[under a CPell]

This song references the traditional/sea shanty Lowlands Away.

[Jordan~]

[butterbean]

[butterbean]

I don't even know where to begin with anything, there are eleventy million directions to go... one small thing I noticed, among the millions, is that the horses are back! There's the horse at the beginning of Anecdotes, the mythological horse references at the end of Time, As a Symptom, all the horseness in Leaving the City, and in this song - I just looked up "debrides" and that comes from the French for "unbridle". Anyway, there's something there... right now it's just tumbling in my mind with everything else. She was talking in one of those interviews about watching birds just flinging themselves in flight, maybe she's speaking of a movement here towards unbridled joy, loving with abandon instead of reigning in those impulses out of fear of loss... there's a certain sense of being held conjured by the image of time moving both ways. If we can't really lose our most precious moments of joy, then what do we really have to lose? We could move into life fearlessly (unbridled), which maybe is true transcendence. "Go free, and graze. Amen." .... just some guesses! ramblings of a dummy trying to catch a bit of the drift of Joanna's genius.

[under a CPell]

Well, I really think you caught the essence of it!

[Jordan~]

[butterbean]

@CPell thanks!

Jordan, I love that image, too - for a long time I didn't know that the birds were killed, and then I read about it here somewhere, probably from one of your posts! Knowing that one piece of information really sets the tone of the whole album from the first words. And, yes, with the horses... it seems like she keeps re-investigating the warring drives for security/safety and liberation. Maybe with the "Go free, and graze," the narrator has experienced some kind of integration of those drives, creating a self-trust that allows her to go forward in peace. ?

[under a CPell]

There is a Chabot Space and Science Center in California, with observatories and a Bean Sprouts Café!

[Jordan~]

"But there was a time we were lashed to the prow
of a ship you may board, but not steer"

The ship is time, before the invention of time travel (the conceit of the song). You 'board' time, travelling through (on, in the analogy) it, but you can't choose which direction it travels in; you're lashed to the prow in the sense that you can't see any of it in front of you, you're at the furthest forward point all the time.

[Steve]

And being lashed to the prow, there's no way you can deviate from the course it's taking.

But what I really came here to say was...

I don't smoke, and I don't relish being surrounded by cigarette vapours, nor do I think fags make someone look alluring / sexy / macho etc. However, one of my favourite lyrics from the album is 'trading smokes'. I think maybe it is because it suddenly collapses the huge cosmological themes down to the tiniest detail. And also because it is a detail so far removed from Joanna's stereotype that it is a joyful jolt.

[hen88]

I first need to say that I absolutely love this song. It's definitely one of my favorites on this album.

Second, in the narrative of the song, does the 101st Lightborne Elite lose to another team, the New Highland Light Infantry? Or is that group just another version of the 101st Lightborne Elite from an alternate reality? Also - it's implied that the song's narrator gets lost in the alternate reality by the end of the song. Time gets all f**ked up, and she ends up on a desert island. Does anyone know what the last line of the song means? "Highlands away, my John." Is she maybe sending an alternate version of her love out into battle once again?

[claire]

[Jordan~]

I love this song so friggin' much.

[queenofnerds]

"The course of Time is very much like the course of a Ship. Here's the ship, it leaves a wake, the wake fades out and that tells us where the ship has been. In just the same way that our past tells us what we have done. But as we go back into the past, and we go back and back, to prehistory and we use all kinds of instruments & scientific metods for detecting what happened." Alan Watts

This quote reminded me of this song

I really like this song, it's becoming one of my favourites.

[butterbean]

It just occurred to me that the Kim Keever pieces accompanying this album are truly "simulacreage", right? (I still can't tell if I've spelled that correctly.) That is so cool.

@ underaCPell - is there really a Bean Sprouts cafe there? Omg, amazing.

@ Steve - I love that trading smokes line, too. Also how the "poor tenant" description calls back to imagery in Leaving the City - maybe Same Old Man, too, and those buried in potter's fields in Sapokanikan, as well as the mentions of borrowing bones and the life that is lent, elsewhere. These songs are so intertwined... or something like that, not sure of the right word.

