Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (22 page)

Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture and fertility,” and her daughter, Persephone

After the second miscarriage, I made
from the choirgirl hotel.
I took on the subject of my loss directly in those songs. The album clearly came from a place of grief, but also from deciding that instead of fighting the patriarchy and expressing rage and defiance, I had to do something new. That was not what I needed then. Those emotions and insights didn't offer the clues to get me through the game of Myst I was playing at that point.

Then the songs started to come, and they held my hand in such a beautiful way. I felt as if I were surrounded by these women and children that somehow knew what I had faced. The songs that came were all the children that couldn't be with their mothers. They were ghosts. It's okay in literature, in a novel like Toni Morrison's
Beloved
, for example, to talk about ghosts, but the idea that there's a consciousness beyond us that can express itself in a song seems weird to many people. I say, though, how can you not believe that? Especially if you're an artist, it's pretty egocentric not to give credit beyond your own talent and intellect—basically that means claiming that you are the sole source of your own inspiration. I don't accept that. I know that my role as an artist is to provide an opening for voices and stories that go beyond my own small, private existence. I knew this with
Choirgirl
because the songs brought me something I needed that I couldn't provide for myself. These songs were children who had found another plane, or mothers who had gone before who had experienced this loss, and they came to share my grief.

Choirgirl
was the antithesis of “Cornflake Girl,” because it was a case of women coming together to support each other. These songs were the supportive, nurturing women. We walk into Demeter, not Aphrodite. This was an unbelievable mothering I was getting.

ANN:
Taking the hands of spirits who walked her through darkness, Amos also found new ways to view other archetypes in the feminine pantheon. Her next work
, To Venus and Back,
approached the fabled goddess of love, but Amos's deepest sense of that emotion was changing, and her new songs reflected that.

As the live recordings from the
Choirgirl
tour were being completed at our home studios, and it became clear that I should record some new material as well, I had to figure out what I wanted to emphasize. We were nearing the millennium, and I began to see the earth itself as a mother who was losing her children every day. And so I thought she needed a friend, and a good girlfriend. I felt Venus was really important to the culture at that moment. There was so much Mars—so much aggressiveness, especially in music, with the explosion of hate rap. Though I thought the music was really powerful, I couldn't help but notice the violence that filled so much of it.

Venus has a fierce and competitive side, but there's more to her than that. Many writers have felt that such a beautiful woman was unable to hold a space for other women, and some beauties can't. But we know some who can in the music business. I also felt that this was a real healing time, a shifting time for me. What Venus meant to me was changing. She wasn't just this narcissistic goddess. Some women tap into that, there's no question. But I think they miss the point. In our culture we so often turn these archetypes into someone sentimentally cartoonish, and cliché, narrowing the scope of the goddesses in question—their descent and resurrection and true role in the mythical pantheon.

All of this thinking brought me to the idea of Venus. What is the essence of that idea? Love. How could I capture in music the compassionate place that women can create for one another, which is not based just in sentimentality? Because sometimes you have to be quite ferocious to
protect the cubs, whether they are real children or ideas. It goes without saying that powerful women are often called bitches simply for being powerful, when in truth some of them can be the most loving, compassionate ones. The crazy thing is, whenever I hear the word
love
, I think of Billy Crystal as Miracle Max in
The Princess Bride
in the scene where the hero, Westly, is lying on the table near death and Miracle Max says something like “What do you have that's so important to live for?” and Westly whispers, more like grunts, “True love.” I hear Miracle Max in my head saying, “To blave” and Westly's friends saying, “He said ‘true love’!” And Billy Crystal says, “He did not say ‘true love,’ he said ‘to blave.’ ” And I think ever since that day I've been searching the planet for To Blave, and once I found it I married it. So it's a wonder that the Goddess of Love could decode the nonsense that had been going on in my brain … but I was beyond ready for True Love, to blave.

I was also attracted to the themes I explored on
Venus
, I think, because at that time I was waiting to get exiled. I was still not getting a lot of radio play with the
Choirgirl
material, though more than with
Pele.
I'd seen how record labels treated artists who were past their first moment of popularity. For me, making this music was a garnering of strength using the mythologies of some of these women who nurtured other women. I was learning that there was a different walk than the popular one.

I was opening up to the role of being a port in the storm as opposed to the most desired holiday spot. Then Alanis Morissette called and asked if I would go out with her on tour. And I thought about it a lot. We were going to flip-flop every night, but then we decided that I would go first because the piano would be in place. On that tour there was graciousness on both sides, and that was a real turning point. It was important for me that that occurred. The thought form that “if one woman succeeds in the music business then one must fail” had become nails across my face, and I wanted to purge that idea from the ladies’ room at the Grammys. The sisterhood
had become shit. It was as if we were all part of some modern harem, competing with each other to go down on that microphone. Go down a storm. As if there were only one microphone. The compassionate Venus had no backstage pass. The patriarchal projected Venus, consumed with the need for adoration and approval, had an Access All Areas.

ANN:
As her understanding of feminine power changed, Amos felt hersef growing stronger. This was a blissful time, despite the sorrow that had come before. Married, delighted with her band, writing exciting new material, Amos felt she could accept what life presented. Yet life, in its way, soon pushed her over the precipice again.

