The Moon / Awake

The Moon / Awake
This soul’s a stowaway
At the heels of a gaze, their eyes betrayed in the arcade
Misdirection pervades, and my image fades of you
(Where are you?)

Could we return to the hymn of the Lake?
Grave refrains of impossible love, not believing what they’d say
Haunting heralds whose words were lost on you
(Where are you?)

I’d bare you my heart, if I knew that it still was there
I’m too nervous to look, too afraid to close the book
So take all the wind from my lungs, if you’re out of air
Just deliver me truth, deliver me you

How’d we lose our place? Who decided our fate?
Decay until we we’re erased, idly wasting away?
Well, the nightmare’s ending soon
(Where are you?)

I’d bare you my heart, if I knew that it was still there
I’m too nervous to look, too afraid to close the book
So take all the wind from my lungs, if you’re out of air
Just deliver me truth, I’ll deliver me you

(Who are you waiting for?)
(Who are you waiting for?)
If the younger me just could have seen the trouble I’d create
He’d never have agreed to carry on
(Who are you waiting for?)
When sins of sons to fathers come, too heavy is the weight
The spirit split in two

Dear apparition, in this fleeting flash
Must I burn the earth, before you turn to ash?
Would such extremes repair our broken past?
The silver lining seldom lies in sight too plain to see
But trust our story’s end can bring redemption for the pain endured

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
Hunter, broken down so thoroughly he cannot even tell if his ‘self’ exists anymore, takes solace from his hollow life as the Son by shooting up in an opium den. He desires to reconnect with the person he was before leaving the Lake, and is venerated: high on opium, he sees a vision of his younger self, who quietly pronounces that Hunter can yet redeem and absolve himself.

What’s in a name?
‘The Moon / Awake’ — Similar to some of the Bitter Suite songs, this song also has two distinct ‘parts’ that represent different ‘chapters’ of the scene, hence the two titles.

The first section is The Moon — again, this is a tie to tarot symbolism. The Moon in the tarot represents uncertainty, confusion, illusions, and a need to listen to your intuition to break through the illusion. In Hunter’s case, the confusion is a fundamental question about his self: who he is, what has he become, and the possible destruction of his self beneath the false Son persona (on top of all of his actions taken to this point). Basically saying that Hunter has lost his self, is not sure how to find it, and does not know where to go now, but also saying that the solution is to get back in touch with his ‘core’ or heart. Represents Hunter’s rock bottom, lowest moment.

Awake is Hunter snapping out of that state of confusion and being able reconnect with his true self, although only temporarily.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter.

🌲🌲🌲

>0:00 – 0:43 Instrumental
Hoo this is dark. Fittingly, too — Hunter is at the absolute lowest moment of his life right now, a shell of a person with almost no sense of self who lives a false life under the thumb of his adversary. He feels absolute uncertainty, confusion, insecurity, and fear about everything presently, but most of all about himself. If he looks in the mirror, he is not even sure anymore who this person he’s become is.

As such, he’s picked up an opium habit. I don’t think he’s in the opium den juuust yet, more like he’s finishing up smiling and waving to his constituents and this scene ends promptly into him departing to the opium den.

Also note that there’s been a timeskip since Act IV — it is now the 1930s, and we can estimate Hunter to be in his 30s.

>This soul’s a stowaway
Hunter is, and has been impersonating the Son.

>At the heels of a gaze, their eyes betrayed in the arcade / Misdirection pervades,
Hunter commenting on how his constituents are looking to him for virtuous guidance and leadership, which he cannot actually give.

‘Eyes betrayed in the arcade’ -> Indicating the lies he tells constituents from the podium/in public, and the false image of a virtuous person he projects while being the Son, false both because Hunter has become kinda scummy and because the Son persona itself is corrupt.

‘Misdirection pervades’ -> Indicating how unfortunately committed to deception he is to ensure nobody finds out the truth of who he is, who he works for, or how corrupt the City is in general.

He obviously feels very pressured about this whole affair, and like he’s betraying the trust of those who rely on him.

