What It Means To Be Alone

What It Means To Be Alone
Oh, you were born with the sun
And oh, you will die with the moon
And everything you thought you had, you lost
But now, you’d never lose what you don’t have
Prayers from above, never answered quite enough
Now the only one you have is

You, with this cruel and bitter heart
You were cold and in love, left here naked in the sun
Run, scared, from this cruel and bitter world
This has only begun, as the bombs are bursting on

Smoke arose on azimuth glares, bodies brood in frigid winter air
Where families’ sons are robbed beneath their feet, and hearts concede
“Ab ovo,” the angel sings, “Ad astra”; our eyes to the sea
We thought that we had a cause for suffering
And reason enough to die alone

Oh, but you, with this cruel and bitter heart
You were cold and in love, left here naked in the sun
Run, scared, from this cruel and bitter world
This has only begun, as the bombs are bursting off

With our feet beneath us, with our hands to the sky
We extend our limbs begging “why oh why?”
Don’t turn away!

Prayers from above, never answered quite enough
Looking up never offered you too much
Now the only one you have is…

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
Hunter, remembering his true wants and values, realises he has made a mistake in coming to war. He feels the absence of God as he fruitlessly prays to leave this pointless hardship, when a terrifying foe approaches…

What’s in a name?
‘What It Means To Be Alone’ — Something Hunter is coming to realise, as he finds himself utterly out-of-place and stranded in the middle of this war… but what does it really mean to be alone? Well, I’d say this: It means you have nobody to rely on.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter. And/or an Omniscient voice, but principally Hunter.

Actually I suppose this warrants more attention. A lot of this song is in second person, speaking with perfect omniscient knowledge of Hunter’s journey and motives, but the speaker does not have the intonation of the Oracles (it’s closer to Hunter’s) nor are they speaking directly to Hunter. Hence, the omniscient voice here is not the Oracles. Rather, the voice seems to be affirming various realisations Hunter is having about his actions and journey, with an incredible tone of compassion and mercy. So, apart from simply being framing for Hunter to introspect (in large part the realisations he’s making don’t sound like consciously wrought trains of thought so much as the scales dropping from his eyes), I wonder if the speaker is the ‘angel’ Hunter identifies in this song (and that features prominently in this song’s music video).

With there being no supernatural elements to the story though, I wouldn’t take it as a like, a literal angel appears and tells Hunter these things. It’s more like… we’re hearing the voice of every higher positive force that loves Hunter but that can’t stop him or impinge on his will being venerated as Hunter realises that wow, he messed up. Parties you could throw in that group would broadly include God, ‘the universe’, Casey, You the listener, the part of Hunter that wants him to have a good life and stop messing up, and to go really crack something like the ghost of Ms Terri in heaven.

Fundamentally though I think the voice is just Hunter, framed from a higher vantage to get the point across of how to approach this song; the things the ‘angel’ says are the things Hunter is thinking, realising, or intuiting, these being deeply true and positive things to recognise, without necessarily demanding strenuous conscious thought put on them (he is still on the battlefield in the middle of a lot of attention-grabbing chaos right now. Maintaining a level of dissociation/distance probably helps when he has to flip into combat-ready survival mode on a dime.).

🌲🌲🌲

>Oh, you were born with the sun / And oh, you will die with the moon
Boy, what a pair of lines. Alright here’s my shot.

‘You were born with the sun’ -> Hunter’s true nature is that of a boy raised on love. As in tarot symbolism, Hunter is in a state of his greatest power, and greatest trueness to himself, when he is openly operating by the sentiments of pure love on which he was raised, given to him by Ms Terri. ‘Floating on wax wings / where is the sun?’ Ms Terri is the sun; so there is a literal element of Hunter being born to her, too — in short ‘Hunter! Stop letting yourself be a cog in the war machine and remember the sensitive, loving boy that you are!’.

‘You will die with the moon’ -> Hunter stifles himself, loses himself, and metaphorically kills himself when he abandons his true nature. The persona he took as a soldier in Cauda was not true to himself and was a form of killing himself; he has snapped out of it this time, but will come to discard his true self for more fake personae, leading ultimately to his non-metaphorical death. In the context of the war, if he continues to be a soldier, he realises he will likely die because he stopped thinking for himself. (Also to stretch a bit, and return to the idea of a Dime/Moon connection, you can also make a literal read of Hunter dying with TP&P, with TP&P being the moon to mirror Ms Terri/sun.)

Indeed, now that Hunter is thinking as Hunter again, we can see his actual opinions about this war, and they are certainly more vulnerable sentiments than the anger and belligerence expressed in Cauda.

