This is the love story to end all of them, the love story of ages, the love story that reveals the heist that we took for life, the most eternal love story to ever be alive.
It is not going to be anything you expect, for it will strip illusions, leave you with something you wouldn't identify as a romance, and leave you with something more.
On the title, "The Raydiant Labyrinth": “Ray” is short for both of the protagonist’s names. The first name means "wide", the second means "ewe". Did her father really have no clue when he named her after the sea dragon before Creation, Chaos? Did he equally have no clue when he ritually destroyed her? Did he have no clue of the implications in naming her after a Biblical prostitute?
-What sets apart a linear memoir from a decidedly invisible figure in the public sphere?
This book travels not just abroad, and doesn’t simply witness the largest world paradigms of conflict that inflict the modern day at “ground zero” (the polarization of West vs. East, as in the Middle-East), or capture the extremity of our present polarization and real danger in the throes of “capitalism” vs. the Earth, its largest landscape is our own interior spiritual quest, how we define ourselves and how this may manifest, conveying that such priorities may have inestimable value.
It does so by exhibiting an entirely ordinary existence, that is, if it was unusual enough to include rainforest protests that toppled elections, living in the West Bank during the onset of the intifada, and a priority unto God that was developed and refined in an upbringing that sanctioned psychedelic drug use, introduced a feminine Holy Spirit, and included self-ordained prophets as church leaders as father figures concocting theological revolutions designed to topple the present tenets of Christianity, an isolated existence that fulminated in threats to one’s life and eternal soul for apostasy by her own father, who sacrificed her for his crimes he didn't believe were crimes.
Alternatively considered as, have you ever survived upbringing by that rare breed of hippie hedonist/fundamentalists, and if so, come out with a fully coherent worldview? (–Or not?) By adulthood our protagonist is semi-immersed in underground Rave culture and gay bars (sans drugs), performing as a nightclub dancer while studying environmental technologies. Her real existence however is based on one interior quest it would be a death knell in her environment to utter. It is what no one knows that matters, and that is the love story.
The love story with a situation up its sleeve. A love story that takes place years before ever having met, and years after barely an encounter. A love story that transfers object, because it succeeds in being universal. A love story with a potential God proof in the Feminine caught between the circumstance of being apart. This book is the delineation of that unknown; -the book chronicles what happened in presenting it to the two people who were most involved with the protagonist as object, without ever having met her. -But how they were inspired by her as object in songwriting succeeded in transmitting universally, meaning it transmitted through a host of songwriters. This happened in full oblivion right in front of everyone’s faces in popular culture, because the inspirational feedback loop occurring in multiple artists can only be perceived by the object. It is based on a universal current of inspiration inside popular music that surfaces rather overtly in 1992, one that ever so gradually begins to succeed in observable attributes of common consciousness, –or appears to.
In reaching the particulars potentially involved in order to find out whether synchronicity or something else is at work, Ray lands in Dublin, London, and eventually Chicago, where she succeeds in contacting the primaries through the providence of chance. (If she lands in your city to find you, she will obtain your home address within 24 hours from a random stranger at a bus stop. Yes, the real world provides absolute fails if this were literary contrivance. -and does so regularly.) The two songwriters she sets out to find to determine whether what she's observing is in fact possible are Bono and Billy Corgan.
As the information age begins to catch up, Ray's effort at contact to initiate communication goes virtual. The quest ends in meeting Bono in Dublin in 1999, and graduates to an online blitzkrieg of a contest launched by Billy Corgan in 2000. It succeeds in the sense that what she presents proves powerful enough they assimilate and integrate her revelations within their creativity to the extent that it begins to develop as an interactive feedback loop inside art, which is precisely what she’d demonstrated was operating already. She succeeds by exhibiting the existing connectivity they possess with other artists of their caliber before their eyes by intercepting the already existing feedback loop, showing their inspiration to be universal. Pure observation is the means of argument. This book conveys how it was presented to the particulars in real time, and what came of it.
With Bono it was a simple matter of handing off a few letters to him personally in Dublin. With Billy, however, who was the individual she asked in her mind to ultimately be with, with the requisite inspirational answer that formed the concept album Machina/machines of god, she landed on his online forum with the imperative of proving it, which took four years and landing twice in Chicago. It has taken Billy eighteen years to respond to the plea she put as a challenge to him then. It has taken Bono seventeen years to respond with one song that answers the very substance of what this book asked him, and to respond that he read this book and to answer what she asked him nineteen years ago. That song is "Book of Your Heart". (I told you it was a love story.)
But the past is something not so easily escaped, and she inadvertently replicated the threat of her father in her marriage, because that is what her upbringing imprinted her to seek. She eclipses the confines of consciousness itself, but never reality. And by book's end reality still seeks her destruction. Her resurrection succeeds in artistry and has a tapestry around the world as inspiration that deigns to save her soul, but never reaches her at home, which is where the danger has always presented: "home is where the hurt is".
This is the story of Eve, and the Garden, and all of the delusions that are still with us that we allow to present as love because we believe in woman as fallen, and hide the raw deal in romance. This is a lifetime that depicts that raw deal as the worst exploitation that can possibly happen against a daughter, with Christianity weaponized to the fullest extent possible to that end. And in the end, that leads to the discovery that this destruction was inbuilt into Christianity by design. That this book conveys a love fully capable of eclipsing human existence and the human condition is the only salvation on offer. Romance fails. Faith and Love, agape and salvation, do not. True love is universal.