Exploring the Back Catalogue: Self-Titled, Lost, Labyrinth & Identity Crisis

January 26, 2021

OPENING TRACK

I think this is a terrific album opener – heart on the sleeve, in your face, setting the tone and preparing you for what is to come.

When I first started listening to this song, while doing stuff in the garden (i.e. not analytically, just in the background), every time it came on I was thinking about people getting lost in other people’s lives, even imaginary people’s lives, like in daytime American TV soap operas, which were always blaring in the background when I was growing up, with their horrible lobotomising soundtracks that paralyse thinking.  I hated these things, still do, and was always running away from them – outdoors miles away, or into my room to put headphones on and listen to something that facilitated, rather than paralysed, thinking.

I think part of the loathing and part of my adult perception of these kinds of shows being anti-human, anti-thought, anti-creativity, anti-love (by presenting a hideous hollow thing they falsely bestow the tag of love upon) can’t help but trace back to having a mother who spent hours every day in front of them and was never available to talk to because of it (probably like the smartphone in many modern childhoods playing out now).  Even when I was pre-school age, it was always, “Wait, I’m watching TV!” and in Australia, that became, “Wait until there’s a commercial break!” which was never muted, so I then had to compete with blaring jingles and people yelling about products, which often made me give up, and when older, mute the bloody thing myself if I was determined to have a conversation (not that you can have much of one in such circumstances).  The TV seemed to always be on, morning to near-midnight, and even most meals were either in front of the thing, or with it running loudly in the background when people were at the table.  (Needless to say, this is not something that happens in the home my husband and I made – the TV is rarely on here, and we have actual conversations – and if the TV is on, it’s more often than not both of us watching something together.)

But I think that the content of such shows is itself sufficient to feel this way.  I spent my childhood watching an adult be caught up in the confected melodrama of shallow characters in what I think of as anti-relationships in a materialistic la-la-land.  There’s such a world of difference between that and good drama:  Daytime soap is soma, is anaesthesia to the things that are precious about being alive and being human – while good drama makes you think, and think things you’ve not thought before, and see differently, and learn, and empathise with others.

So when the lyrics to Lost were first starting to filter through to me, I thought about people who get caught up in depictions of other people doing things instead of living their own lives – people who never develop complex inner lives for themselves, and who avoid actually relating to other people – kind of like the characters they follow, be they soap characters or mindless modern celebrities.  And if you think I’m judgemental here, what I actually am is sad, because of the state of the planet, society and mental/emotional health, and because I’ve seen for myself how this goes in a family, and because the collective microcosms of what happens in dysfunctional families directly give rise to the dysfunctional macrocosm of greater society.  And my point is, some types of activities, art, drama, literature etc counter dysfunction, while others enable and promote it.  One of the reasons I didn’t end up in the gutter, or forever repeating the cycle of my family of origin, is because I was exposed to literature, music and art that showed me different ways to be.  It helped me find myself, who I was, who I am becoming – instead of arresting my development.

The Cure fits into that category for me, which is why I’m writing about it.  I think a lot of their stuff promotes reflection and empathy, in a world that’s in desperate need of these things.  For the space that I’m going through the back catalogue, I’ve ceased paper journalling and am doing my writing here instead.  So it’s going to be personal, and not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s also something you’re not going to find on every street corner.  I’m not doing standard music reviews, or getting into the technical nitty-gritties of the music – I’m just journalling one human being’s response to it, and the tracks I’ve always enjoyed going on when journalling about anything are lived experience, vicarious experience, intertextual stuff (I think of and go into other works that the one I’m looking at reminds me of), human relationships, and philosophy.

Clearly, the lyrics to Lost go many more places than the first place they took me, and I’ll go to some of them (and if others were to chime in, which they are most welcome to in this thread, we’d collectively go to many more places).  I’m going to start with the other album opener that I was reminded of by this one – another heartfelt, thought-provoking performance with the vocal as the centrepoint:

Like Lost, this song set the scene for the rest of the album – raw, thoughtful, heart-on-your-sleeve tours de force from start to finish.

♦ ♥ ♦

It’s stone fruit season, so the first two buckets of nectarines and plums came in last night.  Since we don’t have rumens, we’re unable to eat all of that fresh, so the best fruit goes in the fridge, and the rest gets made into things:  Stewed nectarines (future nectarine crumbles) and concentrated plum spread (great on pancakes, waffles, toast, in yoghurt), and the first plum cake of the season (German recipe, brioche type base, plum quarters arranged on top and generously sprinkled with cinnamon – eat with custard or cream).

