Disorder

I'll be a contrarian and go on record as saying that this song may or may not actually be exclusively about Ian's epilepsy. Yes, Ian suffered from epilepsy. Yes, he wrote about it (most famously in "She's Lost Control"). To me, this song is about more than having an epileptic seizure and I think there's been too much focus on that aspect of it in the comments so far. But as Ian sang, "Who is right, who can tell, and who gives a damn right now?" :-)

For me, the central line is having the spirit but losing the feeling. This is the struggle of an artist, an unhinged and disconnected artist: how to take pleasure from the things around him, how to use them to make and create, instead of growing bored and detached from them and living solely inside his own head; the protagonist has an artist's spirit but he can't live in the normal world, he can't take the banality of day to day existence as it wears him down and dillutes his artistic purity (spirit) and makes him lose his feeling (FEELING FEELING FEELING!). But here's the rub and the paradox of the great artist: without being grounded in the tangible and the real at all, he cannot fulfill the role of the artist as social commentator, trickster, or priest.

And perhaps here is where the epilepsy comes back in: Dostoyevsky also suffered from it and described it as a religious experience but it had similar effects on him, causing episodes of manic depression, the ability to see things in a high state of mania and, for a time, with piercing clarity and then at the next moment losing that feeling completely and suffering from debilitating depression; where everything becomes banal: a chore, a list, and, yes, even a news report, to go back to danohuiginn's previous comment.

Great song.