after reading narcoloth's revelations directly from the author, i decided to take a long hard look to monochromatic stains lyrics. 
ok, after concluding i cannot possibly outstare a dt song, i just came up with this totally weird explanation. take a sit and a drink of choice.
now, to me everything revolves around the theme of duplicity, both physical and mental. as with the best dt lyrics, the song is full of cross-references and many-layered, so that the literal explanation is very simple and down-to-earth, but deeper meanings are always present and consistent with the overall view.
there was a crime and there is a trial. but all identities are constantly shifting and merging. the victim and the culprit are one and the same, everything might as well just take place in the mind of a single individual. and yet the fear and anguish lie precisely in said individual noticing the world outside does exist as soomething separate from him, something he might hurt and eventually destroy. or do you always only destroy something belonging to you?
there is this face in the still water
i can´t remember ever wearing
apart from the mythological reference to the tale of narcissus (the ego-maniac guy who stared too long at his own face in the water with the result of falling in the well and drowning), here we see the basic outline of the situation and the first "investigative" riddle - we're also the judge and jury - is the face in the water that of someone we murdered or merely our reflection? we do not remember, we have no clue as to what our identity is about.
like fingerprints on your heart
reading out the last lines of code
to the untrained eye a secret
i bled away the last of you
some faint trace of what we were - or someone else was - still remains inside, and it tries to reconstruct what happened, what made us us. however, it's not an easy task, because - and here the crime and its perpetrator seem to merge again - at first sight the alter ego or the victim have been totally erased from our memory.
sought trust in shapes of combined results
that trickles from a less than solid case
fought off attacks of resurfaced lust
burn the gracing grounds
passions and feelings seem to have played a major part in our acceptance/denial of what we were and what happened. here the trial setting seems to dominate the scene: to understand identities and roles (in a crime as in everyday life) we have to speculate over scientific matters (combined results) and avoid falling prey of whims that might misguide us. nothing much changes: in the end what's left is a slate washed clean of thought and memory.
what will give in first
the body or the lash
monochromatic stains
who will cave in first
the leader or the fake
monochromatic Stains
the refrain portrays the situation in mid-action: there are two opposite poles, truth/falseness, freedom/constraint, and something will eventually collapse leaving just one member of the duality. and like philosophers said, there is no knowledge without difference, no way of setting things apart. so the one-colour stain blotting our sight is actually everything and nothing, absolution and condemnation for whatever bloody murder we have committed.
this pile of ashes of a soul
informant pokes abound
these sickly little fingers
get away from me
there is no will whatsoever to face duality again, no desire to recover normal eyesight and come to terms with the situation in its mundane sequence of what was->is->will be. the finger(print)s are ignored and dismissed, the remains of the gracing grounds are full of hints we choose to just ignore.
tread not the path of least restraint
each piece of evidence a lie, a lie
the body, the face all items in place
i don´t remember a thing
perhaps the most revealing verse in the song, it denies everything at the very same moment it admits everything. letting go to uncontrolled feelings may result in having to face the consequences of the loss of one's own identity, the hurting of others and so on. the least restraint leads to facts that are true only in the eye of the beholder (projector, anyone?), but they won't prove coherent with what the outside world thinks, feels, is.
then the metaphor gets even deeper and more complicated: "the body" could refer to the body of crime or the author's own physical structure, and the face - that same face that we see in the water - is back at its place (on us? on someone else?), but still reality escapes us and we do not want to face it anyway.
a sacrifice made to the loss of a mind
folly a mans demise
again duality and singularity merge in a complex structure (lines of code?): the crime transfigured us so much we lost all we had and all we were, in the grip of madness and oblivion. but wasn't the crime committed in order to lose ourselves, as an act of liberation we performed treading the path of least restraint?
track now the stains that allow my fall
sickening, the sight of it all
never shall I claim my innocence
i just was not there
and in a disquieting attempt to make me think back to my years as a law student, here comes the responsability issue in all its grandeur.
while the first two lines indulge on pondering about the past and present (chaotic are the tracks before me / barren are the ones behind), stressing the importance of the monochromes in giving in to madness, the latter lines come up with a new topic altogether. with madness blinding our sight, how are we to be taken responsible of our crimes? our identity, everything that makes us us, the face we see in the mirror every day, the combined results of science... well, they simply were not there. in the end, i see the realisation that the absence of a second member to relate ourselves to kills our own existence on the spot, too. and, lo and behold, here we have the victim. and the murderer.
