Is There Anybody Here?
I lay my body down
To rest my weary head
I think I left someone there
I left myself for dead
So is there anybody here
Who can tell me where I am
Or at least where I have been?
Because I fear I’m lost, and I cannot be found again
I left my soul exposed to frail hands who hold
My fate up in the air
And through their fingers fall the meaning of it all
Down to the floor it goes
So is there anybody here
Who can tell me where I am?
Waking in the afternoon, a captive in a passive tomb
Moments turn to long Decembers, stoking fires from dying embers
I try to move a limb, but there’s a disconnect within
A devil in the alchemy, a phantom staring back at me
It’s you
So is there anybody here
Who can tell me where I am
Or at least where I have been?
Because I fear I’m lost, and I cannot be found again
Just waking in the afternoon, a captive in a passive tomb
Moments turn to long Decembers, stoking fires from dying embers
I try to move a limb but there’s a disconnect within
A devil in the alchemy, a phantom staring back at me
A pain I simply can’t express, from troubles I have long repressed
And then there’s you…
🌲🌲🌲
What happens?
Hunter wakes up groggy after his drunken bender, and in this state, finds himself questioning who he is. He has been trying to be the Son, but his encounter with Ms Leading last night has reminded him of the core values, which he is neglecting, and left him confused as to what he’s doing.
What’s in a name?
Kind of mirroring What It Means To Be Alone — Hunter is in such a state of confusion he doesn’t even know if he can rely on himself, much less who his ‘self’ is that is driving his present actions.
Whose viewpoint?
Hunter.
🌲🌲🌲
>I lay my body down / To rest my weary head
‘Move your body to the bed’, ‘I brought my body to the altar’; Hunter has awoken from his drunken night out with the Friends, suffering from a severe hangover that is clouding his mind and making it hard for him to move. Exhausted and aching, he lets himself slump across whatever surface is nearest for him to slump over. Given that last we saw him he was in the bar Ms Leading works at, I’d figure he’s either still there and it’s the morning after (but nobody kicked him out?), or either Ms Leading or the Friends had him moved somewhere he could nap it off after he passed out.
>I think I left someone there / I left myself for dead
Hunter drunkenly reflects on his experiences the night prior, but especially his encounter with Ms Leading. Hunter is groggily realising the way he behaved that night was massively contrary to the way he would typically and naturally act — lying, manipulating, getting smashed drunk, being curt with and rejecting Ms Leading… why did he do any of that? If part of Hunter’s goal in becoming the Son was to enable him to reach heights he couldn’t reach as Hunter, why is he being an even worse person than Hunter…?
Who is he actually, at this point? Is his behaviour reflective of this persona of the Son or Hunter?
>So is there anybody here / Who can tell me where I am / Or at least where I have been?
Hunter asks for a guide to tell him who he is. The nature of these questions makes it kinda hard to break them down smoothly but you can get what the vibe here is, right? Hunter is totally wrecked and questioning if this commitment to life as the Son has erased the very existence of Hunter, if all those bases and morals and experiences he had as Hunter are just gone in the wake of his devotion to maintaining the ‘Son’ persona… but to maintain this persona means doing things he wouldn’t naturally do as Hunter and citing the importance of experiences he didn’t have as Hunter, so is the Son persona a breathing entity in itself that doesn’t really count as Hunter?
‘Where I am’ -> What my position is, morally, right now, and where I could conceivably go from here.
‘Where I have been’ -> The major experiences that have affected me and had implications on my moral and personal development.
Can also imagine him sitting there and having a moment of actual literal confusion over whether he’s known the Friends for years or a day, and other things in that vein, just mixing up the details of his actual life against information he’s had to memorise to maintain the persona of the Son.
>Because I fear I’m lost, and I cannot be found again
Basically just continuing the above ideas, Hunter feels the unnaturally corrupt behaviour he’s exhibited as the Son is making him lose touch with the person he truly is, and his motives for even assuming this persona in the first place feel cloudy. Simultaneously feels he has crossed the line too far to reel back on any kind of ‘good person’ route or to even just drop the persona, worsening his confusion around what this says about him or where he can possibly go except down.
‘Lost and cannot be found’ carries an ecclesiastical shade, evoking the idea of the prodigal son (Luke 15:24) and the idea of being lost until you find salvation through Jesus. He needs some kind of major moral intervention for him to stabilise his self and identity. This is subtle foreshadowing setting up how Hunter will come to find purpose and stability in this Son identity through the manipulative guidance of TP&P.
>1:11 – 1:26 Instrumental
No particular ideas on this representing anything specific but man is it cool. Love how dark this is.
>I left my soul exposed to frail hands who hold / My fate up in the air
Hunter realises his behaviour isn’t being dictated anymore by what he wants to do; it’s being dictated by how he has to conform to the responses people who know the Son expect, or how he has to misdirect them to brush suspicion away from him. He has lost his sense of agency in how he’s able to shape himself under this identity.
>And through their fingers fall the meaning of it all / Down to the floor it goes
…Which makes this whole exercise pointless. If he has to conform to others’ expectations and desires instead of his own, then obviously he’s lost that capacity for maturation and growth that he desired in The Old Haunt and Waves, and especially for maturation or growth into a better person. He’s just bouncing off of one person to another and saying whatever he has to say not to get caught. Plus, beyond the inherent scumminess of deceiving people like this, if the people and expectations he has to conform to are scummy, that’s doubly shooting himself in the foot. Hunter almost sounds to be laughing at himself for how stupid it all is.
