Tori Amos: Piece by Piece

by Amos, Tori

  When I looked back and realized my first crush had been on Jesus, that alone gave me a clue to the type of relationship I wanted in real life: a relationship in which a woman is treated like an equal partner. A relationship in which a woman is respected. From the Gospel of Thomas, also known as the Secret Sayings of Jesus (another one of the manuscripts discovered at Nag Hammadi), I quote from the translation by Dr. Marvin W. Meyer from his book The Secret Teachings of Jesus: Four Gnostic Gospels. I'll set the scene for you first. At the end of the Gospel, Jesus is answering questions from the disciples and from Mary Magdalene, and the final question is an inquiry about when the Kingdom will come. And “Peter said to them, ‘Let Mary leave us, because women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘Behold, I shall guide her as to make her male so that she too may become a living spirit like you men. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’ ” Hang on a minute, all you feminists: wait for the translation. In Dr. Meyer's notes he explains, “Here Jesus’ response to Peter, though shocking to modern sensitivities, is intended to be a statement of liberation. The female principle is saved when all that is earthly (that is, allied with an earth Mother) is transformed into what is heavenly (that is, allied with the heavenly Father), thus all people on the earth, whether women or men, require such a transformation.”

  That Jesus stood up to Peter and elevated Mary Magdalene to the male disciples’ status made me think, No wonder Mary dug this guy. Once, a while ago, I had a kind of waking dream that became a conversation while I was playing the piano. A conversation with Mary Magdalene, who, like a jazz musician, just sat in and started jamming with me. I looked at her with a guilty conscience and said, “You know, Mary Magdalene, I didn't mean to have a crush on your man.” And because I didn't hear a response from her, I kept rambling. “You know, maybe it was more like James Taylor. I mean, in 1971 Jesus and James could kind of pass for brothers, and didn't Jesus have a brother named James?” And all of a sudden I heard this throaty, sexy laugh. And in my day-tripper dream world Mary Magdalene said to me, “Don't you see, you're looking for a guy that treats women a certain way—a guy who wants a complete partnership with a woman.” And then she was gone.

  SONG CANVAS:“The Power of Orange Knickers”!

  I started to think about the word terrorist. It's a word you hear several times a day now. I started to think about what being a terrorist can mean in different situations. I wanted to explore the realm of personal invasion. Now this would be an invasion by someone you know personally, not a stranger. We all know about strangers being filled with hatred— strangers who lash out against a government or an ideal. As a result, this stranger kills innocent people, tragically, people you may know personally. But when there is an intimacy between two people and one person starts to feel invaded by the other person, that is personalized terrorism. As we all know, the battleground between two lovers, or two friends, or two coworkers can be vicious. Painful. Heartbreaking. And bloody. I started to think about the weapons that might be used in this kind of battle, and as I kept digging for an answer, I stumbled into the Realm of Assonance. I started to think, Okay, what is the paradox of terrorist? And Assonance, that beautiful creature, came to my aid and whispered, “Kiss.” And sure enough, we have all felt invaded by a lingering kiss, for good or ill. But I had to find terrorism not just in a relationship of a couple—representing two divided Beings—but within one Being. After all, isn't that the ultimate discovery, the ultimate pain—division within the self, the soul from the body, the mind from the heart, wisdom from consciousness, the addiction from the cure, the two Marys … divided?

  The lyrics started to come to me quickly …

  The Power of Orange Knickers, under my petty coat. The power of listening to what, you don't want me to know. Can somebody tell me now, who is this terrorist? Those girls that smile kindly, then rip your life to pieces. Can somebody tell me now, am I alone with this—this little pill in my hand and with this secret kiss. Am I alone in this?

  ANN: At the conservatory, the safe space her family had chosen for her, Tori gained sight and sound of the reconciliation the Church denied.

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  The funny thing was, my father saw music as the thing that was going to save me from sexuality. It was my protector from possible disaster, because I was at home practicing, not hanging around after school getting stoned or getting pregnant. And right under his nose I was discovering the free space of music. I would watch the guitarists, these men with their axes; it was seductive, and they were one with their instruments. And nothing came in between them and their desire. It's kind of the hard-core version of Brooke Shields saying “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins,” as she did in the famously racy 1980 advertisement for Calvin Klein jeans. My dad, hypothetically speaking, could pull me out of, you know, a car if I was kissing some boy. If he wanted to, he could physically pull me out. But here were these musicians, right in the place where I was supposed to be, and they were conjoined with their instruments. You could not divide them. And you couldn't invade them, either, unlike the way the Church and its ideas had invaded my consciousness.

  I still didn't give up the Church. You have to remember, my father was my manager after I left the conservatory. I was playing in gay bars, but he was steering my career. I'm still going to services every Sunday at age twenty-one. I felt at the time, I think, that I could overcome the contradictions. I had never believed that degradation was the path of the Magdalene. I didn't care what the interpreters of the Bible said. And the more I researched it, the more I discovered what was right. At the same time, I was looking for what Robert Plant was tapping into. This sensuality without the subservience. But really, in my life, I was still experiencing the division between the sacred and the profane. I was not experiencing the transformation of the profane into the sacred. Not yet.

