the north is to south what the clock is to time

a country doctor

Actually it's not.

the north is to south what black is to white/ or high tide to low tide <--- opposites


clock is to time what sails are to wind

but ed's one doesn't work
sorry

PJammin'

who's to argue with the doc? not me.

j0enewt0n

Anyone any idea what that line means anyway???

U-R

i think that's a really good line

my take on it is that it means you can't tell where you're going if you don't know where you've been.

so it doesn't mean the clock is the oposite of time, it means you can't tell the time without the clock and you can't tell where north is unless you know where south is, because it's all relative.

make sense?

soundgrunger

that does make sense U-R
thanks for shedding some light.

Pearl_Jam_Necklace

hey country doctor..it's good to see a post by you. i havent been here as much as id like to be,but i always enjoy reading your threads. nice to see ya are still here

a country doctor

Originally posted by Pearl_Jam_Necklace
hey country doctor..it's good to see a post by you. i havent been here as much as id like to be,but i always enjoy reading your threads. nice to see ya are still here

thanks , nice to hear that somebody likes my stuff

*the stuff of U-R*

wow, i guess you're damn right, at least your explanation really makes sense

if you see it from this point it's an unbelievable awesome line
personally I've never been good at lyrically stuff, but it's amazing to see how easy you can solve such an difficult line

TheSoundofThinAir

i just thought it was another way of saying, you can't have one without the other

JesusTheTerrorist

You use a clock as a way of telling time... and you can use south as a way of knowing where north is....

FinsburyParkCarrots

The clock can well be the opposite of time. Back in the 1840s the massive growth of the railways and the need for accordance to railway timetables in the UK ushered in the standardisation of a central, national clock-time, using GMT. Before then, many different regions kept to a vaguer "local" time based on when the sun rose and set. The clock represented and enforced a sense of time being a shared external reality of experience across the realm. Charles Dickens's "Dombey and Son" (1847-8) is obsessed with clocks and watches.

By the 1920s Modernist literature used all sorts of narrative techniques to demonstrate that the external "time" represented by clocks in the "real" world was vastly different from that experienced by the individual consciousness (mixed up with thought and memory). James Joyce's "Ulysses" (1922) is the sublime example of a novel detailing "a life in a day" of its protagonists, Leopold and Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus. And also, the working title of Virginia Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway" (1925) was "The Hours" (to which that recent book and movie of the same name alludes).

So, Ed's following a grand Modernist tradition in seeing time and clocks as polarised.

a country doctor

Hm...
if I understood everything correctly, what is not very realistic because my mothertongue isn't english and your text is quite , how do you say, refined/sophisticated (?), your explanation doesn't really make.

The meaning of "external" time to subjective time, is for me just a difference, whereas north and south are opposites.
It's a bit extreme to see subjective and external time as complete different things, even if it makes sense and the grand modernist did it, it's not that kind of think I usally think about.

I personally think that U-R's explanation is good, probably even correct; that you can't tell the time without a clock and that you can't tell where north is unless you know where south is, so that you don't know where U-R ( ), unless you know where you have been.

Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots
Stephen Dedalus

I am reading a book of Joyce, "the portrait of artist as a young man" (dunno wheter this is the title in english, I just translated it from german, if i remeber the title correctly). This book is also about Stephen!
I think I gotta read "Ulysses", seems to be an interessting book.


Thanks for your answer Finsbury!

FinsburyParkCarrots

Ah, but a Deconstructionist philosopher such as Derrida would argue that there are no such things as opposites in language, since meaning in any one word is unstable, and since the meaning of the word 'north' is relative to context and never absolute, then it can never have an absolute opposite. And interior and exterior notions of time are no more nor less opposites using this approach to language.



Right, I'll shut up now.

IamMine

Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots


Right, I'll shut up now.

That was the only thing I understood!!

I am not as smart as you are... so I'll go with U-R. That was pretty damn impressive interpretion! My husband and I love to discuss the meanings behind those lyrics and most of the time we disagree or just can't figure it out.

Obviously, it's my favorite song...and that line I could not get - up until now, thanks to you, U-R.

Are we allowed to discuss further with the I am Mine lyrics?

I just get goosebumps when I sign this line in sign language:

"I know I was born...and I know I'll die. The in-between is mine."

a country doctor

Originally posted by IamMINE

Are we allowed to discuss further with the I am Mine lyrics?

I just get goosebumps when I sign this line in sign language:

"I know I was born...and I know I'll die. The in-between is mine."

I actually don't understand what you are trying to say , because I don't know what "goosebumps" are, so I can't figure out the meaning of the wholesentence.

Are you interessted in our interpretation of this line?


@ FinsburyParkCarrots, well your point with not-existing opposites in language is interessting, but I don't think that it helps to find out the meaning of these I am Mine lyrics,
because it's also important to ask, wheter the author of these lyrics(ed) also minds about unrealistic, not-existing, abstract, sry I can't think of the word, stuff like oppoites in language.

I guess that he would never wonder about the "it" in a sentece like:" it rains" (I think Paul Auster wrote about this one in City of glas(?))

a country doctor

"i know i was born and i know that i'll die the in-between is mine"

my take on this one:
humans don't know what was before they were born and they don't know what will come after death, but if they don't belive in life before birth and after death, they can only use the short time between their birth and their death to live.

But I guess that is youite obvious

IamMine

Originally posted by a country doctor
I actually don't understand what you are trying to say , because I don't know what "goosebumps" are, so I can't figure out the meaning of the wholesentence.

Are you interessted in our interpretation of this line?

You don't know what goosebumps are?

It's those little bumps all over your body... Like somebody stratches a soft spot on your back or wherever... or something you see or hear really touches you....


English is not your first language, I take it?

chadeau

My interpritation is that you cannot determine which direction is south without first knowning North using a compass and you cannot tell time without having a clock (unless you can read the sun for time i guess heheh)