No One Knows My Plan

My interpretation of the song relies heavily on Plato's Allegory of the Cave, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave , referred to in the second verse.

The narrator things of himself in the metaphorical position of a person who escaped the cave, and is the only one who knows that our world is nothing but an illusion. He was returned to the metaphorical cave as a consequence of an action he undertook - the line "When I made the shadows on my window shade" implies that, in his metaphor, he took the role of one of the puppeteers. He plans to escape again, but since the world outside the cave is unknown to everyone in the 'real world' he can only talk about his plan to his mirror and the bars locking him in the cave - the prison being another part of his metaphor for his situation.

The burning autumn leaves he mentions could be responsible for the fire that feeds the cave - the prisoners can smell the fire, but don't know it exists, so can't tell where the smell comes from.

I like to take this song more literally - I think it is a man, sitting in prison, biding his time until he can get out and complete his secret plan. He's excited about the plan, and it's killing him not to be able to move on it, so he comes clean to the inanimate objects in his cell.

He's in prision for something he was doing - something that was a part of his plan but not his plan in its entirety, but was still very much illegal. His neighbors (or whoever) saw him (making shadows on his window shade) and this lesser crime got him sent to jail. His neighbors then, really are like the people in Plato's Allegory, because they misinterpret the crime they saw as his plan, while it was only an aspect of the bigger picture.

What his plan actually is - that's a mystery. No one knows. But if it involves dancing, shouting, shrieks of pain, and burning autumn leaves, it's probably for the best that he's in prision.

The cave by the creek allegory is about people who are chained up, heads forward, and made to watch shadows all day. The shadows would be cast by people walking past a fire behind them, each holding an object.

The idea was that after a while they'd be incapable of recognizing the actual object, they'd be too used to the shadows and not make the connection.

This song, to me, is about a man with social anxiety who spends his days watching others interact and thinks about the things he did in the past to alienate himself. He was used to seeing others interact (seeing the shadows) but got so used to watching others that he only knew how to pretend to be sociable.

My 2 cents.

Surprisingly, this is one of the ONLY songs in the TMBG discography that makes any sense to me. It seems like a portrayal of someone who's carefully planning something from within the cold solitude of his own silence. For whatever twisted reason, he "must be silent", yet he longs to voice his plan. He similarly longs to be normal and enjoy the "dancing, shouting" and "the lovely music" (though his warped mind hears them as "shrieks of pain"), yet he's contained within the "iron bars" of his own sad mind.

so, I have to ask, why the burning autumn leaves?

The speaker suffers from social anxiety and has retreated into obessively planning his revenge on people. Above all, he is lonely and confused - I love the garbled Plato reference.

I like to take this song more literally - I think it is a man, sitting in prison, biding his time until he can get out and complete his secret plan. He's excited about the plan, and it's killing him not to be able to move on it, so he comes clean to the inanimate objects in his cell.

He's in prision for something he was doing - something that was a part of his plan but not his plan in its entirety, but was still very much illegal. His neighbors (or whoever) saw him (making shadows on his window shade) and this lesser crime got him sent to jail. His neighbors then, really are like the people in Plato's Allegory, because they misinterpret the crime they saw as his plan, while it was only an aspect of the bigger picture.

What his plan actually is - that's a mystery. No one knows. But if it involves dancing, shouting, shrieks of pain, and burning autumn leaves, it's probably for the best that he's in prision.

In theater class a few months ago, our teacher gave my group this song and told us to make a music video-ish thing out of it.

I ended up dancing on a table. Oh, it was great.

In the case of the burning autumn leaves, it may be a reference to marijuana. I know that this may sound crazy to some of you upon reading it, but while reading Stephen King's Christine, the character Dennis compares the smell of the kids smoking a joint over at the smokers' table as "similar to the smell of burning autumn leaves."

This is a song about a guy sitting in a prison cell and planning to take over the world. He was "careless" and let the people around him know he was planning to overthrow the government, so they had him arrested.

This guy's probably writing a book while he's locked up, and that is the "angle" and the "blueprint" he is working on. He's also an artist, because he's sketching autumn leaves. He thinks he's a great philosopher like Plato, but really he is just a crackpot.

The dancing and shouting and lovely music and burning autumn leaves foreshadow something that the crackpot and his whackadoo friends will do when they get together in September for their big party day, and also because the crackpot who's planning stuff was arrested in November. The shrieks of pain foreshadow the effect the guy's plan will have on those around him.

(The identity of the imprisoned egotistical artist and pseudo-philosopher who is planning something terrible is left to the reader's imagination, of course....)