Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (13 page)

It was actually very well planned, their getting together. It had to be, because nobody else really needed to know except them, and me, and Joel,
her bodyguard. So it was a case of trying to get them together but keep it private. It was a day off, I think, in South Bend, Indiana. And they kind of arranged that they were going to go out for a walk. It was funny, 'cause Joel and I had to sort of patrol around. Mark and Tori came down into the lobby and I was in the little gift shop, and I saw Joel hiding behind a newspaper and I had to go out an emergency exit. We were just trying to give them a bit of privacy.

Eventually Mark and I did become friends and started sort of confiding in each other. And I remember, one time, he said, “Tell me why it is that women invariably pull the same kind of men to them? The one that will taste them, eat them, swallow them, and then spit them out.” In this British accent, I'll never forget it. It's embedded in my mind. That's when I knew this was it. He went on: “Spit them out, leave them at the side of the road, drive away, back up, kick the door open and say, ‘You want to go for another ride?’ ” And I sat there and thought,
There are knights in this world. This is the prince.

It was a surprise to me. I came around the corner one day—I think we were in New Haven, Connecticut—and I literally, like, came around a drape onstage and I ran into them and they were hugging. I was like, “What's wrong? You guys okay?” I thought they were comforting each other because somebody had died or something.

A few people knew before I did, but that was when I found out. Later, we would have talks on the bus and I'd say to Mark, who'd been my friend for a long time, “Look. This is not such a good idea, you know. If you're bad in bed your career could be over.” He'd be like, “Don't worry, don't
worry. Everything's going to be fine.” And I was wrong, you know. And I'm happy to be wrong.

I really feel like my husband is my boyfriend. I am having an affair with my husband, and sometimes plates fly. There's no question. This is someone who is tenacious and has his own way of looking at things. I mean, he wanted to get married, but only if we lived in England. To be his wife required serious change for me. And there are serious boundaries. It is about monogamy with him. That's just it. I think marriage takes more perseverance sometimes than any other endeavor. But this suits my skirt just fine, primarily because I've always been reticent about the concept of “Happily Ever After.” The garden will have weeds and pests that may damage crops; it may even have pestilence to contend with once in a while. But with the right combination of elements, including bees and butterflies, the garden will pollinate and become a garden—not an emotional wasteland but a place of sensuality and balance. So it may need a good beekeeper; all complex gardens do.

ANN:
Having found her human partner, Amos is free to refine the expression of sexuality within her art. She continues to make this task the focus of her work, both onstage and in the studio.

In the beginning I knew that the Magdalene was my teacher. But I couldn't get the information and I didn't know the walk. I didn't know how to do it. So you're casting your lines of questions into what seems a silent, visionless sea, and you know you're stupid because the sea can't be visionless. You're looking for signs all the time … but what do they look
like? So there you go again, casting your line, looking for little signs. But do you need X-ray vision to even see them? Well, first of all, I had to redefine the clichéd term
freedom for women.
I've heard women who do X-rated movies say that they're liberated. That's their right. In a way, it's no different from the way I was approaching sexuality at the beginning of my career. But when a woman is being defecated on emotionally or physically, then we are up to our necks in the Profane, with Sacred nowhere near that casting call. The whole sensuality is gone. It's the brutality of power at its cruelest. We've missed what it's supposed to be about, which is the ecstasy, the coming together. Sex becomes about one person being the subject of somebody else's power, which so often is what Religion is about, too. I've never quite figured out if Sex is in Religion's harem or if Religion is in Sex's harem.

I've asked myself,
Is there a way to reach orgasm and keep your spirituality intact?
To me that is the orgasm of all orgasms, which is what I think I'm experiencing in performance. Not literally, but in an artistic sense. And what you ultimately want is to experience this when you join with your man or your physical counterpart.

We are penalized if we are able to hump energetically like the men. It pisses people off because we don't need them in that case. And it makes people nervous as hell.

