the verge of going down to check on him. But then he finally got up and staggered off, looked ok, probably the alcohol numbed the pain. After that I had a drink myself.
There’s a lot of small fragments of information in this passage—and some of it pertains to Steven just as much as it does to H. For instance, the sentence “Yesterday I found an old notebook of stories and poems I wrote when I was 9 or 10 years old” can be construed as an autobiographical element since “10 years old” was the age that Steven first explored music. However, the “notebook of stories and poems” places this firmly in H territory since that’s a parallel to the eventual ‘Book of Regrets’ and the message of “In the front of the notebook it said “In the event of me becoming famous this must not be published”” only pushes it further into H’s character. Particularly since pages of that notebook are included in the Deluxe Edition materials.
One theme common to the blog entries is present in the sentence “I must have written that last part a few years later. So why didn’t I just throw it away then? (sentimental)” Sure there’s “a few years later” indicating interplay between the past, present (as well as “sentimental” involving Steven referring to an earlier song of his), but the analysis should hinge on H’s refusal to throw the notebook away. In that inaction, there’s the first taste of the human condition leaving people to instinctually lean towards the illogical—a recurring motif throughout the blog posts.
H’s next observation comes in the form of a run-on: “One of the stories in the notebook is about a man who works in one of those giant construction cranes, and he doesn’t have a house so he lives there too, high in the sky above the city, but he’s really happy there, and he’s made the cabin into a nice home.” From the structure alone, one has grammatical foreshadowing towards H’s eventual decline. However, the contents of that run-on also hold thematic significance in two ways. First, “the stories in the notebook” parallel the newspaper clippings that H collects later—one of which fuel the song “Routine.” Secondly, the “man who works in one of those giant construction cranes” mirrors the isolated lifestyle that H ends up living. That second notion’s further supported by the next sentence (“Every night he looks down on the city and sees all the people and what they are doing, but he has no wish to join them”), wherein the reader/listener should note that H ends up doing the exact same thing.
In the next long sentence (“Then one day he’s looking down and he witnesses a murder in the street, and he knows that he should climb down from the crane and go to the police to tell them what he saw, but he just can’t bring himself to go back to the world below, so he keeps it to himself”), an astute reader notices that the isolation of the construction worker isn’t without consequences. That “he can’t bring himself to go back to the world below” results in a conflict between his inner anxiety and morality—either his own or what society foists upon him. That the construction worker gets anxious over witnessing “a murder in the street” suggests that he has stronger ties to the world than H does by the end of her narrative.
I do say ‘end’ since H—at this stage of the game—has more characteristics in common with the construction worker than one would initially think. H even says as much via the line “I’ve seen some strange and violent things from my window gazing down on the city too.” But there is one difference to be extracted from the line that follows (“Last night when I looked out a man was on the ground being repeatedly kicked by 2 others at the bus stop”): that H’s isolation is a security blanket for her. Especially since an incident like this fuels one of her fears: violence falling upon her.
But reality isn’t a story—a notion which can be ascertained from the final three sentences of the blog post. Those sentences read as follows: “Afterwards he didn’t move for a long time, and no one else was around, so I was on the verge of going down to check on him. But then he finally got up and staggered off, looked ok, probably the alcohol numbed the pain. After that I had a drink myself.” That first sentence has the phrase “and no one else was around” to consider—a phrase where the image of this beaten man elicits the notion that society is an agent of naturalism insofar as it doesn’t give a fuck about the people it spits out. Considering Steven Wilson’s previous tirades on the risks of technology (see the Fear of a Blank Planet album), this image is also emblematic of technology facilitating human cruelty thanks to self-centeredness and apathy. However, reality thwarting any tidy narrative comes about by the old man walking the whole thing off, but that thwarting of reality is somewhat tempered by H’s description of “looked ok”—a clue entailing that appearances can’t tell how a person actually is at any given moment. In other words, “looked” can’t serve as a 1:1 reflection of the man’s state-of-being. Furthermore, the walking-off serves the same purpose both technology (in society at large) and alcohol—a numbing effect that avoids dealing with the world in a healthy way. That H “had a drink” herself after witnessing the beating connotes that she’s not that different from the man who was beaten.
Entry 3 (9th January 2009):
No man is an island.
Was that meant to apply to women too? Because I feel like an island. From an early age I remember being alone, and quite liking it. When I had to mix with other children I found it hard to fit in, and I was easily bored. I suppose that’s pretty selfish, but I did try. The older you get the less you can be bothered trying to please others at your own expense, though of course a little give and take is always important. I was always like that. My mother is Italian by birth, she moved to England when she met my Father in her early twenties. I think Dad thought with an Italian wife he could forgo most of his responsibility for looking after kids and the household. But he underestimated her, and her deep curiosity about the world (which she invested in me). In fact she could
never be much bothered with house work or running after me and my brother when we were kids, so from an early age I learned to cook my own meals and do my own washing. It was only when I did go to another kid’s house that I realised that wasn’t exactly normal. Now it seems strange to me that my mother had children at all, but I suppose for a young woman then there simply wasn’t a choice. Or at least there was, but it would never have occurred to anyone to have made it.
My father was a loner too. The picture I have in my memory is of him hunched over his desk, lost in circuit boards and diagrams, usually in the same scruffy clothes he’d worn for weeks. He would only get properly dressed if he was going out (hardly ever), or receiving a visitor (almost never). The closest he got to giving me fatherly advice was to remind me and my brother that I had the whole of my life to get things right and if things didn’t make sense now, then don’t worry, be patient; “It’s only the start”. My mother just said that if I was happy then she was happy. And I suppose I was, so they both left me to it.
H’s first sentences of this blog post (“No man is an island./Was that meant to apply to women too? Because I feel like an island.”) contain quite a bit of info to pick apart. For starters, aficionados of Steven’s projects will notice that “No man is an island” is an abridgement of ‘No Man is an Island (Except the Isle of Man), the original name of No-Man, Steven’s progressive-pop collaborative project with singer Tim Bowness. That winking allusion to Steven’s own work leads to another train-of-thought via the phrase “Was that meant to apply to women, too,” where an aphorism gets picked apart for a valid reason. That reason boils down to chiding the possible sexism of those who created the aphorisms to begin with—the aphorism applies to all people regardless of whether or not the creator intended for it to apply only to males. Such universal applicability may not necessarily be a good thing considering that the phrase “I feel like an island” remains imbued with a symbol of the isolation which leads to a point of crisis during the song “Ancestral.”
That crisis contains relevancy towards the next two sentences: “From an early age I remember being alone, and quite liking it. When I had to mix with other children I found it hard to fit in, and I was easily bored.” Such a memory of prizing “being alone” at “an early age” indicates that the seeds of H’s future isolation were planted early. As a result, the facts that “had” entails H considers interaction a necessity, that “I found it hard to fit in” links to anxieties in H, and that those early seeds constitute the backbone of habits which morph into self-destructive patterns which seem impossible to shatter.
Following that comes a sentence (“I suppose that’s pretty selfish, but I did try”) with thematic and lyrical connections towards H’s present and future. In terms of future, “but I did try” connects to a line from “Ancestral” (“You can try if you want to”). That line’s context is the opposite of how the similar phrase is presented here (for reasons that’ll be made clear in the analysis for “Ancestral”). However, the connection to the H’s present is presented via the word “suppose,” which suggests that—prior to now—H paid little mind to the notion of how she behaves in a panic. In this regard, one can conclude that H has gone through her life (up to this point) based on blind instinct, not conscious decision-making.
Three songs on the album are colored by how one reads these two sentences: “The older you get the less you can be bothered trying to pleas others at your own expense, though of course a little give and take is always important. I was always like that.” This excerpt as a whole reflects H’s perceived trauma of losing her sister to the Visitors and how that experience fried H into solitude because she fears losing someone like that again. But in fragments, this whole section affects (in track-list order) “Hand Cannot Erase,” “Ancestral,” and “Happy Returns.” First, the lines in “Hand Cannot Erase” regarding trust (“Cause trust means we don’t have to be together everyday”) into something that H tells herself but doesn’t live up to. As for “Ancestral,” that track’s role in the album’s narrative shows why the removal of “give and take” proves hazardous. And then “Happy Returns” registers as a last-ditch effort at reversing things before H reaches the point of no return (whether that be abduction by the Visitors, transported to an insane asylum, or dying).
The passages touching upon H’s mother and how her father perceived his wife (“My mother is Italian…about the world (which she invested in me)”) hold considerable depth that touches upon critiques regarding racial and gender-centric inequalities whilst linking them to H’s isolation. First, the detail that H’s “mother is Italian by birth” and her Father’s from “England” is one that carries some weight. To spell it out, H’s genetics are of mixed ethnicity (Italian and English) and because she’s not in a home which fully matches her identity, that’s another factor which exacerbates her isolation.
Next, the sentence “I think Dad thought with an Italian wife he could forgo most of the responsibility for looking after kids and the household” proves revealing of H’s father and of Steven himself. On the topic of H’s father, everything after “Dad thought” can read as the sexist thoughts of a man, yet “think” connotes that since H isn’t her father, she can’t know for sure. As for Steven himself, he’s stated that the “responsibility” mentioned here is something he feels he can’t balance with his music, so he’s opted not to have children. This can register as male privilege due to systemic sexism or it can register as Steven offering a self-aware critique of men who try to have it both ways without a willingness to adjust their lives once children come into the equation. In the case of the latter, it can come across as Steven feeling as though any children and women are better off that he’s opted not to have children since it’d be no different from this scene. That Steven felt that he knew where to draw the line reveals a sense of maturity, self-respect, and prioritization in his own character.
Via the sentence “But he underestimated her, and her deep curiosity about the world (which she invested in me),” hard links between a person’s isolation and gender-centric inequalities are established. Namely through the notion that H’s father “underestimated” his wife serves to highlight systematic sexism as another element facilitating isolation in women. This branches off into “her deep curiosity about the world (which she invested in me)” and how that’s a quality that’s not in vogue with the advent of technology—suggesting that H’s generation has to re-evaluate how that quality is expressed. Otherwise, it’s a quality that may foster disillusionment in a dark variant of ‘curiosity killed the cat.’
Such disillusionment creates an ironic twist in the form of the next sentence: “In fact she could never be much bothered with house work or running after me and my brother when we were kids, so from an early age I learned to cook my own meals and do my own washing.” Here, H’s mother upends gender roles and leaves H to independently perform tasks that women tend to get boxed into by restrictive gender norms. The dark irony of the situation is that this sense of independence in H fosters her future isolation. And in a way, it creates a parallel to the woman depicted in the music video of “Routine.” Not a 1:1 reflection of that woman since the circumstances of that woman differ drastically from that of H (for reasons addressed later).
An extension of the prior sentence and its awareness of restrictive gender norms appears dead-ahead: “It was only when I did go to another kid’s house that I realized that wasn’t exactly normal.” From this, it’s apparent that H was—at an early age—aware of systematic sexism. It’s also evident that normality isn’t the default which many assume—like truth (as elucidated in the title track to Steven’s 2017 album To The Bone), it varies from person-to-person. Additionally, the status of “normal” seems to be utilized by the general public (usually unconsciously) as a tool to render others isolated—especially regarding differences of gender, sexuality, and race.
Such a utilization carries multi-generational after-effects such as those depicted in the next pair of sentences: “Now it seems strange to me that my mother had children at all, but I suppose for a young woman then there simply wasn’t a choice. Or at least there was, but it would never have occurred to anyone to have made it.” A crucial talking-point presents itself via the phrase “I suppose for a young woman then there simply wasn’t a choice.” If nothing else, the word “then” demonstrates a gap in thinking between women of H’s generation and that of her mother’s—a difference in thought dictated by the social climate of their young adulthood. That’s not to say that systemic sexism died in-between their generations because previous passages reinforce that it still exists. Instead, look at the phrase “Or at least there was, but it would never have occurred to anyone to have made it” and consider that the progression of time has altered what components of systemic sexism are emphasized and which are downplayed.
Afterwards, H’s father is presented via images entailing that forces also pull him downward in the next three sentences: “My father was a loner too. The picture I have in my memory is of him hunched over his desk, lost in circuit boards and diagrams, usually in the same scruffy clothes he’d worn for weeks. He would only get properly dressed if he was going out (hardly ever), or receiving a visitor (almost never).” First of all, the image of H’s father “hunched over his desk, lost in circuit boards and diagrams” entail that he was as isolated as both the women in his life. However, the forces that foster his isolation differ from that of his wife or H. Instead of systemic sexism, his isolation is bolstered by a blend of his hobbies/interests and the pressures of capitalism. Such a negative sentiment of capitalism isn’t dissimilar to Steven’s thoughts on the music industry circa 1999’s Stupid Dream, where he stated that “if a modern musician is going to survive as a musician, you have to—in a sense—‘prostitute yourself’ to try and sell your music and your art.” Such a cynical sentiment links towards the father’s isolation, an obsession with accomplishing the task at hand, the delicate balancing act between profession and family, and a consequence of isolation (neglecting himself).
All of that ties into a particularly poignant sentence that registers on several levels: “The closest he got to giving me fatherly advice was to remind me and my brother that I had the whole of my life to get things right and if things didn’t make sense now, then don’t worry, be patient; “It’s only the start.”” On one level, the male privilege of H’s dad can seem as if these words are easy for him to say, but the image already presented of H’s dad can also suggest that he’s telling these words to himself just as much as he’s telling them to his children. Another facet of this relates to the song “Transience” (since “It’s only the start” acts as that song’s refrain), rendering a song that’s supposedly a heartwarming instance of nostalgia into the final calm before the plunge of “Ancestral”—a similar musical function to “A Warm Place” from Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral.[1] As for the advice of “It’s only the start,” it doesn’t appear sound since it’s informing someone to waste their life waiting for things to improve—something that H ends up fulfilling. An additional issue with that advice appears via “the whole of my life” since no one knows how long or short that length of time is—wasting it isn’t smart. Finally, the isolation of H’s dad breeds that of his daughter since dad’s unable to prevent H from falling prey to a similar fate as him.
Two simple sentences (“My mother just said that if I was happy then she was happy. And I suppose I was, so they both left me to it”) conclude the blog entry on a note demonstrating the limitations of human expression. First, this resigned tone from H conveys passivity just as much as her parents were in terms of involvement in her life. While this suggests that (at least in the minds of others) there’s no way to be active without coming across as forceful, the consequences of prolonged passivity entail that there must be a balance between passivity and activity. Next, the word “suppose” denotes H’s condition in the present moment, not H’s state as a kid. In that respect, that one word informs readers that H is so numb that she can hardly tell her own emotions apart—an effect compounded by the warping effects of memory. Additionally, the use of a word like “suppose” instead of a word with more definite connotations indicates that words can’t properly convey feelings in a 1:1 manner—limiting the ways one can dig their way out of the hole of isolation.
Entry 4 (10th January 2009):
Neither of my parents really had any idea what made their daughter tick. I never once saw either of them read for pleasure, but I spent all my spare time devouring books and music. My father had a portable record player but only 2 records that I remember (a Sibelius symphony and a record of kitschy Christmas songs), so he let me have the player in my room, and over time I bought
a few records, mostly when I just liked the cover or title. My favourite find was a record called Sunset Wading. I had no idea what it was, but I bought it because it was on sale, and I figured no one else would buy it if I didn’t. Plus I loved the cover of a man in silhouette paddling in the water at twilight. It looked like the kind of place I wanted to be. I drew and painted while listening to it over and over.
I do love my parents and my brother, but the only thing we really share is DNA.
Themes of previous blog entries, prior albums in Steven’s oeuvre, and Steven’s own life are abound within this entry’s opening duo of sentences: “Neither of my parents really had any idea what made their daughter tick. I never once say either of them read for pleasure, but I spent all my spare time devouring books and music.” From a prior entry, the notion that H’s parents had no “idea what made their daughter tick” constitutes a direct linkage to the isolation and abandonment entailed by the end of the previous entry. In regards to work from Steven’s corpus, the disconnect between parents and offspring in the digital age was also a major theme of Porcupine Tree’s 2007 album Fear of a Blank Planet—although that album ended in a teenager’s suicide. As for Steven’s own life, the man himself also spent much of his childhood “devouring books and music.” Although music occupied the bulk of Steven’s attention, literature holds a place in his heart—as evidenced by his response (in a 2018 interview filmed for Romanian TV) to the question of ‘What book has shaped you the most?’: Dubliners by James Joyce. As a student of literature, I can tell you from experience that even the most straightforward of James Joyce’s materials (which is Dubliners) isn’t simple. While Dubliners is no Finnegans Wake,[2] it’s a challenging-enough read to indicate that Steven’s smarter than most people think of musicians in rock/pop/related genres.
The matter of H’s music also carries thematic and symbolic significance via the following set of sentences: “My favorite find was a record called Sunset Wading. I had no idea what it was, but I bought it because it was on sale, and I figured no one else would buy it if I didn’t. Plus I loved the cover of a man in silhouette paddling in the water at twilight. It looked like the kind of place I wanted to be. I drew and painted while listening to it over and over.” Some basic information about Sunset Wading indicates that it’s by John G. Perry (of the prog-rock band Caravan) and was released in 1976, two qualities suggesting that this album’s one that Steven’s acquainted with enough to see significance in. That significance factors into “the cover of a man in silhouetted paddling in the water at twilight.” Here, the water acts as a symbol of both endless freedom and endless solitude. In this respect, it’s also a visual metaphor for the state of the artist in the modern world and a parallel to the balancing acts that H and Steven deal with (to varying degrees of success). Such a thought conveys that Steven (in creating the character of H) imbued H with aspects of himself, but twisted the effects of those aspects on the choices made—a reflection that if Steven were 10-20 years younger, he’d probably struggle in a similar manner to H. However, the two also have common ground in that both express themselves through the arts: Steven through music and H through painting.
However, the similarities and differences between H and Steven end up becoming mixed together during the final sentence of this entry: “I do love my parents and brother, but the only thing we really share is DNA.” Regarding differences, Steven’s shown appreciation for his parents on multiple occasions, but usually in a low-key and private manner. One exception to this appears in the liner notes for 2011’s Grace for Drowning, where the album’s dedicated to his father, who death from cancer (which occurred just before the album’s recording) cast a long shadow over that album and The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories). A similarity manifests itself via the mention of DNA and a possible allusion to Blackfield’s “Welcome To My DNA.” However, that song appeared on 2011’s Welcome To My DNA, an album where Steven reduced his involvement in the project and let the other half of the duo (Israeli singer Aviv Geffen) take a more active role. This information factors into how the metaphor of DNA serves to further isolation and represent the difficulties in connecting to others in ways apart from physically. Especially considering that Blackfield (like H’s parents) are comprised of mixed ethnicity: English and Israeli for Blackfield and English and Italian for H’s parents.
Entry 5 (11th January 2009):
I managed to get through school without being noticed much. I was lucky that I was naturally bright enough to achieve acceptable grades with the minimum of effort. My parents showed mild curiosity when my school report arrived at the end of each year, but the teachers always said basically the same thing; I was quiet and conscientious but not fulfilling my potential (potential for what I wondered).
There’s an ambiguous wording etched in the sentence “I managed to get through school without being noticed much.” Despite “being” reinforcing H’s passivity, “managed” conveys an active effort on H’s part to maintain a low profile. It’s almost as if she actively desires to isolate herself while instincts lead her to otherwise.
Such a notion boils down to chance via the line “I was lucky that I was naturally bright enough to achieve acceptable grades with the minimum of effort.” Sure, one can latch onto the detail of H settling for “acceptable grades” and conclude that she lacks the motivation to push herself towards academic success. But if so, one misses the crucial component of “naturally bright enough.” In a sense, this is a form of privilege formed upon the basis of intelligence, ethnicity (notice how H is clearly white), and genetics. If any of those three qualities had gone ‘wrong,’ H wouldn’t have been able to coast by through school the way she did.
Loads of information are embedded inside the last sentence: “My parents showed mild curiosity when my school report arrived at the end of each year, but the teachers always said basically the same thing; I was quiet and conscientious but not fulfilling my potential (potential for what I wondered).” On the topic of the school report, a copy of H’s school report is among the materials included in the Deluxe Edition (complete with messages from teachers). Regarding what the teachers say, that’s definitely in-line with the comments included in the Deluxe Edition’s school report (regardless of what grade H received in the course). But that also points towards a lack of individuality—both in the teachers answering to the same higher-ups and in the students bound to the same curriculum. Both facets point at a consequence of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ philosophy towards school: as it’s a system for the masses instead of the individual, the denial of care will leave some to slip through the cracks. Oftentimes, those that slip through don’t know what hit them or they don’t know a way they be themselves without slipping through again. In the words of “Ancestral”: “When the world doesn’t want you, it will never tell you why.”
Entry 6 (12th August 2009):
When I was 13 I had a sister for 6 months.She arrived one February morning, pale and shellshocked, from past lives I could not imagine. She was 3 years older than me, but in no time we became friends.
We’d listen to her mix tapes; Dead Can Dance, Felt, This Mortal Coil…
She introduced me to her favourite books, gave me clothes, and my first cigarette.
Sometimes we would head down to Blackbirds moor to watch the barges on Grand Union in the twilight.
She said “The water has no memory”.
For a few months everything about our lives was perfect.
It was only us, we were inseparable.
Later that year my parents separated and my sister was rehoused with a family in Dollis Hill.
For a month I wanted to die and missed her every day.
But gradually she passed into another distant part of my memory.
Until I could no longer remember her face, her voice, even her name.
An astute observer/listener will notice that this entry consists of the lyrics the spoken-word section read by Katherine Jenkins in the first half of “Perfect Life.” However, there’s a difference between this entry and the album version of the spoken-word section. That difference being that there are two extra lines in this entry since “Later that year my parents separated and my sister was rehoused with a family in Dollis Hill./For a month I wanted to die and missed her every day” doesn’t appear in the album version of “Perfect Life.” Although “Perfect Life” has importance to the album as a whole, an analysis of the majority of the song’s lyrics may be required for this entry.
