Tabula Rasa

I This is my favourite Sinch song. It's amazing how bands like Sinch or Tool or Mudvayne turn lyrics for songs into an artform. They're sorta like poems. I reckon it's mesmerising.

Sinch are incredible i think the style of music they put across their amazing lyrics with is purely sublime...euphoric...i need their album

the album is awesome!! I LOVE it!!! I just can't play it quietly, even on The Arctic Ocean and Plasma. but this one in particular... just energizes me!!

Any ideas what this song is about? I truly is fantastic but I need a few more listens before I can work out then meaning! lol One of my favourite new bands along with 36 Crazyfists love them!

Bendy trees? Defective kids? WTF?! Love Sinch though!! lol

My interpretation of this song is as follows:

Tabula Rasa is latin for "Blank Slate", it's a term which is used to describe some theories of behaviourism with implications about things which are fresh, without preconceptions. It's also something used in a horror context (websites called tabula rasa dealing with horror movies and the like).. the concept of beings such as frankenstein's monster - creatures subject to their creator's will, beings whose own mind is pure but their creation and their existance is warped and it is something that they cannot escape from.

It's that thought which comes to me through the song, and would be an apt reason for the title. The inability to completely control, certain things you cannot shake about yourself, or about the world.. things which are warped by creation, not by their own wishes. Innocents unable to change what they are, or what the world is. Quite sad, but so powerfully expressed, one reason I completely love this song ;)

The kid next door and the bending trees remind me of this innocence twisted by the world in which they live. Then there's the things the author tries to do to free himself, swearing, running, useless feats. He tries things, but cannot escape the truth, the darkness, the lies.. the world in general which surrounds him and pulls him down. The world can corrupt.

It's a very concious feeling of helplessness though.. the chorus.. being paranoid and unable to sleep.. feeling paralysed, not being able to break through what is limiting you, what created you and made you what you are.. other people's conceptions of you etc.

The ending of the song, with the images of a shipwreck and everyone sinking into darkness emphasises being at the mercy of forces greater than yourself, helplessness again, wanting to escape, but no-one can.. and the bitter realisation that those who guide you, or who sustain you are responsible in some way.. the poisoned dew.. the guiding light taking you away from where you want to be.

That's a bit rambled.. but it's what this song brings to me.. the ideas of being at the mercy of other things, wanting more but realising that to some extent we are unable to change what we were created as, or alter the intent of our creator.. not necessarily a spiritual one.. anything human too, such as social stigma or even just the world and nature. I'm sure everyone's felt corrupted and helpless at times.. you can't change how you were made.. but you can help to make the future ;)

cheers for reading this ramble :P

I think some of the lines here are wrong also:

I'm at least half a mile away, but much further than I thought I would be To finding my way out of this hole, but the darkness here is so soothing

and at the end:

What you can't see is your disease, is everything its everything and you You can't taste this, cause you just waste it

Another interpretation I have is the idea of someone watching someone who doesn't realise the position they're in.. and the dispair assoicated with that.. seeing someone suffering.. but they can't help themselves, they can't see through the lies.. and the person watching just wants to get away.. being away from it all in the darkness soothes and calms them from the distress.. Watching someone die.. watching their innocence, their life collapse. Guess it depends what mood I'm in whether I see it as someone on the outside looking in on someone else suffering without realising or whether I see it as the general despair of the human condition. I think the former sits slightly better with the corrected lyrics, but multiple interpretations are fun :)

Sinch are fucking great! :)

Amen, man! A-fucking-men! lol :D

Tabula Rasa is Latin for blank slate, and it was used by empiricist philosophers to counteract such rationalistic theories as the Cartesian notion of innate ideas. Basically, Descartes, when coining the phrase 'I think therefore I am', construed that there exists some 'thinking thing' which is innate or inborn, a priori in the sense that there are (or there 'is' in this case) ideas that exist prior to experience with the external world. Descartes used the example of the idea of God as one which exists prior to experience, but other philosophers, such as Plato and Socrates, argued that knowledge of mathematical or geometrical forms were also innate.

Empiricist philosophers such as John Locke stated that this doctrine of innate knowledge was, in fact, erroneous. Basically, Locke argued that no ideas or knowledge can exist in a human mind without first that human having had some sense-experience with the outside world. It is through our senses that ideas and knowledge is formulated - when we eat something sour, we know only that it is sour after tasting it. It is not something we know of PRIOR to tasting it, thus prior to the sense-experience of taste. This is otherwise known as 'a posterior' knowledge. Hence, all human beings when born are tabula rasa's, or blank slates, upon which ideas are formulated by sense-impressions (from experience).

Having said that, I'm not sure WHAT this song means in reference to it's title.. And I'm afraid that although the lyrics are sublime, I'm sceptical of whether Sinch knew what Tabula Rasa meant either :/