I've realized that my childhood instincts were right. Take Robert Plant, for example. When I met him, I talked with him about what I thought about him when I was a girl. He told me he had been into the white magic thing, as they say. We've joked about how he so famously called himself a Golden God—I said, no, you were the Golden Goddess …

My whole goal has been to penetrate the patriarchy from the day I was five. Sometimes what you have to do is inspire young men so that they don't want to become a part of the abusive side of all that. We all have to reapproach the question
What is a powerful male, a powerful female? How are those roles abused?
If you go after that core, you don't have to worry
about who is part of the peace movement, who is part of Earth First, who is part of Amnesty International. That will take care of itself. But, if you've got 15,000 kids chanting, “Die, bitch, die” at a concert, you may have just lost the battle. They are not going to vote for a female president in that state of mind. So you have to come back to the question
What is political What is social?
But if you go for the core, then you will automatically invite both of them to come in and be characters in this play Sometimes I have found that just to be able to permeate the rigid power stance you come up against in a confrontation, the key is not to try to match their venom but instead to crawl inside their psyche. I want to be right back there in that pituitary and crawl in like a snake.

I investigated a similar character in “Amber Waves,” on
Scarlet's Walk.
The Magdalene and America are really good synonyms, because they've both been pimped out, though they always resurface. I'm talking about the land of America now, not the government. She appeared to me as a fading porn star. That character is based on an acquaintance of mine who had turned her life over to a man; I was watching her demise. In part it comes from a film, too—in
Boogie Nights
, the Julianne Moore character's name is Amber Waves. But in the end, she's another version of the Magdalene. That's why the song is sexy and not just sad. She retains her dignity in her soul by asking the question “Are the Northern Lights drowning or are they just waving?”

ANN:
Whatever form Amos's music takes next, it will, in some way, still serve and reveal the Magdalene. Fervent afternoons in her childhood bedroom, patent

leather nights in LA., the revelations of Hawaii—these are all part of the seedbed. There, too, plays Natashya, always a presence now, the embodiment of a new generation of girls forced to cross the divides forged by history. For her daughter and all young innocents, Amos hopes to offer a bridge.

Today I feel as if I walk a line of Mommy and the Sacred Prostitute. It's funny—because of where we live, Tash is going to a Christian school. She comes home with ideas about God. She said to me just the other day “Mummy do you believe in God?” And my instinct was to ask her, “Do you mean the God behind God?” And you know what I did? I said to myself, “Jeez, T, back off, she's only three and a half. This is your point of view, not necessarily hers.” She says she wants to pray. So when I see that what Tash really wants to do is to just hold hands and say grace, “Let's go, I say, let's bless everything.” And we do. She prays for absolutely everybody—dogs, children, mermaids, God, Mrs. God—literally everybody. We're also weaving in dear Mother Earth; she prays to her as well. She understands Baby Jesus and she understands there's God, but she understands there's a Mother, which hopefully for her will be the two Marys united. Since the two Marys have never been subjugated or divided within Tash's Being, then it makes sense that the two Marys were born married in Tash's little world. Mother Earth is sovereign. Mother Earth has awakened her daughters.

Back in the conference room at Doubleday Books …

The door opens and my publishers walk into the conference room where I've been waiting, flanked by their twelve disciples who will be covering everything from publicity, marketing, and sales of the book. We all
sit down, with Chelsea and Johnny on either side of me, creating the effect of a Honey Baked Ham on rye sandwich, hold the cheese.

My publisher looks at me and says, “We've read the Magdalene chapter, and whatever you and Ann are doing, keep doing it.”

I breathed a sigh of relief, because if they hadn't liked it, sure, I may have lots of songs up my sleeve, but I don't have any other books. This is all I know.

Then he added, “Just keep going. Don't even think about it.”

I responded, “That's it?”

They smiled and said, “That is what most authors would love to hear after having turned in their first chapter.”

I said, “You don't mind the cursing or the profanity? Because we've just had to edit the DVD of any and all profanity, or else they were going to slap a big ‘Parental Advisory’ on it.”

He said, “This is literature, Tori. Curse as much as you want. And by the way, the Magdalene's been very good to us. We've got no problems with the Magdalene.”

And as I looked around at all
The Da Vinci Code
paraphernalia surrounding me, I glanced up at my publishers and asked, “So then why aren't you guys aggressively seeking to publish the Gospel of Mary Magdalene?”