There’s a curious detail about “When I was 13 I had a sister for 6 months” which doesn’t quite cohere with a sense of time. Partly because “had a sister for 6 months” seems to imply that this is a newborn baby girl (something supported by “She arrived”), yet this is refuted by the notion that the sister “was 3 years older than me.” This blatant defiance of logic can point towards three things: a mixing-up of chronology akin to that of Benjy Compson from William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury,[3] H considering the bond between herself and a close friend to be akin to that between sisters, or this sister being a product of H’s imagination. Given the precarious mental health of H, the last of those three isn’t an out-there notion.
Going off of the assumption that H’s sister exists only as a hallucination, then there’s a treasure trove of relevant information to mine from the next couple of sentences: “She arrived one February morning, pale and shellshocked from past lives I could not imagine.” For starters, the symbolism of “February morning”—the last month of winter before the renewal/rebirth entailed by spring—marks a conscious effort by H to impose a degree of order onto reality. Unfortunately, reality’s oftentimes a disordered mess that flies in the face of what’s deemed logical. Much of that disorder comes from what’s unknown or unable to be known—a concept applicable to “past lives I could not imagine.” However, ascribing “pale and shellshocked” to past lives opens up elements of the supernatural into the equation, which must be interpreted in conjunction with H’s possible mental illness.
As for “She was 3 years older than me, but in no time we became friends,” there’s a deluge of details which expand upon those previously-established. First, the phrase “3 years older” carries such importance to the album that it’s the name of the first non-instrumental track on the album—such significance indicates that H unconsciously never forgot her sister. That H claims that “in no time we became friends” informs listeners on the intensity of their bond—that it’s like that shared between friends and like that between sisters. One would think that’s the case with any pair of sisters, but that the bond was established suddenly instead of over multiple years connotes that H doesn’t know from experience what having a sister is like—another hint that H’s sister isn’t real. Therefore, this sister wasn’t born, but rather imagined as being three years older than H.
For one to understand the lines of “We’d listen to her mix tapes: Dead Can Dance, Felt, This Mortal Coil…/She introduced me to her favourite books, gave me clothes, and my first cigarette”—lines which seem like a depiction of various rites of passage—, one should have some context regarding why Steven specifically picked those three musical acts as the mix-tapes. In the very first blog post, H mentioned that she had turned 30 in 2008, meaning that she was born in October 1978—if she was thirteen during the six months where her sister existed, the time is February 1992. All three of these musical acts—an art-rock duo (Dead Can Dance), an early forerunner to alternative rock (Felt), and a gothic-rock/dream-pop hybrid (This Mortal Coil)—were based in the UK and had their original run in the 1980’s. These were musical acts that had run their course, but their demises were recent enough that they were still in the memories of others—a parallel to how the memory of the sister lingers in H’s mind.
A couple of curious lyrical choices render the following line striking: “Sometimes we would head down to Blackbirds moor to watch the barges on Grand Union in the twilight.” Namely the references to places such as “Blackbirds moor” and “Grand Union” which—while extremely specific—aren’t in the knowledge of most listeners/readers. These details aren’t made-up locations, but they’re specific landmarks from Steven’s hometown of Hemel Hempstead—these locations are facets drawn from Steven’s own childhood. Considering that Grand Union canal system does pass through Hemel Hempstead around the same area as Blackbirds Moor, so these details are geographically-accurate. But the point here worth driving home is that Steven’s choice to insert locations that he knows imbues a sense that he’s trying to understand this story and that situating it in what he knows helps him in doing so.
The line that follows—“She said “The waters have no memory””—is one that’s allusive and multi-faceted. In one respect, the phrase “The waters have no memory” functions as an allusion to a Porcupine Tree b-side (found on Recordings) from the Lightbulb Sun-era titled “Oceans Have No Memory.” In another, the same phrase appears to defy nature—stating that people are superior due to memory and imagination. Particularly imagination since that quality can allow one to create anything. Ironically, these words may indeed be coming from a figment of H’s imagination. Yet another way to perceive the phrase “The waters have no memory” is that because of nature’s ability to constantly renew itself, it’s in a constant state of a blank slate—it doesn’t have to worry about anything that plagues the minds of humans. Therefore, nature can live out an idealized existence by simply being.
These next few lines—“For a few months everything about our lives was perfect./It was only us, we were inseparable”—hold notions which don’t quite hold up under closer scrutiny. Sure, the detail of “a few months” supports the “6 months” from earlier, but it still conflicts with that earlier notion of the sister being “3 years older” than H. That contradiction, the idealism of “everything about our lives was perfect,” and the overly-bright imagery which complements the music video for “Perfect Life” all seem to point towards H having a mental illness and imagining/hallucinating this sister.
Although one can interpret the line “Later that year my parents separated and my sister was rehoused with a family in Dollis Hill” as a blunt narration of how events unfolded, there’s more to it underneath. First off, it seems like H picked a location at random since “Dollis Hill” isn’t far enough away from Hemel Hempstead (looking it up on Google Maps gives me 24 minutes by car, 1 hour and 8 minutes by train, and 1 hour and 49 minutes by bike) to believe that H won’t see her sister again. That fact makes me think that the detail of “my sister was rehoused with a family in Dollis Hill” reads like H suppressing what she thought happened. As for what H suppresses, it’s connected to the Visitors.
While I dispute the mechanics behind the disappearance of H’s sister, the line “For a month I wanted to die and missed her every day” leaves little doubt regarding the psychological impact of that loss. That it’s of a traumatic enough nature to leave a thirteen-year-old H to contemplate suicide conveys that it’s more severe than the sister simply moving away. In a cruelly-ironic way, the use of “every day” in this line alludes to the line “Cause trust means we don’t have to be together everyday” (from the song “Hand Cannot Erase”). But unlike its usage in the 9th January 2009 entry, this usage applies it toward the one person H truly valued—and that person may not exist.
The previous line’s severity informs how one reads the last two contained in the spoken-word section: “But gradually she passed into another part of my memory./Until I could no longer remember her face, her voice, even her name.” At this point, the coping mechanisms of trauma have distorted what H considered reality. In a weird sense, this ‘fading out’ marks the only way someone imagined can truly die: by being forgotten. However, it doesn’t quite cohere with how the sister gets brought up in future entries. If anything, this ‘death’ is just a metamorphosis from one concept of the sister into another—from the idyllic to the mythic.
Entry 7 (8th September 2009):
Despite my efforts to be completely invisible to other human beings, I found I couldn’t help but stand out when it came to drawing and painting, and no one was more surprised by this than I. Incredible to me and my family though it was, it turned out that I was a natural when it came to decoding the world I saw and representing it somehow on paper. I wasn’t really sure myself if what I was painting and drawing was real, or in my head. Everyone wanted to know where these strange ideas and images came from, but I knew instinctively that it was not something I should talk about. So I got used to being noticed for this one thing, and yes I suppose I did feel a little pride about it too. It also meant that when my parents would ask me what I was going to do when I left school I at least had some kind of answer that seemed to satisfy them.
From this entry’s introductory sentence of “Despite my efforts to be completely invisible to other human beings, I couldn’t help but stand out when it came to drawing and painting, and no one was more surprised by this than I,” a few of the recurring elements from earlier entries continue to crop up. Those include H’s self-imposed isolation, H’s leanings towards the arts, and H’s appearance on the album cover. In the case of the last one, H’s instinctive creativity provides one reason as to why purple paint adorns the album cover.
This motif of art connects towards notions of sanity and reality during the sentence of “Incredible to me and my family though it was, it turned out that I was a natural when it came to decoding the world I saw and representing it somehow on paper.” At this juncture, the phrase “Incredible to me and my family” denotes that even H has difficulties accepting her own gifts. A possible reason for that denial appears via “decoding the world I saw,” a phrase that places the art of painting under a Coleridge-esque lens—an act of analysis and interpretation in the mind before committing it to paper. However, that same phrase contains “the world I saw,” a wording that (considering H’s possible mental illness) illustrates a thin line between imagination and insanity. Considering H’s gender, this ends up intersecting with ideas presented in Virginia Woolf’s “Shakespeare’s Sister”—that if Shakespeare had an equally-brilliant sister, she’d be denied the opportunities of her brother and that denial would lead to madness and eventually suicide. Furthermore, the sentence’s use of the word “representing” echoes language used in literary theory to describe the arts that dates all the way back to the age of Aristotle and Plato. If we go by what those Greek philosophers stated, an artistic representation is at least one degree removed from reality—a concept not far off from the idea that H is mentally ill.
Speaking of mental illness, the sentence “I wasn’t really sure myself if what I was painting and drawing was real, or in my head” provides an indicator of H’s eventual mental decline. Additionally, there’s the wording of “I wasn’t really sure myself” being applied to her endeavors in the arts. The implications of that application are that everything that H thinks is certain gets cast in doubt.
Further elaborating upon the thread of mental illness comes the next sentence: “Everyone wanted to know where these strange ideas and images came from, but I knew instinctively that it was not something I should talk about.” First off, “Everyone wanted to know” touches upon a human instinct to discover what isn’t known. But more importantly, there’s multiple interpretations towards H’s motivations behind how she “knew instinctively that it was not something I should talk about.” On one hand, this shows that H is aware of the stigmatization related to mental health in the eyes of society. Another viewpoint regarding that same phrase entails that H wants to disappear and that if the public knew the source of her ideas, she never could. But the most likely (there’s evidence in sketches in the Deluxe Edition materials) interpretation would be the third: that H has some slight awareness that the sister and the Visitors weren’t real and that if she told the public that that was the source of her ides, no one would believe her.
Matters transition from mental illness into self-deception via the final two sentences: “So I got used to being noticed for this one thing, and yes I suppose I did feel a little pride about it too. It also meant that when my parents would ask me what I was going to do when I left school I at least had some kind of answer that seemed to satisfy them.” A primary agent appears with “got used to,” a diminished form of desensitization since both stem from repetition. That accustomation allows for H to “feel a little pride,” a curious word choice since pride can come across as a character flaw—matches H’s eventual mental decline with a thematic decline. However, H’s use of “suppose” means that even that should be taken with a grain of salt. Particularly because the previous usage of the word “suppose”—a word with indefinite characteristics—in regards to H’s memories (see the 9th January 2009 entry) denoted that words can’t properly convey feelings in a 1:1 manner. As for the “some kind of answer” that H gives to her parents regarding her future, one gets the sense that H is clutching at straws. One also gets the sense that H herself believed her own answer for a time.
Entry 8 (14th September 2009):
The shocking thing is how easy it is to disappear if you really want to. The whole process of hiding in plain sight started again at college. Fulfil the minimum requirements, socialise just enough, be friendly but don’t make friends, have the occasional sexual dalliance but never give them anything they can fall in love with. Be in plain sight but don’t let anyone see you.
There’s both a variant of an album lyric and some social commentary embedded in the sentence: “The shocking thing is how easy it is to disappear if you really want to.” In the case of the latter, the album lyric in question is “You can try if you want to” (from “Ancestral”), which turns dark as it now applies to H’s efforts to disappear—positing those efforts as transformative yet self-determined. As for how this information is “shocking,” that description reflects that this fact should be shocking, but society turns a blind eye towards it and the problem continues to fester—not only in H, but in countless others.
That self-determined quality becomes slightly undercut by way of the sentence “The whole process of hiding in plain sight started again at college.” Since a college (especially a smaller college such as my alma mater: University of Evansville) can operate akin to a small city, there’s enough people clustered together in such a secluded space that some can easily slip through the cracks, spatially-speaking. So it should come as little surprise that H relapsed into her old reclusive holding patterns. The real question comes from an ambiguity regarding whether or not H’s narration’s a reliable source—something only individual readers can determine for themselves.
One sentence where every component requires elaboration comes about via “Fulfil the minimum requirements, socialise just enough, be friendly but don’t make friends, have the occasional sexual dalliance but never give them anything they can fall in love with.” With the phrase “Fulfil the minimum requirements,” that’s the same approach to academic mediocrity which H utilized in grade school, but college has higher stakes involved. Those stakes aren’t just in grades, but in connections to others and with one’s well-being (physically, emotionally, and mentally)—something which “socialise just enough” entails that H has never exceled at. Instead, H follows the code of “be friendly but don’t make friends” by way of (as “Anesthetize” puts it) “A good impression of myself.”[4] But perhaps it’s the last phrase (“have the occasional sexual dalliance but never give them anything they can fall in love with”) that reveals the most about H’s mindset. Here, H is acutely aware of natural human urges towards lust. Yet because of the perceived loss of her sister, H won’t settle with anyone since she feels as that would diminish that sisterly bond. That this leads into the final sentence (“Be in plain sight but don’t let anyone see you”) suggests that it’s also the mechanism for H’s pattern of isolation.
Entry 9 (19th December 2009):
Ok, so there was one person I got close to. My one and only serious romantic relationship started during my second year at college. He was a photographer, and of course he did all the pursuing, I wasn’t interested at first, but then I found I liked the idea of being both an artist and a photographic muse, I wanted to be Lee Miller to his Man Ray. And yes I liked him, we had fun. But in the end I felt the same way I always did when I tried to be normal (whatever that is), like I was playing a role in a dream of a life, but only by somehow sacrificing my real self.
Whenever we were together I was counting the seconds until I could be on my own again, and I knew that couldn’t be a good thing. Sometimes I couldn’t hide the fact and I hurt him deeply. So in the end I got what I wanted, and I was alone again.
The juxtaposition of these images (a start and ending of a relationship) clues a reader into the notion that it won’t last. And knowing what’s already been established about H, it’s hardly any surprise that it doesn’t work out. In fact, the implications of “have the occasional sexual dalliance but never give them anything they can fall in love with” (from the 14th September 2009 entry) guarantees that this relationship would fall apart.
As for the text itself, the first two sentences—“Okay, so there was one person I got close to. My one and only serious romantic relationship started during my second year at college”—act as though this is an abrupt transition. And maybe it is since this is the first journal entry in three months, but it remains a mystery as to why H writes these specific memories down at these specific times. Regarding “Okay, so there was one person I got close to,” that out-of-the-blue wording connotes that H’s isolation isn’t absolute—there are imperfections in the process of isolation.
For the characteristics forming those imperfections, look no further than the run-on that acts as the next sentence: “He was a photographer, and of course he did all the pursuing, I wasn’t interested at first, but then I found I liked the idea of being both an artist and a photographic muse, I wanted to be Lee Miller to his Man Ray.” Namely, the patriarchal norms that enable aspects such as “of course he did all the pursuing” and “then I found I like the idea.” While the former remains rather obvious, the latter reflects social conditioning interfering with H’s own personality—she’s been programmed to accept that this is normal and desirable, even if it clashes with her ideals. That she likens it as wanting “to be Lee Miller to his Man Ray”—a love affair between (respectively) a surrealist photographer and an artist that occurred between 1929 and 1932—denotes that H tries to bend a situation that’s undesirable to her into something she can live with. And that’s by referencing art history in a symbolic manner.
After that comes what appears to function as a simple, declarative statement: “And yes I liked him, we had fun.” However, it’s never that simple with H and that’s no different here. There’s ambiguities regarding how she “liked him” and the nature of the “fun” (presumably sexual, but that’s not certain). Additionally, the conflation between the two falls further develops the train-of-thought established with “have the occasional sexual dalliance but never give them anything they can fall in love with” by conflating the two things (sex and love) together—H has convinced herself that sex is love in order to cope with the relationship.
All that convincing and self-deception doesn’t matter when faced up against the familiar walls that plague H in the form of the next sentence: “But in the end I felt the same way I always did when I tried to be normal (whatever that is), like I was playing a role in a dream of a life, but only by somehow sacrificing my real self.” That much is clear as early as the phrase “when I tried to be normal” rolls around and suggests that H always has and always will be an outsider to norms. Not that she cares considering the parenthetical of “whatever that is” being used to describe the condition of normality, a sign that that condition isn’t naturally determined, but selected by society. And then there’s the crucial phrasing of “playing a role in a dream of a life, but only by somehow sacrificing my real self.” At this juncture, H’s desires are divided since one—connoted by “dream”—is at odds with the other—entailed by “real.” Such a division has no clear solution, a facet implied by the vague description of “somehow” being applied to “sacrificing my real self”—suggesting that H knows what must be done to achieve normality, but not how to go about it without demolishing a crucial aspect of herself.
That crucial aspect—her isolated leanings—links towards a dark inversion of some of the album’s lyrics in the next sentence: “Whenever we were together I was counting the seconds until I could be on my own again, and I knew that couldn’t be a good thing.” The lyrics in-question (“Cause trust means we don’t have to be together every day”) are found in the title track and have been alluded to in the blog entries before (see 9th January 2009 and 12th August 2009 entries). Now, the reason why H can’t live up to that lyric has been fully-disclosed—her own nature as an isolated person doesn’t allow her to live up to the lyric forever.
H’s inability to live up to that lyric results in things undoing themselves in the last two sentences: “Sometimes I couldn’t hide the fact and I hurt him deeply. So in the end I got what I wanted, and I was alone again.” By the means of H’s inability to trust, the resentment builds up until it she “couldn’t hide the fact.” Even though H feels she can’t prosper in a relationship by being herself, to put on a mask eventually culminates in “I hurt him deeply.” As for the ambiguity behind “what I wanted,” it’s more clear in the context of the “real” (H’s isolation) winning over the “dream” (H likening her love affair to that of Lee Miller and Man Ray).
Entry 10 (2nd January 2010):
One of my neighbours has been listening to the same song over and over since new year’s eve, “dance, dance, dance to the radio”. I remember this song.
I still have the mix tapes my sister made for me, but listening to them makes me too sad, so when I do feel like hearing music (less and less), I have the beat up Dansette record player that used to belong to my Dad, and some classical LPs I bought at the charity shop for 50p. My favourite to listen to in the dead of night (3am is perfect) is Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen. In the cover notes it says he wrote it while he was in a German prisoner of war camp for the musicians in the camp to perform. A message on the back of the sleeve in faded ink: “Love you until the end of time, P xxxx”. I wonder if it was time or love that ended first for them.
Music references pervade this particular entry and they appear as instantly as the first sentence: “One of my neighbors has been listening to the same song over and over since new year’s eve, “dance, dance, dance to the radio.” I remember this song.” The song in-question (with the lyrics “dance, dance, dance to the radio”) is Joy Division’s 1979 recording of “Transmission (Dance to the Radio),” a song that’s significant for a few reasons. One of which is autobiographical since (as any listener of Insurgentes knows) Steven’s fond of the genre of music known as post-punk, of which Joy Division were a stylistic forerunner. Another point of significance is raised by the words of Gail Marcus (who wrote a chapter on this song in his book The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs): “‘Transmission’ is not an argument. It’s a dramatization of the realization that the act of listening to the radio is a suicidal gesture. It will kill your mind. It will rob your soul.” Such a strong comment places the radio as a symbol for technological excess in the modern era. And that detail of “suicidal” (which is especially eerie considering that Joy Division vocalist Ian Curtis hung himself in 1980/81) offers one reason why H’s final fate on the album’s left unclear: there’s several different trails of bread crumbs that all lead to differing conclusions. One conclusion being that H kills herself at the end of the album.
But another conclusion involves H’s sister and the Visitors, the former of which reappears in the next sentence: “I still have the mix tapes my sister made for me, but listening to them makes me too sad, so when I do feel like hearing music (less and less), I have the beat up Dansette record player that used to belong to my Dad, and some classical LPs I bought at the charity shop for 50p.” That reappearance (“the mix tapes my sister made for me”) directly ties to both the 12th August 2009 entry and the lyric from “Perfect Life” that the earlier entry quoted. However, the detail of “listening to them makes me too sad” suggests that H’s trauma regarding the perceived loss of her sister hasn’t fully vanished. Another curious detail to note is that she feels “like hearing music (less and less),” a possible hint that H has experienced Gail Marcus’s conclusion regarding “Transmission (Dance to the Radio)” or that it’s already too late for H—her soul and mind are gone. Which makes it more striking that H explicitly mentions “classical LPs” since that’s a genre of music (much like prog-rock) with a high degree of sophistication.
That sophistication doesn’t mean that it’s a genre of music exempt from woes, as entailed by the next two sentences: “My favourite to listen to in the dead of night (3am is perfect) is Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen. In the cover notes it says he wrote it while he was in a German prisoner of war camp for the musicians in the camp to perform.” The fact that a change of musical genre won’t halt H’s decline reveals itself through the phrase “in the dead of night (3am is perfect),” a wording which imperfectly mirrors the album lyric of “the wreckage of the night” (from “Home Invasion/Regret #9”). As for the nature of “Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen,” it’s a piece of chamber music by a French composer that lasts about fifty minutes and premiered in 1941. That year, combined with the detail Messiaen writing “it while he was a in a German prisoner of war camp,” should clue readers in that the piece of music was composed and performed during the Holocaust. However, the following information (culled from the piece’s Wikipedia article) proves rather illuminating about Messiaen himself:
The quartet was premiered at the camp, outdoors and in the rain, on 15 January 1941. The musicians had decrepit instruments and an audience of about 400 fellow prisoners and guards. The cello was bought with donations from camp members. Messiaen later recalled: “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.”
[Carl-Albert]Brüll [a sympathetic guard] provided paper and isolation for composing, and he also helped acquire the other three instruments. By forging papers with a stamp made from a potato, Brüll even helped the performers to be liberated shortly after the performance. After the war, Brüll made a special trip to visit Messiaen, but was sent away and told the composer would not see him.
While there’s no doubt that Messiaen was a prisoner in the camp, the fact that he worked with Nazis makes him morally-suspect. Additionally, the squalid conditions of the camp and the performance (freezing weather, low food, shoddy instruments) invokes symbolic comparisons that foreshadow H’s mental decline. Yet H’s moral ambiguity also associates her with Messiaen, especially with Messiaen turning away his liberator after the war.
