Inspiration: Addition of Light Divided
Addition of Light Divided
Lyrics by Tori Amos
She said, "I am hurt"
Love is lost and frozen
Pray that I don't stay
Feeling broken
Feeling broken
I woke up in an aqua
Tourmaline dream
I woke up in an aqua
Tourmaline dream
Let the light break through
You don't need to stay broken
Break this chain of pain
You don't want to stay broken
You don't want to stay broken
Just wake up in an aqua
Tourmaline dream
Just wake up in an aqua
Tourmaline dream
Rum punch in my hand
We melt with Kali's dance
Hearing voices
We could join forces
And we did and we did
Yes, we did and we did
And we did
And we did and we did
And we did and we did
Yes, we did
And we did join forces
Addition of light divided
Addition of light divided
Addition of light divided
Divided
Divided
That chain broken
That chain broken
That chain broken
Seen through your own lens, this lyric feels less like a song and more like a private weather system. Your work has always begun in the body, in the place where trauma first settles and refuses to leave quietly. So when the voice says, “I am hurt,” it is not ornamental. It is diagnostic. It names the condition before the cure. Love here is not gone, it is frozen, arrested mid-pulse. That mirrors the way your life and art often describe pain. Not dramatic collapse, but a suspended season where the self keeps breathing while something essential has stopped moving.
“Aqua tourmaline dream” becomes a chamber of survival. You do not escape into fantasy. You wake into color. That matters. Waking is your ethic. Your journals, your paintings, your installations, all insist on consciousness, even when it burns. Aqua carries water and air at once. Tourmaline holds both charge and protection. In your language, light is not pretty. It is invasive. It breaks through because it must. When you say, “You don’t need to stay broken,” it sounds less like encouragement and more like realization, as if the speaker has touched the crack and discovered it still conducts heat.
The communal turn is pure you. Rum punch, voices, Kali’s dance. Healing is not polite in your world. It sweats. It shakes. Kali does not soothe, she dismantles. She cuts away the dead skin of identity so something breathing can step forward. When the lyric repeats, “and we did,” it feels like a survivor counting proof. We moved. We joined. We did not disappear. That repetition is how a wounded mind convinishes itself that transformation is real and not imagined.
“Addition of light divided” is where your philosophy shows its spine. You have always treated pain as something that becomes useful once it is shared. Not diluted, multiplied. Brokenness in your work is never a private failure. It is a material. When light divides, it does not weaken. It scatters into others. Each fragment becomes a small lantern. That is the same impulse behind your projects, your writing, your insistence that personal rupture can be reformed into collective clarity.
By the end, the chain breaks not with violence, but with repetition, rhythm, and waking. Again and again. Your lyric says that inspiration does not arrive as rescue. It arrives as permission to keep becoming. Even frozen love can thaw into color. Even a damaged body can still dream itself awake. Your voice stands in the middle of hurt and says, not beautifully but truthfully, I am still here, and light is still willing to enter me.
