Soft Dementia Over Vermin Sky: Lyrics Unpacked

Going to try something new.

I remember posting some stuff about lyrics on genius from The Origin which I eventually deleted because I realise I'd prefer to let people come to their own conclusions.


These are the lyrics to this song. Here I don't exactly want to give an authoritative interpretation but just expand bits and pieces of meaning in the lyrics to further other's interpretations as its very dense. Personally these lyrics are among the ones I am most proud of.

As with the song itself I am very tempted to remix it for two reasons. The first is that I lost a computer and couldn't use the original ableton mix to finish it, so I simply recorded vocals over an instrumental wav mixdown. This significantly disrupted the quality of the overall mix. Now I have got the original mix back I'd like to try and mix (and master) it properly.

Secondly I was recovering from an illness called Functional Neurological Disorder, a neuropsychiatric illness that has muscle weakness and paralysis among it's symptoms. This includes my vocal muscles, so my singing isn't its best here as I was still in rehab at the time. Even worse, my shitty immune system means I get sick a lot, and each time I get the cold, flu or covid my voice box gets messed around for weeks afterwards. So personally I'd like to try a second take on the clean singing on the second half of the song, but I could be overthinking it.

When I finally get time I might get around to doing the redux, and the original will be available here if anybody somehow misses its grit.

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The song is about multiple things for me and how the criss-cross:

1) my own experience with neuropsychiatric disorders, such as FND mentioned above, but also ADHD and being autistic
2) my own spiritual crisis as a result of poor health and trauma, which led to me unsuccessfully try to find a 'spiritual side'
3) my own fear of disease (hypochondria)
4) my late grandmother who died after suffering long from Alzmeimers disease
4) my experience with benzodiazepines, prescribed to help with panic attacks (which were intensified by ADHD medication, which I have since discontinued)

I'll try and unpack things line-by-line. However, my own interpretation is not definitive. Other meanings are possible. The below is mostly there to help begin thinking rather than terminate it. Assuming anybody is so obliged.

Original lyrics in normal type, and my annotations are in italics.

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soft dementia over vermin sky

The title sets three of the themes: dementia (neurology, drug use, sanity), vermin (hypochondria, fallenness) and sky (god). Hopefully their entwining is obvious as follows.

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silence interior as action potentials occlude into beige tingles in fingertips and sclerotic thumbs

this refers at least partially to FND, which included a distinct tingly feeling as well as shaking and muscle weakness. This made phones and computers very difficult to use for a while)

Spinozist substance abuse of expensive chalk in all its accidents of libidinal contortions converted into trappist sloths of inverted pink virtue.

Spinoza was a philosopher who worked on metaphysics, religion and ethics in the 1600's and is generally understood as one of the greatest philosophers of his (or any) time. One idea he espoused was that of monism, where everything takes place on a single plane of existence which he calls 'substance', and this is essentially his 'pantheistic' definition of God. Everything is, somewhat, One. He was considered a heretic at the time because he depersonalised God and replaced it with essentially the entirety of nature (his commonly repeated phrase being "God, or nature". The comma playing the pivotal role in this formulation). This replaced a philosophy of transcendence (god is seperate to the world as it rules over it) with one of immanence. This idea recurs throughout the entire song.

Hence the punning on 'substance abuse'. The idea is that 'substance' might have two meanings: one related to drugs, and the other to metaphysics - and these two meanings might be tied up. Likewise 'accidents' has a similar double play, in both it's spinozist and literal meanings.

The trappists were a monastic order who took a vow to only speak when necessary, and often employed sign language when speaking seemed unnecessary to communite.

transvestic postulants of acephalous bliss dripped by a good ghostly drop of the One 

'The One' is another reference to Spinoza's monism. It being a 'good ghostly drop' is yet again another drug reference, this time to liquid opoids. The bliss is acephalous because it doesn't think, nor does it have a face.

'Transvestic' is of course related to the word 'transvestite', although I am not sure if it is a real word at all. But when you think about it, all words and no words are real.

