Close To You: A Warning!

Why do birds suddenly appear

Every time you are near ?

Just like me, they long to be

Close to you

While I applaud the singer’s admirable alertness to anomalous animal behavior, it is my understanding that significant deviations from established natural behavior is rarely a harbinger of good things to come. Consider, for example, the Colony Collapse Syndrome exhibited in recent years by bees, or the reports of animals fleeing for higher ground before the devastating 2004 tsunami on the coast of the Indian Ocean. Or, more saliently, Alfred Hitchcock’s (supposedly) fictional account of an avian attack on a small town on the California coast in The Birds (1963). When we catch these cues from our fellow creatures, let us not be so eager to assume they are displaying some sort of unusually strong affection! Rather, we should seek evidence of a supranormal or even supernatural influence!

Why do stars fall down from the sky

Every time you walk by?

Just like me, they long to be

Close to you

Surely this verse is not to be taken literally, as quite obviously, the approach of even a single star—even our own—would be an event so calamitous as to exceed “catastrophic”. It would cause the rapid disintegration of not only the Earth and all its inhabitants, but verily, the entire solar system would be sacrificed to the intense heat and massive gravitational forces of the rogue star.

Of other possible interpretations, perhaps the most benign is that this passage refers to the effect of a powerful hallucinogen such as LSD. Users commonly describe the illusion of strange changes in their perception of light, which may streak, blur, move, “bleed”, pulsate, alter intensity, and shift in apparent frequency (even to the point of triggering perceptions of “new” colors not typically registered by the human vision system).

Alternatively, perhaps the subject of the song generates a local distortion of spacetime, permitting those in his immediate vicinity to see through one or more of the eight other spatial dimensions implied by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity (and modern physicists’ advances in that arena). Such a perception could allow a perspective through which the vast stellar march, normally invisible from our distant three-dimensional vantage point, projects as a rapid motion. From a naïve young woman unacquainted with cosmological physics, such an unfamiliar experience might well be described as the “falling” of the stars!

On the day that you were born, the angels got together

And decided to create a dream come true

I know not under what respected modern or ancient theosophical system angels might be granted the authority to “create” life, but the celestial conspiracy described here implies an even more despicable act. Note that their actions take place “on the day that you were born.” This child, then, has gestated in his mother’s womb for nine months, and immediately prior to birth, the angels interfere with his natural development. Have they overwritten the chromosomes bestowed upon him by his parents, whose hopes to further their genetic contribution to the race are now dashed? Or have they instead substituted a changeling, killing the babe and replacing him with another, as in the ancient European myths?

And how then does this band of body-swappers affect such a transformation? Through what manner of occult spell-casting or pagan sorcery have

they violated the laws of nature? The song outlines the heathen “recipe” that empowers their mystical manipulations of the flesh:

So they sprinkled moon dust in your hair

Of gold and starlight in your eyes of blue

This blond-haired, blue-eyed young man (and surely it is no coincidence that this description matches the Aryan ideal of Hitler’s Nazi regime!) has been polluted with lunar soil in his hair and cosmic radiation delivered to his brain through the immediacy of the optic nerves!

And that is why all the kids in town

Follow you all around

Just like me, they long to be

Close to you

And not unexpectedly, we see that the “angels” have produced the hypnotically charismatic leader common to every cult in our human history, one particularly appealing to our rebellious, susceptible youth. An abomination whose effects on nature, on the cosmos, and on the human spirit and free will are in clear view. The product of a cabal of supposedly superior beings meddling in the affairs of humanity.

A “dream come true?” Nay, a living nightmare! Beware, all, beware! Let not this thing be “close to you!”