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palms
03-02-2006, 01:59 AM
Disposition

“Mention this to me
Mention something, mention anything
…and watch the weather change”

I think this song is about how ‘unstable’ our perception of reality is at any one given moment. How just a small arbitrary event can completely change the landscape of your mind (sorry that sounds so lame, I think of it like that because I think of “weather changing” not as the weather of the world, but the ‘weather’ (emotions, feelings, beliefs etc) of an individual’s personal world).

For example, after listening to ‘faaip de oiad’ you’re suddenly presented with the possibility of a behind-the-scenes world conspiracy. This would be a totally different way of viewing the world, and everything you know about world events has the potential to now be taken in a sinister light. Nothing has really changed, you havn’t been given any new facts, you’ve just been shown a different way of perceiving what you already knew. So just given the facts that you know about world events, you don’t really have any reason to believe in either view (the conspiracy theory or whatever you previously thought) over the other. But you could go either way, and I’m sure that sometimes in my life my view of the world changes in situations similar to this.

Another example may be that you really like a girl and although yesterday she seemed really distant, today she smiles at you etc. Yesterday you might have felt that life sucked, was unfair, that this girl didn’t like you, but today everything is great and you’re sure she likes you. Nothing has really changed, she probably thinks the same about you today as she thought yesterday, and you know this, but you can’t help but believe deep down something different than what you believed deep down yesterday.
Obviously you could also describe this story as just you feeling different because you’d never considered that she might like you until today (or in many other ways), but this is also just different ways of perceiving the same ‘facts’. I might currently think that what I believe to be the truth changes day-to-day or month-to-month, but next time I read this I will probably think that this is a load of crap. And I will always truly believe what I believe in each moment, it’s not like they are just moods with a normal mood to go back to, there is no objective truth, there is just what you believe to be the truth at that moment. And what you believe to be the truth at some particular moment can be influenced and changed by anything (i.e. the meaning you construct out of all these random events is entirely dependent upon the random events, so is itself arbitrary). And I think the point of this song near the end of the album is to put what has been said previously in the album into some perspective, and then ‘reflection’ is like his final view of reality, given what has been said in ‘disposition’.

Any thoughts on this interpretation?

Crucify the Ego
03-09-2006, 10:13 AM
Great interpretation, you explained your thoughts well. A glaring omission from your explanation, however, was how the title of the song fits in.

In philosophy, physiology, and psychology, a disposition is a habit, a preparation, a state of readiness, or a tendency to act in a specified way.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition"

I think that this definition ties in pretty well with your original post.