Song as a whole has this amazing tone of mercy to it; I suppose that is what Hunter needs or is seeking right now.

>And everything you thought you had, you lost / But now, you’d never lose what you don’t have
Boy, WHAT a pair of lines. Hokay.

‘Everything you thought you had, you lost’ -> What did Hunter think that he had? We can trace his obvious losses of Ms Terri and Ms Leading, but can probably go further — he’s lost his feeling of belonging here, of purpose here, of home here, of desire to be here, perhaps even his pride as a morally justified person…

‘You’d never lose what you don’t have’ -> Since what he lost is everything, what he has is nothing, which means he has nothing to lose. He has no attachments to anything going on in the war anymore, and hence no scruples against trying to distance himself from it, aka to stop thinking like a soldier. Further, since he has nothing, there’s a sort of liberation in that… he can pursue whatever he wants without fearing the consequence of losing anything else. It’s also kind of like, ‘do you feel comforted, having run from everything in your life? This is where you wind up when you do that…’.

>Prayers from above, never answered quite enough / Now the only one you have is / You
Interesting phrasing.

‘Prayers from above, never answered quite enough’ -> Hunter has voiced several requests over the course of the Acts to reach a good ending, specifically in HHMHT and VVV with the ‘sing me to the lake’ reprises. While he has experienced some positives, the negatives have been far heavier. He does not feel his wishes are being heard, or rather, that the important part of them isn’t in any consummate fashion. He had a happy life with Ms Terri? She dies. He has a happy life with Ms Leading? It turns complicated. He sees prospects of comfort elsewhere? He’s allowed to try it, but it’s worse than where he came from.

Prayers ‘from’ above twigs at me though, wouldn’t a prayer usually be to above? I wonder if there’s not a double meaning in the sense of, Hunter feels alone because he’s realised that higher powers aren’t going to give him the perfect happiness he wants, while everyone watching along with the story knows that Hunter got himself into most of these messes and could’ve been fine if he’d just one thing different.

Either way, the nets are gone. Wherever he thinks to go next, he has to get there without relying on the universe to favour him.

Edit: Figured this one out. Prayers ‘from’ above is the demands of the Christian religion, which Hunter is saying don’t answer his major life questions sufficiently or suitably. Basically he doesn’t see how living as a good Christian, or accepting Christian doctrine, explains the realities of life he’s seeing in front of him, leading him to disillusion with the faith.

>You, with this cruel and bitter heart / You were cold and in love, left here naked in the sun
‘This cruel and bitter heart’ -> Hunter’s been cruel and bitter in his behaviour during Act II, but I think this is moreso pointing to his mindset as of Cauda; Hunter is recognising that his cruelty and bitterness is what got him into his current predicament. He was cruel and bitter leaving the Lake, cruel and bitter dumping Ms Leading, then cruel and bitter as a soldier… maybe he’s just the problem?

‘You were cold and in love’ -> Pointing to his treatment of Ms Leading; cold owing to the pain of Ms Terri’s suicide that he was trying to bandage (and his consequent edginess that made him flip so hard), in love because he was indeed in love. These two sentiments collided poorly, but Hunter sounds to be starting to recognise how it happened/maybe even forgive himself for it?

‘Left here naked in the sun’ -> Hunter was and is in an extremely vulnerable position coming to war. To be naked doesn’t just imply babelike innocence (he trusted the war machine to love him) or defencelessness (he has nothing to fall back on to get him out of this), but being naked ‘in the sun’ implies being completely exposed. Hunter cannot even pretend to like, agree with, or keep the rhetorics that training has battered into him, or that his pained ego convinced him were good ideas.

>Run, scared, from this cruel and bitter world
Hunter recognises that the world outside his designated safe zones is dangerous and hostile. He wishes to return to the comfort and safety he had when sheltered by Ms Terri, which he found again in his relationship with Ms Leading. Simultaneously, Hunter is thinking about escaping from the war as soon as he can, to get back to somewhere more familiar (so the City or the Lake).

>This has only begun, as the bombs are bursting on
This shot grounds us in the scene of where Hunter is: on an active battlefield, with bombs literally going off all around him and his unit. Though Hunter has been at war long enough to know he doesn’t like it, he also recognises that he broke quickly and doesn’t have the constitution to continue doing this for the full length of the war. Rather, knowing it’s Hunter, I bet what he wants is for the whole war to end the second this engagement’s over and he can return to camp — obviously, not going to happen.

Simultaneously foreshadowing the four horrors of war Hunter will face over the next four songs, which he is still naive to.