Of course, when you’re slicing up stone fruit, you need musical accompaniment – so this morning I asked Brett, “Would you mind if I put on the self-titled?”  He said, “It’s not something I personally particularly want to hear, but I don’t mind if you put it on.”  So I compromised and went to play the opening track only.  Of course, the CD player is having its roughly annual conniptions at the moment, and started skipping towards the end of the track, and once it does that, you won’t get sense out of it for at least another hour or until you’ve shaken it vigorously in exactly the right manner.  (If this wasn’t an intermittent problem, we’d have replaced the item, but it mostly behaves and it still responds to being shaken.  It’s probably dust in the works somewhere.)

While the CD player was actually working, we figured out why I like the opening track and Brett doesn’t (and this also applies to most, but not all, of the rest of the album).  It comes down to the fact that I’m very lyrics-driven and he’s not.  When the lyrics engage me, and the music fits them, I’m happy, even if I’d not listen to the music on its own.  Brett is more focused on the instrumental side and if that doesn’t work for him, he doesn’t care what the lyrics are one way or the other.  He finds a lot of the music on this album harsh, and this turns him off – paradoxically, considering he listens to Tool and other music like that, which is at least as harsh, and indeed, too harsh for me to want to listen to.

So why, I asked him, does he like other people’s harsh music but not The Cure’s, and would he like it if he didn’t know it was The Cure?  He said that it’s a different style of music to the harsh music he likes – that e.g. Tool is very mathematical, has interesting changes in time signature, and works with a limited palette of instruments.  (Can you credit that my atheist husband has just been theatrically apologising to “the gods” for confusing palette with palate?  When I pointed that out to him, he said, “I’m repenting to St Oxford, god of the English dictionary and brother to St Roget, patron deity of synonyms and antonyms…” and went on to expound at length but I omit it for brevity.  :angel)

♦ ♥ ♦

Now let’s look at the actual lyrics of the opening track to The Cure’s 2004 album, and go some other places:

LOST

I can’t find myself
I can’t find myself
I can’t find myself
I can’t find myself
In the head of this stranger in love
Holding on giving up
To another under faded setting sun

And I wonder where I am…
Could she run away with him?
So happy and so young
And I stare
As I sing in the lost voice of a stranger in love
Out of time letting go
In another world that spins around for fun

And I wonder where I am…
Could he ever ask her why?
So happy and so young
And I stare… but…

I can’t find myself
I can’t find myself
I can’t find myself
I can’t find myself

In the heart of this stranger in love
Giving up holding on
To this other under faded setting sun

And I’m not sure where I am…
Would he really turn away?
So happy and so young
And I stare
As I play out the passion of a stranger in love
Letting go of the time
In this other world that spins around for one

And I’m not sure where I am…
Would she know it was a lie?
So happy and so young
And I stare… but…

I can’t find myself
I can’t find myself
I can’t find myself
I can’t find myself

In the soul of this stranger in love
No control over one
To the other under faded setting sun

And I don’t know where I am…
Should he beg her to forgive?
So happy and so young
And I stare…
As I live out the story of a stranger in love
Waking up going on
In the other world that spins around undone
And I don’t know where I am…
Should she really say goodbye?
So happy and so young
And I stare… but…

I can’t find myself
I can’t find myself
I can’t find myself
I can’t find myself
I got lost in someone else

Reading through these words, you get the sense of someone in midlife looking back, but what is the love story they are getting lost it?  You could imagine this fitting a scenario of comparing one’s own life to that of another person’s, perhaps in a story, or in a film or play or drama, or even a story imagined for other people.  But the possible reading that strikes me the most is that this person is looking back at their own story, and that the stranger is the younger version of themselves.

It would fit various things, but I wondered what would it be like to sing songs you wrote 30 years ago – in one way it might be like looking at old photo albums, but the way we are “inside” does shift over time. Some things stay the same, or very close – but other things we grow out of. In my 30s looking back at my early 20s I was very aware that I was progressing in ways that were really important, emotionally – I’d had a rough start and had to straighten so many things out, and to my chagrin, you couldn’t always just think yourself out of trouble – and in my case, what I thought and what I felt were often quite different, which was a hard nut to crack.