Another interesting facet of the passage comes from the ending sentences: F “A message on the back of the sleeve in faded ink: “Love you until the end of time, P xxxx.” I wonder if it was time or love that ended first for them.” First of all, the “message on the back of the sleeve” is a woefully out-of-place juxtaposition considering the context of the piece of music it’s printed on—if that message was written by the former owner of the LP. There’s also the possibility that that message was originally present on some sheet music of the piece—in which case, the message is from Olivier Messiaen to his fellow performers. That interpretation does have some faults and some support, both of which can be ascertained from H’s reply of “I wonder if it was time or love that ended first for them” (although that indicates that H isn’t fully aware of the context behind the piece’s creation). The detail that sinks the idea that Messiaen wrote the message is that love probably ended first since for “time” to end suggests that the performers died in the Holocaust, something which isn’t factually true.
However, what lends credence to the notion of Olivier Messiaen writing that message comes from an interpretation that the “end of time” in the piece’s title doesn’t refer to death, but to the apocalypse. Further support’s determined by Messiaen stating in the Preface to the score that the work’s primary inspiration derived from the Bible. Not just any book of the Bible, but the Book of Revelation. More specifically, this passage from Rev 10:1-2, 5-7 (King James Version):
"And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire…and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth…And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever…that there should be time no longer: But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished…”
One generous reading of this connection between the Holocaust and biblical apocalypse is that—to Holocaust survivors—the event felt like an apocalypse. To those who survived, it wasn’t uncommon for families to be torn apart permanently and for the survivors to be forced to start a new life in an uncertain future—if they had a future at all. Additionally, the fact something of the scale of six million Jews dying creates a conundrum regarding the divinity of God that can create more questions the more one probes into it: there’s no way for God to be all-good if he’s everything all at once, but if he’s all-good (and no evil things), he’s not everything at once.
As for how all this applies to H’s narrative, it serves as to outline the hopelessness of her situation. It’s the clearest sign yet that her decline is inevitable. In fact, it’s already begun.
Entry 11 (30th April 2010):
Where do you go if you don’t belong anywhere? If I wanted to run away then why come to the city? Because this is the place to hide. This is the place to be invisible. Anyone can be no one here, and I am someone that wants to be no one.
I move from somewhere to everywhere to nowhere. Do you see me?
Three major threads run through the first two sentences: “Where do you go if you don’t belong anywhere? If I wanted to run away then why come to the city?” First, there’s the sense of not belonging “anywhere” and how that’s an extension of H’s lack of a cut-and-dry identity, a notion discernable as early as when her mixed heritage (Italian mother and English father) was disclosed (in the 9th January 2009 entry). Second, there’s the question of “why come to the city,” to which the answer lies upon the same “hiding in plain sight” principle that college operated on for H. Thirdly, this idea of H not belonging “anywhere” can appear to echo an album lyric: “When the world doesn’t want you, it will never tell you why” (from “Ancestral”). That last notion points to a self-pitying streak in H, but also towards the cruelty of a world that turns a blind eye on people, leaving the most vulnerable out to decay.
Decay itself now has an identifiable monument via the sentences: “Because this is the place to hide. This is the place to be invisible.” One can now see that the vastness of a large city (in H’s case, London) only exacerbates the effects of “invisible” which were already noticeable in H’s college days. In addition to that, the modern-era of technology has made the notion of invisibility easier than at any other point in human history. That’s not to say that technology’s the sole culprit, but that it’s the final piece of the puzzle that the vast city already formed the backbone.
This sense of invisibility segues into a chilling sentence: “Anyone can be no one here, and I am someone that wants to be no one.” That “Anyone can be no one” appears contradictory, but makes sense when considering the vastness of the city and how many people are as lost and disillusioned with society as H—potentially thousands, if not millions. As for “I am someone that wants to be no one,” that can read as H having suicidal thoughts—or it can be read as desiring no connections towards other people, a complete state of isolation. Regardless of interpretation, there’s now textual support for a theory behind the phrase “hand cannot erase”: that even if one deliberately attempts to erase any trace of oneself, the memories of other people digital footprints will linger—it’s impossible to erase yourself fully.
If that reminds Steven fans of some of the thoughts experienced by the protagonist of the Fear of a Blank Planet album (namely the suicidal thoughts of the closing track “Sleep Together”), you’d be correct. And that’s not the only callback to that particular album since there’s one in the last two sentences of the blog entry: “I move from somewhere to everywhere to nowhere. Do you see me?” Namely to the lines “You’re somewhere/You’re nowhere/You don’t care” from that album’s title track. The connection between the earlier song and this entry are that—in both cases—the juxtaposition between “somewhere” and “nowhere” suggest the irrelevancy of location since the speaker’s problems are unsolvable. But it differs in the instance of H with the phrasing of “Do you see me?,” a wording which creates the impression that she wants reassurance that she can’t be seen—almost as if she’s teasing the general public.
Even the image connected to the text carries symbolic resonance. Namely that the darkness of the tunnel that’s slowly enveloping H chokes off her last chance of escape (indicated by the light at the end). The image also goes the other way in a Joycean manner[5]—the darkness can mark natural lighting, a contrast to the artificial lights of the city shining through.
Entry 12 (20th May 2010):
Against my better judgement I went to a party tonight, someone at work who I actually spoke to a few times, is leaving. It’s surprising (to no one more than me), but I’m actually pretty good at parties. While I’m making pleasant small talk you would never guess that in my head I’m simply biding my time before I can return to my solipsistic cocoon. Like going to church, a party is a ritual that once had a purpose, but not any more.
As an indulgence I took a cab home. Gazing out through a taxi window at the streets of London on a Saturday night is like watching reality TV with the sound off.
H’s opening sentence of “Against my better judgement I went to a party tonight, someone at work who I actually spoke to a few times, is leaving” contains a lot to unpack. Starting with “Against my better judgment,” we’re immediately made aware that the time since the last entry has left H a narrator that’s more unreliable than before—considering her self-destructive form of isolation, it’s questionable whether or not her judgment’s “better.” As for how H speaks the departure of “someone at work who I actually spoke to a few times,” it’s telling that she speaks of an acquaintance (if not an outright stranger) in the same yearning terms normally reserved for close friends.
Additional layers of detail unveil themselves over the course of the next two sentences: “It’s surprising (to no one more than me), but I’m actually pretty good at parties. While I’m making pleasant small talk you would never guess that in my head that I’m simply biding my time before I can return to my solipsistic cocoon.” First, the use of “(to no one more than me)” is echoic of how H phrased her artistic talents as something that “no one was more surprised by this than I” (from 8th September 2009 entry)—in both this and the earlier entry, there’s a form of denial that’s enabled by the tenuous line between H’s artistic imagination and insanity. Next, H remains fully-aware that she’s fooling herself at the parties since the phrase “pleasant small talk” doesn’t gel with H’s worldview after the perceived loss of her sister—the “pleasant small talk” can’t be the truth since H considers that unpleasant.
But the bulk of analysis rests upon H’s description of her “solipsistic cocoon.” A good starting point involves ‘solipsism,” which has a definition of “the view that the self is all that can be known to exist,” something which goes so hand-in-hand with ‘extreme egocentrism’ that the two are synonyms in Merrian-Webster’s dictionary. As for “cocoon,” there’s the symbolism of a hibernation and eventual rebirth—ironic since this ‘rebirth’ involves either death, insanity, or abduction by the Visitors. The juxtaposition of both “solipsistic” and “cocoon” entails that location doesn’t matter—she will develop or decay based on her own mind. Unfortunately, one’s own mind often falls prey to the whims of the minds of others—or even the whims of random chance.
Such an institution that can cloud the minds of some is named in the sentence “Like going to church, a party is a ritual that once had a purpose, but not anymore.” Here, Steven’s opposition to organized religion comes through H’s voice—at best, religion’s considered just another way that people try to make their lives easier. But for H to equate that to a party in that both are rituals “that once had a purpose, but not anymore” says something completely different—something more relevant to H’s character than the slam of organized religion. In this instance, H decries parties as pointless, cutting off another avenue of socialization and illustrating that her desire for isolation takes precedence over any other desire she may have.
And then the entry concludes with two striking sentences: “As an indulgence I took a cab home. Gazing out through a taxi window at the streets of London on a Saturday night is like watching reality TV with the sound off.” One curious note comes from the use of the word “indulgence,” which connotes spending, self-centeredness, and/or excess on the part of H—almost as if she’s used to walking home on her own. Then there’s the striking image comparing an empty London street to “watching reality TV with the sound off,” an appropriate comparison since both are equally-hollow materials whose lack of substance is more noticeable once the primary stimulus is drained. Additionally, the mention of “a taxi window at the streets of London” brings to mind the opening line to “My Book of Regrets” (a track originally considered for Hand. Cannot. Erase. and has evidence in the blog entries): “In the back of a taxi-cab in London town.”
Entry 13 (4th March 2011):
I adopted a cat! Or I suppose with cats it’s always the other way around. 3 days ago I came home from my night shift in the early hours and there she was sitting outside my door, just looking like she was pissed at me for keeping her waiting. I was amazed how easy it was to make the decision to keep her. A week ago we were one, now we are two.
My sister used to say that to me. She has returned to my thoughts a lot recently, after years of barely thinking about her at all. It was a strange feeling when my parents adopted a child, but in a nice way, to have someone I could talk to and confide in. I think she’s the person I talked to the most in my whole life, even though we were only together for the 6 months leading up to Mum and Dad separating. At the time I wondered if they adopted her to try to bring them closer together, or just to distract me from what was happening between them. I never saw her again and I don’t really understand why I never tried that hard to find her, or why it seemed so easy to forget, but then I assume she never tried to find me either. Sometimes things that meant so much at the time mean nothing in the end. I never felt brave enough to tell her everything, but in time I definitely would have, especially as I suspected they visited her too. I think it was why we connected.
There’s an about-face in the opening two sentences of the entry: “I adopted a cat! Or I suppose with cats it’s always the other way around.” Sure, the excited exclamation of “I adopted a cat!,” suggests an out-of-character idea that H is overjoyed at a new responsibility. However, the statement of “I suppose with cats it’s always the other way around” acts as H deflecting that responsibility by leaving it up to random chance—a contradiction indicative of H’s disassociation in the time since the previous entry. Also applicable to things are the previously-established connotations of “suppose” (from the 9th January 2009 entry) insinuating that H has blindly let life carry her. Another component complicating matters is the phrase “always the other way around,” where H applies a blanket statement and assumes that nothing else can be true—a demonstration of her solipsism. That same phrase can signal that—unconsciously—H fully believes that she’s past the point of no return.
The details of how H met her cat get elaborated upon the next sentence: “3 days ago I came home from my night shift in the early hours and there she was sitting outside my door, just looking like she was pissed for keeping her waiting.” First of all, that H has a job should indicate that she’s socially active, but that she works “night shift” undercuts this by providing another sign of social isolation. Next, the fact that the cat looks “like” indicates a similarity to, but not a 1:1 resemblance towards being “pissed for keeping her waiting.” That latter phrase positions the relationship between H and the cat as parallel to how H likely imagines how her sister would react if the two were reunited. Alternatively, H’s family may react the same way, compounding H’s social isolation.
Another familiar notion reappears via the next sentence: “I was amazed how easy it was to make the decision to keep her.” At this juncture, the “amazed” feeling which H experiences reflects a tendency of humans to eschew logic. In fact, humans tend to do things out of emotions and/or instinct, not rationality.
One source motivation irrationality comes from the influence of memory, as it appears within the next three sentences: “A week ago we were one, now we are two. My sister used to say that to me. She has returned to my thoughts a lot recently, after years of barely thinking about her at all.” In this set of lines, things commence with the phrase “A week ago we were one, now we are two,” a signal of two things: that the perception of unification is at the core of the album and that H’s perceived loss of her sister stripped her ability to bond with others. Following that, the statement that “My sister used to say that to me” should be taken with a grain of salt since it’s questionable whether H’s sister was ever real at all—let alone that she was abducted by the Visitors. Regardless of whether it happened or not, the sister’s recent return to H’s thoughts “after years of barely thinking about her at all” suggests that H had spent years suppressing trauma and that the cat reminded H of her sister.
That sense of reminding rears its head around via the next sentence: “It was a strange feeling when my parents adopted a child, but in a nice way, to have someone I could talk to and confide in.” Just the word “adopted” provides the sources of H’s association of the cat to her sister—both were adopted. As to the nature of the “strange feeling,” one should note that “to have someone I could talk to and confide in” isn’t as saccharine as one initially thinks. In fact, it’s a phrase connoting that H feels that if she had this bond with any other person, she’d be defacing the memories of her sister. Additionally, the phrase can also entail that H’s focus on her sister borders on an unconscious obsession—another sign that H isn’t mentally well.
Further clouding matters comes from the connotations fueling the next sentence: “I think she’s the person I talked to the most in my whole life, even though we were only together for the 6 months leading up to Mum & Dad separating.” While there are familiar threads to the “6 months” from the 12th August 2009 entry (and the lyrics to “Perfect Life”) and “think” recalling the notions of both imperfect memory and unreliable narrator, the brunt of contention stems from just how much is true. From the phrase “the six months leading up to Mum & Dad separating,” there’s nothing preventing the parents from being as much a figment of H’s imagination as the sister. Alternatively, “Mum & Dad” are H’s imagination of the Visitors.
There’s a disconnect between thoughts and actions contained within the sentence of “At the time I wondered if they adopted her to try to bring them closer together, or just to distract me from what was happening between them.” Notably, everything after the phrase “At the time” registers as the thought-process of an adult, not that of the teenager who experienced these events. As for H’s avoidance of her problems (outlined by “just to distract me from what was happening between them”), that’s provides an irony: that the happiest moments of H’s life was borne of the same reflex (avoidance) that undoes her.
H’s train-of-thought starts running-in-circles during the next sentence: “I don’t really understand why I never tried that hard to find her, or why it seemed so easy to forget, but then I assume she never tried to find me either.” First, there’s the utter confusion in H that she didn’t “understand why I never tried that hard to find her,” but that confusion’s possibly indebted to the years of suppressing the trauma behind the perceived loss of her sister. This suppression created a diversion of truth, a concept referred to via the connotations of the word “seemed”—that appearance doesn’t quite match reality. Such connotations are especially true if one believes that H is mentally ill and has been hallucinating all this for years. And then there’s the reactionary assumption that her sister “never tried to find me either,” an act of victim-blaming brought on by a fearful reaction to the information she’s been denied.
Two elements are at play within the sentence that reads “Sometimes things that meant so much at the time mean nothing in the end.” The first (and more minor) element constitutes a link towards a line in “Ancestral”: “Things that mean so much mean nothing in the end.” Of greater importance comes from the fact that “things that meant so much at the time mean nothing in the end” and the consequences of that fact coming to fruition. Such a consequence stems from only having access to one’s own mind—without communication, no one can know who or what other people consider important. Therefore, H’s solipsism and her isolation converge into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
New information and a confirmation of previously-suggested ideas spring about during the blog entry’s final two sentences: “I never felt brave enough to tell her everything, but in time I definitely would have, especially as I suspected they visited her too. I think it was why we connected.” First, the phrase “I never felt brave enough to tell her everything” reflects some sense of lingering regret in the mind of H, which she attempts to deflect by way of what could’ve been in the phrase “but in time I definitely would have.” But then the big nugget of information unveils itself in the phrase “especially as I suspected they visited her too.” That phrase uses the word “they,” a reference to the Visitors, a group of aliens which (if H is to be believed) abducted the sister and made contact with H once. However, the word “suspected” casts this in doubt since it suggests that H doesn’t know for sure whether “they visited her too.” Then comes “I think it was why we connected,” a sentence further supporting the notion that H may be mentally ill. In fact, this ‘sister’ could have been an elaborate imaginary friend or a new persona—maybe they ‘connected’ because the sister was the product of H’s out-there mind.
Entry 14 (5th March 2011):
I’ve been trying to think of a name for my cat (how to refer to her majesty), but nothing seems right yet.
There are two details within this entry’s only line: “I’ve been trying to think of a name for my cat (how to refer to her majesty), but nothing seems right yet.” That H has difficulties naming her cat reflects the lack of focus her disheveled and falling-apart mind. At the same time, the parenthetical “(how to refer to her majesty)” ends up betraying H’s reclusive nature since it implies that she reveres whatever good company comes her way. That idea’s especially relevant considering that the cat reminds H of her sister.
This photo also has relevance. In one sense, H’s face in the photo looks a mixture of happy and disgruntled. Meanwhile, her cat looks disinterested—illustrating that H’s thoughts about her cat are one-sided.
Entry 15 (9th March 2011):
They visited today. Asked me strange questions, like “would you be missed, and if so, by who?”. I figured it would most likely be the energy company, it’s been a long time since I had much contact with anyone including my family, they seemed happy with that.
“Would you be missed, and if so, by whom?”
For as long as I can remember I have collected stories of the disappeared, women who simply vanished one day without any warning. My mother was always bemused when I would cut these articles out of the newspaper, but I felt some sense of responsibility to these women, to keep them close to me, just as most people simply stepped over them on their way to the football results. Sometimes there would be a follow up story, a missing person had been dragged from a lake or found in a ditch. But more often there would be no follow up at all, and the mystery would just hang there, at least it did for me. The reports I was most fascinated with always had some small detail that made me think perhaps these people disappeared by choice, an apparently insignificant item missing from their room, or something out of character they said to a friend just before they went missing. I was sure these were not victims, on the contrary they were people in control of their own destinies who simply no longer wanted to be where they were and who they were. Stories not about loss and tragedy, but about escape and rebirth. Isn’t it actually quite an appealing idea to leave everything behind and start again with a blank slate? Did someone offer them this chance?
The bevy of questions contained in the start of the passage (“They visited today. Asked me strange questions, like “would you be missed, and if so, by who?” I figured it would most likely be the energy company, it’s been a long time since I had much contact with anyone including my family, they seemed happy with that. “Would you be missed, and if so, by whom?””) appear indicative of those that’d be asked by a therapist. Or it could be voices in H’s mind bargaining with herself, potentially as far as convincing herself that she won’t be missed—so that H should just die or join the Visitors (the most likely identity for “They”). In regards to “they seemed happy with that,” that’s a result which paints the Visitors (if they’re real) as manipulative and predatory. Finally, the detail of H long having lost “contact with anyone including my family” becomes further supported by the contents of “Happy Returns.”
A main point to emphasize emerges via the sentence “For as long as I can remember I have collected stories of the disappeared, women who simply vanished one day without any warning.” In the Deluxe Edition, there are newspaper clippings of missing persons articles of six women (all of which are fictionalized): Florence Duncan, Lena Springer, Teresa Cavanagh, Sian Preston, Jane Rimer, and Madeline Hearne—with the last one of critical importance since her story is the basis of the story-within-a-story of “Routine.” Further analysis on each of the women and what their stories have in common would make this entry too long, so they’ll get their own section after analyzing the blog entries.
However, the true importance of the blog entries to H and to the general narrative exposes itself in the next sentence: “My mother was always bemused when I would cut these articles out of the newspaper, but I felt some sense of responsibility to these women, to keep them close to me, just as most people simply stepped over them on their way to the football results.” In a broad sense, this one sentence points to both the blind eye society turns in order to silently condemn the iconoclasts and towards the misguided theorists like H who attach more significance to this than what is really there. Perhaps H’s actions aren’t surprising given that the phrase “some sense of responsibility to these women” places some personal attachment insofar as her sister’s a missing person. However, H’s status as an unreliable narrator returns in the wording of “most people simply stepped over them on the way to the football results,” a phrasing in which H paints herself as morally-superior than the general public—hypocritical considering that she’s been established as a morally-gray character.
Such an instance of hypocrisy seeps into the stories that H preserves during the following sentence: “Sometimes there would be a follow up story, a missing person had been dragged from a lake or found in a ditch.” These two examples of death are ones with ambiguous cause—they could have been murders or suicides for as little information that readers receive. Regardless of whether these deaths were self-inflicted, the presence of a body being “dragged from a lake” or “found in a ditch” are visceral examples of ‘hand cannot erase’ physical evidence. However, the visceral detail doesn’t’ match the accounts of the missing persons in the Deluxe Edition.
Those accounts fall more in-line with the next sentence: “But more often there would be no follow up at all, and the mystery would just hang there, at least it did for me.” As a result of that, the phrase “the mystery would just hang there” denotes how the lack of a resolution proves haunting—it leaves readers/listeners wondering endlessly about what could’ve happened. That’s why these missing persons accounts haunt H, why the story of Joyce Carol Vincent haunted Steven enough to write this album, and why the story of H sticks with listeners/readers so vividly. But with H, there’s undoubtedly a sense from the phrase “at least it did for me” that her perspective’s skewed. Which leaves one to consider to what degree does that skewed perspective owe to attentiveness or insanity? Or are they identical for H? Both aren’t questions with easy answers.
More hints as to the nature of H’s skewed perspective uncloak themselves via the next long run-on sentence: “The reports I was most fascinated with always had some small detail that made me think perhaps these people disappeared by choice, an apparently insignificant item missing from their room, or something out of character they said to a friend just before they went missing.” Here, the attentiveness and the insanity go hand-in-hand through the phrasing of “always had some detail that made me think perhaps these people disappeared by choice”—a statement that delves into the form of conjecture normally reserved for conspiracy theorists. Given that H believes that these people (like her sister) were taken by the Visitors (and that the Visitors can take form as voices in H’s head), there’s more evidence pointing towards insanity. But the way that this sentence ends—with the phrase “something out of character they said to a friend just before they went missing”—points towards a detail consistent with all six missing women and foreshadows the letter written down by H that contains the lyrics to “Happy Returns.” That letter begins with “Hey brother,” (the song’s opening line). In the instance of H, her “out of character” action involves to H wrapping up presents or to her writing the letter at all. If the connections are 1:1, then to equate a “brother” with a “friend” speak volumes about how utterly disconnected H becomes by the end of the narrative.
