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Author Topic: Darwin  (Read 19497 times)

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AGelbert

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Re: Darwin
« Reply #105 on: March 16, 2015, 08:24:07 pm »
This is a song that has meaning. It is sung with meaning, by the woman who wro,te it. Do you know what the meaning is?

The clouds never expect it
When it rains,
But the sea changes colors,
But the sea
Does not change

She uses metaphors to tell a story, but do you know what the story is about?
Thanks for bringing this up... I really liked this song and could hear it was sung with meaning, but I had no idea what the story was, until I looked it up on Wikipedia just now.  And, I find myself inspired by the mondegreen "one-winged dove".

Interesting page for the song on wikipedia. I never knew there was a word called mondegreen and I didn't know 'edge of seventeen' was an example of one. I took it as being literal-figurative, meaning seventeen going on eighteen - at least that's what it meant to me.

It's funny because a song is someone projecting their 'objective' meaning. All the people listening to it, give it 'subjective' meaning from their own objectivity. You rarely think what a song means, it just paints pictures - until that is the song starts meaning something to you. It's unexplained on the wikipedia page, how Tom Petty's first wife is involved in the song, but from the meaning I project onto the lyrics and story and emotion, Tom's wife's involvement is what the song's about.

The story is told from the POV of a woman, talking to her friend about how her relationship broke up. She then tells how when she first met him at seventeen, he gave her life meaning. But as time goes by, she is watching her man fall in love with another woman. That other woman is a singer - she is both the white winged dove, and the nightbird. From the POV of the man, she is the dove singing "Ooh ooh ooh!", but from the POV of the woman, she is a nightbird - an owl - singing "Come away, come away." By being a singer, and singing a song to the man and for the man, she is giving her love for him more 'meaning'. Singing I love/want you. has more meaning than saying it, and that's how the woman telling the story lost the man.

I can empathise with Tom Petty's first wife, because the song is sung from her point of view - it is how I lost the love of my own life. The man is Tom Petty "seemed broken hearted" (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) The white-winged dove/nightbird is either Stevie Nicks or another singer, who sings for Tom and gives his life more meaning. This happened to me, and although I've liked this song for years, I only liked it for the term 'edge of seventeen' which is how old my love was when I first met her. We broke up 13 years ago now. I only know the song because it is one of the tracks that play on Liberty Rock Radio in the video game Grand Theft Auto IV - which came out in 2008. The meaning of the song only became clear to me when I read the wiki page about Tom's wife. I get Stevie's objective meaning from that, and even then, because the wiki page doesn't go into detail, I have to apply subjective meaning to it. What it meant to me, only dawned on me about an hour before I posted the video, so in the past 24 hours, I have learned something about myself and the break-up of my relationship with Barbara.



I bought GTA4 in 2008 - it changed my life. It got me hooked up to the internet again, because I wanted to choose that "muliplayer" option on the "player character's" phone (an in-game options menu) I got hooked on video games at that point - I gave away my garden to play them and give them my time. I nearly always had a game console, but it was the most casual pastime. Multiplayer and the world of the internet changed that. I liked relating to people both in-game, and on internet forums - there is something to be said for running around a virtual world where other people like you have agency. It can give your life meaning - and the way game developers make games, they can fill those virtual worlds with more meaningful activities. Caring about this and discussing this is all part of the love of gaming. The GTA community is massive and passionate, because the way Rockstar Games build worlds, fills them full of humour, activity and physics. You can switch radios on and off or change the channel - the term used is "living, breathing world." This is Rockstar's goal as artists and commercial game manufacturers.

So I'm playing this game and Edge of Seventeen is a part of it. It's just background music. First you like the sounds - music is so great - the rhythms and melodies. I can't describe music in words. Then you like the songs - the pictures they paint in your mind, sung in full voice. Then you may find it means something to you, so you give it some more attention. Then you personalise it. Have you ever noticed that when you break up with someone, all the songs seem to be about you?

In 2002 I broke up with the love of my life. We were together nine years and loved each other very dearly. I met her when I lived in the Cayman Islands. She was seventeen, four weeks from her eighteenth birthday, I was twenty-four. We fell in love, but she was from Germany and only on the island to vacation with her Godparents. I was from the UK and living under Caymanian gainful occupation license. Cut a long story short, I moved to Germany and lived there for three years - then we broke up. I came home to England, but Barbara said she made a mistake and came over to England. We lived together in England six years, but by 2002 I was having a serious problem with alcohol.

She would say to me, "Come to bed Joseph, I MEAN it!" but I would wait until she had gone to bed to open up my stash of booze that I had hidden away. She knew all about this and confronted me many times - even making me go to AA - which ended in abject failure. In this final period, she was at teacher training college, doing a post-grad so she could become a German language teacher in the UK.

Unbeknownst to me, she was going out with her friends some evenings (it's all part of drifting apart) and visiting a bar where a band played. I found this out later, that the lead singer dedicated songs to her and sung them for her. Then she came and dropped the bomb that she wanted to break up with me. I asked her why and she said it was the alcohol. Then she told me she was going to Sweden very soon; on her own to visit her Godfather without me. This was a big thing. When she came back, I had tried to clean my act up and begged her to stay. But she told me she was going to visit a friend in Oxford, and when she came back she was going to Germany and to Spain with her sister.