>Smoke arose on azimuth glares, bodies brood in frigid winter air / Where families’ sons are robbed beneath their feet, and hearts concede
Transition lines from the omniscient voice to Hunter’s grounded, conscious voice. These are sights Hunter has witnessed that left an extreme impression on him, but the intonation is still that of the omniscient narrator — that’s how we know the narrator in both cases is Hunter. Really impressive how smooth the transition is here by the way, like it’s to the point you almost don’t notice it despite being so explicit. Rooted in the way the pronouns bounce around, from ‘you’ to none to ‘we’ with the physical scene transition happening from the illustrations of action in ‘run, scared’ and ‘bombs bursting on’ into an outright scene description ‘smoke arose on azimuth glares’ after all that thinky-feely stuff.

Another case of the softness of Hunter’s voice feeling like him being very honest and in-tune with himself; won’t last, but over the transition it’s there.

ANYWAY

‘Smoke arose on azimuth glares’ -> ‘Azimuth’ means the angle between a reference point (say, north), an observer, and a point of interest along a straight vector from the observer (say, a town); here though, it’s in reference to azimuth bombs or AZONs, an early form of guided bomb. Fancy language to describe smoke rising in the distance as infrastructure is bombed, with the added dramatic element of distant explosions and the trail of the smoking flares that were also characteristic of AZONs.

One thing to note though is that AZONs were WWII things, not WWI things. This might be another one of those ‘alternate history’ moments or they’re not literally azons so much as it’s just borrowing the language to get the idea across of what these bombs are doing — hitting infrastructure.

‘Bodies brood in frigid winter air’ -> Self-explanatory, Hunter recounts a harrowing memory of seeing exposed corpses strewn across a battleground. I think these may be dead enemy soldiers in this particular case that are getting to him? BUT let’s zoom in on the coolest thing here… it is now WINTER! Since VVV was set in summer, we now know the timeskip between Act II and Act III covered at least two seasons for Hunter to travel and get trained up.

‘Where families’ sons are robbed beneath their feet’ -> Hunter has shed the military view of soldiers being pawns or resources; he recognises all the soldiers involved in this war, enemy or not, are people whose deaths their loved ones will mourn. Given the nature of conscription, beyond the men simply being robbed because they get killed, they are literally robbed in the sense that the compelling force of a mandate steals them from the safety of their homes (to get killed).

‘And hearts concede’ -> echoes of ‘love decays (while callgirls perform)’ in this. Basically describing Hunter’s situation in Cauda again; the soldiers know that being soldiers means forfeiting their personal sense of right and shutting off their selves to become tools of the machine, and even though nobody wants to do this, they do. Simultaneously, the families concede that these men are likely not to return again. SIMULTANEOUSLY, carries the literal element of hearts stopping — the soldiers dying.

>And hearts concede / “Ab ovo,” the angel sings, “Ad astra”
BEAUTIFUL line. Pretty layered one too, you know now that I have to properly think about them Act III has had a ton of these fat pithy lyrics and we’re only three songs in, it’s wack.

So, ‘ab ovo’ is latin for ‘from the egg’, used as part of a longer phrase ‘ab ovo usque ad mala’ or ‘from the egg to the apples’, with eggs being the first course of a typical meal and fruits being the last. The phrase then means ‘from the beginning to the end’, or in another sense, ‘in whole’, or ‘until it is completed’.

We’re not going to the apples though, we are going to the ‘astra’ — stars. With stars signifying the infinity beyond the earth, the fundamental meaning of the phrase stays the same: ‘from the beginning to the end’, but with the implication of going to somewhere higher and beyond this firmament, that is to say, to heaven.

The one singing this phrase is the angel: a divine messenger. Whatever the angel says carries the authority of God.

Finally, ‘and hearts concede’ blends into this line; it’s a part of it. So putting these elements all together, what is ultimately being described here is: the soldiers are conceding that god, or whatever fundamental force of the universe you want to say governs these things, will not intervene to stop the war and will not release them from it midway through. The war and the soldiers’ involvement in it will continue until it is complete, that being both the process of the war itself and its implications on the soldiers’ lives, which will definitely involve pain and likely involve death. This is how both the soldiers are conceiving it — they are not allowed to be freed from the horror of war until ‘the process’ is done — and how Casey is about to write Hunter’s encounter with the four horrors (and all of Hunter’s misfortunes in general actually; they never ‘stop’ halfway through).

At the same time, this is an extremely merciful line. It carries a promise that whatever is at the end is something greater, or something good, or some divinely-touched frontier we can only dream about scraping. The juxtaposition of ‘egg’ to ‘stars’ creates another image, of an infant at the beginning, then of man becoming dust and billowing out into the infinite cosmos at the end — somehow, there’s a method to all this.