...deafened by the sound of drunken ambulances squealing and children glazed in zoonotic bacteria from rolling in the fetid mud of city playgrounds

This is probably a reference to hypochondia. Indeed when I was a child I'd frequently get sick, and have many horrible memories of being hospitalisted over a bout of vomiting illness.

...into a mesocyclone of half-remembered Absolutes of benz-fried GABA receptors soundclouds of unknowing.

A mesocyclone is a cloud that is above a tornado and produces it. The Absolute is a reference to Hegel , and generally refers to knowledge that isn't relative, usually the knowledge of our own necessary limits of knowledge, and of knowledge that is itself already truth (see The Phenomenology of Spirit). It can also be a reference to God. There are obvious parallels with this idea and that of Spinoza's God/Substance. 

Half-remembered is a dementia reference. Are those with dementia able to be virtuous if they forget the existence of god? Also, wouldn't the existence of such disease be a violation of God's benevolence? This ties with some ideas from An Angel.

Another idea is that reality in-itself is not a consistent world of perfection, but a chaotic world of disassociation and confusion. It would be entirely possible to re-interpret dementia not as a mere 'disease', but what happens when one directly accesses the Absolute, or The Real. 

...a single word is either a shield or aporia yet oxazepam is always many a shield.

Lacan often talks about language as something horrifying, a 'torture-house'. Sometimes words can protect us from the Real, but in other cases they can *be* the Real. Since the Real is often the locus of anxiety confusion, trauma and even psychosis, what better way to protect one from being swallowed by it than a benzodiazepine? 

anxiolytic negation contra squirming flesh and a forebrain

'anxiolytic' means a class of drugs used to treat anxiety, such as benzodiazepines.

cleansing of neurocapitalist twittering overwhelm finite minds unable to contain the limitless of the celestial.

Capitalism itself, with its tendency to upend and destroy meaning is often the cause for many a meltdown and even psychosis. Notedly, Lacan often would define psychosis as what happens when a sense of limitation is missing from the human subject.

a mindless xanax blind hindbrain halfsleeps bricked by the dementia of the young is the closest mankind has tasted the entropy of heaven

'bricked' is a term used for being high on benzodiazepines, I am not too sure if this is an Australian slang or universal, but is what is used here in Melbourne/Naarm.  

Generally here is meant to show an equivocation between profound and ecstatic religious experiences and simply being high on drugs that are designed to produce a sense of calm. The 'dementia of the young' means that younger generations are more prone (at least in popular culture) to abuse benzos, and who knows what long-term neurological issues might be in store for them if they survive until old age...

teens castrated knifelessly to become angels pure and sperm-white and biblically accurate with unbrushed hair and mallgoth strap leathers all wings spasming with Christ’s forgotten organ swallowing as all light shines none too dimly.

The first part is about (humorously) equivocating the old practice of castrati and current transgender healthcare youth guidelines. It is sadly ironic that religious zealots and patriarchs were originally on the side of 'child mutilation' rather than against it. Castrati existed purely for aesthetic reasons to have voices of angels. Trans kids and teenagers always go through an exhaustive informed consent process and the end goal is only to alleviate gender dysphoria. Furthermore, children are never operated on (with the exemption for coercive sex reassignment for intersex people) and underage (AFAB) teenagers usually only have mastectomies (a reversible procedure) to undo breast development. In high school, I knew a cis girl who had a breast reduction because of their excessive size and nobody made any complaints. It goes to show it was never about children - religious zealots historically are the ones who non-consensually mutilated children. Indeed there have been calls for the catholic church to be held accountable for the fad. It was never about bodily autonomy, just about hatred. And all this history is convientently forgotten.

Given the history of castrati, it is also profoundly ironic that trans women are often seen as abominations, when a few centuries ago those who transitioned before puberty would likely be considered to have possessed angelic voices.

Christ's forgotten organ is not only a reference to the forgotten organs of the Castrati, but also how Christ's wounding on the cross is interpreted by some scholars to have vaginal overtones. Gender ambiguity has its paws all over christianity (Thanks to violet for pointing this out).  

Valium yields a form of dying best enjoyed in quick fits  or it will be suffered shaking, vomiting and long.