Conspiracy theories rebound in full-force within the next run-on sentence: “I was sure these were not victims, on the contrary they were people in control of their own destinies who simply no longer wanted to be where they were and who they were.” First of all, H’s statement of “I was sure” leaves it open that the speaker currently isn’t sure since “was” is a past-tense verb. This creates the sense that H doubts whether she believes in her words or if she’s just spitballing ideas at random and hoping that one maintains logical coherence. But with what little known about these women’s last-known moments, there’s only three things H can ascertain from “people in control of their own destinies who simply no longer wanted to be where they were and who they were.” Those three things are faking their deaths, suicide, and abduction by visitors—and from the positive manner that H spins this, something as dark as suicide can be eliminated as a possibility.
Even with suicide officially off-the-table, the next sentence of “Stories not about loss and tragedy, but about escape and rebirth” contains a conceit that there’s nothing good in the world—likely because that’s what H’s isolated state has led her to believe. Although this doesn’t lead to H committing suicide at the end of the album, this sense of nothing good existing in the world is essentially the same escapist impulse that fueled the speaker of Fear of a Blank Planet (whose story ended in suicide during “Sleep Together”). In H’s case, her escapist impulse consists of a new world, either literally by way of the Visitors or figuratively through faking her death.
Those impulses are provided further fuel-for-the-fire in the culminating sentences of this entry: “Isn’t it actually quite an appealing idea to leave everything behind and start again with a blank slate? Did someone offer them this chance?” H’s self-query regarding the appeal of leaving “everything behind and start again with a blank slate” posits a temptation that H is just about to succumb to. However, that still leaves it open whether the temptation is towards the Visitors or faking her death. And then there’s the mention of “someone,” which removes all doubt: H wants to seek the Visitors, which may not even exist.
Entry 16 (10th March 2011):
After I finished painting tonight I couldn’t sleep, so I sat looking out the window. It was a cold but perfectly clear night. Sometimes I just gaze for hours at the cityscape stretching on forever in all directions, but tonight a couple arguing at the bus stop broke my reverie, so instead I watched some TV and had a drink, then managed to fall asleep for an hour or so. I woke up a few minutes ago. It’s beginning to get light outside.
I remembered what they asked me the night before, and I thought about the dog the Russians sent into space in the fifties, Laika. They found her living as a stray on the streets of Moscow and figured no one would miss her. She was always meant to die, there was no other possible outcome.
I’m going to call my cat Laika, I think she likes it, she was asleep on the sofa, but when I said it out loud she opened her eyes.
While the opening sentences of “After I finished painting tonight I couldn’t sleep, so I sat looking out the window. It was a cold but perfectly clear night” mostly acts as scene description, there’s one reiteration of a familiar motif through “painting.” Sure, it’s her passion and it’s been used as an analogue for artistic expression, but one should also consider that one function of art is to add or erase. In that sense, it links to both the album cover and to a literal usage of the phrase ‘hand cannot erase.’
Another familiar theme reappears—but has new developments—during the following run-on sentence: “Sometimes I just gaze for hours at the cityscape stretching on forever in all directions, but tonight a couple arguing at the bus stop broke my reverie, so instead I watched some TV and had a drink, then managed to fall asleep for an hour or so.” Of particular notice is the image of “a couple arguing at the bus stop broke my reverie,” where from the denial of isolation, readers can see that isolation acts as redemptive to H. Not only does this solidify that—in H’s mind—the outside world’s preferable to other people, but it also contains the same ethos as that of ‘purification within nature’ exhibited by Romantic-era poets (especially William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelly, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge). However, the omnipresence of the city renders such an ethos unattainable in the modern world.
The next two sentences (“I woke up a few minutes ago. It’s beginning to get light outside.”) contain ample use of symbolism that’s deliberate both in its usage and its positioning in the narrative of the blog entries. Regarding the symbolism itself, it’s that of the dawn standing in for a new beginning. However, there’s a dark irony in that symbolism’s deployment when considering that it appears in the entry directly after the newspaper clippings. That positioning suggests that H has reached a new step in her downward decline—and she might not even know it.
Where matters jump (at least) neck-deep in the rabbit hole is through an allusion to history in the next three sentences: “I remembered what they asked me on the night before, and I thought about the dog the Russians sent into space in the fifties, Laika. They found her living as a stray on the streets of Moscow and figured no one would miss her. She was always meant to die, there was no other possible outcome.” This “Laika”—one of the first animals in space and the first to orbit Earth—occupied Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957. Since the technology to de-orbit hadn’t been developed yet and since next-to-nothing was known regarding spaceflight’s impact on living creatures, Laika’s survival wasn’t expected. Sure enough, Laika died a few hours after launch due to overheating, possibly brought on by equipment failure. The comparisons to the doomed state H believes she’s in isn’t unwarranted, but comparisons are furthered when factoring in that Vladimir Yazdovsky (leader of the program of test dogs used on rockets that Laika was part of) wrote in a later publication that “Laika was quiet and unassuming”—personality traits not unlike those applied to H. For Steven himself to form a comparison between a female dog and a female human can come across as a sexist insult, but one also has to consider that Steven—a vegan since his teenage years—respects animals as much as human beings. Therefore, the symbolic association’s based on the factors of isolation shared between H and Laika. One can also ascertain from “figured” that the higher-ups who selected Laika to occupy Sputnik 2 are analogous to the Visitors selecting people to abduct. Even if H’s death isn’t a literal death, this whole comparison ominously foreshadows her fate.
All of that renders the fact that H names her cat Laika (in the last sentence “I’m going to call my cat Laika, I think she likes it, she was asleep on the sofa, but when I said it out loud she opened her eyes”) a decision which comes across as tone-deaf. But the fact that her cat “likes” the name is equally-concerning. Namely since that indicates that the cat shares H’s desire to disappear.
Entry 17 (5th June 2011):
The streets are Marie-Celeste deserted, but the sky is more active than I have ever seen it before. The light from the city usually makes it impossible to see the stars, but on a warm night like this I can take the bus to a place where everything is dominoes and chiaroscuro. Still light that travels for years to reach here, but now there is also something else in the sky, much closer to home. I must be dreaming again.
H’s penchant for obscure historical references strikes again in the sentence “The streets are Marie-Celeste deserted, but the sky is more active then I have ever seen it before.” Beginning with “Marie-Celeste deserted,” there’s a reference to both a fictional story, a historical event, and a linkage that helps one better understand the concept. The fictional story—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1884 short-story “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement”—provides the name of a fictional ship called “Marie Celeste.” However, that ship had a basis in an actual ship: the Mary Celeste, which was an American merchant ship discovered adrift and deserted just off the Azores Islands on December 5, 1872. Since no one who had been on board was ever seen or heard from again, the name of the ship’s become a byword for unexplained desertion—a detail rendering it thematically appropriate to details already known about H. Strikingly, one of the coordinates (42.711252, -23.261750) etched into the Key of Skeleton is close to where the wreck occurred. Furthering thematic significance comes the contrast between the desertion and the implied presence of Visitors in “the sky is more active,” suggesting that H thinks the Visitors were responsible for the disappearance of the crew of the Mary Celeste.
That thread of the Visitors segues into the next sentence: “The light from the city usually makes it impossible to see the stars, but on a warm night like this I can take the bus to a place where everything is dominoes and chiaroscuro.” At this point, H believes that the Visitors (associated with “the stars”) are a part of nature, which indicates (in the phrase “The light from the city usually makes it impossible to see the stars”) a dichotomy of society and/or technological progress invalidating the natural world. That invalidation makes for a perverse irony via the phrase “take the bus” since that entails that technology’s become so pervasive that it’s a requirement to access nature.
And then there’s the multiple layers of meaning to coax out of the phrase “dominoes and chiaroscuro.” To understand the layers of meaning, one needs to know that “chiaroscuro” (Italian for ‘light-dark’) is a term relating to art denoting the use of strong contrasts between light and dark—usually bold contrasts that affect a whole composition. With this in mind, a domino itself—with black dots on a white exterior—is a chiaroscuro. Additionally, the stars against a night sky also presents a visual chiaroscuro. On yet another level, Steven digs this concept since one of his other projects (Bass Communion) has an album named after the term. But Steven’s music—lush execution combined with incredibly-dark subject matter—can represent a musical chiaroscuro. Lastly, “dominoes” ties into the notion of a “domino effect,” providing another layer of foreshadowing regarding H’s fate.
Further credence of the connection between the stars and the Visitors emerges during the ending sentences of this entry: “Still light that travels for years to reach here, but now there is something else in the sky, much closer to home. I must be dreaming again.” Assuming that H isn’t hallucinating, the phrase “now there is something else in the sky” divvies out the clearest evidence yet of the link between the Visitors and the stars. However, the word “dreaming” at the end of the entry does leave open the possibility of H hallucinating this detail. But even before that, H maintains dubious credibility since there’s two interpretations of how she states that the Visitors are “much closer to home.” On one level, that phrase entails that—because she knows someone who she suspects was taken by the Visitors—she has a greater connection to the Visitors and is more qualified to discuss matters regarding them. On the other hand, it can register as smugness—almost as if H states that her past experiences make her less likely to fall victim to the same fate.
Entry 18 (19th June 2011):
You know the internet makes it even easier to be invisible J.? You can pretend to be whoever you want to be, create whatever construct you want to pass off as your life and personality, and then erase it all with just a few clicks. I think you would hate it, but who knows? I would have said the same thing about me until I got sucked in, at least for a while. I started with a Facebook page, I don’t know why I agreed to it, but one of the girls at work set it up for me, so before I knew it I was checking for new messages and friend requests every day. For a few minutes at first, and then whole evenings would pass by finding pages dedicated to artists, musicians or films I liked (or the ones I wanted people to believe I liked anyway) and placing them in some kind of order on my page. Before you know it you are buying things you don’t want or need, telling personal details to total strangers, and arguing on a forum with a kid from Utah about why David Lynch is not a pretentious douchebag. After about 6 months I woke up one morning and just felt sick to my stomach with the whole thing and deleted my page – boy, that felt so good, to erase myself again. Me, the disappearer. Anyway, what I wanted to say was that it seems while I was in this phase I joined a site called Friends Reunited. I had totally forgotten about it, but I guess I was trying to find some trace of you. Today I had a message through the site from someone I went to school with. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and son, and their dog, works for a big department store chain, buying shoes. She included some old photos of us on a school trip to Whitby in North Yorkshire, but it definitely wasn’t me in the photographs, and I don’t recognise her name, so I think she got the wrong person.
From just the opening line of the entry (“You know the internet makes it even easier to be invisible J?”), there’s a few things ascertainable. First, the presence of “the internet” lets one know that this entry corresponds to the lyrics of “Home Invasion.” Also, “the internet” is a target that Steven’s gone after before—both in the Porcupine Tree song “Every Home Is Wired” (from Signify) and in the entire Fear of a Blank Planet album. But in this instance, the internet’s a target due to how it furthers the isolating effects of society in general.
Such isolating effects are further elaborated upon within the next sentence: “You can pretend to be whoever you want to be, create whatever construct you want to pass off as your life and personality, and then erase it all with just a few clicks.” Right from the word “pretend,” the familiar themes of escapism and illusion re-emerge, but this isn’t too different from the fiction that H has spun regarding her own life. Given that “whoever you want to be” for H is “no one” (as of the 30th April 2010 entry), that ties directly into the notion of ‘hand cannot erase’ by means of desensitization and social numbness. Both of which are extended via “create whatever construct you want to pass off as your life and personality,” a statement entailing that—unless one lets their guard down—the general public will only see the social mask instead of the real person. As a result, invisibility and anonymity foster another division. Where the link between that and the phrase ‘hand cannot erase’ becomes even more explicit appears dead-ahead: “erase it all with just a few clicks.” On a surface-level, that act marks a hand erasing something by means of a keyboard. However, since the Internet isn’t a tangible physical property, erasure isn’t fully possible. And even when someone is ‘erased,’ there are still signs that a person existed. Beyond that, there’s memories in anyone a person had ever interacted with.
One would be wise to consider some of the implications of the next two sentences: “I think you would hate it, but who knows? I would have said the same thing about me until I got sucked in, at least for a while.” Just from “I think you would hate it,” there’s the sensation that H imagines that she’s re-established contact with J—possibly with the Visitors acting as a medium. That alone marks another sign of H’s mental decline, but there’s a parallel to something earlier in the phrase “I would have said the same thing about me until I got sucked in.” That similarity echoes H’s behavior at blending in at parties (from the 20th May 2010 entry) before “at least for a while” suggests that that behavior has already died.
Even before that behavior died, there’s the suggestion of half-heartedness buried inside the next run-on sentence: “I started with a Facebook page, I don’t know why I agreed to it, but one of the girls at work set it up for me, so before I knew it I was checking for new messages and friend requests every day.” For instance, “I don’t know why I agreed to it” presents yet another case of people not behaving rationally. And that lack of rationality provides a rare instance of H giving into society’s whims—as denoted from “one of the girls at work set it up for me.” However, the phrase “so before I knew it” renders H’s volition in this situation rather dubious.
One can’t help but extend that dubious volition into the run-on sentence that reads “For a few minutes at first, and then whole evenings would pass by finding pages dedicated to artists, musicians or films I like (or the ones I wanted people to believe I liked anyway) and placing them in some kind of order on my page.” Particularly in the transition from “minutes” into “whole evenings,” a shift that carries associations of addiction. However, that addiction (at least from “the ones I wanted people to believe I liked anyway”) is—via another example of a self-deceitful mask—enabled by a power trip and the idea to create the ideal image. Such a perception isn’t realistic and—along with the activity of “placing them in some kind of order”—signals the antithesis of “Flaws are everything and chaos reigns” (a line taken from Steven’s “Deform to Form a Star,” appearing on 2011’s Grace for Drowning).
The already-explicit links to the internet are rendered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer in the next line: “Before you know it you are buying things you don’t want or need, telling personal details to total strangers, and arguing on a form with a kid from Utah about why David Lynch is not a pretentious douchebag.” That’s namely due to the phrase “buying things you don’t want or need” mirroring a line (“Download the shit you didn’t want”) from “Home Invasion.” But it does use the internet as a venue for new topics of discussion starting with the phrase “telling personal details to total strangers.” Such a phrase denotes that the ‘privacy’ of the internet has an emboldening effect on H, behaving unlike how she has before. Further evidence of this emboldening effect can be derived from the phrase “arguing on a forum with a kid from Utah about why David Lynch is not a pretentious douchebag,” where that effect makes debates between differing opinions nasty since that ‘privacy’ removes any filter. Even the choice to mention “David Lynch” is relevant since he’s a director that occupies a ‘love-it-or-hate-it’ status. As a result of that status, artistic types such as H are more pre-disposed to enjoy his films while an average-joe (like “a kid from Utah”) would consider him “a pretentious douchebag” that utilizes dense symbolism in order to mask an inability to write a coherent plot.
Although it’s appropriate (in the sentences “After about 6 months I woke up one morning and just felt sick to my stomach and deleted my page—boy, that felt so good, to erase myself again. Me the disappearer.”) that H deletes her page as quickly as it was created, the phrases which emerge afterwards prove even more revealing. Beginning with “boy, that felt so good, to erase myself again,” there’s the presence of a smug attitude that leaves H feeling like she can do the impossible—erase herself. In fact, “again” suggests that H believes she’s already done it, so there’s no difference between doing it one more time. Such a sentiment remains embedded with her declaration of “disappearer” as if it were a job title.
After a while, the point becomes reached where H appears to ramble during the sentences that read as follows: “Anyway, what I wanted to say was that it seems while I was in this phase I joined a site called Friends Reunited. I had totally forgotten about it, but I guess I was trying to find some trace of you.” But where things aren’t rambling reveals a nugget of ambiguity—the phrase “I guess I was trying to find some trace of you.” First, the uncertainty of the word “guess” leaves open the notion that H unconsciously knows two things: that achieving ‘hand cannot erase’ is impossible and that J likely never existed. Second, the “trace” of J that H tries to find seems like it can only be found if H erases herself for good.
As for the extended anecdote (“Today I had a message through the site from someone I went to school with. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and son, and their dog, works for a big department store chain, buying shoes. She included some old photos of us on a school trip to Whitby in North Yorkshire, but it definitely wasn’t me in the photographs, and I don’t recognize her name, so I think she got the wrong person.”) that takes up the last three sentences of the entry, there’s a paradox at play. That paradox involves a hole in the information age—one would think that the abundance of information available on the internet would make objective fact easier to obtain and would lessen confusion in the world. This anecdote demonstrates that that’s not the case—even without mentioning conflicting political views, this anecdote provides an example indicating how easy it is to cause confusion in a packed world. All that the internet does is offer a new venue for that confusion.
Entry 19 (20th June 2011):
I watch Laika from the window stalking sparrows. Birds can be pretty stupid, I read that the cat moves its tail when it’s closing in on its prey, because the bird fixates on the part of the cat moving the most and thinks it still has a few more precious moments to feed before it needs to escape. If it takes to the air a split second too late it’s curtains for the bird. But these birds are smarter and always get their timing exactly right, so eventually Laika gives up and comes home, but then gives me a nasty scratch with her claws when I try to pick her up. Some kind of quota of suffering inflicted on another living creature has been achieved after all.
Within the first two sentences of the entry (“I watch Laika from the window stalking sparrows. Birds can be pretty stupid, I read that the cat moves its tail when it’s closing in on its prey, because the bird fixates on the part of the cat moving the most and thinks it still has a few more precious moments to feed before it needs to escape.”), there’s a specific word that holds particular symbolic weight. That word is “sparrows,” which acts as a possible reference to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (specifically Act 5, Scene 2, lines 208-13):
“There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it not be now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.”
This allusion does fall on its face since this sparrow doesn’t fall. Considering the recurring notion of orderly fictional narratives not matching up to the mechanisms of reality, upending a motif from the Bard provides a potent example of that notion in action. However, it also serves as a symbol of how H’s holding patterns are destined to become prolonged over the course of a slow decline.
Once things shift to the next sentence (“If it takes to the air a split second too late it’s curtains for the bird.”), parallels to H’s future are made while demonstrating the merciless nature of the natural world. Namely, if one substitutes the predator-prey relationship between Laika and the sparrow for the blind-eye of society, H’s entire story gets summarized in one sentence. Especially since it evokes a sentiment akin to a line from “Ancestral”: “When the world doesn’t want you, it will never tell you why.”
The moment where the upending of the Shakespeare allusion occurs is in the next run-on sentence: “But these birds are smarter and always get their timing exactly right, so eventually Laika gives up and comes home, but then gives me a nasty scratch with her claws when I try to pick her up.” Given the symbolic meaning of sparrows (prophecy), the phrase “these birds are smarter” acts as a defiance of prophecy. That Laika gives H “a nasty scratch” afterwards further places things that were once held as certainties as not-so-certain—a sign that events are truly unpredictable.
But the final sentence (“Some kind of quota of suffering inflicted on another living creature has been achieved after all.”) holds a morbid view of things. As ascertainable from the phrase “quota of suffering inflicted on another living creature,” there’s an extremely bleak view of both nature and human nature at play: our flaws ensure that we respond to suffering and the fear thereof with isolating oneself. In H’s instance, she seeks to evade “suffering” by shutting herself from the world. Unfortunately, since (kind of like a Buddhist idea) the suffering is inevitable, H only changes the form that the suffering will take. Or as the lyrics of “Ancestral” state: “You can shut the door, but you can’t ignore/The crawl of your decline.”
Entry 20 (11th September 2011):
Regret is a very human impulse. At least I don’t imagine Laika has any regrets. You have a million possibilities open to you, but in the end you need to make a commitment, or you stay in a holding pattern of indecision and nothingness forever. Perhaps I am too afraid of being haunted by the ghosts of those other paths.
They prowl my flat tonight. They won’t leave me in peace.
From merely the first couple of sentences (“Regret is a very human impulse. At least I don’t imagine Laika has any regrets.”), there’s ample information to take in. One can possibly read from “Regret” that this entry marks the point where the track “Regret #9” occurs—on a very appropriate date. That H describes the sensation of regret as “a very human impulse” speaks towards H’s solipsistic mindset and towards the limitations of what people can know about how the brains of animals work.
H does seem to have some awareness that regret is a folly—at least if there’s any indication in the following sentence: “You have a million possibilities open to you, but in the end you need to make a commitment, or you stay in a holding pattern of indecision and nothingness forever.” The primary dichotomy decrying regret stems from “make a commitment, or you stay in a holding pattern of indecision and nothingness forever. In fact, that dichotomy determines how one interprets the album’s ambiguous ending. If one’s inclined to believe that H goes insane at the album’s ending, then that’s the result of sticking to the “holding pattern” by remaining isolated. If one believes that H actually does get abducted by the Visitors, then that’s the result of a “commitment” she made. Alternatively, H slowly goes insane and her irrational mind leaves her to think that that “commitment” is a rational choice.
And with the sentence that reads “Perhaps I am too afraid of being haunted by the ghosts of those other paths,” one can now see a cause of H’s indecision. These “ghosts of those other paths” denote the regrets themselves—namely of what could’ve been. Furthermore, several sketches in the Deluxe Edition depict ghosts. However, the details “They prowl my flat tonight” and “won’t leave me in peace” identify the ghosts as “They”—similar language as that ascribed to the Visitors. One can read that as H beginning to conflate the two as she’s starting to lose her mind or as the Visitors being a supernatural entity.
Lastly, the photograph attached to this isn’t without relevance. On one level, the lighting creates two upward stacks pointed towards the sky—evoking comparisons to the Twin Towers. On another, the coordinate 42.711256, 23.261750 (one of the coordinates printed on the Key of Skeleton)—when placed into Google Maps gives this:
It’s the same building shared between both photographs. But what’s striking is that those coordinates point to an apartment building in Bulgaria (specifically Street Ivan I Stilyana Paraskevovi 7, Sofia city). My best guess given the separation in distance between London and Bulgaria is that that apartment building was the site of a tragedy and that the person who died had characteristics in-common with H. If that’s the case, it adds more fuel to foreshadow H’s fate.