On tour with Alanis, I found out I was pregnant. Again. I thought it was going well. I really believed the little one and I were out of the woods, out of harm's way. I was on tour, I was watching myself, I was strict on every level. I'd been taking my vitamins for months. Duncan was with me and I was happy. I'd walked the dark road. I was basking in the sunlight. How foolish of me—the tunnel had just opened its convertible top for a moment. I had no idea that this tunnel was going to lead me to Mordor.

After the tour was finished I continued to travel, doing promotional appearances. I was getting more confident and felt we were blossoming. When I went to France to do promotion for
Venus
, alone with Natalie Caplan, who was my assistant at that time, things started to go wrong. I just told Natalie to get me out of there. I mean, this was a country where I could talk to you about wine, but that's all I could do. What was I going to do? How was I going to talk to the doctors, discuss the 1994 vintage from Château Chasse-Spleen? I just remember lying in bed in Paris and starting to bleed. And I remember that week, the second week in
November, some journalist saying to me something like “How do you feel about marketing your pain?” I was so ill, I was worried, I wasn't feeling well. I was sitting there thinking,
Maybe I'm just having a little bleeding, it happens.
I just remember sitting through those interviews, reaching the end of my rope.

I said to him, “How do you define Baudelaire? How do you define Rimbaud? These are your touchstones—how do you define what they did? At least I'm not marketing someone else's pain.” That was a cruel moment.

I remember being there in the heart of Paris, and there was something kind of familiar about it all. That's all I'll say. I wasn't feeling as if I were in a place I didn't know or hadn't felt lost in before. I've always been very drawn to certain things about France. Debussy was one of my first ways in to music. But at this moment, in this life, I was lying there and it was getting worse and worse, and I knew what was happening and Mark wasn't there.

As the realization was dawning on me that I was losing this little life, I called Beenie. She picked up the phone and as soon as I heard her voice I let out a cry so aching that I think even Paris must have shuddered. She knew in that moment what was occurring and she said, “Oh my Beenie Bean, feel me right there with you on the bed; my hand is on your tummy and the angelic Beings are there to receive this life.” Mark and I had called her Phoebe, and I think that, rightly or wrongly, this pregnancy had felt the most real somehow. Maybe I should say the healthiest. I had done everything right and in that moment I knew that I would never seek to be a mother again. I knew that as I lay there while the sheets were turning to blood and I was having stabbing pains that racked my body, as I cried like a baby. No. Babies don't cry with this kind of pain. They have different pains, but this was the cry of Demeter, whose daughter had been taken from her.

Now that I know Natashya, I understand why I was grieving so deeply. Something in my makeup, in what holds me together—as crazy as it is sometimes—I knew that there was a presence missing from my life, and I ached for this relationship. No different from the simple truth that you cannot find your loved ones when they have died. Neither can you find a loved one when they haven't been physically born. The aching can be great on both sides, because there is an emptiness. When Kevyn Aucoin died, I felt this emptiness. When my Poppa died, and when my little girl hadn't physically been born, time and time again, I wept from the deepest part of my heart.

I spoke with Beenie, who was able to talk about and be present with me lying in my own blood, and I can see now how she held the archetype of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, and how I, as a second-string understudy for Demeter, was mothered by Persephone's compassion and knowing. The other line rang in the room at that moment. Natalie had called L.A. to alert certain people to what was occurring. In some ways it happened, it seemed, for a thousand years—that day was a thousand years. That day was November 11, 1999. My first miscarriage was December 23, 1996. My second miscarriage … I did not choose to keep a date because it wasn't the same as the first and the third.

I picked up the phone, and the suggestion was to go see a doctor immediately in Paris. They were getting names and told me to take a couple days to recover and then go on to Spain to continue my promotional tour. As if a couple days off was a huge boon, a gift.

In that moment a schism happened between me and the music industry. All my shattered discordant pieces of the different Toris puzzled themselves back together with Phoebe's glue. I now understood that I was a commodity. I was a commodity through the condolences, through the “I'm so sorrys.” “I'm so worried about you, but the show must go on.” I
hung up the phone and for the next two hours I talked to everyone from Dr. Rita Lynn to Mark.

Dr. Rita has been a mentor for me for many years, along with being one of the most respected psychologists in Los Angeles, having been part of the Cedars-Sinai psychiatric ward as well as a private practitioner. She has helped me to string together the fragments of my life. She's called it “beading a necklace.” So when I called her and told her that “those who are they” wanted me to see a doctor immediately in Paris, take a couple days off, and continue on to Spain to do promotion for
Venus
, she interceded and said, “That is absolutely and positively what is not going to happen. I will call management, record companies, and whoever I need to call to instruct them on how to be humane.” Then she proceeded to lay out, very simply, what I had to do. She said to me, once she had walked me through the next ten hours of my life, “I'm calling Johnny, and we will put this plan into action and he can deal with ‘those who are they.’ ”

After I hung up the phone, Natalie was there within minutes. I said my goodbyes to Beenie and I stared blankly at the carpet, now marked by the remains of my wishes for Phoebe and me in shapes that looked like little rosebuds, not bloodstains. I walked out of that hotel room a changed woman in many ways. So we went on the train and I was bundled up because I was really a stuck pig at this point, bleeding. I know, I know—pigs again. There was just this moment of knowing it was the end of that pregnancy. And this was the hardest loss in the end.