Another ten years later, looking back at my life, the things I’ve regretted about my 20s and 30s – mostly, running after people who didn’t treat me with respect (family, boyfriends), spending too much time going around in circles in my head, and being too isolated – are also things that have an inevitability about them when I consider the dynamics of the family I was born into, and the early life experiences this produced for me. I regret that; how nice would it have been to not have had a vulnerability to people with similar character traits to my family of origin, and to have had respectful and supportive relationships from the outset. How much darkness and pain that would have avoided; how many car crashes often in considerable public view (a friend who specialises in trauma counselling says if you’ve got money it’s easier to hide things like this, but if you’re poor you’re liable to bleed all over the carpet in public).

So it’s not pleasant looking back at those problems, but the silver lining to this kind of stuff is that it does tend to produce desirable qualities like compassion, empathy, a tendency to reflect and to re-assess periodically, an identification with people who are doing it tough (as opposed to the repulsive attitudes you can observe in some quarters about that).

I don’t write songs, but I am able to look back at poetry written on and off since my teenage years. Some of it I still really like and identify with, some of it rings alarm bells about what I wasn’t seeing when I wrote XYZ. My early-to-mid-20s were my worst time, and the poetry this produced was bleak. Conversely, I wrote some incredibly rose-tinted stuff when I first met Brett, in my mid-30s – and when I think I should already have known better! Textbook honeymoon blindness, but I guess since I’m human it’s not so unreasonable that I have typically human pitfalls, even if the psychology books intellectually forewarned me. :yum:

Now, what if you’re in midlife looking back at falling in love as a teenager, and this relationship actually stayed with you? Would you get a bigger case of the bends looking back than what I can compare it to? If you read a journal you wrote at the time, or letters to each other, would you be, on one level, jolted by the realisation that you are now significantly different? If so, would you necessarily be jolted in a bad way?

Or: If you’re a person who managed to have a relatively decent relationship from a very young age and this has now lasted into midlife without your killing one another or playing “happy families” to the outside while torturing each other with your respective dysfunctions on a daily basis, would you then get nostalgic for the “good old days” when you were in your physical primes, without creaky knees and arthritic finger joints, with peachy complexions and twinkles in your eyes, when you had energy for all sorts of things and you didn’t need glasses to read or to write? Would you want to go back to any particular point and have this nostalgia for it? See, this doesn’t happen to us, because we assume we couldn’t take our current-day minds with us, and we don’t want to have to learn various things all over again. I do know some people who say, “If I could go back 20 years knowing what I know now, I would!” – but don’t know anyone who would trade a backward leap to youth for their hard-won wisdom since (but our sample isn’t necessarily representative of the general population, and anyway, ask us again in another 20 years, maybe…errrr…shall we go back a decade or two and have rip-roaring wild-animal sex with each other, without any sort of pre-planning or preparation?:-D)

Maybe some people pine for a time when they were more innocent, less cynical, things were still fresh, possibilities seemed limitless, they didn’t know some things they wished they hadn’t learnt about this world or each other… maybe others look back in consternation at the unwise things they did, including to each other, and are grateful to have come out of that comparatively intact.

It will be interesting eventually to watch that little clip in which RS talks about each of the songs on this album, but I’m not doing it until I’ve looked at all this without the official commentary! :)

Closing thought on Lost: Often, you have to lose yourself before you find yourself – but there’s different ways to lose yourself, too – which could start a whole different bit of discussion but I’m out of here now!  :angel

April 14, 2021

If I don’t get back into this thread, I’m not going to finish with this album, let alone the four earliest ones I’ve not listened to yet, before The Cure actually put out their new one, and this is going to cause all sorts of time anomalies.  :1f631::winking_tongue

This post is going to be about Labyrinth, which I’ve wanted to write about for some time.  It just happens that I’ve just explained how useful a song that is elsewhere, and I’m going to replicate part of what I said about it here (and when I get around to it, finish the post properly).

What a song like this does is to acknowledge the fundamental difficulties you confront as you live your life, rather than gloss over this stuff.  It’s a place you can go which says, “This is real, and it’s OK to hurt.”  It’s somewhere you can feel what you feel, and be honest, and just be, instead of putting on a good front for everyone else.  Most of the time I’m positive and constructive, but OMG I couldn’t be those things if I was never allowed to feel the despair or the pain and acknowledge them as real.  Feeling like this isn’t just about aspects of our individual situations, it’s the whole thing – society, the state of the biosphere, the whole mess we’re in on so many levels.  Because that’s as true as the beauty and the joy we can find, and because I live a lie if I can’t acknowledge darkness as well as light.

