Erased by Grenga Ma

This song is about some person, somewhere who has been “erased”; or, at least he thinks he might have been erased.

Erasure refers to Dr. Ewen Cameron’s dream of correcting schizophrenia by erasing existing memories and reprogramming the mind of the patient. The CIA found this interesting and hired him to work on project MKULTRA in the 50s and 60s (this work later became the basis for the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual). Cameron was keen on electroshock therapy and hallucinatory drugs. His patients (i.e. victims) seldom made it through intact. Those that did were forever distorted — unsure of themselves, their surroundings, their memories. Dr. Ewen Cameron was a disturbed man.

Blanken

I’ve managed to invent a word for this song: blanken. I didn’t realize this wasn’t a real word until my spell checker said, “WTF? Do you mean blacken?”. After checking dictionary.com, I opened up my hard copy of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition, 1995) and sure enough, no record of such a word exists. So as I flex my poetic license muscles, I present to you a definition:

Blanken: verb (used with object): To make blank. To whiten.

Now you can fully understand the following lyrics!

In the back of your mind there is something hiding from before
But it's not coming through your brain is holding back the sore
Need an electrical boost, a trigger or two, to unfurl the fabric of thought
Psycho cognitive pangs and electrical spans of synaptic inhibitors wrought

It’s not plain, the pain, or new
You’re insane to think it can’t happen to you

When perception is lost the feelings drown in a sea of erase
You can’t tell that you’re bound, or on the ground, or if you're floating in outer space
So you’re feeling detached, you don’t have a clue, is this life even yours to pursue?
There’s that feeling inside, you cannot survive, if you can’t pull apart the glue

It’s not plain, the pain, or new
You’re insane to think it can’t happen to you

If you’re dimly aware that there’s something buried deep inside
You’ve got a scattered sense, although intense, you try so hard to deny
Have a memory shard, a déjà vu, did they try to write you anew?
Who could be they, that took you away, to blanken your slate through and through

It’s not plain, the pain, or new
You’re insane to think it can’t happen to you

If you were disappeared then events may someday resolve
Cause on some fateful day, with your blankness at bay, a clue to your past may evolve
But what does it mean, these delusional dreams, squeeze you empty of all of your might
Is there nothing to do, but add some more glue, and keep your psycho life under blight?

It’s not plain, the pain, or new
You’re insane to think it can’t happen to you

Don says:

October 14th, 2009 at 9:11 pm

Wow, this is a great song. Not what one would expect based on the subject of the song. This flows very well and the guitars are mesmerizing and very relaxing. Absolutely amazing!