Entry 21 (24th September 2011):
They asked me to recall a time when I felt completely happy. First I thought about my sister, but then I remembered a time when I was taking a train journey with my mother, I must have been about 4 or 5 years old. We were going to the seaside in Wales. It was a long hot Summer and we were passing through miles and miles of sun bathed countryside with cows and sheep and horses. My mother was happy that day. There was no one else in the carriage, it felt unreal. I didn’t want it to end. For me the happiest moments have always been somewhere between departure and arrival, when there’s no set-up to the story, and it doesn’t go anywhere, or really have an ending.
Beautiful limbo….
Right off the bat, there’s ambiguity in the entry with the opening sentence: “They asked me to recall a time when I felt completely happy.” The identity of “They” isn’t clear—it can refer to the therapists (from the 9th March 2011 entry) or to the Visitors. Either way, H is no paragon of mental health.
That first sentence serves as only a prelude of the next one: “First I thought about my sister, but then I remembered a time when I was taking a train journey with my mother, I must have been about 4 or 5 years old.” Here, “remembered” recalls memories that may have previously been suppressed. The memory itself—the “taking a train journey with my mother”—indicates the point of the narrative where “Transience” occurs, which acts as a flashback after the events of “Home Invasion/Regret #9.” Structure-wise, the pleasant memories of “Transience” serves a similar role on Hand. Cannot. Erase. as “A Warm Place” does on NIN’s The Downward Spiral—a final point of comfort before everything goes to hell. As for the familiar symbol of a “train,” it—as always when it appears in Steven Wilson’s corpus—functions as a symbol for the passage of time. But here, its appearance in a flashback actually marks the passage of time in H’s present moment—the speeding train leaves her far behind. Some credence to the present moment is established by one of the lyrics to “Transience” (“Filigree circles around your wrist”), which imply the presence of self-harm scars in H that she likely wouldn’t have at “4 or 5 years old.”
There’s also a lot of information to glean from the next cluster of sentences: “We were going to the seaside in Wales. It was a long hot summer and we were passing through miles and miles of sun bathed countryside with cows and sheep and horses. My mother was happy that day. There was no one else in the carriage, it felt unreal. I didn’t want it to end.” Although I’m unable to pin down specific locations with “the seaside in Wales” and “miles and miles of sun bathed countryside,” those first two sentences matter less than the three that follow. Because starting with the notion that H’s “mother was happy that day,” the unreliability of memory comes firmly into play. Sure, H could’ve read her mother’s facial expression and assumed she was happy, but to know whether she’s truly happy requires reading the interior mind, something that’s impossible. Further evidence of the faultiness of H’s memory is ascertainable from the detail that “no one else was in the carriage”—a point where how H remembers events conflicts with how those events most likely occurred. Furthermore, from “felt unreal,” one could read that the Visitors have modified a memory in H and that the “unreal” feeling stems from H being somewhat aware of the discrepancy between how she’s remembering things and how they probably occurred. Regardless of how modified the memory is or isn’t, the phrase “I didn’t want it to end” invokes the meaning of the train symbolism from earlier in this entry, as well as the words H remembers from her father in the lyrics to “Transience”: “It’s only the start.”
Both the passage of time and the goal-oriented state of the world interferes with H’s ideas in the next sentence: “For me the happiest moments have always been somewhere between departure and arrival, when there’s no set-up to the story, and it doesn’t go anywhere, or really have an ending.” What H desires—an ambiguous state “between departure and arrival”—marks the epitome of indecision wrapped in the window-dressing of profundity. Additionally, that state’s impossible to sustain in a world as goal-oriented as the one we live in. The impossibility of H’s idea is further proven by taking apart H’s use of the word “story.” That that word was used is ironic considering that while H propositions chaos as a sustainable lifestyle, stories are structured by the person who wrote them. That’s to say that life has elements of fiction insofar as we impose a structure on it—both on an individual and a societal level.
The takeaway from that and H’s last bit of words in this entry (“Beautiful limbo…”) suggest a moral to the story: even if reality’s a chaotic mess, human beings need to operate with some degree of order and they need to balance between order and chaos. Too much of either isn’t a good thing. And one example of an overabundance of chaos is depicted with “Beautiful limbo…” and its indication that H outright revels in a chaotic lifestyle.
Entry 22 (28th September 2011):
They left me a book called “Key of Skeleton”, I’ve been reading it, but it’s hard to follow, and I’m constantly distracted by the old episodes of a cookery based game show that seem to run all day long every day on TV. I’ve been watching it for weeks, and I don’t seem to have seen the same episode twice yet, so there must be hundreds. Sometimes they show old episodes of Antiques Roadshow instead.
Immediately upon the start of the entry, the sentence “They left me a book called “Key of Skeleton”” allows a lot of parts to chew on. From “They,” we’re led to believe that the Visitors are involved. But the meat-and-potatoes of this sentence comes from the mention of the “Key of Skeleton”—a cypher which links the numbers recited in parts of both “Regret #9” and “Ancestral.” Those numbers are something that Steven’s stated (in an interview) hold the hidden key in uncovering what happens to H at the end of the album, but the same interview also has Steven state that no one has cracked the code behind the numbers yet. However, describing the “Key of Skeleton” as “a book” is a curious detail since—between the Deluxe Edition and the blog—we only get to see one cypher. This suggests that there are other cyphers in the book and that they are deliberately kept away from us. Or that the one cypher we’ve been permitted to view is the only one that matters. Or that Steven’s wrong and none of the cyphers matter at all. Take your pick—but I’m convinced it’s another piece of the album’s mystery.
Judging from the cluster of sentences that carry out this particular entry (“I’ve been reading it, but it’s hard to follow, and I’m constantly distracted by the old episodes of a cookery based game show that seem to run all day long every day on TV. I’ve been watching it for weeks, and I don’t seem to have seen the same episode twice yet, so there must be hundreds. Sometimes they show old episodes of Antiques Roadshow instead.”), one can determine that H doesn’t solve the mystery behind the Key of Skeleton, either. That’s partly due to her “constantly distracted” state—indeed, the state of modern society—furthering her sense of isolation and meaninglessness. For the sake of specifics, it’s worth noting that the programs H mentions as “cookery based game show” and “Antiques Roadshow” are most likely the UK version of MasterChef (which lasted for 146 episodes in the original run and 278 episodes in the revival run) and the BBC UK original version of Antiques Roadshow (which has lasted since February 1979). That both are long-running series suggests that this state of modern society has endured for a long time—and that for one to solve the Key of Skeleton, that person would need to be completely cut-off from that.
Entry 23 (29th September 2011):
This image—a diagram of the Key of Skeleton—allows for a small summary on how this thing works and why it’s proved to be one nasty son-of-a-bitch to decode.
The primary component of the Key of Skeleton takes the form of the six-ring wheel in the center. Outside the outermost ring are a series of twenty-six numbers (same as the number of letters in the English alphabet) that unevenly align with the columns of letters in the rings. These numbers add up to 328 and the sequence of numbers on the top left of the Key of Skeleton (3, 6, 4, 12, 3) are similar to those spoken in either “Regret #9” or “Ancestral.”
There are a total of fifteen columns—just as there are fifteen letters in ‘hand cannot erase’ and the two anagrams printed on the Key of Skeleton: ‘arcane handset on’ and ‘her antennas coda.’ The shaded column of letters is assumed to be where one starts deciphering. The fifteen columns of letters come in five variants (each repeating three times)—clockwise from the shaded area, the columns read: OEUODI, ENDVRY, ATAOJL, OETADL, and []KINOK.
On the bottom-left corner, one can see a list of four sets of coordinates: 51.602178 - 0.118029, 51.475069 – 0.081780, 50.886425 – 1.369235, and 42.711256 – 23.261750. Usually, coordinates are separated by a comma, not a dash like these are, rendering it ambiguous whether or not the coordinates were meant to be read as a positive/positive pair or a positive/negative pair. Further confusing matters is that both the positive and negative variants of these coordinates have significant events attached to them: apartments buildings that were sites of tragedies (positive) and tragedies with elemental symbols attached to them (negative). I tend to think that both contain significance in uncovering the mystery.
Bottom line is that if I have stumbling blocks involving interpreting the album, it’s going to come down to this fucking cypher and the numbers in “Regret #9” and “Ancestral.” It would probably be best to send this to someone who’s a prodigy at cryptography and algorithms and have them take a crack at….cracking it. Otherwise, this is Finnegans Wake-level shenanigans. If it comes down to this being the only thing that stops me from solving the mystery, then I say “Fuck solving the mystery.”
Entry 24 (2nd October 2011):
A list: “Things that calm me”.
I thought it would be easy but after half an hour there were just two things on it:
1. My cat
2. Cigarettes
While doing this I opened my second packet today. Cigarettes calm me. Well, just for a few minutes, but it’s a start.
Have they been back since? I can’t remember, but I see the lights in the sky. I don’t feel any better after they visit me.
Instead I think I should go to a doctor.
I swallow a couple of pills. Laika jumps on to my lap, curls up and goes to sleep.
The ticking of the kitchen clock…. nothing else. The city sleeps beyond my window. But the city never sleeps.
Looking out tonight I see lights in the sky. The lights become more, then less. Afterwards just the unholy glow of the city. Ticking. Silence. And a growing feeling of warmth inside me. I close my eyes. The warmth is wandering through my body, through my chest, into my mouth. My eyes are still closed and I’m not here anymore.
The night ends.
Beginning with the opening few lines of “A list: “Things that calm me.” I thought it would be easy but after half an hour there were just two things on it:/ 1. My cat/2. Cigarettes. While doing this I opened my second packet today. Cigarettes calm me. Well, just for a few minutes, but it’s a start,” there’s symbolic resonance in this entry. That symbolism stems from the items on the list: other forms of life (the cat) and flirtations with death (the cigarettes) are the only things which calm H. However, the construction of “Cigarettes calm me. Well, just for a few minutes” is one that undercuts itself—suggesting that the calming effect doesn’t work, a sentiment speaking volumes towards the pervasiveness of the world’s woes on H.
Following that train of thought comes the weakening of another line of defense: “Have they been back since? I can’t remember, but I see the lights in the sky. I don’t feel any better after they visit me. Instead I think I should go to a doctor.” For starters, the “they” refers to the Visitors. Then, the phrase “I can’t remember”—with the tacit mention of one of H’s faculties starting to fail her—implies that she’s starting to slip even further. That sense of slipping away supports the idea that “lights in the sky” (ostensibly pertaining to either the stars or the Visitors) is H’s way of hallucinating the visitors anytime she sees the stars in the night sky.
Up until now, those hallucinations have been deemed by H as something comforting. However, the phrasing of “I don’t feel any better after they visit me” points to something sinister about the Visitors (if they exist) and to something indicating that H may be more screwed-up than initially thought. As for the latter, that phrase connotes a split between H’s mental and physical states regarding the Visitors. H’s mental state wants any inkling of the Visitors that she can possibly receive because of her escapism. But H’s physical state (bound by human instincts) operates with the classic ‘flight or fight’ response, if not with outright physiological aversion. After all, H believes the Visitors took J away, so there’s likely something dangerous about them.
Needless to say, the phrase “Instead I think I should go to a doctor” registers as a colossal understatement. H is a person with significant psychological troubles—troubles that may lead a doctor to assume that she’s crazy. And if that’s not the case at this moment in H’s story, then that may be true of H by the end of the story.
This entry’s next pair of sentences (“I swallow a couple of pills. Laika jumps on to my lap, curls up and goes to sleep.”) carry off of the thread of physiological aversion, provide a link to an album lyric, and foreshadow the events fueling the next entry. The album lyric in question—“You slowly move towards the medicine chest” (from “3 Years Older”)—posits the pill-popping depicted by “I swallow a couple of pills” as either a recent (if “3 Years Older” is an overture to the album’s concept) or chronic (if “3 Years Older” is the first song on the album chronologically) issue for H, whether for legitimate reasons or not. As for the connections associated with the thread of physiological aversion, one implication regarding the pills denotes that the only way to stop that physiological aversion to the Visitors is to deaden what causes it. Therefore, H’s use of pills amount to emotional numbing—further linking her to the Fear of a Blank Planet protagonist and also explaining the stoic wording of many of these entries.
On the topic of foreshadowing, there’s something to draw from the phrasing of “Laika jumps on to my lap, curls up and goes to sleep.” This is the last time readers ever see Laika in the narrative, so that also factors into reading these lines—this “sleep” could very well read as the sleep of death. Or at least a sleep involving abduction by the Visitors. Regardless, it fulfils the name given to the cat. It also imbues H’s list with an additional sting—between the cat ‘running away’ and the cigarettes helping less-and-less, H’s last lines of defense are quickly breaking down.
Additional symbolism arises from the next sentence: “The ticking of the kitchen clock…nothing else.” At this crossroads, the “ticking of the kitchen clock” and the symbolism associated with it are inseparable from the detail that the “ticking” is a mechanical noise. Therefore, this is a symbol of mechanization, societal degradation, and artificiality—all cloaked in a facsimile of time.
That all of those are ascribed to society at large (instead of just H) proves vital in reading the next duo of sentences: “The city sleeps beyond my window. But the city never sleeps.” At this point, there’s a contradiction at play between capitalist society and human limitations. The human limitation depicted (sleep) would appear to win out due to “The city sleeps beyond my window.” However, the phrase “the city never sleeps” conveys the contrary. The implications of such are that the forces enabling isolation remain a core component of how society is structured.
The associations between society and sleep provide a venue for H’s interior mind during the next triad of sentences: “Looking out tonight I see lights in the sky. The lights become more, then less. Afterwards just the unholy glow of the city.” First off, the recurring phrase “lights in the sky” signals the Visitors, but the dimming of city lights (“then less”) seems to imply that the Visitors are turning away. But the biggest point of contention stems from the phrase “Afterwards just the unholy glow of the city”—a phrase that supports H’s disdain for society and her escapism. Come to think of it, “unholy” serves as an apt word to convey the broken quality of society—as well as one which echoes the album lyric “I have lost all faith in what’s outside” (from “Home Invasion”).
H’s interior monologue concludes this entry with a sequence of sentences that connote so much about her: “Ticking. Silence. And a growing feeling of warmth inside me. I close my eyes. The warmth is wandering through my body, through my chest, into my mouth. My eyes are still closed and I’m not here anymore. The night ends.” First, there’s the “Ticking. Silence” that invites the interpretation that H desires a simple form of order, but that’s impossible in a reality as chaotic as the world we live in. Next, the description of “a growing feeling of warmth” entails that the pills are the last thing which can calm H. Given that the cigarettes once calmed her, one can imply that the pills won’t calm H forever—her body will build up a tolerance. But what truly describes a facet of H is a phrase she likely didn’t intend for that reading: “My eyes are closed and I’m not here anymore.” In just four words (“I’m not here anymore”), H elucidates her death-obsessed, escapist notions with utter clarity. Additionally, those words also link to the fact that she’s most comfortable while in a state of limbo or non-existence. Unfortunately, that’s unsustainable in the real world.
Entry 25 (17th October 2011):
Laika has disappeared. She hasn’t been home for a week, I threw out her cat food today.
That was another waste of time.
There’s quite a bit to divulge from the brief first paragraph that reads as follows: “Laika has disappeared. She hasn’t been home for a week, I threw out her cat food today.” The most obvious (and immediate) part stems from the fact that “Laika has disappeared,” forming parallels towards the women (in the “9th March 2011” entry). But there’s another detail at play: the fact that the cat “hasn’t been home for a week” while the span of time between this current entry (17th October 2011) and the previous entry (2nd October 2011) are a little over two weeks.
However, H’s last words of this entry (“That was another waste of time.”) are the ones which reveal her character the most. To state that Laika “was another waste of time” showcases a cynical attitude in H regarding how she perceives other people: they will inevitably abandon her and/or not give a damn about her. If one considers that J never really existed, then this one statement of H’s provides another piece of evidence. That evidence suggests that H created J in her mind and that—although she was evidently taken by the Visitors—she always gave a damn about H. Therefore, J’s idealized in H’s mind to such a degree that no actual person or animal can live up to her.
The photo (H staring at a black suit through a department-store window) placed in conjunction with the words on this entry carries significances about H’s state-of-mind. First, there’s the visible reflection instead of the tangible form—a sign that H is rapidly losing substance. Then, there’s the suit itself entailing another identity that H wants to assume—suggesting her escapist desires in the cloak of a new start with the Visitors. That it’s a black suit points towards nothingness (in line with her death-based obsessions) or everything in a Joycean sense (starting again with a blank slate).
Entry 26 (1st November 2011):
The smell of burning leaves. I’ve barely spoken 20 words in the last month. It makes me even more uneasy when I don’t hear from the visitors for weeks on end.
Symbolism already rears its ugly head within the opening sentence: “The smell of burning leaves.” As for what “burning leaves” conveys, that’s a two-fold endeavor. On one hand, it’s a symbol of dismantling the past. On another, it’s an example of one of H’s attempts to erase herself—again invoking the phrase ‘hand cannot erase’ as a response.
However, H’s attempted self-erasure carries dire consequences via the next sentence: “I’ve barely spoken 20 words in the last month.” That reads as the behavior of someone who’s catatonically isolated. Which suggests that even if ‘hand cannot erase,’ repeated attempts at self-erasure aren’t without a steep price on a person.
Sadly, that steep price doesn’t deter H any—as can be ascertained from the last sentence: “It makes me even more uneasy when I don’t hear from the visitors for weeks on end.” The key description at play in this sentence is “even more uneasy” about the absence of the Visitors. Such a description indicates the perverseness of H’s priorities—she no longer gives a damn about the world outside and only wants the Visitors to take her. That Visitors is lowercase in the quote also points to a degree of H’s sanity slipping away.
And then there’s the photo attached to this entry—a black-and-white H with only the head visible that has eyes covered with green paint. Regarding the black-and-white H, that states how she’s drained of life and has her sanity slowly slipping away. That only H’s head is visible in the photo identifies the engine behind H’s slow decline: her unbreakable solipsism. As for the green paint plastered over H’s eyes, that serves a two-fold purpose: denoting her identity as a painter and (by concealing the proverbial ‘windows to the soul) entailing that H is stripped of substance.
Entry 27 (2nd February 2012):
Tonight it’s 2-tone night at The Hope and Anchor and the trumpet refrain from Ghost Town drifts across the estate like a sombre fog. Even though I have to work tomorrow I find I can’t sleep, so I end up watching the club-goers staggering out paralytic in the early hours, the 40-something are-you-looking-at-me brigade, still picking fights, but these days without any real agenda.
I told the visitors to leave me alone for a while, I need to think.
Specific regional references to both music and location pervade the opening line of this entry: “Tonight it’s 2-tone night at The Hope and Anchor and the trumpet refrain from “Ghost Town” drifts across the estate like a sombre fog.” Those references are “2-tone,” “The Hope and Anchor,” and “Ghost Town.” Regarding “2-tone,” that’s the name of a genre of British music (from around the late 70’s-early 80’s) that fused traditional ska with the musical elements of punk rock—and the genre’s name invoked a desire to transcend and defuse racial tensions in Thatcher-era Britain. As for “The Hope and Anchor,” that refers to a pub on Upper Street in the London borough of Islington—significant since that pub was a leading venue in British punk rock in the 70’s (a variant being 2-tone) and still in business (both as a pub and a live music venue) today. Both converge in “Ghost Town,” a 1981 song by 2-tone band known as The Specials (with a prominent trumpet part). The use of that particular song isn’t insignificant since “Ghost Town”—with themes of urban decay, deindustrialization, unemployment, and violence in inner cities—was a hit (spending three weeks at #1 and ten weeks in the Top 40 of the UK Singles Chart) at the time of the 1981 England Riots. Such themes are still relevant nearly forty years later, ensuring that (alongside the description of “like a sombre fog”—the type of language one would assign to brass instruments during the Jazz Age) timelessness is created by applying an older situation into a contemporary lens. All of those themes also play a factor in H’s nilhistic and escapist stance on life.
An equally-allusive sentence is the run-on that immediately follows: “Even though I have to work tomorrow I find I can’t sleep, so I end up watching the club-goers staggering out paralytic in the early hours, the 40-something-are-you-looing-at-me brigade, still picking fights, but these days without any real agenda.” Introducing matters comes “Even though I have to work tomorrow I find I can’t sleep,” a detail suggesting that H also has ADHD/ADD (along with other conditions H may possibly have)—considering how Steven’s depicted mental illness here and in Fear of a Blank Planet, this can register as problematic. That the “club-goers” that H watches “staggering out paralytic” imbues a physical version of the mental indecision that H experiences. That—along with the purposeless to life denoted by “still picking fights, but these days without any real agenda”—means that these club-goers have more in-common with H than they know. However, the matter of perspective and the isolation of H prevents both parties from realizing that.
As for the concluding sentence of this entry (“I told the visitors to leave me alone for a while, I need to think.”), it might act as the most concrete evidence yet of H’s mental decline. In this case, it’s important that H states that she “told the visitors” since it confirms the presence of voices in her head. Whether that means insanity, the Visitors, the supernatural, and/or hallucinations of the Visitors/supernatural is left vague enough for the reader/listener to decide.
Entry 28 (3rd February 2012):
Look for me and you will find me.
The only words in the entire entry—“Look for me and you will find me”—aren’t exactly comforting. In fact, they’re a rather ominous foreshadowing of something that’ll become impossible within three years’ time. Additionally, it’s the final sign of shutting herself off from the world—from now on, H won’t be the one that reaches out to others.
Both photographs embedded in the entry support the idea of H refusing to reach out. Of vital importance to an interpretation is the fact that both photographs are of the same café. While in the above photograph, H remains in plain view, the bottom photograph has H completely obscured—she’s in plain sight and will be alone unless others reach out to her. Yet because society turns a blind-eye, no one will.
Entry 29 (28th March 2013):
I found this on-line today.
Lena Springer disappeared in 1876. Despite an intense search by police, she was never found. Her family always held out hope that the quiet but kindly girl would return. They waited years, eventually dying one-by-one still with the hope that their beloved Lena might come back.
