Head in the Clouds (Clarity)

Head in the clouds
Vapor zones
Blurry edges--hazy borders
Escaping capture
Disappointing grasping fingers
Established ghosts mock expectations
With the unquestionable touch of rain

Head's in the clouds
Feet not far below
Dangling out of touch with something solid
On the ground, with sense consensus
Is the ideal position
To stage the tired compulsory spectacle
No choosing--celebrate the magnificent piles we've made!

Head in the clouds
The inevitable diffusion
Viewpoints equal, denominators common
The skies--now--the only show--one!
Shield your eyes with illusion now, you'll see it later
Or stare now while you can feel


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I'm in the process of setting these admittedly abstract words to music; sort of a dreamy but insistent guitar part with some tone painting and a growing between-verse guitar line that splits into R and L stereo channels for some hopefully interesting psychedelic interplay. We'll see. It'll certainly be difficult to realize by myself in a live setting, but the sound of the recorded version is already pretty well-formed in my head.

Since I'm trying to babble less extensively about these words, here are a few way markers. The song uses the familiar figure of speech "head in the clouds" to evoke the battle between abstract, mystical, imaginative thinking and extremely rational, cause-and-effect, score-keeping thinking. The first verse illustrates the mystical process--reality clearly exists as a force to be intuitively experienced, but its purpose is unclear--you can't deny the feeling of rain, but the abstract idea of the process of rain forming in the sky is difficult for the human mind to comprehend and express. Verse 2 more disparagingly refers to the rational denial of those types of thinking ("Get your head out of the clouds!") in favor of peaceful interaction with the rational world we strive to create for ourselves in human society (i.e. the "magnificent piles we've made," which is probably one of my more venomous images for the status quo). The third verse asserts that large, abstract and greater-than-human processes are at work whether you want to bury your head in society's sand or not. Ironically, the two viewpoints aren't really mutually exclusive, though today's world seems to have a large enough body of rational evidence that many people seem uninterested in contemplating what's going on beyond the reality that is immediately affecting their personal worlds.