I know that Walker has said this is a really difficult song to get, but I think I've got a bit about what he's getting at. Douglas Hofstadter wrote a book called "I Am A Strange Loop" which was an idea of what "the self" is; as he reasoned it, the self is the result of the mind looking in on itself infinitely, responding to and categorising its own changes. If you imagine that Walker thinks of the self in the same way (he's said that this song is about the self), the overall theme of these lyrics makes quite a lot of sense - he's comparing the way diseases react to stimuli and change infinitely to the way the mind can change infinitely as it views its own processes at continually increasing abstractions. And indeed he links the created form of humans to how they in turn respond to these diseases (herpes to clit, tumour to breast), as though the process of infection and evolution and immunity that take place in an epidemic are like the processes of a gigantic mind. It's still a really obscure song, but I get the feeling that's what he's going for; "Strain after strain after strain" is basically a colourful way of describing Hofstadter's concept of the self.
I know that Walker has said this is a really difficult song to get, but I think I've got a bit about what he's getting at. Douglas Hofstadter wrote a book called "I Am A Strange Loop" which was an idea of what "the self" is; as he reasoned it, the self is the result of the mind looking in on itself infinitely, responding to and categorising its own changes. If you imagine that Walker thinks of the self in the same way (he's said that this song is about the self), the overall theme of these lyrics makes quite a lot of sense - he's comparing the way diseases react to stimuli and change infinitely to the way the mind can change infinitely as it views its own processes at continually increasing abstractions. And indeed he links the created form of humans to how they in turn respond to these diseases (herpes to clit, tumour to breast), as though the process of infection and evolution and immunity that take place in an epidemic are like the processes of a gigantic mind. It's still a really obscure song, but I get the feeling that's what he's going for; "Strain after strain after strain" is basically a colourful way of describing Hofstadter's concept of the self.