August 14, 2021

I’m finally getting back to this thread. Here’s a preamble for a later song discussion.  :)

THE ULTIMATE LEGO BOX

When you’re teaching Chemistry to 13-year-olds, introducing them to the concept of atoms, you need to find a way to help them visualise things that are invisible to the human eye.

So I used to start off all of this by asking how many of the students present had ever played with Lego. Usually that’s most of them, because even the ones who didn’t have their own had come across it at friends’ places. This, by the way, is the simple block Lego I’m talking about, not the more modern, pre-fab, no-imagination so-called Lego where you don’t have to construct from scratch…

I’d ask them, “What did you build?” and we’d go around hearing about various construction projects from brand-new teenagers shiny-eyed with childhood nostalgia. So, so many things to make from just the handful of different types of building blocks.

If you hand out periodic tables without that kind of preamble, some students are going to be nervous – chemistry has this reputation for being difficult, periodic tables are not uncommonly seen as big scary things only the nerdy kids are going to understand, etc. I know this because I talk to students, and also because that’s how it was for me – I didn’t get this preamble when I was in middle school, so I thought, “OMG this is going to be difficult!” – and the real irony is that I was a nerdy kid and ended up winning school science prizes and ultimately a scholarship into an undergraduate science degree. But I was nervous when I first looked at a periodic table, and I didn’t want the kids I taught to feel that way, it’s so unnecessary if you just explain it properly.

Atoms are like Lego blocks, just much smaller so you can’t see them with your naked eye. And then we can talk about, “So how do we know they exist?” and from there, “How can we know anything exists?” and how in science we have models that approximate the reality but aren’t the actual reality, and how each successive model gets closer to the reality and helps us understand more and more complex things about reality – and then we can talk about, “What is reality? Is what I see reality? Can I trust my senses?” and we can do visual illusions, and talk about colour blindness, sensory variation, hypothetical body swaps, other animals sensing magnetic fields etc, and then we can talk about the fact that we don’t actually “see” solid objects, which themselves are lattices made mostly of empty space, and how what we see is just photons bouncing off the lattices and entering our retinas, passed along as nerve signals to the brain which uses its software to make an internal picture out of all of that for us, which isn’t ultimate reality but is our own reality, etc etc.

See? It’s fascinating, and I don’t know why these things are never on the curriculum when atoms are introduced, but that’s how I did it in my classrooms, and the kids consistently responded with switched-on thinking and expressions of wonder – you don’t need to be a science nerd to be amazed by the realisation that what you see isn’t necessarily how it is, that it’s different for the person next to you but you still have overlap, that we can navigate at all in this jungle, and that there are wonderful things waiting just under the surface of a simplification you take for granted – the universe is full of mind-blowing amazingness.

Back to the periodic table: It’s nature’s ultimate Lego box. There’s 94 “standard” types up to and including Plutonium, and there’s a few more you can transiently make in the laboratory, which are too unstable to stay together for very long. (Atoms themselves are made up of, at the next layer of the Matryoshka-doll-ness of all of this, three sub-components – protons, neutrons, electrons – and then we can talk about other subatomic particles, and the ultimate exchangeability between matter and energy, etc. We can talk about atomic models, and how as you advance in school, you’re presented with more and more complex models which get closer and closer to the reality, but how when you’re 13 you don’t need to know about probability spaces just yet – and we can look at how children of various ages draw people, how at age 3 they draw circles with sticks coming off for arms and legs and how they gradually make more and more realistic representations – and then we’re all OK with that idea in relation to the model of the atom.)

So: The objects you see around you – chairs, desks, curtains, pens, the floor, the walls, your own bodies, the window glass, the trees outside, the birds in them etc etc – are miniature Lego constructions, made from the different types of atoms (called “elements”) in the periodic table. Just like with real Lego, you can use a relatively small number of different types of blocks to make a near-infinite number of vastly different things. And even when you’re preparing meals, on one level you’re just arranging atoms in certain ways that are going to be tasty – and doing a little re-arranging too with actual cooking (here we can talk about chemical versus physical change, etc).