Long after all her living relatives had died, Lena Springer returned in the most extraordinary fashion. She suddenly materialised in August 1954 in the middle of a busy street in downtown Vienna, 78 years after vanishing without a trace. Seconds after appearing in the midst of heavy traffic she was struck down and killed by a bus.
The bus driver who struck and killed the odd pedestrian testified that the woman seemed bewildered and confused. The driver swore the woman literally appeared with no warning right in front of him. Although the deceased dressed immaculately and her clothes looked new, the police investigation confirmed the mystery woman lying dead on the street wore clothing almost a century out of date. Police found coins long out of general circulation, some still retaining mint lustre, in the woman’s purse, along with banknotes dating from the 1870’s. Also about her person were letters on crisp paper and with handwriting unfaded by age. The letters were dated 1880 and addressed to Fräulein Lena Springer.
Officers went to the address on the letters and found an elderly man living there, who identified himself as Herr Elkan Springer. During a lengthy interview with Herr Springer, he told investigators that his aunt Lena has disappeared during her daily walk 78 years before. At the time he was only 3 years old. Reports were made by the family and an investigation was undertaken by authorities, but no trace of his missing aunt ever surfaced. The year was 1876. Lena Springer was 28.
Herr Springer was able to produce an old family photograph of his mother with his aunt Lena. It was the exact likeness of the woman killed on the busy Vienna street.
Lena Springer died 104 years after her birth, at the age of 28.
The visitors told me no one ever comes back, but what about Lena Springer I ask them?
There’s something suspect about this entry the moment one reads that the first line is “I found this on-line today.” Although there’s no indication as to the reputability of this account, Lena probably did exist within the world of Hand. Cannot. Erase. However, like the other missing people in this narrative, Lena is fictional.
That status as fiction is apparent upon a closer study of one detail in the embedded narratives first sentence: “Lena Springer disappeared in 1876.” The fact that the year “1876” would be the one picked by Steven for a disappearance provides a tacit hint that places the veracity of this story in doubt. Because in Jack Finney’s sci-fi short-story “I’m Scared” (1952), 1876 was the year that Rudolph Fentz disappeared. The ties aren’t limited to that short-story since the short-story was only the origin of the urban legend surrounding Rudolph Fentz—an urban legend whose events contain strong ties to the events of the Lena Springer account. Additionally, since Finney’s short-story was subsequently doled out as fact (rendering it an urban legend during the 70’s and—with the advent of the Internet in the 90’s—perceived as proof of time travel), there’s a suggestion that the same could be true of the Lena Springer account which H just found.
But just because this account may not be true doesn’t mean that H doesn’t find relevance in it—that much reveals itself via the next two sentences: “Despite an intense search by police, she was never found. Her family always held out hope that the quiet but kindly girl would return. They waited years, eventually dying one-by-one still with the hope that their beloved Lena might come back.” From merely the mentions that Lena “was never found” and that the family described her as a “quiet but kindly girl,” there’s traits consistent with all of the missing girls in the narrative (found in the Deluxe Edition materials) and with H herself—probably the reason why H considers this story absolutely true. However, the fact that H doesn’t take the statement that the family “waited years, eventually dying one-by-one still with the hope that their beloved Lena might come back” to heart shows that H remains selective in what information she chooses to take in.
In fact, the element of this story that H latches onto can be observed within the span of a single sentence: “Long after all her living relatives had died, Lena Springer returned in the most extraordinary fashion.” A single word—“returned”—makes a world of a difference in interpretation. The presence of that word connotes that since Lena came back, the possibility is now open for J to return. That is, if the story of Lena’s true and if J existed in the first place—both of which remain dubious at best.
A wealth of content that ends up muddying the waters and tweaking the source of the urban legend makes an appearance over the course of the next sentence: “She suddenly materialized in August 1954 in the middle of a busy street in downtown Vienna, 78 years after vanishing without a trace.” First of all, “materialised” contains a double-meaning since the mid-50’s world Lena entered is a more materialistic one than that of the last quarter of the nineteenth-century. However, “August 1954” and “downtown Vienna” are alterations of the Rudolph Fentz urban legend—that was set in Time Square in the middle of June of 1951.
However, the largest piece of meaning is derived from the length of time that Lena Springer’s disappearance lasted: “78 years.” That’s a number with connotations to tarot cards (78 being the number of cards in a deck of tarot cards), gramophone records (78 RPM), mathematics (78 being a semiperfect number—or a natural number that’s equal to the sum of all or some of its proper divisiors), and numerology. That last one—where 78 has connotations of preserving harmony among family members and maintaining a harmonious home—proves darkly ironic since Lena’s involuntary departure prevented that harmony from ever happening. Or for Lena to decide that a family isn’t for her.
And then there’s the next trio of sentences: “Seconds after appearing in the midst of heavy traffic she was struck down and killed by a bus. The bus driver who struck and killed the odd pedestrian testified that the woman seemed bewildered and confused. The driver swore the woman appeared with no warning in front of him.” Although one can go on about the last two sentences and how the perspective of the bus driver likely flinched in a panic, there’s a more telling bit of information lurking in the first sentence: “Seconds after appearing in the midst of heavy traffic she was struck down and killed by a bus.” For starters, this creates another parallel to the Rudolph Fentz urban legend since the same event happened there—except with a taxi instead of a bus. However, the image of a vehicle striking a pedestrian (especially one displaced from time) has a rich layer of symbolism: it’s an image of technology killing humanity in the most literal sense. In this regard, this one image presents the end-point of society’s inducement of isolation.
That isolation also extended to Lena’s jumping forward in time, as can be observed in the next sentences: “Although the deceased dressed immaculately and her clothes looked new, the police investigation confirmed the mystery woman lying dead on the street wore clothing almost a century out of date. Police found coins long out of general circulation, some still retaining mint lustre, in the woman’s purse, along with banknotes dating from the 1870’s. Also about her person were letters on crisp paper and with handwriting unfaded by age.” One needs to consider that, by jumping in time, Lena’s effectively a stranger to this time period insofar as no one knows where she came from or who she is. The fact that she’s referred to as a “mystery woman” suggests that because the police didn’t know her identity, Lena’s of no importance and is therefore held in lesser value than a woman of her own time would. If one wants to go by the details of the “clothing almost a century out of date,” the “coins long out of general circulation,” the “banknotes dating from the 1870’s,” and the “letters on crisp paper” in order to assume that the Visitors abducted her, one would also assume that the Visitors function on a different time flow than humans. However, that’s also assuming that this story isn’t a bunch of bullshit.
There’s definitely a hole in the argument which comes about via the sentence “The letters were dated 1880 and addressed to Fräulein Lena Springer.” The flaw in the argument concerns the date “1880”—there’s no way that Lena could receive those letters since she had disappeared in 1876. One workaround could entail that those letters concerned dowry and that “1880” was the tentative year that Lena was due to be married—in a ceremony that never happened due to her disappearance. The possibility of dowry isn’t the only antiquated practice present in this sentence because the term “Fräulein” isn’t commonly spoken in Germany nowadays. That’s because “Fräulein”—a German honorific for an unmarried woman (like Miss in English)—now carries connotations of disrespect and sexism.
Another usage of a German honorific leads into something else during the next triad of lines: “Officers went to the address on the letters and found an elderly man living there, who identified himself as Herr Elkan Springer. During a lengthy interview with Herr Springer, he told investigators that his aunt Lena had disappeared during her daily walk 78 years before. At the time he was only 3 years old.” Here, the use of “Herr” does correspond to the English ‘Mr.,’ but that’s also an honorific used prior to rank or occupation. However, the crux of things stems from the fact that “aunt Lena had disappeared during her daily walk 78 years before. At the time he was only 3 years old,” where there’s a lot to draw from. That the disappearance occurred on an occasion as routine as a “daily walk” indicates that the disappearance was as abrupt as the reappearance and that it could’ve seemingly been any woman who suffered Lena’s fate. Seemingly…until one recalls Lena’s family describing her as a “quiet but kindly girl”—if this story isn’t an urban legend, than the Visitors are outright predatory. Also, from the fact that Herr Springer “was only 3 years old” in 1876, one can deduce that he’s 81 in 1954.
Although most of the contents of the final few sentences (“Reports were made by the family and an investigation was undertaken by authorities, but no trace of his missing aunt ever surfaced. The year was 1876. Lena Springer was 28. Herr Springer was able to produce an old family photograph of his mother with his aunt Lena. It was the exact likeness of the woman killed on the busy Vienna street. Lena Springer died 104 years after her birth, at the age of 28.”) boil down to further details linking this to the Rudolph Fentz urban legend, a careful reading does extract one curious facet. That facet arrives at the very end, that “Lena Springer died 104 years after her birth, at the age of 28.” Recall how the embedded narrative also says that 78 years pass since Lena’s disappearance, perform basic addition with 28 and 78, and one arrives at the number 106—there’s a discrepancy between the account and basic mathematics. Such a conclusion connotes that the embedded narrative is a hoax devised by someone in-universe who isn’t that bright.
Yet H falls for it hook-line-and-sinker, as one can deduce from the entry’s final line: “The visitors told me no one ever comes back, but what about Lena Springer I ask them?” From that question, there’s a problem in believing in the Visitors if one also believes in the Lena Springer case. That problem’s rooted in the notion that the Lena Springer case creates a hole in the message that the Visitors transmit—unless the Visitors only tell people what they want them to know, rendering them manipulative. And that’s if they even exist at all. Otherwise, both H’s insistence on the Visitors and how she latches on to the Lena Springer case point towards insanity. If not insanity, than an overactive imagination that’s obsessed with conspiracy theories.
Entry 30 (8th July 2013):
These set of four images carry symbolic interplay of light and shadow—making them a chiaroscuro. For example, the black-and-white emphasizes the desolation of H’s life even as the lights reflect off of her. That the black-and-white makes the tattoos on her forearm resemble blackened burn marks provides a physical wound to symbolize the perceived loss of her sister. Additionally, the presence of a sunken collarbone suggest that H isn’t in the best of health. This would give another parallel to the Joyce Carol Vincent case since—while Vincent’s remains were too badly decomposed to perform an autopsy—the believed cause of death was either complications from a peptic ulcer or an asthma attack.
Now to address the elephant in the room—yes, these are topless photos. However, in none of the four photos do the lights fully illuminate H’s breasts. In a sense, sexuality is both emphasized and de-emphasized at once. The fact that the objects in H’s hands—an apple and a cigarette—correspond to changes in lighting are significant. While moments of life (marked by eating the apple) are what the light emphasizes the most, self-destructive tendencies (marked by the smoking) are distinguished by the increase in shadow in the third and fourth pictures.
Entry 31 (24th April 2014):
Are you still following me?
Someone is following me.
We are a crowd of millions separated by concrete walls.
Every day I watch the same people from the estate at the bus stop, and the same people on the bus on my way to and from work. They never talk to each other or interact in any way that I can see, but they are all part of this crowd. They are as familiar to me as anyone alive, but I have never spoken a word to any of them.
Tonight I was painting a self portrait, but occasionally I would look out of the window down to the bus stop and there was a kid waiting there, a girl of maybe 11 or 12. I watched her for a long time. Buses came and went but she didn’t get on to any of them. At some point mid evening I must have dozed off because I woke up several hours later in darkness.
Anyone will tell you that in the city there is no such thing as silence, there is always a soundtrack, whether it’s the hiss of a train in the distance, next door’s TV, or the hum of the central heating. But tonight I can hear nothing, just a heavy claustrophobic silence. I check the clock, 3.25am. I make my way to the bedroom, but as I do I pass the window and glance out. The girl is still there, alone now. Only now she seems to be gazing back at me, across the hundred yards or so from the bus stop to my window. The room is dark so there is no way she can see me, but still I know she is staring at me. Not around me, or vaguely in my direction, but directly through my eyes, deep into my turbulent soul.
H’s method of framing the opening pair of sentences (“Are you still following me/Someone is following me.”) strikes a reader as unusual, but the two must be taken in juxtaposition with one another. For instance, the bold-faced line possibly marks voices rattling about inside H’s mind—one conclusion being that it’s the voice of one of the Visitors while another suggests its evidence of a split personality. Up until now, readers have only had H’s own words, but now we have an interrupting voice.
But the topic offshoots from those opening lines into something else via the next line: “We are a crowd of millions separated by concrete walls.” That one sentence emphasizes a paradox that’s part of society: that while we’re more powerful than ever in terms of sheer numbers, we also fear being united. Perhaps that’s by societal design. The brilliance of using “concrete walls” is that it demonstrates that the fear of being united is true spatially, not just in terms of a diversified (in terms of gender, politics, ethnicity, religion, and other ideological factors) public.
Such a fear of bonding with other people establishes itself as a focal point during the next triad of sentences: “Every day I watch the same people from the estate at the bus stop, and the same people on the bus on my way to and from work. They never talk to each other or interact in any way that I can see, but they are all part of this crowd. They are as familiar to me as anyone alive, but I have never spoken a word to any of them.” One fact ascertainable from the mention of “the same people” on a daily basis is that this fear of bonding has become so hardwired that repetition doesn’t make anything easier—except the ability to turn a blind eye. That effect’s rendered observable via the closing line of “They are as familiar to me as anyone alive, but I have never spoken a word to any of them.” Which evokes a perverse quality illustrating that isolation on a societal level results in the inability to value a human being for human’s sake.
Those depressing notions transition into irony and a new event over the course of the next three sentences: “Tonight I was painting a self portrait, but occasionally I would look out of the window down to the bus stop and there was a kid waiting there, a girl of maybe 11 or 12. I watched her for a long time. Buses came and went but she didn’t get on to any of them.” While the ironic element arrives early on (that the phrase “self portrait” comes across as ironic since H hasn’t had a sterling view of herself), the main-course is the new event. That event centers upon “a girl of maybe 11 or 12,” with a major clue being that that isn’t far-off from the age H and J were when they interacted. If one interprets this as J returning, than this (plus the Lena Springer embedded narrative from the 28th March 2013 entry) render reappearances into a recurring thematic motif. On one level the year-long gap between this entry and the Springer embedded narrative can mean that this event catches H by surprise. But on another, this event can suggest the gap in time amounts to a gradual decline in sanity—which jars readers, but feels not out-of-the-ordinary for H.
Even with the change between H in 2014 and H in 2013, there are a few things kept constant that can be perceived within the next short sentence: “At some point mid evening I must have dozed off because I woke up several hours later in darkness.” First, the phrase “I must have dozed off” (along with “At some point”) solidifies that H remains an unreliable narrator because she’s unable to determine when she fell asleep. Next, there’s the recurring symbol of “darkness,” which has contradictory meanings relating to nothingness and unknowable truth.
However, nothingness appears to become the dominant meaning over the span of the next duo of sentences: “Anyone will tell you that in the city there is no such thing as silence, there is always a soundtrack, whether it’s the hiss of a train in the distance, next door’s TV, or the hum of the central heating. But tonight I can hear nothing, just a heavy claustrophobic silence.” Just the description of a city having “no such thing as silence” because “there is always a soundtrack” speaks volumes about the state of the modern world—that one can think that constant mechanical noise is normal when it’s a perversion of the natural world, something that renders the idea of progress into one of regression. Perhaps it’s only appropriate that a superficial life like H’s listens to “the hiss of a train in the distance,” an image connoting nostalgia in the works of Steven Wilson (who is likely being self-deprecating here). This gets followed up by “next door’s TV, or the hum of the central heating,” symbols denoting the anxious state of the modern world (see 28th September 2011 entry) and mechanization of life functions. Even the undercutting of this notion (in the form of “But tonight I can hear nothing, just a heavy claustrophobic silence) isn’t comforting since it registers as too quiet—an effect that’s the result of generations of urbanization and technological progress.
Closing out this entry comes a cluster of sentences (“I check the clock, 3.25am. I make my way to the bedroom, but as I do I pass the window and glance out. The girl is still there, alone now. Only now she seems to be gazing back at me, across the hundred yards or so from the bus stop to my window. The room is dark so there is no way she can see me, but still I know she is staring at me. Not around me, or vaguely in my direction, but directly through my eyes, deep into my turbulent soul.”) with a scenario suggesting the title of the song “Home Invasion” since this mirrors an actual home invasion sustained by Joyce Carol Vincent, the inspiration behind the album (and the character of H). In this situation, this could also be a hallucination or the Visitors slowly coming for H.
But there’s a few things worth talking about regarding Joyce Carol Vincent. One of which is that as a result of this home invasion, Joyce moved into a shelter for victims of domestic violence—that H doesn’t do so is problematic unless Steven didn’t look at that part of her life when generating the album’s concept. Another problematic component about Joyce (in relation to the album’s promotional materials) comes from a matter of ethnicity:
As one can observe from the above photograph, Joyce Carol Vincent was a black British woman. For the woman (actress Carrie Grr) in the rest of the photographs (in the blog, music videos, and promotional materials for the album) to be depicted by a white woman amounts to whitewashing. Now I’ve heard rumblings that Carrie Grr was selected as the face of the album not by Steven, but by Lasse Hoile (a visual artist who has been a frequent collaborator of Steven’s ever since Porcupine Tree’s In Absentia). If that’s the case, I’m willing to chalk the blame on the shoes of Lasse. But even if Steven had a part (even if it was limited to confirming Lasse’s pick), one could counter that this instance of whitewashing is marginally less problematic than it would be if the story of Joyce Carol Vincent were one that’s inextricable from racial elements (such as if the isolation Joyce experienced was because she was black). Regardless, this is one thing I’m willing to critique Steven or Lasse over.
Entry 32 (24th November 2014):
Recently I’ve been haunting myself. A few days ago I woke up some time in the middle of the night, but didn’t open my eyes for a long time, just lay there listening to the rain on the window. When I did open my eyes I was standing at the end of the bed just watching. Then I leaned over and handed myself an envelope with the words “A List of Betrayals ” written on the front of it. It’s still on my bedside table, I haven’t had the courage to open it yet.
Only one sentence (“Recently I’ve been haunting myself.”) in the entry and ambiguity already creeps into the forefront since the phrase “haunting myself” suggest a couple of things. For starters, it conveys that H has scared herself with what’s happened to her and/or what she’s become. Additionally, one can use the 2nd December 2014 entry to conclude that this phrase foreshadows a conclusion H reaches in the next entry—that she sees no point in the state of her own life.
During the next sentence (“A few days ago I woke up some time in the middle of the night, but didn’t open my eyes for a long time, just lay there listening to the rain on the window.”), a few key phrases further outline many of H’s character traits through action alone. Most notably, the fact that “A few days ago” comes across as an understatement since the behaviors described here mirror those exhibited by H seven months ago (in the 24th April 2014 entry). Proof of this stems from the repetition of “some time in the middle of the night” (from the earlier entry), a sentiment supporting that H is an unreliable narrator (since she can’t remember when awoke). However, that H “didn’t open my eyes for a long time” entails a want for oblivion—for a “beautiful limbo” (from the 24th September 2011 entry). Even with all of this, her action of “listening to the rain on the window” is an embrace of nature that’s limited enough to be made possible in a modernized world.
But one can call into question whether these limited activities matter in the scheme of things—and there’s proof of that in the next sentence: “When I did open my eyes I was standing at the end of the bed just watching.” Merely the description of “just watching” serves to downplay any significance to H’s activities. In fact, it suggests a passive involvement—one where H lets everything pass her by. In this regard, she doesn’t matter to the world and the world doesn’t matter to her.
The next sentence (“Then I leaned over and handed myself an envelope with the words “A List of Betrayals” written on the front of it.”) offers a curious detail via the mention of “A List of Betrayals.” It’s more than likely that that list has significance to the book labeled “My Book of Regrets” (see 12th December 2014 entry). If that’s the case, it’s left ambiguous as to who mailed the “envelope” to H.
However, the next sentence (“It’s still on my bedside table, I haven’t had the courage to open it yet.”) clears a couple of implications up. First, this lack of “courage” conveys that H’s physiological aversion to the Visitors (see 2nd October 2011 entry) has returned. This suggests that the numbing effects of the pills (see 2nd October 2011 entry) aren’t working anymore—her body’s built up a tolerance to them.
Entry 33 (2nd December 2014):
Why do I still stay? It gets harder and harder to answer that question. I think the visitors ask me this, or maybe I just ask myself in my head, but sometimes over and over again like an anti-mantra. I dream of the disappeared. I dream of Sian Preston, Teresa Cavanagh, Jane Rimer. I dream of Lena Springer and Madeline Hearne.
In interpreting the first duo of sentences in this entry (“Why do I still stay? It gets harder and harder to answer that question.”), one should look at the perspective of a similar line from the album itself. That line—“Why do you still stay?”—appears in “3 Years Older,” a song that may be told from J’s perspective. That detail of perspective suggests that J was the girl in the 24th April 2014 entry. And possibly the person who sent the envelope from the 24th November 2014 entry.
For the next major sentence (“I think the visitors ask me this, or maybe I just ask myself in my head, but sometimes over and over again like an anti-mantra.”), there’s a lot to take in—all on the topic of H’s last lines of defense being quelled. First, there’s the usage of “think” to entail a lack of certainty in a way that adds more fuel to the ‘H is an unreliable narrator’ fire. Second, the lowercase ‘v’ in “visitors” recalls the same connotations of H’s sanity slipping away that that grammatical oddity invoked back in the 1st November 2011 entry. However, since H believes J is now one of the visitors, it remains consistent with the perspective of “3 Years Older.” Thirdly, the phrase “maybe I just ask myself in my head” entails a battle with voices in one’s head—a notion conveying split personality or the Visitors controlling H.
But lastly (and most importantly) comes the phrase “sometimes over and over again like an anti-mantra,” a phrase loaded with meaning. On one level, “sometimes” lets one know that even H can’t withstand these occurrences on a constant basis—she will crack at some point. On another, one should recall that “mantra” is a word with origins in Hinduism that means “a word or sound repeated to aid concentration in meditation. Therefore, the word “anti-mantra” is ambiguous as to what it’s being ‘anti’ about: the voices or the focused effort of a mantra. If the former, then an “anti-mantra” amounts to H’s last-ditch effort to cast away the Visitors from her mind. In the instance of the latter, “anti-mantra” adopts a defeatist stance where H—accepting her grim future—opts to hasten her decline since she feels that nothing can stop it.