Another irony - benzos are frequenctly used for intentional overdose, but the withdrawal effects from long-term use can be likewise lethal.

yet a transcendent tangle of shredded nerves in a cumulus of divine forgetting, found exclusively in the urinals of raves and the shrunken cortexes of the senile everywhere at the end of money.

It is interesting that drugs (not just benzos, where memory loss is a noted side-effect, but also ketamine which is very popular right now among the young) that are intentionally used to disassociate and forget, to induce a little dementia for the traumatised young. Perhaps dementia is not as terrifying as the Caretaker makes it: what better way to escape trauma? Furthermore, often the best treatments for dementia are unavailable to the elderly who just happened to be poor.

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than it is for the rich to enter into the kingdom of God yet this bricked pale girl is already there stark naked in its forecourts 

Finally we get to me. The inspiration for this poem comes from taking my (prescribed, luckily) oxazapam to deal with intensifying panic attacks, only to find the sense of calm it provided me was almost spiritual. I had a spiritual experience on prescription medication, triggered merely by neurochemistry. I distinctly remember walking home with my girlfriend while the sun set a beautiful amber. Spirituality and neurochemistry are one and the same.

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in the name of the father 

my divine light severed finger from

a chemical kenosis claps and twists out

in the names of the father 

my delusional bed of dried lavender

makes as much nonsense as a koan

in the name of the son 

he was pulled out of his sex

and plunged into the nerves of stars

in the real of the holy spirit

I become as gentle as grass

and spin like a roofied ballerina

These parts are probably the more opaque lines for me, as I think the unconscious is doing its own thing here. The 'name-of-the-father' is a reference the Lacan and specifically how the missing signifier of the name-of-the-father (that is, the fundamental signifier of law, limitation in one's unconscious) is the fundamental structural feature in psychotics. Psychosis in this instance is a fundamental psychological chaos and disorganisation that one can have and its broad range of symptoms are either defences from the chaos, or caused by it. Contrast it to the gentle bliss of not only benzodiazepines, but also antipsychotics. It should also be noted that the psychotic is not *wrong* in their psyche being unstructured, rhizomatic and disorganised - capitalism follows a similar (lack of) logic. 

Notedly, some Lacanians consider transness as a symptom of a fundamental psychosis in one's unconscious. I've stated my disagreement with this idea elsewhere in my paper in Transgender Marxism (p.230). Furthermore, autism used to be called 'childhood schizophrenia' as it was often confused with psychosis.

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empty the

sea of the skull

like a sun dying out

kenosis always chemical

-

We are at the end of the song. The first part of the song is typical for me: dissonant, anxious and screamy, whereas the latter is ...peaceful? It mirrors taking a benzo after a panic attack. Doing decrescendoes in music for me is compositionally significantly harder than producing a crescendo. It usually takes time to be convincing, hence the long runtime of the song. Also, I think words of this scope require a song of a similar scope.

Basically the message admittedly is still pessimistic, athiestic and materialistic: most spiritual matters are neurochemical. The idea of this isn't new: Freud made an early attempt to explain the appeal of religion in psychological terms, and this poem merely takes it further in the direction of neurochemistry, something that has advanced significantly since the time of Freud (and indeed Lacan). However even if 'oceanic' feelings (as Freud put it) are merely neurochemical and/or a result of unconscious 'software' processes in the brain, it does not make them any less profound to experience first-hand. Indeed these emotions and sensations are so powerful they can fuel charity organisations and genocide.

I find it difficult to be an atheist. I wish I had access to the 'oceanic feeling' that so many religious friends and foes around me seem to enjoy, a feeling powerful enough to grant life a purpose. Because it is merely a feeling - complicated chemical processing involving GABA receptors in the brain - there is no way I can rationalise my way into feeling it. I don't think anybody can. I tend to think the entirely of religious - in particular of the monotheistic variety - always stems from some fideism. Some element of religion, in the last instance, always stems from a seed of irrationality.

I hope the message is clear: benzodiazepines are precisely the perfect drug for the funeral of god.

Indeed, perhaps they are the drugs that killed him.

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