During a recent live Q&A in Seattle, Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan and Soundgarden guitarist drank wine, which you can watch on video below. Keenan also talked about shadows, and Alternative Nation transcribed his comments.
“I feel like there’s a lot of changes going on, and it’s hard for people to kind of stay grounded anymore. The shadow I think is just that inevitability. We live in a place that has gotten away with it for a long time, most countries don’t last as long as we have. Rome fell in a much shorter period of time, and I feel like we have kind of been coasting in that way, but that’s political stuff. I think that just our changes are happening in consciousnesses in general, and I think just being able to balance out that new chaos, it could be that there is a new polarity that we’re aware of, maybe the poles have shifted slightly. I’m speculating again, I’m an artist and I tell stories. If it sounds good, I’ll just fucking say it like it’s true.
Whales, and fish, and birds, just off their course, dumping themselves onto beaches. It could be just that new gesturing, that new orientation, of that polarity, just that slight degree off at the pole, which amplifies and widens as you get closer to the equator. It could be something as simple as that, just our fucking heads are spinning, and people can’t hang on. I think partly right now that shadow, it’s a collective unconscious shadow that we’re trying to balance out what this new world has in store. In general, people are surviving some crazy cataclysm like a meteor, or a smaller island communities extremely large tsunamis or something, that just almost annihilates that entire culture. The guys to survive either consciously knew how to survive, or they accidentally knew how to survive, and those things get sewn into your daily practices, which eventually of course becomes religion.
I think we can practice those things all we want, but the reality is most likely the curveball that’s coming has nothing to do with that ancient curveball, it’s a new curveball. That’s where the creative juices that conscience connected creative juice has to be what you’re constantly honing, and keeping your feelers out for. I don’t think it’s important we survive, that might be something hard for our culture to get our fucking head around, we might not be included in the next phase. Humans might not be part of the next picture, get used to it.”
