On interpretations
Remembering a great evening, a great conversation. What matters when we read someone, is not that the author meant: it is what his or her words meant to us. We cannot guess the underlying intention of every sentence, every word. Why do some books touch us in a way that other books, perhaps better books, don't? It's all a matter of interpretation. The books I liked the most were the books that touched me in some way, that triggered feelings that I don't think the author ever expected to trigger in any of the readers. Writers, they write for themselves. Not for someone else - even if the story, the book, whatever, is dedicated to someone else. If one wants to write for someone, then one writes a letter, a good and old-fashioned letter. And even this is arguable.
So it's all about interpretations. Goes, for example, for everything I've written here in the last four years. What I meant, or even the random target of my words, doesn't really matter: what matters is that the words meant for those who read it. Probably it never meant a damn thing, but hey, that's not really up to me. I know what they mean to me, and sometimes, after i write something here, it ends up meaning something totally different. It goes for music, for example. What has the musician(s) in mind when they create a song? They know the meaning of their own songs, but for the ones who listen to them - me, you - they might mean something completely different. I always thought that the song Like Spinning Plates, by Radiohead, was about love - until a video I saw recently shown me that it is actually about war. Avoiding the common place that says that love and war are one and the same thing, the funny thing is, Like Spinning Plates is about war, and makes sense that way, but it could be about love. About betrayal.
Going for my favourite song, Knives Out. It was rumoured that it was about cannibalism. Could be, yes. You go to some lyrics website and read the visitors' comments. Let's look at some interpretations, from here:
I think the "mouse" is a metaphor for who the "I" in the song used to be. I hear it that way because of the parallel between "He's not coming back" and "I'm not coming back" at the beginning.
It sounds like the narrator's really struggled with his decision to give up on whoever he's talking to. It sounds like he's finally given up on defending himself from being "eaten" by an insensitive partner who he once trusted. He lets them impose their own unfair and selfish interpretations of his intentions to make sense of their own lives narrowmindedly, so that the injustice of his situation stops "eating" at him.
By letting himself be a "mouse" to them, by allowing a part of himself to be caught, cooked, eaten, disregarded, belittled, consumed, destroyed, he is able to finally detach himself from a painful internal struggle which he now sees is pointless. You can hear the last trace of venom he allows himself to feel in "If you'd been a dog//they would've drowned you at birth." He realizes that he can't make them see how they've hurt him, either by pleading or by anger, so he makes the difficult decision to give up on being involved at all. (Or maybe I'm just hearing all this because of personal experience... does it make any sense?) [anonymous]
It does make sense to me. But it could also be like:
To me this song about how we encounter certain situations and we are forced to do things we don't want to do - Sometimes we just have to take the knives out...(try not to think to violently when you hear this one) [Clark]
A longer review gives some interesting points. My highlights:
(...)Well, the knives in "knives out" seem to have a dual meaning to me, perhaps this is due in part to a third interpretation, that of the film director. Nonetheless, I made a connection between the "knives are out" in the Shakespearian Julius Ceaser sense (et tu, Brutus?) and the relationship souring when the couple fight in the train compartment, her with the knife, him with the lump hammer. She also "goes under the knife" in the wonderful operation game scene, is this revenge or more likely a dissection of the relationship and her after the break up.
The medical theme in the video for me is especially poignant (I work in operating theatres); I have also occasionally interpreted the sound of articulating a "hundred thousand breaking hearts" also as the sound of a soul "in extremis" (at the point of death). There are parallels between having your hope denied by love and the feeling of life as a futile exercise, therefore you have reached death in life. I once treated a man who arrived for emergency surgery. As he arrived into the theatre, before he was anaesthetised, he held my hand, looked into my eyes and said "I'm so glad to see you". He died shortly afterwards during the operation despite our best efforts to save him. [Mr. K. Tootnoy]
We can never escape our personal experience. Interpretation is all about it: personal experience. And about the right moment, too. Sometimes a book, a song, a painting tells us nothing at first, but when we read, listen or see it some time later, it does ring a bell, it does trigger an emotion we had not felt before.
