Tantobourne

Ok. I will try my damndest to keep this brief (hah).

Take a puzzle box and empty it out onto a table. Spread the pieces around and perform the mundane task of flipping the fricking pieces over......

....
....
finally you flip the last piece.

Now before you is this broken sea of colour and lines. You have a picture in your mind of what the ultimate goal is. Your nirvana is completing the picture that is on the cover of the box. Your not as lost as you think. Thankfully, someone was kind enough to leave you a guide.

So where do you start?

I normally start with the border; the "picture frame" in a sense and then work inwards.

The going is slow but as your begin to fill in the borders the picture starts to take cohesion. You are alert to shape and color and your hand instinctively and intuitivly begins to find the next piece. Putting the pieces back together. Filling the hole.

This is a puzzle that you won't push away. I know, those that have played with puzzles have all too soon swept it back into the box and tossed it, dejected, into the back corner of some dusty recesss of your home. No. This is your life. You are drawn into completing this puzzle and to meet your will with the finished product, that nirvana I mentioned earlier: call it god, call it the big picture, so long and thanks for all the fish.

And sometimes, in the process of reconstructing this puzzle you find yourself a little frustrated and pissed. You manage to push past the frustration and find the next piece with some satisfaction. Then there's times where you wonder why your even doing this at all. Where you just want to quit and are weary but have the obsession to see it through.

What? What's that you said? "What the fuck does this have to do with the Philosopher's stone?" and "What the fuck does this have to do with the damn video?"

Well....absolutely nothing. Perhaps.

I alluded to the frame of the puzzle because of the picture frame in the video. The one that separated the cold santizied world from the lush, rich forest of nature and 'real life', that which lies beyond perception of humanity. The larger cycles.

And the philosopher's stone? I am thinking of the leaf. I am thinking of our individual spiritual journeys and how we ever strive to transform all that is base within us into the golden wealth of our wildest dreams. To complete the puzzle. To throw open that last earthly gate of our mortal body, the third eye, and keep on spiralling up and out. The stone is always there, waiting for us. It is only found we we are ready to find it; when we have the want to seek it out.

...And that's all I have to say about that. My interpretation.

edit: *laughs* I pretty near associated the whole album to the whitebread, 1960s, buzzcut, freckles & ponytail passtime of puzzles. I suppose that isn't really doing Tool any justice to know people are doing this shit behind their back. Ah, well.