Non-living objects tend to have relatively stable “Lego block” arrangements – you may gradually wear some blocks off the surface of your table, etc. Living things, on the other hand, are constantly changing their Lego blocks! This is pretty obvious with growth and change – but even when you plateau a bit in your 20s and 30s, for instance, the building blocks are changing all the time. The most exchanged building blocks in your body are hydrogen and oxygen – because your body is around 70% water, and water diffuses readily throughout your whole body rather than being built into its biochemical structures, and you’re constantly drinking (and eating) it in, and peeing, breathing and sweating (and crying, and snotting, and bleeding etc) it out again.

Here Comes The Identity Crisis!

Knowing about the water going in and out probably doesn’t give many people an identity crisis, and neither will the common electrolytes – sodium, potassium, chloride etc – going in and out with the water, in varying proportions. I guess the identity crises begin with the idea that the “solid” things about your body – the biochemical structures that make up your muscles, your bones, etc, and particularly your brain – don’t stay the same. The brain, for instance, can look much the same a year later, but have exchanged a lot of its atoms for other atoms mostly the same type – is it still the same brain? (Of course, it’s not just on that level that things change – you’re constantly making new neural connections and pathways, deleting some old stuff, adding new stuff, editing – and the more you use your mind, the more of this you will do, and this is how you learn, and grow as a person.)

So even when things look very similar from the outside, they can actually be very different, more different than you probably imagined, from a building-blocks perspective. Just like you can take some blocks out of a Lego castle, and put different blocks from exactly the same type into the gaps, and afterwards it won’t look any different. But it’s different. Does it matter? How, and how much?

It’s sort of like the question: If you beam up Scotty, is the Scotty that arrives in the Enterprise the same as the Scotty that just left the planetary surface?


Scotty, by the way, doesn’t always just do the beaming – he also gets beamed!

And that question has bells on, when you consider that the Scotty problem is about a near-perfect copy, and what happens in life – even in the relative plateaux visually in your 20s and 30s – is about constantly altering copies your body makes of itself.

Which is where we’re going to join the Cure track Labyrinth. Let’s read the lyrics to that – now that our minds are thinking about change in nature…  ;)

LABYRINTH

Say it’s the same sun spinning in the same sky
Say it’s the same stars streaming in the same night
Tell me it’s the same world whirling through the same space
Tell me it’s the same time tripping through the same day
So say it’s the same house and nothing in the house is changed
Yeah say it’s the same room and nothing in the room is strange
Oh tell me it’s the same boy burning in the same bed
Tell me it’s the same blood breaking in the same head
Say it’s the same taste taking down the same kiss
Say it’s the same you
Say it’s the same you and it’s always been like this
Say it’s the same you
Say it’s the same you and it always and forever is
Say it’s the same you
Say it’s the same you and it’s always been like this
Say it’s the same you
Say it’s the same you and it always and forever is
Say it’s the same you
Say it’s the same you

Yeah tell me it’s all the same
This is how it’s always been
But if nothing has changed… Then it must mean…

But the sun is cold – the sky is wrong
The stars are black – the night is gone
The world is still – the space is stopped
The time is out – the day is dropped
The house is dark – the room is scarred
The boy is stiff – the bed is hard
The blood is thick – the head is burst
The taste is dry – the kiss is thirst
And it’s not the same you
It’s not the same you
No it never was like this
It’s not the same you
It’s not the same you and it never really is
It’s not the same you
It’s not the same you
No it never was like this
It’s not the same you
It’s not the same you and it never really is
It’s not the same you
It’s not the same you

Oh it’s not the same
This isn’t how it’s always been
Everything has to have changed…

Or it’s me…

The narrative develops and morphs a bit as we progress from stanza to stanza, so I’m going to look at this in “chunks” – but I’m deliberately leaving the entire run-through of the lyrics to this song as it is, above, because I think it’s worth reading through in its entirety and thinking about, and because if you’re reading this, you’re going to want to do that yourself and do your own thinking, and field your own impressions, and they’re not going to be identical to my thinking and impressions, because we’re all a different set of personality, life experiences etc.

The title to me is an interesting summary of the song as a whole, which references an old philosophical conundrum about continuity and change – to what extent is anything fixed? What does it mean to say I am me; what is this thing called “me”, does the “me” change and how, is all of “me” in constant flux or are any aspects of it constant, or even approaching constant; ditto everyone else, and any given thing in the universe. A Buddhist will have a different answer to the average Westerner, etc – there’s many takes on this, and you can literally go around in circles chasing your own tail with questions like this – and feel as if you’re in a labyrinth trying to find a way out.