With that in mind, it’s little surprise that the contents of the last part of the entry are as follows: “I dream of the disappeared. I dream of Sian Preston, Teresa Cavanagh, Jane Rimer. I dream of Lena Springer and Madeline Hearne.” Before explaining why H ‘dreams’ these people, one should go through who these people are. Since we already talked about “Lena Springer” (in the contents of the 28th March 2013 entry), one can assume that all five of these women are missing persons and that all five are elaborated upon in the Deluxe Edition materials—and you’d be right. But of special notice are the names “Sian Preston” and “Madeline Hearne.” Sian because her missing persons article (found in the Deluxe Edition materials) has numerous parallels to Joyce Carol Vincent’s life that are clearer than that between Joyce and H. Madeline’s of special significance since she’s the subject of the song “Routine,” a story-within-a-story that’s one of the most-haunting moments on the entire album. For the “dream” which H holds of these “disappeared” women, that’s due to the fact that she holds them in an idealized manner—as people who seized their destiny.
Although I don’t always speak of the images attached to these entries, this one is important. From what I can tell, the setting is in a therapy office or mental institution with paints of yellow, blue, and green splattered on the screen. Notice that there’s no purple paint like on other parts of the album materials? One can suggest that that marks a lack of stability—this is one of the last points H has before she completely falls apart.
Entry 34 (12th December 2014):
“My Book of Regrets”
Here we go again.
It’s been so long since anyone called me on my phone I almost forgot I had one. That’s weird I thought, not even someone trying to sell me something. It was keeping me awake thinking about it so in the middle of the night I got dressed, went down to the pay phone next to the bus stop and dialled my number to make sure there was no problem getting through. It started to ring, so then I knew for sure that it was just that noone ever called me. Although when I thought about it I couldn’t remember ever giving the number to anyone, not even my brother, who prefers to email me anyway (can’t remember when he last did that either though, maybe on my last birthday). I was just about to hang up when the phone was answered. After a few moments of heavy silence I said “who are you and what are you doing in my flat?”. A woman’s voice responded “I’m waiting for you…. And anyway what do you mean by calling at this time of night? People are normally asleep at this time you know.” I could hear one of my sister’s old mix tapes playing in the background.
“That’s as may be, but it still doesn’t explain what you are doing in my flat. And anyway I literally left a minute ago so you can’t have been waiting long”.
“Yes I know that, I can see you from here. You passed me on the stairs now, didn’t you see me? By the way your milk is off, can you pick some up while you are out?”
“Yes I suppose so, will you still be there when I get back?”
“Yes of course, I told you I’m waiting for you. We have a lot of catching up to do. I always liked this tape”.
When I got back of course there was no one there. I put the new milk in the fridge, poured the old milk into the sink and went back to bed.
It was raining again.
Quite a few things can be made out from this entry’s introductory pair of sentences: ““My Book of Regrets”/Here we go again.” For starters, it indicates that the opening track of Steven’s 2016 EP 4 ½ is part of the Hand. Cannot. Erase. narrative—albeit the song apparently wasn’t recorded in-time to make it on the final version of Hand. Cannot. Erase. Additionally, it links back to the album properly via an oblique reference to the line “You made a list of all your big regrets” (from “3 Years Older”). As for “Here we go again,” it’s apparent from the sense of dread that this “Book of Regrets” is something with ties to H’s past—possibly involving J, as well.
Despite that tie to the past, there’s an abrupt concern with present matters during the next two sentences: “It’s been so long since anyone called me on my phone I almost forgot I had one. That’s weird I thought, not even someone trying to sell me something.” Here, the whole excerpt depicts a surefire sign that H has become so detached from people that technology can’t aid her. One can even read this as a slight against capitalism since the fact that commerce is mentioned via “sell me something” invokes the sentiment that capitalism doesn’t care about the well-being of anyone.
That feeling of apathy towards H only feels confirmed via the next run-on: “It was keeping me awake thinking about it so in the middle of the night I got dressed, went down to the pay phone next to the bus stop and dialled my number to make sure there was no problem getting through.” However, that apathy may also serve as confirmation bias. Additionally, the manner that the next sentence (“It started to ring, so then I knew for sure that it was just that noone ever called me.”) is stated by H implies that others still care about her, but she doesn’t know it.
H’s next run-on sentence (notice a pattern) runs a psychological gamut: “Although when I thought about it I couldn’t remember ever giving the number to anyone, not even my brother, who prefers to email me anyway (can’t remember when he last did that either though, maybe on my last birthday).” At this point in time, H finds a way to blame herself, only to comfort herself before ripping the rug out from underneath. This won’t be the last mention of her “brother,” since that tie (or lack thereof) returns in full-force during two points: the 21st December 2014 entry and the lyrics to “Happy Returns.”
A brief pair of sentences (“I was just about to hang up when the phone was answered. After a few moments of heavy silence I said “who are you and what are you doing in my flat?””) place new imagery into the narrative. For example, the sentence “I was just about to hang up when the phone was answered” invokes connotations of the supernatural/Visitors invading the real world—or of H’s hallucinations adopting nightmarish levels of realism. That nightmarish quality’s evident from the “moments of heavy silence” and the urgency of H’s question—this is a response borne out of fear.
That fear carries over into what comes next: “A woman’s voice responded “I’m waiting for you…And anyway what do you mean by calling at this time of night? People are normally asleep at this time you know.”” To begin breaking this down, the fact that this voice is “waiting for” H implies that the voice belongs to J. But the narrative leaves it open to suggest that this is merely an incredibly-vivid hallucination. One piece of evidence supporting the idea of this being a hallucination also ties into H’s decline. That evidence entails that H is beginning to fudge up aspects of J’s character (assuming J was always only imaginary). This can be supported by the fact that the J which H imagined before now likely wouldn’t guilt-trip H by asking “what do you mean by calling at this time of night?”
However, the kicker stems from the next sentence: “I could still hear one of my sister’s old mix tapes playing in the background.” By recalling both the 2nd January 2010 entry and a lyric from “Perfect Life,” this proves that H believes this person is J. That doesn’t confirm whether she is J, but it doesn’t confirm or deny whether this person’s a hallucination. One would do well to heed something from the next sentence (““That’s as may be, but it still doesn’t explain what you are doing in my flat. And anyway I literally left a minute ago so you can’t have been waiting long.””): that (based on “doesn’t explain what you are doing in my flat”) if this J’s a hallucination, she doesn’t need to follow conventional logic. She can work on dream-logic.
From the next words ascribed to J (““Yes I know that, I can see you from here. You passed me on the stairs now, didn’t you see me? By the way your milk is off, can you pick some up while you are out?””), some continuity is established while character is further developed and a wrench gets thrown into the equation. In the case of continuity, the phrase “I can see you from here” refers to an ongoing event dating back to the stranger in the 24th April 2014 entry. Regarding character development, the phrase “You passed me on the stairs now, didn’t you see” appears to be spoken in a taunting manner—which denotes that J’s fully-aware of H’s decline and is willing to manipulate that. On the topic of curveballs, the fact that this J knows that “your milk is off” is a detail which throws a wrench in the ‘hallucination theory’ since checking like that requires an autonomy that a hallucination probably can’t accomplish.
Even though H speaks the next sentence (““Yes I suppose so, will you still be there when I get back?””) to J, the words reveal far more about H. Just the phrase “Yes I suppose so” connotes that H still believes J to be better than herself. Such a conclusion (especially if J’s a hallucination) speaks volumes as to the depths of H’s self-image. And then there’s “still be there when I get back,” a phrasing evoking both excitement and fear—H has wanted this reunion to occur for so long and is scared that it will vanish as suddenly as it happened. And that excitement is deserved since J’s reply (““Yes of course, I told you I’m waiting for you. We have a lot of catching up to do. I always liked this tape.””) all but spells it out that this hallucination is J—at least in H’s mind.
But the cruelest card of all is dealt in the closing set of sentences: “When I got back of course there was no one there. I put the new milk in the fridge, poured the old milk into the sink and went back to bed. It was raining again.” Starting with “When I got back of course there was no one there,” we’re led to believe that H expected J to disappear. Not only that, but since J did re-disappear, it’s assumed to be a sign that H can’t trust anyone—not even idealized figments of imagination. Conversely, the acknowledgement of this J figure’s autonomy in the form of noticing the milk and reacting to it accordingly implies that this hallucination’s more autonomous than H. That’s a distressing thought that’s contrasted by the calm of “It was raining again.”
Entry 35 (17th December 2014):
I know you are reading this J.
Even a one-sentence message as sparse as “I know you are reading this J,” there’s still considerable room to delve into analysis. First, “know” shouldn’t register with the forceful quality H applies to the word since there’s no way H can know for sure. However, H is desperate to achieve permanent contact with J—to the extent that she’s willing to break her solipsistic code. Secondly, the subject of “this” is left ambiguous. One can assume that “this” refers to the blog entries themselves—and J read them, discovered H’s location, and triggered the events of the 12th December 2014 entry. Seems like an awful lot to assume of an entity that might exist only as a hallucination.
The photograph of this appears unassuming of and no importance, but it carries larger significance. It’s the same building as from the 11th September 2011 entry, but the fact that there are so few lights sends a message. That message being that H wants J to find her—with or without the Visitors.
Entry 36 (21st December 2014):
I barely know my brother. I know he has a wife and 2 children, but I have no idea if he’s happy or what is important to him, I never did, he never gave anything away. Maybe he learnt that from me. I met his family once, the last time I went home for Christmas, 4 years ago, the children were too young to understand who I was, and I’m sure my brother and his wife probably figured their Aunt was always going to be largely absent from their lives anyway, so no point letting them get close to me. But still every year I get a Christmas card from them and an invitation to visit, whether out of duty or genuine concern I couldn’t say. It arrived today and for some reason this time it made me cry. I realised there’s no point now.
H’s initial sentence of this entry—“I barely know my brother”—is stark and solemn. But it accomplishes so much in terms of illustrating the extent of H’s isolation—that family members are like strangers. However, this renders the connotations of J’s actions in the 12th December 2014 entry (if J actually exists) into a new context. That context being that J barely knows H anymore.
At least three threads of information are tangled up within the next duo of sentences: “I know he has a wife and 2 children, but I have no idea if he’s happy or what is important to him, I never did, he never gave anything away. Maybe he learnt that from me.” Although one can think that the fact that H knows his brother “has a wife and 2 children” undercuts the ‘stranger’ quality, these people are only factual details lacking any emotional weight. Judging from “but I have no idea if he’s happy or what is important to him, I never did,” H always lacked that emotional weight since that requires being close to people, the antithesis to H’s isolated nature. That isolation—an inaction—carries consequences in the form of the phrase “he never gave anything away. Maybe he learnt that from me.” That’s a sentence evoking “If you choose not to decide/You still have made a choice” (from Rush’s 1980 song “Freewill”) and Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s In The Cradle” simultaneously.
As an extended run-on, the next sentence (“I met his family once, the last time I went home for Christmas, 4 years ago, the children were too young to understand who I was, and I’m sure my brother and his wife probably figured their Aunt was always going to be largely absent from their lives anyway, so no point letting them get close to me.”) contains a plethora of details ascertainable from the sense that H has wasted her life. In fact, the phrase “I met his family once, the last time I went home for Christmas, 4 years ago” is a matter-of-fact way to state that one has wasted four years of their life. But that same phrase also demonstrates that H is divorced from any sense of tradition, as well as any connection towards other people.
Such an idea segues into the phrase “the children were too young to understand who I was,” where (much like trains) the kids themselves are a symbol of the progression of time. This entails that H couldn’t connect back to other people (even family members) even if she tried her damnedest—time and progress have left H hopelessly behind. If one wishes to tie an album lyric into the mix, this functions as an answer to one (“Do the kids remember me?”) in “Happy Returns”: no they don’t remember you, H.
This sense of being left-behind morphs into something else entirely during the phrase “I’m sure my brother and his wife probably figured their Aunt was always going to be largely absent from their lives anyway.” Here, H accepts her fate that she’ll be abandoned by anyone that should care about her. Such a conclusion makes one question H’s logic in holding onto J (regardless of whether or not J’s real). If nothing else than for the simple reason that J can abandon H.
All this culminates at the end of the sentence: “so no point letting them get close to me.” The word “letting” (an active verb) serves to remind readers/listeners that this whole thing was the result of choices H made due to her unhealthy coping mechanisms—which only made things worse in the long-term. If this wording intends to portray H as a ‘villain protagonist,’ then she’s the Mother Courage of being anti-social. If sympathy is meant to be elicited, it’s done so in spite of this, not because of it. Which isn’t a flaw in Steven’s storytelling, but an acknowledgement that the real world and real people don’t amount to the tidy, organized narratives found in fiction.
One key ambiguity rears its ugly head over the course of the next sentence: “But still every year I get a Christmas card from them and an invitation to visit, whether out of duty or genuine concern I couldn’t say.” That ambiguity—“whether out of duty or genuine concern”—brings up a distinction that matters. The former quality amounts to routine taking over, which allows the sender to turn a blind-eye on a family member. However, the latter offers hospitality and human caring, transcending the isolation and offering emotional stakes in one of the few displays of humanity in this cold narrative. That H “couldn’t say” regarding which one motivated her family is telling—her isolation has become so prolonged that the mannerisms of anyone are an enigma now.
The fashion that this entry concludes is heartbreaking as it is simple—just two sentences that read: “It arrived today and for some reason this time it made me cry. I realised there’s no point now.” In essence, this crying signals that H has reached her breaking point, something supported by her realization that “there’s no point now.” This pointlessness is likely due to realizing the implications behind the symbolism associated with “the children”—she’s waited far too long for any human connection to make a difference.
Entry 37 (1st January 2015):
Streets pretty deserted this morning, just me and the dog walkers. The detritus of the night before, and something else, I pick it up. A handwritten letter fluttering amongst the cans, bottles and fast food packaging. The ink has been washed away by the rain in places, and elsewhere parts have been crossed out. A love letter, possibly unrequited. Either it was never sent or the recipient simply threw it away.
“I love you but I’m lost…”
Hand cannot erase this love.
For one to interpret the first couple of lines (“Streets pretty deserted this morning, just me and the dog walkers. The detritus of the night before, and something else, I pick it up.”), one should recall that New Year’s Eve shenanigans of drunken revelry will have occurred the night before. Yet the “deserted” state of the morning of January 1st implies that nothing happened due to the lack of evidence—despite the detritus saying otherwise. As for what “detritus” means, that’s waste or debris of any kind—something no one would want, so it rots away. Which means that the “something else” is of more significance than the physical waste and the wasted time of the night before.
However, this is undercut by the next sentence: “A handwritten letter fluttering amongst the cans, bottles and fast food packaging.” It’s a sentence that calls to mind that if this letter didn’t happen to catch H’s eye, it’d have been just another part of the detritus. The mere fact that one glimpse can inflate the significance of something shows H’s self-obsessed tendencies in a subtle way. Especially considering the next sentence’s (“The ink has been washed away by the rain in places, and elsewhere parts have been crossed out.”) imagery of that letter having already undergone decay—and the response being tempered in the first place by editing.
Nevertheless, the simple next sentence—“A love letter, possibly unrequited.”—proves curious. And not just for the notion that H probably yearns for something that the isolation will never let her have. The curious elements stem from the ambiguity regarding what kind of love H would yearn for. One could believe that it’s between herself and a sister (J) or just to connect with anyone on a genuine level without forsaking her identity. Regardless, this ties into the refrain of “Hand cannot erase this love” (the chorus of the album’s title track).
But the entry ends via more ambiguity, allusions, and inversions by way of the last two sentences: “Either it was never sent or the recipient simply threw it away. “I love you but I’m lost…”” With ambiguity, H can’t know the answer to this either-or situation because she wasn’t one of the two people (sender or recipient) involved. Which creates an inversion since H is—for once—made the victim of another person’s solipsism instead of her own. That other personality even comes through in the allusion (“I love you but I’m lost”) of a 2014 song by Sharon Van Etten, which speaks towards the listening tastes of the person who wrote the letter—tastes far removed from H’s classical and 80’s post-punk leanings.
In regards to the photo complimenting the entry, it’s the front cover of the album—but with H’s hair defaced by what looks like underwater algae. In a sense, it’s the earliest detritus (in a primordial conception) and entails that the notions behind “Ancestral” extend back centuries. Which makes one wonder what the Visitors can possibly be (if they exist at all).
Entry 38 (4th January 2015):
I am making my way up through the burned out shell of a building, floor after floor, room after room of decay and ashes. The wind blows through the empty corridors and stairwells, the carrion call of memory. I am looking for something or someone. Ghosts of people who were once here.
“We are not lonely, because we chose to be alone.”
“We are not lost, because we chose to disappear.”
I look out at the awning of the stars across the sky. And the wreckage of the night.
One may initially view this opening sentence (“I am making my way up through the burned out shell of a building, floor after floor, room after room of decay and ashes.”) and wonder what H could possibly be talking about. It turns out that this “burned out shell of a building” may tie into the negative set of coordinates (which are associated with elemental symbols). The coordinate in question (51.475069, -0.081780) marks the location of a fire that killed six people (three of which were kids). In this regard, the “decay” evokes both the decrepit state of the building and the fact that—in the eyes of society—the memories of the deceased are only a footnote.
On the topic of memories, there’s the very next sentence: “The wind blows through the empty corridors and stairwells, the carrion call of memory.” Here, it’s outright stated that the memories themselves are dying by the second. And that statement appears in the form of language which places the natural world (signified by “wind”) as serving one of two purposes: remembering the dead or killing memories of the dead. If the latter, then nature can erase—even if a hand cannot.
Memory itself factors into how one reads the next pair of sentences: “I am looking for something or someone. Ghosts of people who were once here.” Intriguingly, these sentences register as ambiguous while also opening another layer in the narrative. Namely that there’s now a possibility that J was real, but died in this fire (explaining why “I had a sister for six months”). As a result, H envisioned everything about the Visitors as a way of coping with her adopted sister’s death. It would also explain why the story of Madeline Hearne warrants a focus on the album (via the song “Routine”)—both H and Madeline lost people close to them due to a tragedy that occurred in a school setting, so H shared part of Madeline’s pain.
After that revelatory passage comes a pair of quotations: ““We are note lonely, because we chose to be alone.”/“We are not lost, because we chose to disappear.”” Despite the fact that they’re quotations giving the impression that they may be allusions, there’s no apparent source for these quotes. So one is left to imagine that they’re H’s own writings. In which case, both quotes are ironic—but for different reasons. The first quote—“We are not lonely, because we chose to be alone”—registers as irony since that would appear to be the case until recent events (the 21st December 2014 entry) occurred. As for the second quote (“We are not lost, because we chose to disappear”), this irony stems from the fact that this is exactly what happened to H in this narrative. However, if one chooses to believe that H—in her madness—finds the Visitors, then she finds herself at the instant she loses her last grip on reality.
H’s final two sentences (“I look out at the awning of the stars across the sky. And the wreckage of the night.”) offer a clue that all is far from well. The first sentence distorts a line (“They only are the stars across the sky”) originally found in the song “Home Invasion.” That distortion offers a grammatical sign that H’s grip on reality is falling apart even further than before.
Entry 39 (12th January 2015):
I have a box of photographs, mostly family pictures, or from my time at college when I was briefly someone’s muse. It’s been years since anyone took a photograph of me. I don’t give in to nostalgia easily, but I do sometimes take the box out and lay the photos out around me while I paint. The strangest thing…I have had the sense for a while that every time I do this there are photos in the box that were not there before, snapshots of moments I don’t remember being photographed at all. Until today I put it down to my bad memory, but tonight there is a photo that I know cannot be. It is of me and my sister, down at Grand Union, it’s twilight. I know that this photograph was never taken, it simply cannot exist. And yet here it is in my hand like a still from the movie of my life.
Four of them came tonight, it’s never been so many before, so I know it’s serious, they interrupt my dreaming.
Three references are ascertainable from the opening sentence (“I have a box of photographs, mostly family pictures, or from my time at college when I was briefly someone’s muse.”). First, the “box of photographs” acts as a symbol of memory that has appeared in Steven’s lyrics before (see Porcupine Tree’s “My Ashes” and “Mellotron Scratch” for two examples), but it also presents the thematic motif of this particular entry. Second, the fact that they’re “mostly family pictures” is indicative of humans usually being thrust into a family at the start of life—and that H doesn’t seek out other people. Finally, there’s the phrase “my time at college when I was briefly someone’s muse,” a reference to the 19th December 2009 entry.
This detail of memory crops up again during the sentence “It’s been years since anyone took a photograph of me.” But here, this plain-spoken fact calls the entire blog into question since no one knows how the photographs here came into being—with one possibility being the Visitors. That and another self-contradiction in the next sentence (the taking of “the photos out around me while I paint” and how it undercuts the phrase “I don’t give in to nostalgia easily”) showcases that people aren’t uncomplicated.
Where things become puzzling is within the span of the following sentence: “The strangest thing…I have had the sense for a while that every time I do this there are photos in the box that were not there before, snapshots of moments I don’t remember being photographed at all.” At this juncture, one is left to wonder how this “sense” originated—with one possibility being that it’s the sense of her sanity slipping away. Additionally, the detail of “snapshots of moments I don’t remember being photographed at all” points towards the manipulation of memories.