>and my image fades of you
‘You’ is Hunter’s former self, or ‘true self’, or ‘heart’. The way Hunter behaves in public is so antithetical to the person he used to be, that he cannot even tell if any of his old self’s principles still exist inside him. If you took the things that defined Hunter when he was young, then the things that define him now, the difference would be so stark as to be different people. Or, putting it more simply, he has massively changed as a person, and with every betrayal of his moral heart, feels himself changing even more and more into someone worse and entirely different.

This is agonising to Hunter, who would more rather be the old Hunter than the current Hunter, because the old Hunter was a better person than present Hunter, and this isn’t how he wanted to wind up.

His behaviour is eroding his image of his self. It’s not just his constituents; Hunter feels he has betrayed that younger version of himself that lived in such innocence at the Lake.

>(Where are you?)
Hunter is desperate to find something that reconnects him to his old self.

>Could we return to the hymn of the Lake?
He is probably in the opium den by now. Hunter wants to go back to a state of safety, purity, and innocence — specifically, he wants to relive it by getting high, since being high puts him in a similar state of comfort and gives him visions of his past.

>Grave refrains of impossible love, not believing what they’d say / Haunting heralds whose words were lost on you
Hunter reflects on the warnings given to him by the Oracles, and recognises now how correct they were about everything. ‘Grave refrains of impossible love’ probably points to how they specifically told him that 1. He shouldn’t expect Ms Leading to be spotless, and 2. He shouldn’t expect to find love in war. Hunter has become seasoned enough to see their viewpoint. He deeply regrets the path he has taken and would change things if he could go back.

>I’d bare you my heart, if I knew that it still was there / I’m too nervous to look, too afraid to close the book
Hunter wants to be ‘true to himself’ and act according to good principles that his younger self would have approved of, but he isn’t certain that he has even a shred of ‘principle’, much less ‘self’ to be true to, left inside him. He can’t say with certainty that he’s completely broken, or completely incapable of resisting and doing something about the situation, but the thought of trying or resolving to change things and realising he can’t, or even worse that he’s changed so much that he would rather not, terrifies him too much to try anything. It would signify that yes, he really has lost all connection to himself and all capacity for virtue; that there’s nothing left of him except a villain he doesn’t recognise, a puppet for TP&P, and a smiling face for the masses.

The hope he has left is barely more than a sliver, and it’s not so much hope as ‘existential dread’, but there is still an off-chance he is clinging to that some fundamental element of his old self still exists and can shine through.

>So take all the wind from my lungs, if you’re out of air / Just deliver me truth, deliver me you
Hunter speaking to his younger self again; he is willing to sacrifice the life he has now if it means he could resurrect his old self, and do something to destroy all this evil that’s taken over his life. He sees his old self as dead or smothered, needing this kind of resolution to bring back.

Really intimate line.

>How’d we lose our place? Who decided our fate?
Hunter wonders where exactly he went wrong, but isn’t able to pinpoint a specific moment where he definitively… not quite sinned, but like, Hunter wound up here on the back of a ton of impulsive and emotional reactions that blend into each other in one long chain of cause and effect. What was the link he could have broken to avoid all this while still staying true to his heart? Was there even one?

>Decay until we we’re erased, idly wasting away?
Hunter considers what his future will be. He is currently stuck in the same routines of doing not much with little to look forward to until he dies. Following the fate idea, he wonders if this is just the ultimate trend of his life, to spiral further and further down into vice until his soul putters out.

>Well, the nightmare’s ending soon
Foreshadowing that Hunter will die as told by the Oracles, while pointing to him about to escape the ‘nightmare’ by shooting up on opium (hence ‘Awake’).

>Just deliver me truth, I’ll deliver me you
Hunter shoots up so that he can contact his younger self.

>(Who are you waiting for?)
Probably two things: Hunter has shot up on opium, and is waiting for the high to take him fully so that he can see himself again. Second thing is more like, what is he waiting for? If he knows he wants to do something to reclaim his past self and turn against this evil, what is the thing inside him that’s stopping him exactly? If the person he’s trying to contact is himself — by definition, he should be able to do what this person wants him to, even if Hunter is scared, lost, and confused right now. What is the trigger of affirmation he is seeking?

>If the younger me just could have seen the trouble I’d create / He’d never have agreed to carry on
Explicitly driving in the point; Hunter’s life has not turned out how he wanted it, rather, Hunter has not turned his life into something he wanted. He feels he should have made better choices to protect his younger self, who he has come to love.

