There are a few things that I can point out in this song:
"when finally we opened the box
we couldn't find any rules
our heads were reeling with a glut of possibilities,
contingencies
but with ever increasing faith
we decided to go ahead and just ingnore them
despite tremendous pressure to capitulate and fade"
This is a fairly straightforward presentation of a combination of Sartre's and Camus's existentialist position. From Sartre, that man finds himself all at once in the world, lacking direction, meaning, or rules (Existentialism is a Humanism). The metaphor in the song is opening the box of a board game and not finding the rule sheet that tells you how to play. The word "contingencies" is a dead give away, as the radical contingency of human experience is a central theme of existentialism. The following 3 lines are probably inspired by Camus's essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus," which suggests that one disregard the very real absurdity ("absurdity" being a synonym for radical contingency) of existence and live in spite of it.
The phrase "furiously sleeping green" is an obvious reference to Noam Chomsky's famous nonsense sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." Chomsky composed the sentence so that each pair of words defied reason (colorless-green, green-ideas, etc.). Nonetheless, English speakers unanimously accept the sentence as grammatical, unlike "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless." I can think of a few ways of relating that to the rest of the song, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone else.
There are a few things that I can point out in this song:
"when finally we opened the box we couldn't find any rules our heads were reeling with a glut of possibilities, contingencies but with ever increasing faith we decided to go ahead and just ingnore them despite tremendous pressure to capitulate and fade"
This is a fairly straightforward presentation of a combination of Sartre's and Camus's existentialist position. From Sartre, that man finds himself all at once in the world, lacking direction, meaning, or rules (Existentialism is a Humanism). The metaphor in the song is opening the box of a board game and not finding the rule sheet that tells you how to play. The word "contingencies" is a dead give away, as the radical contingency of human experience is a central theme of existentialism. The following 3 lines are probably inspired by Camus's essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus," which suggests that one disregard the very real absurdity ("absurdity" being a synonym for radical contingency) of existence and live in spite of it.
The phrase "furiously sleeping green" is an obvious reference to Noam Chomsky's famous nonsense sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." Chomsky composed the sentence so that each pair of words defied reason (colorless-green, green-ideas, etc.). Nonetheless, English speakers unanimously accept the sentence as grammatical, unlike "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless." I can think of a few ways of relating that to the rest of the song, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone else.