>1:55 – 1:58 aaa a a aa a aaaa a aAA AAA AA aaaa
Just highlighting these aaas because I love them. I like envisioning them as a little chorus of demons around Hunter.
>So is there anybody here / Who can tell me where I am?
A little less emo, a little more optimistic. Probably a legitimate call for some kind of anchor point relationship or guidance.
>Waking in the afternoon, a captive in a passive tomb
Things are a little brighter as Hunter has napped off the worst of the hangover, though he’s still pretty out of it. It’s afternoon by the time he seems to collect himself.
‘A captive in a passive tomb’ -> Referencing the passive nature Hunter has been forced to adopt to keep his Son persona going; he has to go with the flow and nod along to what others are saying about him, because they know the person Hunter’s trying to impersonate better than Hunter does. Hunter feels trapped in this predicament with his soul functionally dead. Might also be a literal description of him waking up in the bar or whatever building he’s in and still being so wiped out he can’t really move, plus there’s nobody else around, so it’s like he’s confined in this empty tomblike spot.
>Moments turn to long Decembers, stoking fires from dying embers
Really hard lines. I think it is mostly following on from the idea of Hunter waking up at the bar all alone and being super out of it — time feels to be moving slowly (’moments turn to long Decembers’, might also be pointing to it being literally December and him seeing the snow outside, following on from the ‘there was some kind of service going on at the church’ idea? Like it’s near Christmas time. Or a timeskip?) and Hunter is struggling to snap himself back into proper lucid consciousness (’stoking fires from dying embers’, also shows how weak Hunter’s sense of self is after that night, if the inherent ‘fire’ that he is has become so dull and weak as to just be an ember that he has to consciously stoke).
Love the poetry on this, contrast of the coldness of December to the warmth of stoking a hearth.
>I try to move a limb, but there’s a disconnect within
Following on from him having a hard time waking up again — his body feels sluggish and isn’t moving how he wants it to. Being in the weird state of mind that he is, he ascribes this not to alcohol but as another marker of how the Son persona feels to have taken him over; he can’t even operate his own body anymore because the persona has its own consciousness that he can’t control. (Or vice versa, maybe he is the Son and he can’t move the body because he’s fighting against Hunter as the one who dictates that).
>A devil in the alchemy, a phantom staring back at me / It’s you
Basically just continuing the ideas from the line above; Hunter feels the Son persona has become its own thing that is maybe more powerful and real than Hunter at this point. I would kneejerk ‘the phantom’ as being the Son (so he’s haunted by the behavioural expectations of the Son), but given how Hunter has also made allusions to himself dying, the phantom here could also be Hunter’s ‘real self’ and he’s become haunted and self conscious of how even the most minor actions he’s taking might not belong to Hunter anymore. Like he can envision himself watching himself and is terrified by the implications of this.
Really like ‘devil in the alchemy’ as a lyric (’a disruption in the conversion process (nervous system in this case as he struggles to move his limb if you’re going literal; the Hunter -> Son transition being metaphorical)’) and how it echoes ‘hymns with the devil in confessional’ but don’t have anything too specific to say about it.
>Chorus Repetition
Get the image of Hunter finally being able to get himself up and start wobbling his way out of the empty bar.
>A pain I simply can’t express, from troubles I have long repressed / And then there’s you…
Hunter draws everything in the song back into one thought: is his behaviour as the Son (and consequent identity issues) a result of the deep formative pain that Hunter suffers as Hunter (which would then make the Son persona be, by all intents, a Hunter thing), and this entire identity issue and poor behaviour he feels forced to engage in running downstream of him just repressing and turning away from his problems again?
‘And then there’s you…’ this time refers to Ms Leading. Hunter is thinking back on his encounter with her last night and wondering if getting more involved with her again might be a way of freeing himself from this identity crisis and un-repressing that pain, but at the same time he’s extremely conflicted on whether to actually do that because, well, un-repressing the pain will hurt and Hunter hates feeling hurt. I don’t think he actually thinks about it in such mechanical terms though so much as he’s been forced to consider that, yeah, just being around Ms Leading is enough for those old feelings and desires to well up again and the option to act upon them or embrace them instead of this persona is there, but it’s an extremely painful option so it scares him.
>4:08 – 4:59 Instrumental
Hunter considers the option of returning to Ms Leading, or at least of speaking with her again. Though initially comforted and attracted by this prospect, the more he thinks, the angrier he gets. Going back to the ideas he outlined in Waves, he indignantly feels that he will be forced to feign happiness or wellness around Ms Leading anyway, and that he’ll be forced to compromise and shape his self in deference to her as much as he has to do it to other parties (’I left my soul exposed to frail hands that hold…’ instrumental). Ultimately he decides not to mingle again with Ms Leading.
>5:00 – 6:03 Instrumental
Unsure of anything particularly but it’s cool. After all his thinking Hunter just returns to the same emo situation he had starting out with all this.
>6:03 – 6:42 Instrumental
Calmer now. Unsure.
空劫罰 祟りネコ | JP -> ENG / TDH 