  Finally, a month or so after my twenty-first birthday, I moved to L.A. Partly, I was trying to get away from my father's control. At a certain point, the curfews he was imposing, the protectiveness, it was just overbearing—considering I worked six nights a week, bringing home my own bacon. At the time we were having too many disagreements. Whom he wanted me to date and whom I wanted to date … it was just all falling apart then. And I knew that I had to become a woman.

  In L.A., ironically enough, I lived behind the Methodist church on Highland and Franklin. But I started running around with all sorts of people and getting exposed to all sorts of ways of thinking. This period was a huge turning point for me because I decided what I was going after, even if I didn't know how to go after it yet. I was around other people who'd come from kind of the same place I had, escaping their upbringing, so everybody was always searching. I was exposed to other cultures and began to see how different people worshiped and how different people looked at the joining of two people. Yet I was still having personal relationships in which I had to take on a role. And this lasted for a long time. Until I was broken down enough on such a level that something in me rose up to the powers that be and just said, “No. I don't need you to see me as an honorable woman, or as an object of desire; I don't need to pay respect to your Gods.”

  During those years in Hollywood, what worked was the rock chick type or the folk poet. So much of the music business is about men desiring you.

  I mean, there weren't a lot of ugly women getting signed. Maybe in some way I decided, This is what the industry seems to want, and everything that I'm doing isn't working. When I would turn in the tapes of me at the piano to various producers or A&R men, the responses would be, “This is not happening. Nobody wants this. The piano girl thing is dead.” To you who are reading this right now, that statement, “The piano girl thing is dead,” seems ridiculous in light of what is occurring right now in music. And it was a ridiculous, unfounded assertion. But it was implemented by the Record Company Cheeses, and it did its damage.

  It took a while to recover and reintegrate. By the time I finall
y got to make Little Earthquakes, I made a conscious decision not to be objectified here. My material had to be about the content, not the powder-puff compact. They couldn't come between me and my piano. So in a way, no matter what people wrote about how I was onstage at the time, I think I desexualized myself. I was trying to find out who this person was who played the piano. There was a return to the girl I had been at five, who had her own beliefs when she stood up to her grandmother. When she stood up to the patriarchy of the Christian Church. At this time in my life there was a reclaiming of a person. A person whom I had locked out of the proceedings at a certain point.

  I wrote a song during the recording of Little Earthquakes that never got released, and one of the lines was “Boy masturbating down the hall in the dark”—that's how it starts. I can't remember much more, but I remember the next verse:

  I have 50 hearts, they're all in 50 different drawers

  When you come calling I always put the purple one on

  If I dumped all 50 out on the living room floor

  would you say clean up the mess before I get home?

  It was just one of those moments of seeing fifty different girls inside myself. There's a girl who goes and does business. There's a girl who attends church. There's a girl who has sex, too. She knows her trade. There were so many girls, I couldn't keep track of the keys to the hotel … And the men I was dating at the time may or may not have seen these divisions. Here I was, declaring myself a steward of the Magdalene, uniting the two Marys, and yet in my life I was the complete opposite. This was the paradox.

  SONG CANVAS:“God”

  With Little Earthquakes I started to face down the split between the Marys, both personally and in the larger sense. I continued to explore it during the Under the Pink phase. I think taking on the role of Ms. God, or God's lover in the song I wrote called “God” (from Under the Pink) was a big step for me personally in reuniting the two Marys within my Being. I began to realize that I needed the voices of both Marys to hold an anchor for the Ms. God archetype I was to embody in order to sing this song. I'll ask myself the question that other people have asked me over the years: “Define which God, Tori. Which God is the God in the song ‘God’? Do you mean God, God?” And my answer is “It depends on who you think God, God is.” In Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, Elaine Pagels makes the “God behind God” concept of certain early Christians quite clear by quoting from different texts found in Nag Hammadi. Referring to the Apocryphon, the Secret Book of John, Pagels writes, “The Secret Book tells a story intended to show that although the creator-god pictured in Genesis is himself only an anthropomorphic image of the divine Source that brought forth the universe, many people mistake this deficient image for God. This story tells how the creator-god himself, being unaware of the ‘blessed one, the Mother-Father, the blessed and compassionate One’ above, boasted that he was the only God (‘I'm a jealous God; there is none other besides me’). Intent on maintaining sole power, he tried to control his human creatures by forbidding them to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge.”

  Here I need to refer again to Dr. Meyer's The Secret Teachings of Jesus from the Gospel, the Secret Book of John. The one we know as Jesus the Savior is teaching his disciple John:

  Now Sophia, who is the Wisdom of Afterthought and who represents an eternal realm, conceived of a thought. She had this idea and this invisible Spirit of Knowledge also reflected upon it. She wanted to give birth to a being like herself … rather, something came out of her that was imperfect and different in appearance from her, for she had produced it without her lover. It did not look like its Mother and had a different shape … she threw it away from her, outside that realm, so that none of the Immortals would see it. For she had produced it ignorantly. She surrounded it with a bright cloud and put a throne in the middle of it except for the Holy Spirit, who is called the Mother of the Living. She named her child Yaldaboath. Yaldaboath is the first Ruler who took great power from his Mother … this gloomy Ruler has three names: the first name is Yaldaboath, the second is Saklas. The third is Samael. He is wicked because of the mindlessness that is within him when he said, “I am God and there is no other God besides me.” The Lord continued speaking to John … “The arrogant one took power from his Mother, he was ignorant, for he thought that no other power existed except for his Mother. He saw the throng of angels he had created and exalted himself over them.”