That notion of memories being manipulated comes full-force across the span of the next two sentences: “Until today I put it down to my bad memory, but tonight there is a photo that I know cannot be. It is of me and my sister, down at Grand Union, it’s twilight.” Despite the sentence “Until today I put it down to my bad memory, but tonight there is a photo that I know cannot be” acting as a confirmation bias, that same sentence acknowledges (while downplaying) H’s own mental decline. Which segues straight into the image of “me and my sister, down at Grand Union, it’s twilight”—an image that isn’t made easier by the descriptions given elsewhere (in the lyrics to “Perfect Life” and the 12th August 2009 entry). In fact, this image calls the veracity of both aforementioned instances into question—further supporting the idea that J wasn’t real at all. Or (if J was real) the time this photo was allegedly taken came after the fire (see 4th January 2015 entry). Another suggestion entails that the intruder (from the 12th December 2014 entry) placed this photograph in the box before leaving, which also suggests that the Visitors (if real) can doctor photographs/memories. If not real, it’s evidence of H’s mind slipping away even further. In fact, the next sentence (“I know that this photograph was never taken, it simply cannot exist.) presents an ultimatum: H is insane or the Visitors are involved (unless one believes both are occurring at once).
Regardless of what holds true, there’s some details of interest nestled inside the next sentence: “And yet here it is in my hand like a still from the movie of my life” For starters, there’s H’s apt mention of “movie,” an art form that (like writing) can be edited and ordered in a way that life cannot. That detail solidifies that—despite the shock H experiences at this moment—H doesn’t believe she’s going insane.
While the gap before the next sentence (“Four of them came tonight, it’s never been so many before, so I know it’s serious, they interrupt my dreaming.”) denotes that some time has passed between it and the previous sentence, there’s a sense that it’s cut-off from the events of the rest of the entry. Which isn’t entirely true since the themes of memory remain applicable. Obviously, the “them” in “Four of them” refers to the Visitors. Then, there’s the phrase “it’s never been so many before, so I know it’s serious,” in which H uses the memories of past experiences in order to gauge the severity of the situation. But the primary point of analysis stems from “they interrupt my dreaming.” Since dreams can often be based on memory (whether real memories or imagined), this can be a reason for the alteration of H’s memories—the photograph is just a physical manifestation of it.
Entry 40 (23rd January 2015):
I am not the only island, there are a few others living here. Every Thursday I see the same man walk to the bus stop in a duffle coat and West Ham scarf, and return 2 hours later struggling with recycled grocery bags. Perhaps I am the only one that sees him, hiding in plain sight. It’s not really the same, because I know isolation is not his choice. He was only a person in relation to his wife, and now she is gone he no longer sees himself reflected in her eyes, the only tangible evidence he had of his own existence.
If I am defined by my reflection in the eyes of others then I should be nothing. But I see myself reflected in every window, every painting, every song, every book… what narcissism! There was a period in my late teens I would listen to The Smiths every day. The singer was the king of the narcissists, but sang such beautiful words, “This night has opened my eyes and I will never sleep again.” And then there was Ben Watt’s North Marine Drive, fragile bedroom things written by a maudlin teenage boy with his life to come, listened to by a self obsessed teenage girl with her life waiting to happen.
Where’s your sense of humour girl?
You and me J, only hearing the music, speaking to me again now through the tape hiss of time.
Inaugurating matters comes the sentence “I am not the only island, there are a few others living here.” Here, there’s a call-back to the first sentence of the 9th January 2009 entry. However, the meaning of that earlier usage (“No man is an island/Was that meant to apply to women, too?”) is subverted in order to deflect the severity of H’s isolation and/or insanity.
While on the topic of isolation, different shades of the topic are painted across the span of the next three sentences: “Every Thursday I see the same man walk to the bus stop in a duffle coat and West Ham scarf, and return 2 hours later struggling with recycled grocery bags. Perhaps I am the only one who sees him, hiding in plain sight. It’s not really the same, because I know isolation is not his choice.” First, there’s H’s sighting of “the same man” on a regular basis “struggling with recycled grocery bags,” an image presenting another case of isolation, but in a person that appears to expend more effort maintaining a connection to the world than H ever has. Second, the sighting offers H a chance to reach out to someone, but she doesn’t—despite the phrase “hiding in plain sight” (previously applied to H in several earlier entries) suggesting that this man’s a kindred spirit. Lastly, there’s “I know that isolation is not his choice” functioning as a concise statement as to why H doesn’t reach out—since it’s not a 1:1 replica of the circumstances behind her own isolation, there’s always the potential for a schism to occur.
Such a danger in H’s lifestyle smoothly transitions into another dangerous habit in the next sentence: “He was only a person in relation to his wife, and now she is gone he no longer sees himself reflected in her eyes, the only tangible evidence he had of his own existence.” To elaborate upon what the dangerous habit is, one should become aware that there’s a contradiction inherent to interacting with other people: you need other people to keep you afloat (since isolation’s never healthy), but it’s unhealthy to have other people act as a substitute for the lack of a stable center. The old man falls under the latter while H constitutes the former—both of these people are opposite extremes, but equally-unbalanced.
These ideas factor into how one interprets the following duo of lines: “If I am defined by my reflection in the eyes of others then I should be nothing. But I see myself reflected in every window, every painting, every song, every book…what narcissism!” Despite the disgust conveyed by the exclamation-point after “narcissism,” one needs to have some degree of self-centeredness in order to function in the world and not be thrown away by society. However, one shouldn’t look up to overdoing it or underdoing it.
Speaking of narcissistic self-centeredness, there’s the subject of the next set of lines: “There was a period in my late teens I would listen to The Smiths every day. The singer was the king of the narcissists, but sang such beautiful words, “This night has opened my eyes and I will never sleep again.”” While there’s no denying that “The Smiths” were an influential band (they and REM practically set the template for alternative rock to follow in the 90’s), one has to admit that “the singer” (Morissey) is a jackass—despite being as influential as he is polarizing.
However, it’s the polarizing aspects of Morissey which effectively demonstrate his status as “king of the narcissists”—all of which involve a fervent degree of political expression. First, there’s his animal rights activism (since he’s been vegetarian since the age of eleven)—not a topic I have any problem with people expressing or supporting. It’s when he accepted the motives behind the militant tactics of the Animal Rights Militia where I have a problem, as he stated “I understand why fur-farmers and so-called laboratory scientists are repaid with violence—it is because they deal in violence themselves and it’s the only language they understand.” Second, his ardent anti-royalist stance that’s “pro-working class, anti-elite, and anti-institution” which equated the Royal Family to a dictatorship and called Margaret Thatcher (upon her death in 2013) “a terror without an atom of humanity…every move she made was charged with negativity.” Thirdly (and most damningly), there’s Morissey’s defense of a particular vision of English national identity—one that’s controversial in regards to migration. Controversial to the point where (in a 2017 interview) he was quoted as stating “when you try to introduce a multicultural aspect to everything, you end up with no culture.” No matter what ‘legacy’ or ‘heritage’ arguments one tries to use to justify that, that’s a viewpoint synonymous with racism. And a viewpoint which marks the ultimate expression of “narcissism”—being so self-centered that you can’t see other races as human.
Another music reference leads to more introspective leanings via the following run-on: “And then there was Ben Watt’s North Marine Drive, fragile bedroom things written by a maudlin teenage boy with his life to come, listened to by a self-obsessed teenage girl with her life waiting to happen.” Simply put, Ben Watt is a British singer best-known as half of Everything But The Girl and North Marine Drive is his 1983 debut solo album which was mainly acoustic in instrumentation. With this in mind, “fragile bedroom things” can describe that album’s sound, but also the state of both the photographs and H’s mental health. And it’s fitting that it’s this particular album since the phrase “listened by a self-obsessed teenage girl with her life waiting to happen” conveys (among other things) that it’s an album with a long history in H’s life. But “self-obsessed” means something else entirely if one considers that J’s imaginary. In that case, one can suggest that J’s akin to a persona of H and (as a result) H has had a sense of self-obsession for her entire life.
Perhaps that is finally realized by H during the sentence “Where’s your sense of humour girl?” With this considered, the “humor” of it registers as if fate played a cosmic joke on her. However, to ascribe the blame to fate removes all responsibility away from H. Don’t forget that she could have averted this at any point, but (for a variety of reasons) she never did. In that sense, she’s both a victim and an oppressor to herself.
With the way that this entry ends, memory returns to the forefront via the sentence: “You and me J, only hearing the music, speaking to me again through the tape hiss of time.” Like the photographs from the 12th January 2015 entry, music evokes memory—but also distortion of memory.
Entry 41 (27th January 2015):
I was woken up last night by the sound of the television coming from the next room. I sometimes fall asleep in front of my TV, but I surely wouldn’t have gone to bed without switching it off. I lay there for a while retracing my actions (brushed teeth, took sleeping pill, read..etc), but couldn’t figure it out at all, so I got up.
My 13 year old self was watching an old TV show from the sixties. “I haven’t seen this one” she said.
I sat down to watch it with her for a minute or two.
“It’s the episode called Murdersville, I’ve seen it.”
“Well of course you have, you’re seeing it now.”
“Right, I see what you mean…”
I get up and make some tea.
“What happened to our sister?” she asks me after a while
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”
She watches the rest of the episode.
“That was a good one, I like Mrs Peel best.”
“So what about our sister?”
“She’s waiting for us.”
“I’m tired, I want to go back to bed”.
“What are you waiting for?”
What am I waiting for?
“Maybe turn the volume down in case it upsets the neighbours”.
Then I went back to bed.
Before addressing the text of this entry, one should peer over the photo. The contents of which contain the following as legible phrases: “I dreamed another nightmare” defaced over “I dreamed we were dancing again,” “Bad Joke,” “Please,” and “No.” There’s also a drawing of a man (on the right) covered in paint of a tone like the album cover, as well as a girl (on the left) with a skull over her head. Regarding the phrases, the defacing of “another nightmare” over “we were dancing again” indicates how radically memories can be distorted for H—anything she considered idyllic with J can be ruined. In fact, the phrases “Bad Joke,” “Please,” and “No” register as responses to that distortion of memory—H doesn’t want the one thing she considered happy to be rendered into something laden with despair and terror. As for the drawings of the man and the girl, one can assume that’s a depiction of a Visitor taking either J or H.
The textual component of this entry (which will consist of crucial sentences, not of every sentence) falls in-line with the subversion of expectations and joys morphing into terror. But even before one gets to the crux of the freakiest part of the entry, the opening sentence—“I was woken up last night by the sound of the television coming from the next room”—should unnerve anyone familiar with the Joyce Carol Vincent case. Specifically, the fact that drug addicts frequented the area around Joyce’s flat and how that explained why no one questioned the constant noise from the TV—even after Joyce was a corpse left to rot in her flat for over two years. That detail is one that should tip readers—something’s off with what’s about to occur.
A continued portion of setting up for the punchline adopts the form of the next pair of sentences: “I sometimes fall asleep in front of my TV, but I surely wouldn’t have gone to bed without switching it off. I lay there for a while retracing my actions (brushed teeth, took sleeping pill, read…etc), but couldn’t figure it out at all, so I got up.” Judging from the phrase “surely wouldn’t have gone to bed without switching it off,” the signs are already present that—since she’s losing track of any semblance of routine—she’s slipping further into insanity. And from the phrase “retracing my actions (brushed teeth, took sleeping pill, read…etc), but couldn’t figure it out at all,” H is now on shaky-ground—all of her previous mental mechanisms are failing her.
Once the kicker—the surreal image of the sentence “My 13 year old self was watching an old TV show from the sixties.”—arrives, there’s all sorts of connotations worth picking apart. From just the image of “My 13 year old self” and the idea of H hallucinating her younger self right before her eyes, there’s another instance of ‘Benjy Compson syndrome’ (see 12th August 2009 entry). Only this time—with the past and present converging—it’s more severe than the earlier occurrence. Especially considering—with the special emphasis on time with “sister”—that it compounds upon H’s already-unsteady relationship regarding J and H’s mental health.
From the mention of “the episode called Murdersville” and “Mrs Peel” later in this entry, it’s clear that this “old TV show from the sixties” is the British spy series “The Avengers” (no relation to Marvel, but the reason why the 2012 Marvel movie had to be renamed “Avengers Assemble” in Europe). The episode in question (Series 5, Episode 23) has—judging from an episode summary taken from IMDB—thematic links to H’s narrative:
When Mrs. Peel’s friend Major Croft goes missing she traces him to the picture postcard village of Little Storping. Unfortunately the entire population are assassins for hire who lure their victims to the village, kill them, and then claim that they have never been there. Croft has been killed, along with his valet to prevent them from exposing the sinister secret and Mrs. Peel is next on the hit list unless Steed can save her. Fortunately, she manages to put in a phone call to her ‘husband.’
Thematic similarities are present in the form of missing persons, death, and the erasure of identity. As for the luring of victims, that’s not far removed from the activities of the Visitors (if they exist).
Another upsetting portion of dialogue arrives some time later: ““What happened to our sister?” she asks me after a while./“I was going to ask you the same thing.”” Part of what clouds this is that it proves that H (regarding J) knows no better now than when she was thirteen. The implications of that entail connotations of uselessness, wasted time, and that maybe there was nothing to know since J may have never existed at all.
But that’s nothing compared to the most affecting moment of the entry—the blend of dialogue and interior-monologue that reads as follows: ““What are you waiting for?”/What am I waiting for?” What matters isn’t young H’s question, but present-day H’s immediate and urgent (as denoted by the bold-type) mental response—the question itself puts a dent in her weakening armor. Namely that it leaves H feeling as if it’s useless to remain in her current lifestyle. However, H already feels that—apart from the Visitors or committing suicide—there’s no way out of that isolated lifestyle.
Entry 42 (10th February 2015):
I realised today that I have not spoken a syllable to another human being (including myself) for a whole week, neither have I stepped outside of my front door. I spend hours watching nothing in particular from my window. The couple that live in the flat next door are arguing again, I never know what about, the language sounds Eastern European, but I imagine it is about money, it usually is. My money is running out. Maybe in the end it will be this that makes me give in. There’s not much more they can tell me now, I have no more questions, and no more reasons to stay. I wonder for the millionth time how long it will be before anyone misses me. And I know my sister is waiting.
One look at the opening sentence (“I realized today that I have not spoken a syllable to another human being (including myself) for a whole week, neither have I stepped outside of my front door.”) and a reader is left feeling no hope regarding H. The behavior depicted here—that of someone catatonically isolated—remains consistent with the ‘life is pointless’ implications of the mental response to the younger H (in the 27th January 2015 entry). But the fact that H states “(including myself)” among the people she hasn’t spoken to suggests that she’s completely given up.
That sense of surrender extends to the next sentence: “I spend hours watching nothing in particular from my window.” Here, H’s last remaining connections to the world and to nature are tenuous at best. In a macabre sense, this paints H as a spectre whose time is growing short—an image which works regardless of what happens to her at the end.
Another mention of money (in the sentence “The couple that live in the flat next door are arguing again, I never know what about, the language sounds Easter European, but I imagine it is about money, it usually is.”) reminds readers of H’s disgust towards the pervasiveness of capitalism. However, the next two sentences (“My money is running out. Maybe in the end it will be this that makes me give in.”) illustrate that H’s apathy has overtaken even what she used to hate—she no longer cares about poverty or death.
That apathy reaches a zenith in the form of the next sentence: “There’s not much more they can tell me now, I have no more questions, and no more reasons to stay.” On a basic level, this supports the ‘life is pointless’ implications of the 27th January 2015 entry. But a deeper dig would hinge upon “no more questions,” a phrase entailing that knowledge is useless since nothing that can be learned can get her out of this—only the experience of the Visitors can do that. Needless to say, H is destroyed and beyond hope as of this moment—no one can save her.
And then the Visitors don’t linger away during the last two sentences: “I wonder for the millionth time how long it will be before anyone misses me. And I know my sister is waiting.” In fact, the “millionth time” refers back to the 9th March 2011 entry, where the question of “Would you be missed, and if so, by whom?,” was asked from the Visitors. At this point, H fully believes the visitors. As for “sister,” that’s a concrete reference to J.
Entry 43 (11th February 2015):
How do you erase what was never there in the first place?
Even with the one simple sentence of “How do you erase what was never there in the first place?,” this entry offers significant material to analyze. For instance, the simple act of question erasure can be read as a realization that ‘hand cannot erase.’ However, asking “what was never there in the first place” is a trait that’s haunting in the ambiguity of what it’s applied to. It can be applied to H herself, to J, or to the Visitors.
In the case of applying “what was never there in the first place” towards H, there’s a brutally-depressing conclusion. That conclusion amounts to the idea that H was never a complete person. This comes in to play with how the physiological and psychological aspects of H operate completely at-odds with each other whenever the Visitors are involved. Since the two couldn’t be united, the war within those two sides never allowed either to be fulfilled.
Regarding ascribing “what was never there in the first place” to J, one has to consider this as the closest the narrative gets to confirming J’s non-existence. Considering that one could make a convincing argument for J having existed and died in a fire (see 4th January 2015 entry), that this entry does so in as little as twelve words is impressive. Impressive insofar as this entry renders the ‘fire’ story an elaborate sham—the fire did happen, but H fooled herself into thinking that J was one of the victims.
On the topic of associating “what was never there in the first place” with the Visitors, this one also involves multiple aspects of H. In this scenario, one aspect realizes that the Visitors were never real. However, that one aspect is a whimper compared to the others, who are bellowing in a yearning quality for them.
Entry 44 (28th February 2015):
You can come back if you want to but no one ever does.
I told them I’m ready, it’s time to leave now.
Even at this late stage of the game, new suggestions are exposed—look no further than the first sentence of this entry: “You can come back if you want to but no one ever does.” On a surface-level, there’s echoes of lyrics from “Ancestral” (“You can try if you want to,” “Come, child,” and “When the world doesn’t want you, it will never tell you why” spring to mind). However, looking at the sentence makes one wonder ‘Why would no one ever want to come back?’ Then it hits a reader that this sentence reveals a lot about the state of the Visitors—that it’s a state akin to that of divinity and bliss.
But the meat-and-potatoes of this entry is the bold-faced final sentence: “I told them I’m ready, it’s time to leave now.” Regarding the bold print, this textual choice conveys a finality and a certainty regarding this decision—as if H is expending every drop of energy she has left into these words. As for the words themselves, “told them” amounts to another talk with the Visitors through telepathy while “I’m ready” conveys a total state of surrender. Then, there’s “time to leave now” creating a logical hole that H probably doesn’t care about at this point—if the Visitors are divine beings, H (as a mortal) can’t have any say in what they do.
Entry 45 (2nd March 2015):
Ascendant Here On…
Although the final entry consists of only three words, it’s important to note that those three words mirror the name of the album’s final track. That track also utilizes the “Perfect Life” vocal melody on piano, suggesting that H has found joy wherever she’s at. Regardless, this is the point of the narrative where H loses her last grip on sanity or is taken by the Visitors. But unless someone cracks the Key of Skeleton, this ending (along with that of the album) is left ambiguous.
Given that one has—between the blog and the album lyrics—more than enough clues to make a convincing interpretation of the album, perhaps its better off remaining ambiguous. In a sense, it might not even matter what the cracking of the Key of Skeleton could reveal—removing the ambiguity eliminates some of the mystery that can fuel analysis. For an example of this, look no further than James Joyce, who once said about Ulysses that he had “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” rendering that novel immortality. While it’d be nice to discover what lies behind the Key of Skeleton, the open-canvas nature of Hand. Cannot. Erase. is part of what makes this album one of my all-time favorites—it lets the listener fill in the blanks.
Beginning the analysis proper involves delving into this in tiny chunks, the first of which being the word “Ascendant.” Given that the previous entry established H’s idea of the Visitors containing qualities of the divine, this word is an appropriate one. Especially considering that it’s one with implications of transcendence and moving up to a higher state.
If one carries this notion of divinity into “Here On,” then the Visitors are effectively immortal. And that’s why no one ever comes back—this state lasts forever. In a roundabout way, this does acknowledge that the Lena Springer account (from the entry) was a hoax—because Lena (according to the hoax) did come back.
While one can call it petty to pour over punctuation, the use of an ellipsis instead of a period is an important distinction in what marks the last word of both the blog and the album (since “Ascendant Here On…” is an instrumental track). In essence, this ellipsis acts as a visual representation of the unending quality of this narrative. Regardless of whether H is actually taken by the visitors or if she’s hallucinating it vividly (due to insanity), the story of this album/blog continues long after the camera shuts down. In a way, the effect is comparable to that achieved by the ending of Mad Men—life goes on for every character in that show, but it must be imagined by the viewer from that point forward. Needless to say, this does outright dismiss the idea that H kills herself since she’s continuing on.
TO BE CONTINUED
Endnotes:
1. The Downward Spiral: 1994 album by industrial project Nine Inch Nails that’s a concept album detailing a man stripping away all aspects of his identity; “A Warm Place”: a calming ambient-esque piece which comes immediately after “Big Man With A Gun,” one of the album’s most-chaotic tracks….the song also had Trent Reznor unconsciously copy the melody to David Bowie’s “Crystal Japan,” something he did square away with Bowie while the two acts toured together in the mid-90’s.
2. James Joyce: Irish novelist (1882-1941) who was one of the pioneers of the ‘stream-of-consciousness’ technique, making him one of the most influential authors of the entire twentieth century; Dubliners: 1914 short-story collection which charts the accounts of Irish middle-class life around Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century; Finnegans Wake: Joyce’s final novel (published in 1939) that took him seventeen years to write and is considered the most difficult novel to read in the English language.
3. Benjy Compson: the mentally-disabled fourth Compson child whose stream-of-consciousness narrative (which takes up the first quarter of the novel) abruptly jumps around in time whenever italics are involved; William Faulkner: American author (1897-1962) noted for The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, Light In August, and several other novels set in the fictional American South county of Yoknapatawpha; The Sound and the Fury: 1929 novel concerning the fall of a once-prosperous Southern family…often deemed Faulkner’s masterpiece, but a challenging read….in 1998, Modern Library ranked it #6 on a list of the 100 greatest English-language novels of the 20th century.
4. “Anesthetize”: the third track on Porcupine Tree’s 2007 album Fear of a Blank Planet; “A good impression of myself”: both the opening line to “Anesthetize” and a paraphrase of the first line of Bret Easton Ellis’s 2006 novel Lunar Park.
5. Joycean manner: In James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922), darkness was used as a symbol of an unknown metaphysical truth while light denoted superficiality.