Just really, really succinct and evocative way of looking at, well, life and death; the consummation of a life. Can see how these lyrics could capture the imagination of a screenwriter for over ten years.

>”Ad astra”; our eyes to the sea / We thought that we had a cause for suffering / And reason enough to die alone

‘”Ad astra”; our eyes to the sea’ -> Though the soldiers know the war will not end until it is ‘done’, and what ‘done’ may mean for them individually may mean dying, they are looking for an out. Screw whatever plan is going on, the soldiers want to run back to those steam ships and go home. Note the third person inclusive pronoun here; Hunter is talking explicitly now, and though he’s again framing himself as part of a collective mind of soldiers, we can figure this is him confessing that if he had the option right now he would say ‘screw this war!!!’ and go back to the City.

‘We thought we had a cause for suffering / and reason enough to die alone’ -> Another reference to the mindset instilled in Hunter in Cauda. Hunter’s military training told him that he would suffer this pain to defeat evil and protect the innocent, and that if he died that was a hero’s death. He has realised now it’s not like that at all. The machinations driving all this death belong to the politicians, not to the soldiers who are basically just ordinary people who in peacetime circumstances wouldn’t wish hurt on anyone. He doesn’t believe in his side’s unequivocal goodness anymore, hence doesn’t feel justified in what he’s doing or really see the point of it.

Moreover, Hunter knows what he really values is love. Implicitly, if he’s to suffer for a ‘cause’, that ‘cause’ would have to be love.

>Chorus Repetition
The background vocals on this repetition are ‘Who’s laughing now?’. So basically drawing attention back to the attitude with which he left Ms Leading, particularly his mockery of her in Red Hands and arrogance he could find better than her in VVV — Who’s laughing now? Not Hunter. He completely messed up.

>With our feet beneath us, with our hands to the sky / We extend our limbs begging “why oh why?”
Extremely evocative. The soldiers beg God to intervene and release them from this pain — the first explicit depiction of Hunter struggling with faith. We know that Ms Terri was ex-Catholic and struggled with the Church, so you can question how religiously she would’ve raised Hunter, but she also wanted him to integrate with the Lake and have a good sense of morals, with her own morals still being fundamentally Christian despite her experiences with the Church, so it’s possible he could still be basically Christian. I can’t tell if this is Hunter questioning capital-G-o-d God yet, because I’m not sure how much stock he put in God from the start, but it is certainly his view of the world being fundamentally a good place, that will provide for him, shattering.

Actually it’s probably both. So, starting, it’s a callback to 1878 and The Lake and The River, (’Branches twisting reaching for the sky / Hands extending reaching for the…’, ‘His branches reached so far before / His leaves were bold extremities with great control’) evoking the image of the Tree. The Tree is both a paternal figure for Hunter and a symbol of the boundary between the idyll of the lake and the danger of the world outside it; Hunter is now calling for a paternal figure (God) to demarcate the line of what is safe and what is dangerous and keep him securely inside the ‘safe’ zone of life, that is, for his life not to have pain or suffering, since God should be able to guard him from experiencing such things.

But of course, Hunter already left that safe zone when we went past the Tree to see more of the world outside. He is realising now that all of the world outside is not safe, and nobody is protecting him now. This isn’t yet the condemnation of God that we’ll see in Mustard Gas, but this is him realising what it means not to be sheltered.

With the Tree being a very masculine symbol too, really like it being invoked here in the context of soldiers. Don’t have much more on that thought but it’s neat.

>Don’t turn away!
Beautiful! Hunter calls out for God not to abandon him. Can’t add much more than that; the singing here stands for itself.

>Prayers from above, never answered quite enough / Looking up never offered you too much
This is a bit of a wild read here but I can’t help but hear the repetition of this first line echoing Ms Terri’s wish for Hunter to stay innocent and have a happy life, probably because of the reference to the Tree a verse earlier.

‘Looking up never offered you too much’ -> Getting a little sardonic. This is of course Hunter resigning that putting his faith in God to usher him into happiness so far hasn’t worked out, but also saying that his optimistic attitude towards finding things that would solve his problems (HHMHT, Smiling Swine, VVV) also never worked out. ‘I need to stop expecting things to go well for me’.

>Now the only one you have is…
Hunter feels alone. Ms Terri is gone, Ms Leading is gone, and now it even feels like God has turned away from him. He recognises the only one who can get him out of the place he’s put himself now is him, when something catches his attention…

>4:17 – 4:50 Instrumental
Rising from the smoke of the battlefield, the silhouette of this terrible machine instantly mutes all sentiments of mercy. As its mighty, wicked turret swishes side to side, the Tank, vanguard of the four horrors, draws nearer, and nearer…

In Cauda Venenum | Act III | The Tank