Here’s how I think about it.

Say it’s the same sun spinning in the same sky
Say it’s the same stars streaming in the same night
Tell me it’s the same world whirling through the same space
Tell me it’s the same time tripping through the same day

We’re starting with the universe: Stars, planets, space, time. As the song progresses, we move from the “macro” view of the enormous backdrop within which we live, to zoom in closer and closer – the house, the room, the people, our lives, consciousness etc.

I personally like such a methodological, ordered and holistic approach to considering philosophical questions and existential conundrums. This stuff isn’t just suddenly going to reveal itself to you in a smoke haze; it requires thought and effort. The “Eureka” moments we have that seem to come out of nowhere are actually our subconscious, which has been very busy in the background if you’ve been feeding it well, alerting you that there has been an insight or development – that something has coagulated for you. It hasn’t coagulated out of nothing and nowhere, it’s coagulated out of the data and impressions that have floated around your subconscious. Since you don’t have all possible data and impressions, and since your processing equipment is limited, this isn’t an exact or necessarily accurate process.

But, it’s sort of like cooking – the better the quality of the ingredients that go into it, the more likely you are to have something useful at the end. (And sadly, much of modern thinking is fast food, and produces low-quality hamburgers. What else can you make out  the soundbites, vastly incomplete information, non-fact-checked claims, etc that are quickly becoming the main thought diet modern humans consume, especially through social media and the devices that are now wedded to their navels… Please, people, if you’re not doing this already, cut out the superficial chatter that’s standard fare now, and instead of paying attention to that go read books, find complicated texts that stretch you, listen to music on headphones, think, reflect, take your time, write, journal, discuss with a friend…you already know that to feed your body with fresh and healthy things instead of junk is an act of self-care and love; now do that for your mind as well…be selective, because if you aren’t you will just be flooded with any old junk by the path of least resistance…)

So: Stars, planets, space, time. The sun may look much the same to you as it did 30 years ago, but it has lost mass and changed composition because it’s actually a nuclear furnace burning through fuel. It’s losing mass at around 5.5 million tonnes a second, from a combination of solar winds and nuclear fusion, and that sounds like a lot to us, but is negligible in terms of the total mass of the sun, which has been doing its thing for over 4 billion years and is only just middle-aged. You can read more mind-blowing stuff on this; like on this proper astrophysics blog.

Just like us, the sun will one day cease to be what it is and collapse into other forms. It’s confronting when you’re a child to learn that even the sun won’t go on forever. I remember the horror I felt at about age 7 when I was lying in the dark trying to get to sleep, the day I learnt that one day the sun will burn out. I felt strangely disembodied, and like I was spinning. Later on I realised that because of the comparative puniness our own life spans, this fact isn’t of that much practical relevance to us, or the next thousand generations following – which probably won’t be following anyway because we’re so good at crapping into our own nest and thinking that’s OK. (And sadly, politicians largely think in even smaller increments of geological time – only reaching to the next electoral cycle and their own chances of staying in power, and completely myopic beyond this.)

This is a matter of frames of reference: The sun’s life span is astronomical compared to ours, which can set us off thinking about the brevity of our own existence, and lamenting about the mere drop in the ocean etc. But now flip that, and compare our average life spans to those of the adult stage of the Mayfly, which usually doesn’t last beyond 24 hours – just enough time to mate and make the next generation. I was about 7 when I learnt that and cried for ages, feeling so sorry for the little things – just like I cried when I learnt that dogs only see in black and white. All the gorgeous colours my dog couldn’t see! Later on I learnt that a dog can smell “colours” humans can’t even imagine, and would probably cry if it understood my own experiential poverty in that department.

(By the way, I’ve realised that one of the reasons I remember certain things so vividly is because growing up in a traumatic family environment gave me complex PTSD and therefore turned up the volume on my emotions. This resulted in my making technicolour memories like movie clips, complete with attached emotions experienced at the time – because a super-engaged amygdala will give you this. The scenes of family violence, abandonment and other direct trauma in early childhood – the unprocessed stuff – for a long time were “silent” clips without associated sounds and emotions, because that’s what a child’s brain does to survive. However, it also gave me incredible recall of the more “ordinary” scenes of childhood – so many things that moved me, one way or the other. Coupled to that, I’ve also recently learnt I’ve got a form of synaesthesia which makes me frequently experience witnessing something happening to someone else as if it were happening to me, on the tactile and emotional levels in particular.)

