Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
This song was inspired by the title of Philip K Dick's chilling novel of the same name, about Jason Taverner, a world famous chat-show host with over 30,000,000 viewers, who wakes up one morning to find all trace of his identity has been wiped from the Earth's data banks.

Taverner is a Six, a genetically modified human created by top-secret government experiments forty years earlier, which resulted in a handful of exceptionally smart and beautiful people. Waking suddenly in a seedy hotel room, with no idea how he got there, and without identity papers, he realises he's a non-person in a fascist US police state. He's also smart enough to realise that staying a non-person will result in imminent death, or a very short life in a forced labour camp.

Through Taverner's quest to regain his identity and solve the riddle of an alternative universe where he doesn't exist, Dick deals with two themes which recur in much of his work - what is reality and what is it to be human?

What impressed me greatly was Dick's ability to write about the human condition with such insight. This becomes more understandable when we find that having been married several times himself - none of which relationships had a happy ending, he had "been there, done that, got the T-shirt " in terms of love and grief. Here is an extract from Chapter 11, which, with the last Chapter (27) is my favourite:

"Grief causes you to leave ourselves. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can't feel grief unless you're had love before it -grief is the final outcome of love, because it's love lost. You do understand; I know you do. But you just don't want to think about it. It's the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Jason, grief is awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That's what death is, the great loneliness. I remember once when I first smoked from a water pipe rather than a joint. It, the smoke, was cool, and I didn't realise how much I had inhaled. All of a sudden, I died. For a little instant, but several seconds long. The world, every sensation, including even the awareness of my own body, of even having a body, faded out. And it didn't leave me in isolation in the usual sense because when you're alone in the usual sense you still have sense data coming in even if it's from your own body. But even the darkness went away. Everything just ceased. Silence. Nothing. Alone."

Apart from Taverner, other characters who inhabit Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said include the dogged Inspector McNulty, and ruthless Police General Felix Buckman - who sees Taverner as the perfect fall guy for his police-government intrigues. It's Buckman however, who weeps on his way home at the end of the novel, and recalls the lute music from John Dowland's Second Lute Book of 1600, in which collection "Flow my tears" is the second piece.

And here I have to confess to a little anomaly. The very last chord in this song, the keyboard chord that swells and then fades at the end, was inspired by one of the closing scenes in Ridley Scott's movie 'Blade Runner', which itself is an adaptation of Philip K Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"? Remember the scene on the roof, in the dark and the rain, where Rutger Hauer's Roy, after saving his life, talks to Harrison Ford's Deckard? Remember how eloquent Roy's descriptions of off-world?

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die..."

Lost in time like tears in rain. Fantastic. And the story runs that Hauer came up with those lines just a few minutes before the scene was shot - they were not in the script, but Ridley Scott had the foresight to allow him some creative space. Nice one Ridley.

And remember how, as his head slumps forward onto his chest, and he dies, Roy releases the white bird into the dark heavens? For me, that was one of the most powerful and dramatic cinematic moments of all time. It was visual poetry, a perfect counterpoint to Roy's own poetry. The last chord in the song is to celebrate Roy's last 'breath'; his own flight into his own dark heaven, and his parting, very human, compassionate gift to Deckard - his very life. The white bird flies into the night, taking Roy's last breath with it, leaving Deckard with another chance to live and love another day. Replicant or not.

Afterwards Deckard says:

"I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments, he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life, anybody's life, my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die."

Written by Con Meehan
© 2003 Lightning Bird Records Ltd.
℗ 2003 Lightning Bird Records Ltd.
All rights reserved.