Hey guys, this band called Assemblage 23 has awesome (although admittetly dark) lyrics. I was wondering if any of you had an interpretation of this song, I can't really figure out what he is trying to say.

Divide

I lost myself in shapeless oceans
Whose depths concealed more than they showed
Beliefs obscured by mists around them
A legacy they'd been bestowed

Columns of ice paint awkward pictures
Distorted forms that once seemed real
Engulfed inside transparent textures
Billowing curtains as hard as steel

For all the noise filling the landscape
Whispers & cries with no reply
It's quiet here within these boundaries
And thoughts collect like pools of light

CH
My eyes divide the sky
As sirens sound in heaven
My will brings down the moon
And shatters it to pieces

The silence grew inconsequential
The day became a paradigm
A thousand years, a hundred decades
An arbitrary slice of time

I found myself with no companion
Except the salty earth and sky
And suddenly there came my focus
The world around me clarified

(CH)

And so I walked in isolation
Hoping solace would cross my path
Ignored the road that lay behind me
And stepped away from the aftermath

I lost myself in shapeless oceans
Whose waters turned from dark to clear
I floated there, a tiny island
With no more doubt, with no more fear

(CH)

I basically took these lyrics right off their website [www.synthetic.org] but I would definitely recomend them to anyone who likes techno/trance and awesome lyrics (very good musically as well). So, what do those lyrics mean?

I see the first three stanzas as a dream sequence, focusing on coldness, isolation and detachment. In the last three stanzas it seems to me to be an awakening and self-awareness which helps the protaganist center himself.


Les

Personally, when I see an author change the tense from past to present and back to past again, I strongly suspect s/he is less than totally accomplished. Therefore, the lines may mean nothing at all, created randomly from refrigerator magnets.

The (nicely done) two-syllable endings on the odd lines and the single endings on the even suggest the opposite, but the non-rhymes (reply/light, heaven/pieces, sky/clarified) again point to possible lack of knowledge about construction. Yeah, I know lyrics are not as stringent as 'regular poetry', but even so ...

So, we have to ask ourselves if the text makes any sense. For example,

My eyes divide the sky
As sirens sound in heaven
My will brings down the moon
And shatters it to pieces

Do sirens ever sound in heaven? And how is that similar to eyes dividing the sky? Are we to assume this is solipcsism, whereby the mere thought of something creates that reality?

I'm with Les on the interpretation. The author is merely trying to create an image of desolation, which somehow leaves the speaker with hope in the end. Some relation to Donne's 'no man is an island' also? Sure, why not.

Does it have to be - couldn't the 'as' mean 'at the same time as' - ie the sky dividing sets off some divine 'emergency alarm'?

Good point. Does that help it make more sense? I'm not totally convinced. Does bye, bye, miss american pie make any better sense? Nuh-uh.

"I lost myself in shapeless oceans
Whose waters turned from dark to clear
I floated there, a tiny island
With no more doubt, with no more fear."


Literature is full of accounts of transcendent experiences (religious, drug-induced, near-death, etc.) that leave someone with a sense that there is NOTHING TO FEAR because they've somehow seen above and beyond the small perspective they had before.

I would put this song in that category: An account of a hard-to-describe experience -- something between "The Daffodils" and "The Book of Revelation."

The vaguaries of the sirens and the columns of ice don't bother me; they feel like images grasped and bundled together to give a sense of the OTHER-ness of the experience.

RadicalTurnip (for so you have yclept yourself): If there is a "meaning" to this lyric, I would say maybe it's like this: "I was afraid of losing myself in the great swirl of all this wild stuff, but once I was lost in it I realized there was nothing to fear at all."

Yclept? I clepe that an archaism.

is an archaism an orgasm you haven't had in years?

Bah, okay. I was hoping for some divine revelation...would still accept any ideas on the topic, however. There are other songs of theirs that I respect literarily...Especially "Disappoint"...

Sorry- we're easily distracted around here. The lyrics strike me as dreamlike- he's not seeing real images. Think- American Pie, Coleridge's Kubla Khan, almost anything by Edgar Allan Poe.

pam