  In The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels writes, “According to the Hypostasis of the Archons, discovered at Nag Hammadi, both the mother and her daughter objected when ‘he became arrogant, saying, “It is I who am God, and there is no other apart from me.” … And a voice came forth from above the realm of absolute power, saying, “You are wrong, Samael” (which means “god of the blind”). And he said, “If any other thing exists before me, let it appear to me!” And immediately, Sophia (“Wisdom”) stretched forth her finger, and introduced light into matter, and she followed it down into the region of Chaos…. And he again said to his offspring, “It is I who am the God of All.” And Life, the daughter of Wisdom, cried out; she said to him, “You are wrong Saklas!” ’ ”

  So to answer the question, this is the God to whom I refer in the song “God.” I am not referring to Jesus’ Divine Father termed the “holy Parent, the completely perfect Forethought, the image of the Invisible One, that is, the Father of everything, through him everything came into being, the first Humanity,” again from Meyers. In this translation Jesus frequently refers to himself as “the Child of Humanity.”

  CONVERSATION BETWEEN TORI AND ANN:

  At that time my life as a woman seemed settled. I was involved with my producing partner, Eric Rosse. We thought we were a lifelong thing. We were looking at buying a house in the Taos area of New Mexico. But the truth is, we were more collaborators than man and wife. We were really dear friends. There was a deep respect and pairing, but I wasn't his girlfriend at heart. I wasn't his squeeze.

  After making Under the Pink, we were just worn out. We broke up during the tour. The whole crew knew about the breakup and saw other men sort of coming in and out of my life. There was certainly gossip. Mark, my future husband (who kept his distance), was around; he was the engineer on this tour. He just kept to the sidelines, observing, occasionally bringing me a cup of tea. I had a crush on him from the first day I saw him, but this was months and months before we got together. And I was busy chasing baby demons.

  The Under the Pink tour was long, and the compartmentalization within me had gotten worse and worse. The fragmentation process had worked perfectly. It can be very functional. I think that's why a lot of women have affairs, why they lead other lives. It all has to come out some way unless you find a way to say, No, I'm one person, I let my hair down, I have a good time with my friends, I put my hair back up, but either way I'm the same person—I just have different sides.

  Shapes with different sides … The hexagon. The honeycomb, a structure of hexagonal cells constructed from beeswax. While writing the songs for The Beekeeper, my latest album, I've been walking through many different types of gardens. The songs were trying to show me that they formed a shape and were independent but connected to each other, no different from the structure of hexagonal cells that make up the beehive.

  Margaret Starbird, author of The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail and The Goddess in the Gospels, has been inspirational to many daughters of the Christian Church, myself included. She is also “a faithful daughter of the Roman Catholic Church” and years ago set out to prove that the idea of Jesus’ being married to Mary Magdalene was a heresy she had to clarify. This educated Christian woman has shaken one of the pillars of the Christian patriarchy. In her words, “It is my conviction that Christianity and its inception included the celebration of the hieros gamos, the ‘sacred marriage’ of opposites, a model incarnate in the archetypal Bridegroom and his bride—Jesus Christ and the woman called Magdalene.” In her latest book, Magdalene's Lost L
egacy, she writes about the symbol of sacred marriage: ?. “Jewish rabbinical tradition teaches that the Ark of the Covenant kept in the Holy of Holies of Solomon's Temple on Mount Zion in Jerusalem contained, in addition to the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed, a ‘man and a woman locked in intimacy in the form of a hexagram’—the intimate union of the opposites.”

  The beehive, formed of hexagons, was foundational for the visual piece of The Beekeeper. Once it was clear that we were working within the structure that was made of six sides, I began to subdivide the album into six segments. A large subtext of The Beekeeper is the garden, though our version of “the Garden of Original Sin” metamorphoses into “the Garden of Original Sin-suality.” Our garden is made up of “the archetypal symbols for male and female, the V (chalice) and the (blade)” (as mentioned by Starbird in her book, Magdalene's Lost Legacy). She goes on to say, “This feminine association of bees was known and honored in ancient times: priestesses of the goddess Artemis were called melissae, and Demeter was called ‘the pure Mother Bee.’ In Hebrew the name of Deborah, one of the great Old Testament heroines, means ‘queen bee.’ ”

  Our sonic garden for The Beekeeper is made up of Desert Garden, Rock Garden, The Orchard, The Greenhouse, Elixirs and Herbs, and Roses and Thorns. This is where the story of original Sin-suality between male and female takes place.

  SONG CANVAS: ‘Marys of the Sea”