>When sins of sons to fathers come, too heavy is the weight
Man, nice line. It’s like I know exactly what it’s getting at but for the life of me can’t explain it. Basically ‘when the consequences of your actions catch up with you, you’ll regret it…’ but more than that too; he’s the father that should have nurtured the son.

>The spirit split in two
The high hits in earnest. Visions of Hunter’s past flow through him in waves as he ascends to a sort of higher plane of consciousness. The Apparition of his younger self coalesces from these images, before him. I think it’s also kinda like, the high separates him from his connection to his body and hence his ‘Son’ persona (which doesn’t have an intrinsic spiritual element; it’s just empty behaviour), so it’s not so much that the Apparition is an external entity (though it is framed like a kind of divine or ‘higher’ force that comes to Hunter), but more like, Hunter is able to attune himself to his own ‘essence’ in these moments, and this essence takes the form of his younger self since that’s firstly who he wants to see and secondly the strongest and highest fidelity state of Hunter’s unblemished soul, which he is physically able to observe through the schism.

We are now in ‘Awake’.

(…’but now we wake up’: ‘make way for the awakening long overdue’; Hunter’s pronouncements of finally living in a way that is true to himself. He was wrong both times in Act IV, but this is a genuine instance of Hunter immersing himself in his true self, snapping out of uncertainty to see truth.)

>Dear apparition, in this fleeting flash
Hunter addresses the Apparition. Or as he calls it, the ‘dear’ apparition, since it is an apparition of the ‘dear’ Hunter, back when he was doted on by Ms Terri. Outrageously sleek phrasing points to how he regards the apparition as precious, to the fact he is addressing it, to its age and identity, and to the beatific flame/fire power infused in it by Ms Terri’s pure love (‘my dear Hunter’).

These highs, and these sessions of unfettered connection to his self, are only momentary.

>Must I burn the earth, before you turn to ash?
Though Hunter spent most of The Moon expressing his fear and doubt, truthfully Hunter does recognise an action he could take to get away from all this corruption: and it’s the scorched earth strategy, in a very literal sense. If TP&P and Hunter have been playing a game of chess, or maybe poker, this is Hunter flirting with the idea of going ‘screw it’, upending the whole table, and baptising the room with a good dose of arson. Or, well, if he’s not literally thinking about burning down TP&P’s things as an announcement he won’t play around anymore, he at the very least is thinking of setting a fire under his tail by leveraging his knowledge of TP&P’s own dirt.

Hunter feels there’s a time limit on when he’ll be able to do this, that limit being the point where he can no longer feel connection to his true self at all. However, he’s fundamentally reluctant and scared to escalate matters. We heard why in Moon — apart from a general fear of chaos Hunter’s always had, (and his fundamentally reactive nature — it’s rare for him to do things without an immediate emotional impetus driving him), he’s terrified of trying it, only to realise that he’s changed too much and he can’t. He wants to know if there’s easier alternatives that maybe aren’t so threatening.

He knows there really aren’t, though, or at least aren’t any that his heart would advocate. The action he has to take is clear, at least for as long as the high and this brief connection to himself persists.

Very ‘do I have to pick you or the world?’ with understanding that his desire is to pick ‘you’. Ultimately that is the nature of his choice: keep living a corrupt lie, or die virtuously true to himself.

>Would such extremes repair our broken past?
Hunter seeks to be redeemed for all the sins he has committed. He wants to do something that makes up for it all.

>The silver lining seldom lies in sight too plain to see / But trust our story’s end can bring redemption for the pain endured
The Apparition speaks to Hunter. It assures him that he, and all the pain and suffering he has endured to this point, will be venerated. Nothing that happened up to now was pointless; every moment was necessary so that things could reach an ultimately good end and absolution. Even if it doesn’t seem so, and even if it’s frightening, it is the right move to start the fire.

>5:13 – 6:09 Instrumental
The high ends and Hunter is dumped back into his false life, and back into uncertainty, darkness, and confusion. A message comes through to Hunter that TP&P wants to see him. Groggy, and not in the mood for it, Hunter cleans himself up into a state to go to Church.

Regress | Act V | Cascade