heaven and hell come crashing

EDWARD BATCHELDER: Alright, I guess we can get to that some other date. My last question here, and I don't know if you've ever answered this before, is: do you think that we have any political or ethical responsibility to the dead? As I looked through interviews with you, and as you've talked today, you talk about your sense of not being able to forget the suffering. "Fine, the person has died and they're not suffering any longer, but for those of us who were there, those of us who in someway took partook vicariously, perhaps, we had our own experiences of suffering. That experience goes on." Yet, at other points you'll say, "There's nothing glorious in being dead" and that your work is all about the living. Those seem to me to be two very opposing statements.
DIAMANDA GALÁS: Actually, that's a very interesting point. Whilst they do seem to be opposing, they're actually the same because of a line that I could draw from "Blind Man's Cry," when the person is on the cross but he doesn't believe in God and he's saying, "I wished I believed in angels, I wished I believed in God. The only thing I can believe in is death as the escape from this pain." That's the thing that I'm talking about. Looking at that and saying that the worst thing is not to believe in God, not to believe in an afterlife, not to know that there is any justification for your suffering except that you suffered—that there was no reason for it—to have everything stolen, to be raped, to be tortured, and there be no reason for it. There is no good reason for it. There is not martyrdom. That's the person in "Blind Man's Cry" saying that. There is no martyrdom here. I'm not going to be kissed by the angels. I'm not going to go to heaven. I'm not even going to hell. This is hell. And that's where it unites with my saying there's nothing glorious about death, and where I say the living, the living dead, or the dying alive is my subject. In the last breaths a person would draw, I can only imagine he or she would be thinking about a legacy. What have I left? Will anyone remember me? Will anyone remember me? Will anybody shed a tear for me? And that's what I'm talking about.