¤ milky moon ¤

Steve wrote:By the way - don't google the word 'debride' - the images are shocking. By analogy with the word 'bride'. I had assumed it just meant something like 'uncouple'. However, it seems (I had to look at my OED, rather than the computer screen!) it is derived from 'bridle', and originally meant the surgical removal of any constriction (eg necrotic tissue) around an organ or pussy wound, that prevented it from functioning properly or discharging the pus. More recently, it has come to include the removal of any foreign bodies, such as dirt, from a wound. I'm a little confused as to how that word is working in this particular lyric though.

I remember getting transparencies back with holiday photos when I was a small child, but I never knew that's what they were called or what they were for! Thanks for the explanation - that's a very plausible theory! Is that a commonly used model? Do you know where it's taken from?

If you want to look up a word online, use Wiktionary. You can add it as a search engine on most browsers, too.

I actually had those exact transparency slides in mind when I read this lyric for the first time! I think it makes sense with meaning only 'right here', a photograph is still a depiction of a specific place and exists in the now and in a specific location regardless of when it was taken. Like the suspension of the Golden Gate--
It's very visual to me, but how I imagine it functions in the context of the song is the realisation that over time it can be relieving to 'shed' or 'debride' past experiences by keeping going and looking forward: 'travelling light.' and so, like looking through a stack of old photographs and coming to terms with the past by discarding them one by one you can allay the weight of the past.

My goodness Under a CPell & Jordan~ now I do feel old! Slides were the go to method of keeping photographs for many people, until - well it seems so recent that its hard to believe there's a whole generation who now have forgotten this technology as completely as the slide-rule was dumped from the classroom as soon as electronic calculators emerged!

I've not heard the exact expression (stack of slides) used for this purpose, but the analogy of a set of still photos to demonstrate motion in time is (or was, when I was at school) commonly used to explain the concept. Its certainly what I first thought of when I read the lyric.

Incidentally (but not completely unrelat fly), here's another anecdote from my physics lessons:
To demonstrate how an object picks up speed when sliding downhill, set up an inclined plank, and place a toy car at the top of it. Attach a long, narrow strip of paper to the car, and thread it through a little machine that prints a single dot on the tape every tenth of a second. Start the machine, and let the car go. As it moves off, it pulls the paper through the machine, faster and faster as it accelerates, so that, once it has stopped, you can see a series of dots which show far it travelled every tenth of a second.
The machine is called a ticker. And the paper ... well, you can guess what that's called. Quite why it gets thrown out of skyscrapers when famous people are in town, I can't be sure!

From the Paste Interview:

Paste: I’ve often wondered too about the instances when you double or triple your voice and make it a chorus of Joanna Newsoms, which you do a lot on this album. Is that because you can’t find the right voice, or the right person who gets what you’re going for?
Newsom: No, it was a choice for this record. I’ve had other people sing harmonies on records in the past. But one of the sort of sci-fi notions on this record is the idea of traveling sideways through time, colonizing various iterations of the multiverse in which human life never evolved to exist in the first place, having that be a form of population control. In “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne,” there’s this sort of horror movie sting that happens at the end, where a different version of Earth evolved to develop the exact same set of technological advances and basically, an iteration of Earth occurred where all of the conditions were exactly the same, and so it’s basically a copy, and they’re coming over to colonize in reverse, and this idea of doubling, so that’s sort of the horror/sci-fi version of doubling and there’s constant references to the doubling of the self and the halving of the self, the binary of the self throughout the record, so it seems to be the most sensible move to have myself be doubled and copied over and over again, singing harmonies, rather than bringing in another person.

I've always interpreted the New Highland Light Infantry to be an alternate universe version of the 101st Lightborne Elite. She seems to confirms this in the Paste interview.