The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots While Bottle Waxes Pedantic

Today i think i'm going to be a very specific kind of annoying person, and pedantically dissect In The Morning of the Magicians. 

The book Wayne is referencing is a favorite among conspiracy theorists, new age weirdos, and occult leaning axis aficionados. It is a somewhat intentional experiment in cognitive dissonance, what with its prehistoric astronauts and Lovecraftian similarities. That's not really important, we're interested in defeating the pink robots. As he describes it, the song is a deep consideration of love and hate: if you feel loved then you are loved, but where is the proof? 

There are a couple really tricky ideas in the lyrics (and my wink wink nudge nudge friends will no doubt intuit that it's the same kind of nuance i think leads everyone to misunderstand Marx) that we need to put under the microscope. First thing's first, we have to unpack all the contractions. 

"In the morning i'd awake, and i couldn't remember" 

Couldn't is easy, it's "could not." "I'd" is trickier, we need a deep dive into the grammar pool. Could, would, had, should, did, i think that's all the possibilities. Then we need to decide if "calculations" needs an apostrophe, and if error is a verb or a noun, and the truly mind bending rhetorical twist that tells us love and hate very much matter but we don't know why. 

But back to "i'd." What happens when we put each one in there? 

"I could awake" - grammatically lovely, but it puts the whole song in a conditional future context which we may or may not want to do. 

"I would awake" - still conditional, but without a clear distinction of tense. 

"I had awake" - no, that's just silly. 

"I should awake" - another future conditional, but with the added implication of external expectation, i.e. he is compelled to awake in a state of not remembering. That's pretty iffy if you ask me. 

"I did awake" - ooh, a rhetorical past tense. Past tense for the narrator. It's a fact, he awoke that one time. 

I don't think it makes much difference if we unpack it as "i would" or "i did," neither skews the rest of the song in some weird direction. I suppose it should go without saying that "i" is a magician, whatever that might entail for you, but i warned you i was being pedantic, so of course i said it. 

WC: And i could not remember. 

B: Remember what? 

WC: what is love and what is hate. 

B: ok, gotcha. You woke up and you couldn't remember what the difference between love and hate actually is. 

WC: the calculations error. 

B: hold up. Are love and hate the resulting error of some calculation? Are you using "error" as a verb, saying "error" when you mean "err?" Or, is it like a hyphenated double predicate nominative; love and hate are the calculations-error. 

WC: .... 

B: kay, thanks for clearing THAT up. 

WC: what is love and what is hate, and why does it matter? 

B: ok, ok, i smell what you're saying. This is a really tough conceptual contraction. 

We have to reach for our old friend "structural problem solving," and think backward. Love and hate very much do matter, but you can't remember why because you don't really understand the tangible difference between the two. Yeah, that's one of those weird communication failures where you totally hate somebody, but they think you love them, and all the rest of the permutations. If you feel loved, then you are loved, but you could be completely mistaken. 

WC: is to love just a waste? 

B: that tastes like a rhetorical question. 

WC: how can it matter? 

B: yeah, that's a tough one. How can the distinction between love and hate be important if we can totally misinterpret your hate as love and vice versa? Bad news, Wayne, there's no actual answer to that question. It's what we call an irreducible binary opposition. Collapse that puppy and we end up in an alternate universe with feet for ears and our internal organs in a suitcase we have to carry around with us everywhere. 

WC: as the dawn began to break, i had to surrender.... 

B: past tense for you, then. I had my suspicions. 

WC: the universe will have its way, too powerful to master. 

B: i've always said so. Some things just are the way they are. Can't live with 'em, can't send 'em to boarding school. Best you can do is take it one relationship at a time and be as honest as possible. 

WC: oh-oh-oh-what is love... 

B: stuck in the end loop there, huh? Ok, look, if one more robot is learning to be something more than a machine, then you have to build in some fuzzy logic. I call it binary flipping, and it's a doozy of confusionment. I find it helps if you explain that it feels like you want me to be horrible, and i just can't do that. Sometimes it doesn't and you just have to cry it all out until it passes. 

I'm kind of the opposite of a motivational speaker, so if it's not going in a direction you think is "improving," you might want to talk to your doctor or see a professional therapist. Me, i'm the kind of guy who wakes up in the middle of the night with a leg cramp and starts kneading my calf until it relaxes. You're already in excruciating pain, it's not like you can make it actually hurt MORE at the moment. Maybe call off the evil robots, or reprogram them not to destroy us? I don't know, you're the one who can't remember the difference, remember? If failing is objectively less worse than succeeding, maybe that's the logical way to go. But again, i'm not the boss of anyone, so grains of salt and stuff. Buck up, buttercup. A wise Jane of the Siberry Janes once told me "it can't rain all the time." 

Well, that was fun (for me because i'm weird). Look for the sequel, How To Read Marx Like A Human Not A Tool, wherever future things i write appear after i write them. Should be at least as fun as differentiating contractions, or my name isn't Whatis Wrongwithyou Jones (most people just accept it and call me Bottle).