So getting back to the song – no, it’s not really the same sun spinning in the same sky, it’s a sun further along in its life cycle that’s had some changes – but from our frame of reference and in our direct experience, it looks and feels the same (the extra burning sensation in our part of the world these days is due to damage to the ozone layer, rather than changes in the sun). And similarly it’s not the same stars streaming in the same night – and that’s an even more mind-blowing thing, because some of the sources that made the light we see no longer exist, it’s just light still travelling in space (and if you think about it, it’s a nice metaphor for our own lives – there are still impressions left of us after our death; like words we wrote, songs people recorded, things we’ve said or done that have been helpful for other people, that they remember when they’re facing difficult stuff, etc).

When we look up at the sky, we’re seeing the past – because astronomical distances are so enormous that even at the speed of light (300,000 km/s) it takes the light of our own sun about 8 minutes to arrive on Earth. The light even from the brightest stars we see can be hundreds of years old; the light from the Andromeda Galaxy, just visible with the naked eye on clear, moonless nights away from areas of light pollution, takes around 2.5 million years to get to us, so that’s how old that light (and the image of the galaxy) is when it gets to our eyes. (Want to play? …Andromeda, Andromedary… :winking_tongue)

So while the stars at night may still look much the same to us as they did in our childhood, there’s a lot more complexity going on than we see at first glance. We’re still seeing pictures of the past; these are now several decades more recent, but their appearance to us is still just as delayed as it was when we first saw them. It’s a “delayed telecast” with approximately the same delay.

Similarly, we know that it’s not exactly the same world whirling through the same space. The world has changed – geologically, plus we’re cumulatively wrecking the biosphere and exterminating other species; living things are constantly dying and being born, social and political changes happen (for better or worse), etc. It’s still Planet Earth, but a changed one. Also, the world isn’t even whirling through the same space – the universe is expanding and our location in it is constantly changing. Because our location in relation to the sun and our own solar system is much the same (although the planetary orbits are pretty individual) we don’t tend to notice.

And it’s not the same time tripping through the same day either, even though it may feel like it. Time is a continuum, even if we align our concept of it to the cycles of day and night of our rotating planet, and the revolution of our planet around the sun. This spring is not like last spring, and today’s midday is not the same as yesterday’s. Westerners, interestingly, tend to see time as more linear and “running out”; the Hopi Native Americans and many other Indigenous people see time as more cyclical and replenishing, and that’s neither right nor wrong, it’s just a matter of perspective – it’s like the wave-particle duality of light, both things can be simultaneously as true as each other – and probably neither of them are completely true.

So say it’s the same house and nothing in the house is changed
Yeah say it’s the same room and nothing in the room is strange
Oh tell me it’s the same boy burning in the same bed
Tell me it’s the same blood breaking in the same head

Now zooming in on happenings closer to home – the house and room are a bit more pedestrian to consider than things astronomical and living creatures, from my perspective. As we saw in the post’s preamble, non-living physical objects aren’t constantly changing out their components, although they can wear down etc. Plus, this is just a side view here; and in this stanza, I’m getting more haunted house vibes than anything else.

Tell me/say…

(Constructing…)

Say it’s the same taste taking down the same kiss
Say it’s the same you
Say it’s the same you and it’s always been like this
Say it’s the same you
Say it’s the same you and it always and forever is
Say it’s the same you
Say it’s the same you and it’s always been like this
Say it’s the same you
Say it’s the same you and it always and forever is
Say it’s the same you
Say it’s the same you

Yeah tell me it’s all the same
This is how it’s always been
But if nothing has changed… Then it must mean…

But the sun is cold – the sky is wrong
The stars are black – the night is gone
The world is still – the space is stopped
The time is out – the day is dropped
The house is dark – the room is scarred
The boy is stiff – the bed is hard
The blood is thick – the head is burst
The taste is dry – the kiss is thirst
And it’s not the same you
It’s not the same you
No it never was like this
It’s not the same you
It’s not the same you and it never really is
It’s not the same you
It’s not the same you
No it never was like this
It’s not the same you
It’s not the same you and it never really is
It’s not the same you
It’s not the same you

Oh it’s not the same
This isn’t how it’s always been
Everything has to have changed…

Or it’s me…

(Constructing, and this is going to be fun, at least for me.  :P  Work to do – will add to this later.)

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