So she was in Spain and I went on the computer and she got an e-mail which I opened - it was from a guy. I went through her e-mails and she had hidden his e-mails among her friends and family's. I pieced together that she had not been to Oxford, but had gone to France to be with this singer.

I expolded, and changed the locks so she couldn't come back. I took all her stuff to my mothers and when she got back to the UK, it was the start of her first term as a teacher. She had to stay at one a friend's house, and eventually she needed to get her stuff from my mother's. I agreed to help and we spent a couple of days together. When she had got all her stuff into her new home, she helped me write a letter to her mother apologising for what I had done, because her mother meant a lot to me. Then I made a pass at Barbara which she rebuffed.

The next day I called Barbara and apologised and said it would be better if we didn't see each other again - she said OK. A minute after I put the phone down it rang. She was crying and said, "Come here. I want to see you." I asked why and she said, "I don't want to lose you." I ran as fast as I could to see her - I just felt the same way. We then had an affair which broke down because of my emotional state and the fact that drugs had joined the alcohol in the list of my addictions.

Over the next two years I lost everything that meant something to me. I was a first class ecology student at MMU, on my way to becoming a biology teacher - that blew up. I had a part time job as a domestic at the Manchester Royal Infirmary - where I meant something to people - that blew up. I lost my cat - I left it out in the hall drunk one night and she disappeared. Everything just collapsed and all that was left was the alcohol and drugs.

In May 2004 I didn't drink for one night, and one night became two. Then a week passed and by now I was back doing the job I was doing on the Cayman Islands when I met her. I said to a colleague, "Not drank for a week!" He said it's good to have a break now and again isn't it? "Yeah."

11 years later and I've cleared myself of drink and drugs, and I'm listening to that song and talking on the Doomstead Diner about existence and God (who I saw years before Barbara by the way) and the meaning comes to me. Not Stevie Nicks' objective meaning but my own. The song itself is about meaning - and how saying I love you through song, has more meaning than just saying I love you through language.

Stevie Nicks is singing the song through the eyes of Tom Petty's wife, she herself is the night bird. Stevie Nicks is saying that the POV of Tom Petty's wife is more song-worthy than the POV of herself (or other singer)

[embed=1056,594]<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ojGKSgug_FM?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>[/embed]

This is what makes Humanity new in the Universe - meaning. The question is not, "What is the meaning of life?" because Humanity = life plus  meaning. My cat has a conscious mind. Conscious minds have no meaning. Only humans, in the known universe, have meaning. Life has no meaning. From life only humanity has meaning. Meaning is everywhere and it is a ubiquitous part of human life. The most intelligent animals can do tricks and are capable of emotions, but they cannot do the meaning thing.

There is no life on the internet - only meaning. You ask the question, "What does something mean?" Look around the room or place you are in right now. It is a place in this universe that holds some of your meaning. Everything in the room has meaning, because you have meaning and project it onto it. You could be looking at somebody elses meaning, reflecting back at you. It is what you are doing as you read my words. What is reflecting back is your meaning of them.

Why are we here in the Diner? It is a quest for meaning. I'm going to project my meaning as best I can, but remember - meaning is only 100,000 years old - give or take a few millennia. It was born in a human mind and into a universe where powerful forces already existed. Life, chemistry, physics, free will. Those things and many others that came into existence, added stature to the thing that was there in the beginning - that thing is The Great Spirit.

My question to The Great Spirit - God - is are we just here to provide You with meaning, and when we go You keep the meaning? Or do we take meaning with us and You have no further use for it?

JM,
Thank you for sharing all the challenging and difficult experiences you went through. It takes courage to be honest. I salute you for that honesty.  :emthup:  :icon_sunny:

Quote
My question to The Great Spirit - God - is are we just here to provide You with meaning, and when we go You keep the meaning? Or do we take meaning with us and You have no further use for it?

I don't have the mental horsepower to answer for God. All I know from my experience is that we exist and there is a right way, a wrong way and (many ways in between) for us to behave as human beings. What is "right" and what is "wrong" is not, in my opinion, subjective. In fact, the Being that created us wrote the owner's manual into our spirit.

The "owner's manual", if followed perfectly, will enable us to achieve our highest potential. Aristotle, in so many words, said that happiness, while we all would love to have it 24/7, cannot be sought because happiness is the byproduct of a life of virtue.

Many will split relativistic hairs on what "virtue" is and what "vice" is.  ::) 

I think that ALL human beings, mentally retarded or Amygdala stunted psychopaths excluded, understand instinctively what "virtue" is and what "vice" is. IOW, if you can't handle it, don't dish it out. If you see someone in need, help them if you can. Protest against any and all physically and mentally harmful actions by your fellow humans against themselves, each other and other life forms (beyond honest, not contrived, self defense). 

We are designed to support the tribe, not to seek to have the tribe rotate around our wants. Service without self interest is counterintuitive to a degree, but it is the only modus vivendi that provides the "meaning" to a life that gives happiness as a byproduct.

People who are that way live more fulfilled (i.e. happy) lives.   

I believe God needs nothing from us. We are the ones that need to follow the owner's manual instructions written in our spirit. I believe God is pleased by that because God is good.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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