@ clare - What do you think the windy highlands are? i was thinking maybe she said "windy" as a way of describing the chaos (blown-apartness) of a terrain in the aftermath of time travel or a war on Time. It is hard for me to wrap my mind around this terrain that she's describing... like, she seems to say that prior to our tampering with time, we were bound to the leading edge of it with no control over it, but that this same state of affairs was before Space had a taste of its limits... So Space was limited by the advent of time travel - did they switch places, Space used to be unlimited, and now it's Time that's limitless or something?? Are there any physicists on milkymoon??

[Jordan~]

I think we're to understand that time travel had the effect of collapsing the fourth dimension - the linear dimension of time - into a traversable fourth dimension of space. So I think, after the verse about bidding goodbye to the great divide, we're to understand that there isn't a temporality in the narrative anymore; everything is spatial. The windy highlands (where our sailors have gone), then, are the parts of space-time in which the transtemporal war between us and our ghosts is being conducted, while the round desert island is Earth in the pre-time-travel present, to which we were bound when we were still lashed to the prow of a ship you may board but not steer.

[Steve]

[under a CPell]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chabot_Sp ... nce_Center:

For decades, it also served as the official timekeeping station for the entire Bay Area, measuring time with its transit telescope.

So, when timekeeping was no longer relevant, they could let the telescope go to ruins?
(I mean: in the song, not in reality...)

[Steve]

Our brains are not good at visualising things in four dimensions, but one way we can get time into our understanding is to lose one of the other dimensions, say height. Now, imagine filming a billiard ball rolling across a smooth surface: it will gradually slow, but the film will run at a constant rate, and so the image of the ball on the film will move across the slides, but by a smaller and smaller amount each time. Now, imagine mounting every frame of the film into a plastic frame (for those of you old enough to remember the days before jpegs, that's how we used to show our home photographs - you'd send the film away to be processed, and receive back a set of shiny postcard-type prints, or a box of these little mounted 'transparencies', through which you'd shine the bright lift of a projector, to view them in the dark on a screen.

Let's imagine piling these transparencies up, and then slicing through them, in the path of the ball, so that we have effectively removed another dimension. All that remains now is the spatial dimension that defines the path of the ball, and the temporal dimension indicated by the increasing height of the pile as we move from picture to picture, each taken (say) 1/16th of a second apart. It might look like this:

==----------------o--==
==---------------o---==
==------------o------==
==---------o---------==
==---o---------------==

(where = represents the reinforced plastic frame of the picture, and - represents the thin film it encloses and in particular the image of the table on which the ball is rolling, and o represents the image of the white ball on the table).

The curve represents path of the ball through space-time, moving a little less with the passing of each instant.

The little framed pictures were known as slides, and when piled up like that -they form a stack of slides.

"Never saw what we could unravel,
in traveling light,
nor how the trip debrides–
like a stack of slides!
All we saw was that Time is taller than Space is wide"

By the way - don't google the word 'debride' - the images are shocking. By analogy with the word 'bride'. I had assumed it just meant something like 'uncouple'. However, it seems (I had to look at my OED, rather than the computer screen!) it is derived from 'bridle', and originally meant the surgical removal of any constriction (eg necrotic tissue) around an organ or pussy wound, that prevented it from functioning properly or discharging the pus. More recently, it has come to include the removal of any foreign bodies, such as dirt, from a wound. I'm a little confused as to how that word is working in this particular lyric though.

[under a CPell]

Thanks for this explanation, this part of the lyrics now has become a little clearer. Although I knew of that meaning of the word "slide" I still had the image of a stack of those children's playthings in my mind instead. I saw that the word debride is derived from the French word for unbridle, so I thought it could mean "become unbridled", "get out of control" and in my mind's eye I saw the stack of children's slides slip one by one, like a set of dominoes or something like that.