To be found... 3

From Opel: Immersion Set for Distant Shores
Jump to navigationJump to search

White2.jpg
Go to cover page
Go to i. Introducion
Go to ii. The title
Go to iii. The totem
Go to iv. The far distant shore
Go to v. Driftwood
Go to vi. Dry tears
Go to vii. A circle of grey
Go to viii. To be found…
Go to ix. Information pack

Go to previous page

page 83

Go to next page

Hand-right2.jpg

From this last interpretation we could guess that Syd had been talking about these topics with Roger Waters, who in 1967 wrote the line "Over the mountain watching the watcher", one of the few lines of "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun" not directly taken from a translation of Chinese poetry: a technique already used by Syd for "Chapter 24". In that song Waters also wrote a line with "lessons of giving" which had something to do with love, and could have something to do with what Syd "is giving" in "Opel", but we find that another line by Roger Waters coincidentally expresses, more clearly than in Set the Controls, how volatile the possible answers to certain questions are, like the question about who is being addressed in "Opel" when Syd didn't tell anyone:

And no one called us to the land
And no one knows the where’s or why’s

— Pink Floyd, "Echoes"

Personally, I prefer to think that the person Syd is trying to find is from a place "to be found", since we can't find it in any research, but it allows us to read and reread Syd's lyrics in a Sisyphean way, similar to Camus' suggestion about Kafka:

The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread. His endings, or his absence of endings, suggest explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem justified, require that the story be reread from another point of view.

— Albert Camus, "Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka"


sources →
Pink Floyd. "Echoes." Meddle. Written by Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason, and David Gilmour. Harvest Records, 1971. LP. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThWiS8tW1Uo
Camus, Albert. "Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka." The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O'Brien. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. 124. Print. http://moe.machighway.com/~cliffor1/Site/HopeAbsurd.html