This song always stuck in my head since it was released. If Bono says it's about addiction then so be it. To me it always had something else to it though.
If you take away the detail of drugs you get a broader picture of the character of "the woman".
One day she wakes up and realises life can't go on the way it has. She has to do something, but her ideas are dreamy and inadequate. She wants to take a trip on a steam train into a romantic version of the past, a train that hadn't existed for some years if this song was made in 1987. She wants to get away from the crappy weather, but it's not really the weather that's upsetting her.
The tone of the song changes and the tempo increases as she considers how she's been living, using anything with a temporary high: "Sweet the sin, bitter the taste in my mouth" afterwards. Temporary fixes are no longer any good. She sees what lies in her future if she stays, and the option of the "seven towers" will send her into total despair. She has one way out, and names it with a riddle:
You got to talk without speaking
Cry without weeping
Scream without raising your voice
How do you do those things? You have to connect with a genuine centre in yourself so your intent is clear without all the cultural noise and affectation people usually attach. This is like the saying, "If looks could kill". You can tell what someone is feeling or thinking, without them saying, because their actions and responses are totally genuine.
It doesn't say what exactly she applies that genuine intent to, but it could be an art form. She might be a musician, for example. To become completely genuine isn't going to be easy. She has to break all connection with everything that holds her in her current reality:
"I took the poison, from the poison stream, and I floated out of here..."
and then she's free of it, delirious and floating with the sense of shock and new loss and endings, but moving forward nonetheless. But hang on, how exactly did she do it?
The answer is in how the song changes into something intensely desperate and real.
She commits a metaphorical "crime against herself" in order to cross that final boundary.
She "runs through the streets", unable to wait any longer because old things are pursuing her, old cycles won't let go. She wasn't planning on going at that time, but something really bad and unexpected happened and she just grabbed what she could and ran. She accelerates the process of escape by using what she does know about life (pearls of wisdom), and something about her current identity (white gold), and uses it to transform some other part of herself in a less than ideal and temporary way (eyes painted red), and she knows it'll come at a cost to her later, but she's desperate, and angry at having to do it, and raging at the unfairness and hopelessness of it all. She steps through the final doorway feeling almost as destroyed as she imagined she'd be if she had stayed in her old life. She made it, but there's now no way back.
She's willing to suffer the piercing "needle-like coldness" of being nobody in the wide open World, of not knowing anyone, being loved by no one, having no protection from anything, no home, no history, an unimaginable future, no way back, just so she can be something free and of herself - she's running to stand still.
This song always stuck in my head since it was released. If Bono says it's about addiction then so be it. To me it always had something else to it though.
If you take away the detail of drugs you get a broader picture of the character of "the woman".
One day she wakes up and realises life can't go on the way it has. She has to do something, but her ideas are dreamy and inadequate. She wants to take a trip on a steam train into a romantic version of the past, a train that hadn't existed for some years if this song was made in 1987. She wants to get away from the crappy weather, but it's not really the weather that's upsetting her.
The tone of the song changes and the tempo increases as she considers how she's been living, using anything with a temporary high: "Sweet the sin, bitter the taste in my mouth" afterwards. Temporary fixes are no longer any good. She sees what lies in her future if she stays, and the option of the "seven towers" will send her into total despair. She has one way out, and names it with a riddle:
You got to talk without speaking Cry without weeping Scream without raising your voice
How do you do those things? You have to connect with a genuine centre in yourself so your intent is clear without all the cultural noise and affectation people usually attach. This is like the saying, "If looks could kill". You can tell what someone is feeling or thinking, without them saying, because their actions and responses are totally genuine.
It doesn't say what exactly she applies that genuine intent to, but it could be an art form. She might be a musician, for example. To become completely genuine isn't going to be easy. She has to break all connection with everything that holds her in her current reality:
"I took the poison, from the poison stream, and I floated out of here..."
and then she's free of it, delirious and floating with the sense of shock and new loss and endings, but moving forward nonetheless. But hang on, how exactly did she do it?
The answer is in how the song changes into something intensely desperate and real. She commits a metaphorical "crime against herself" in order to cross that final boundary.
She "runs through the streets", unable to wait any longer because old things are pursuing her, old cycles won't let go. She wasn't planning on going at that time, but something really bad and unexpected happened and she just grabbed what she could and ran. She accelerates the process of escape by using what she does know about life (pearls of wisdom), and something about her current identity (white gold), and uses it to transform some other part of herself in a less than ideal and temporary way (eyes painted red), and she knows it'll come at a cost to her later, but she's desperate, and angry at having to do it, and raging at the unfairness and hopelessness of it all. She steps through the final doorway feeling almost as destroyed as she imagined she'd be if she had stayed in her old life. She made it, but there's now no way back.
She's willing to suffer the piercing "needle-like coldness" of being nobody in the wide open World, of not knowing anyone, being loved by no one, having no protection from anything, no home, no history, an unimaginable future, no way back, just so she can be something free and of herself - she's running to stand still.