you're welcome to join in on solving this case.
rahvin.
ok, after concluding i cannot possibly outstare a dt song, i just came up with this totally weird explanation. take a sit and a drink of choice.
now, to me everything revolves around the theme of duplicity, both physical and mental. as with the best dt lyrics, the song is full of cross-references and many-layered, so that the literal explanation is very simple and down-to-earth, but deeper meanings are always present and consistent with the overall view.
there was a crime and there is a trial. but all identities are constantly shifting and merging. the victim and the culprit are one and the same, everything might as well just take place in the mind of a single individual. and yet the fear and anguish lie precisely in said individual noticing the world outside does exist as soomething separate from him, something he might hurt and eventually destroy. or do you always only destroy something belonging to you?
there is this face in the still water
i can´t remember ever wearing
apart from the mythological reference to the tale of narcissus (the ego-maniac guy who stared too long at his own face in the water with the result of falling in the well and drowning), here we see the basic outline of the situation and the first "investigative" riddle - we're also the judge and jury - is the face in the water that of someone we murdered or merely our reflection? we do not remember, we have no clue as to what our identity is about.
like fingerprints on your heart
reading out the last lines of code
to the untrained eye a secret
i bled away the last of you
some faint trace of what we were - or someone else was - still remains inside, and it tries to reconstruct what happened, what made us us. however, it's not an easy task, because - and here the crime and its perpetrator seem to merge again - at first sight the alter ego or the victim have been totally erased from our memory.
sought trust in shapes of combined results
that trickles from a less than solid case
fought off attacks of resurfaced lust
burn the gracing grounds
passions and feelings seem to have played a major part in our acceptance/denial of what we were and what happened. here the trial setting seems to dominate the scene: to understand identities and roles (in a crime as in everyday life) we have to speculate over scientific matters (combined results) and avoid falling prey of whims that might misguide us. nothing much changes: in the end what's left is a slate washed clean of thought and memory.
what will give in first
the body or the lash
monochromatic stains
who will cave in first
the leader or the fake
monochromatic Stains
the refrain portrays the situation in mid-action: there are two opposite poles, truth/falseness, freedom/constraint, and something will eventually collapse leaving just one member of the duality. and like philosophers said, there is no knowledge without difference, no way of setting things apart. so the one-colour stain blotting our sight is actually everything and nothing, absolution and condemnation for whatever bloody murder we have committed.
this pile of ashes of a soul
informant pokes abound
these sickly little fingers
get away from me
there is no will whatsoever to face duality again, no desire to recover normal eyesight and come to terms with the situation in its mundane sequence of what was->is->will be. the finger(print)s are ignored and dismissed, the remains of the gracing grounds are full of hints we choose to just ignore.
tread not the path of least restraint
each piece of evidence a lie, a lie
the body, the face all items in place
i don´t remember a thing
perhaps the most revealing verse in the song, it denies everything at the very same moment it admits everything. letting go to uncontrolled feelings may result in having to face the consequences of the loss of one's own identity, the hurting of others and so on. the least restraint leads to facts that are true only in the eye of the beholder (projector, anyone?), but they won't prove coherent with what the outside world thinks, feels, is.
then the metaphor gets even deeper and more complicated: "the body" could refer to the body of crime or the author's own physical structure, and the face - that same face that we see in the water - is back at its place (on us? on someone else?), but still reality escapes us and we do not want to face it anyway.
a sacrifice made to the loss of a mind
folly a mans demise
again duality and singularity merge in a complex structure (lines of code?): the crime transfigured us so much we lost all we had and all we were, in the grip of madness and oblivion. but wasn't the crime committed in order to lose ourselves, as an act of liberation we performed treading the path of least restraint?
track now the stains that allow my fall
sickening, the sight of it all
never shall I claim my innocence
i just was not there
and in a disquieting attempt to make me think back to my years as a law student, here comes the responsability issue in all its grandeur.
while the first two lines indulge on pondering about the past and present (chaotic are the tracks before me / barren are the ones behind), stressing the importance of the monochromes in giving in to madness, the latter lines come up with a new topic altogether. with madness blinding our sight, how are we to be taken responsible of our crimes? our identity, everything that makes us us, the face we see in the mirror every day, the combined results of science... well, they simply were not there. in the end, i see the realisation that the absence of a second member to relate ourselves to kills our own existence on the spot, too. and, lo and behold, here we have the victim. and the murderer.
you're welcome to join in on solving this case.
rahvin.
