I see the song quite differently than almost everybody here. Most people seem to think this song is about how "we are all basically alone" and how what we mistake for closeness, love, sex and all that is actually just a bunch of chemicals working together. I see the song as quite the opposite of that, though. Perhaps even a criticism of that kind of thinking. To me the song seems to deal with our inability to understand our lives and ourselves, and with how we are always pursuing these meanings through all the wrong methods.
It reminds me of the lyrics to Rocket Man when he says:
"And all this science I don't understand
It's just my job five days a week
A rocket man, a rocket man"
Or Space Oddity with:
"Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles, I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows
Ground control to major Tom, your circuits dead, there's something wrong"
Space Oddity particularly is filled with a lot technical vocabulary that actually doesn't mean much. It just gives us this sense of how we create a whole different world that the world we live in, something completely disconnected to ourselves, and call it science and try to reduce our lives to something that we can understand while we don't even understand this very behavior and our very processes. Everybody seems to be kind of clueless. I don't think Andrew's word choices are random and there are certainly a lot of proposal ambiguities and puns, but in the end I don't think the meaning of the scientific terms matter as much as the overall meaning that we are all trying to find out "the reason why" with really futile and even silly efforts. And at the same time life goes on independently of all that, and our famous scientist has to go home in the end of the day and there are bullies all around and people are getting screwed and the scientist is doing his best to understand all this mess, but in the end it's beyond all meiosis and all this scientificism is just a crutch.
I see the song quite differently than almost everybody here. Most people seem to think this song is about how "we are all basically alone" and how what we mistake for closeness, love, sex and all that is actually just a bunch of chemicals working together. I see the song as quite the opposite of that, though. Perhaps even a criticism of that kind of thinking. To me the song seems to deal with our inability to understand our lives and ourselves, and with how we are always pursuing these meanings through all the wrong methods.
It reminds me of the lyrics to Rocket Man when he says: "And all this science I don't understand It's just my job five days a week A rocket man, a rocket man"
Or Space Oddity with: "Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles, I'm feeling very still And I think my spaceship knows which way to go Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows Ground control to major Tom, your circuits dead, there's something wrong"
Space Oddity particularly is filled with a lot technical vocabulary that actually doesn't mean much. It just gives us this sense of how we create a whole different world that the world we live in, something completely disconnected to ourselves, and call it science and try to reduce our lives to something that we can understand while we don't even understand this very behavior and our very processes. Everybody seems to be kind of clueless. I don't think Andrew's word choices are random and there are certainly a lot of proposal ambiguities and puns, but in the end I don't think the meaning of the scientific terms matter as much as the overall meaning that we are all trying to find out "the reason why" with really futile and even silly efforts. And at the same time life goes on independently of all that, and our famous scientist has to go home in the end of the day and there are bullies all around and people are getting screwed and the scientist is doing his best to understand all this mess, but in the end it's beyond all meiosis and all this scientificism is just a crutch.