Concerning Knives Out, I'll stick to the first interpretation. And Like Spinning Plates will always be about a broken dream.
So it's all about interpretations. Goes, for example, for everything I've written here in the last four years. What I meant, or even the random target of my words, doesn't really matter: what matters is that the words meant for those who read it. Probably it never meant a damn thing, but hey, that's not really up to me. I know what they mean to me, and sometimes, after i write something here, it ends up meaning something totally different. It goes for music, for example. What has the musician(s) in mind when they create a song? They know the meaning of their own songs, but for the ones who listen to them - me, you - they might mean something completely different. I always thought that the song Like Spinning Plates, by Radiohead, was about love - until a video I saw recently shown me that it is actually about war. Avoiding the common place that says that love and war are one and the same thing, the funny thing is, Like Spinning Plates is about war, and makes sense that way, but it could be about love. About betrayal.
Going for my favourite song, Knives Out. It was rumoured that it was about cannibalism. Could be, yes. You go to some lyrics website and read the visitors' comments. Let's look at some interpretations, from here:
I think the "mouse" is a metaphor for who the "I" in the song used to be. I hear it that way because of the parallel between "He's not coming back" and "I'm not coming back" at the beginning.
It sounds like the narrator's really struggled with his decision to give up on whoever he's talking to. It sounds like he's finally given up on defending himself from being "eaten" by an insensitive partner who he once trusted. He lets them impose their own unfair and selfish interpretations of his intentions to make sense of their own lives narrowmindedly, so that the injustice of his situation stops "eating" at him.
By letting himself be a "mouse" to them, by allowing a part of himself to be caught, cooked, eaten, disregarded, belittled, consumed, destroyed, he is able to finally detach himself from a painful internal struggle which he now sees is pointless. You can hear the last trace of venom he allows himself to feel in "If you'd been a dog//they would've drowned you at birth." He realizes that he can't make them see how they've hurt him, either by pleading or by anger, so he makes the difficult decision to give up on being involved at all. (Or maybe I'm just hearing all this because of personal experience... does it make any sense?) [anonymous]
It does make sense to me. But it could also be like:
To me this song about how we encounter certain situations and we are forced to do things we don't want to do - Sometimes we just have to take the knives out...(try not to think to violently when you hear this one) [Clark]
A longer review gives some interesting points. My highlights:
(...)Well, the knives in "knives out" seem to have a dual meaning to me, perhaps this is due in part to a third interpretation, that of the film director. Nonetheless, I made a connection between the "knives are out" in the Shakespearian Julius Ceaser sense (et tu, Brutus?) and the relationship souring when the couple fight in the train compartment, her with the knife, him with the lump hammer. She also "goes under the knife" in the wonderful operation game scene, is this revenge or more likely a dissection of the relationship and her after the break up.
The medical theme in the video for me is especially poignant (I work in operating theatres); I have also occasionally interpreted the sound of articulating a "hundred thousand breaking hearts" also as the sound of a soul "in extremis" (at the point of death). There are parallels between having your hope denied by love and the feeling of life as a futile exercise, therefore you have reached death in life. I once treated a man who arrived for emergency surgery. As he arrived into the theatre, before he was anaesthetised, he held my hand, looked into my eyes and said "I'm so glad to see you". He died shortly afterwards during the operation despite our best efforts to save him. [Mr. K. Tootnoy]
We can never escape our personal experience. Interpretation is all about it: personal experience. And about the right moment, too. Sometimes a book, a song, a painting tells us nothing at first, but when we read, listen or see it some time later, it does ring a bell, it does trigger an emotion we had not felt before.
Concerning Knives Out, I'll stick to the first interpretation. And Like Spinning Plates will always be about a broken dream.
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