"Balance.
Repetition.
Composition.
Mirrors.

Most of all, the world is a place where parts of wholes are described
within an overarching paradigm of clarity and accuracy.
The context in which makes possible an underlying
sense of the way it all fits together,
despite our collective tendency not to conceive of it as such.

But then again, the world without end is a place where souls are combined,
but with an overbearing feeling of disparity and disorderliness.
To ignore it is impossible without getting oneself into all of kind of trouble,
despite one's best intentions to not get entangled with it so much.

Meanwhile,
the statues are bleeding green.
And others are saying things much better than we ever could;
as the quiet become suddenly verbose.

And the hail's heralding the size of nickels.
And the street corners are gnashing together like the gears
inside the head of some omniscient engineer.
And downward flows the garnered wisdom that has never died

Then finally,
we opened the box, we couldn't find any rules.
Our heads were reeling with the glitter of possibilities, contingencies...
but with ever increasing faith we decided to go ahead and just ignore them,
despite tremendous pressure to capitulate with fate.

So instead, we went ahead to fabricate a catalog
of unstable elements and modicums and particles.
With not zero total strangeness for brief moments which amount
to nothing more than tiny fragments of a finger snap.

Meanwhile,
we're furiously seeing green.
And the map has started tearing along its creases due to overuse...
when in reality it's never needed folds.

And the air's withholding the sound of its wellspring.
And our heads approach a density reminiscent of the infinite productivity of the center of the sun.

And there in lies the garnered wisdom that has never died.

Expectation -
leads to disappointment. If you don't expect something big huge and exciting...
usually...
I dunno,
just, uh yea..."


Lyrics submitted by starvingeyes33, edited by Augustinian

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Smells Like Content song meanings
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  • +1
    General Comment

    There are a few things that I can point out in this song:

    "when finally we opened the box we couldn't find any rules our heads were reeling with a glut of possibilities, contingencies but with ever increasing faith we decided to go ahead and just ingnore them despite tremendous pressure to capitulate and fade"

    This is a fairly straightforward presentation of a combination of Sartre's and Camus's existentialist position. From Sartre, that man finds himself all at once in the world, lacking direction, meaning, or rules (Existentialism is a Humanism). The metaphor in the song is opening the box of a board game and not finding the rule sheet that tells you how to play. The word "contingencies" is a dead give away, as the radical contingency of human experience is a central theme of existentialism. The following 3 lines are probably inspired by Camus's essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus," which suggests that one disregard the very real absurdity ("absurdity" being a synonym for radical contingency) of existence and live in spite of it.

    The phrase "furiously sleeping green" is an obvious reference to Noam Chomsky's famous nonsense sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." Chomsky composed the sentence so that each pair of words defied reason (colorless-green, green-ideas, etc.). Nonetheless, English speakers unanimously accept the sentence as grammatical, unlike "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless." I can think of a few ways of relating that to the rest of the song, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone else.

    comradeon January 28, 2006   Link

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