The Caves of Altamira - Steely Dan - What the Lyrics mean to me
I got into Physics to escape the irrational world of Man. In college, I modeled myself after Einstein, as my inspiration, a man who spent 99% of his time thinking about the world and analyzing it. Within this context, I feel huge kinship with Steely Dan:
"I recall when I was small
How I spent my days alone
The busy world was not for me
So I went and found my own
I would climb the garden wall
With a candle in my hand."
He leaves the world of men to go spelunking, to lose himself in the artifacts of an ancient world 20,000 years old.
"I'd hide inside a hall of rock and sand
On the stone an ancient hand
In a faded yellow-green
Made alive a worldly wonder
Often told but never seen."
There, inside the caves, he hides in the dark with his candle, where the ancient people and their lives come alive to him.
"Now and ever bound to labor
On the sea and in the sky
Every man and beast appeared
A friend as real as I."
The cave drawing, he is sure, will always be there for him, as escape from the outside world of "busy" people. Seeing all the drawings and artifacts are made real for him, like watching a movie of these ancient people. And they are his friends. The world in the cave is more real to him than the outside world.
"Before the fall when they wrote it on the wall
When there wasn't even any Hollywood
They heard the call
And they wrote it on the wall
For you and me we understood."
The chorus displays his awe and wonder at the lives of these people and how they recorded it for us to see and know that they were alive and lived real lives.
"Can it be this sad design
Could be the very same
A wooly man without a face
And a beast without a name."
And he wonders if he is actually looking at a sorrowful rendering of God, a bearded being with no name (just "God.'')
"Nothin' here but history
Can you see what has been done
Memory rush over me
Now I step into the sun."
My own personal interpretation of this is that the history he is witnessing on the cave walls has given him an alternate world to inhabit, to lose himself in. The history is now his life. It is HIS memories. And without even leaving the cave and his candle, he steps into the world and now lives in the sunshine of an alternate reality.
At this scale, it is easier to see that the trees are not under the influence of "artificial" gravity. It is real.
🌎🌐
The gravitational field around each blade of grass and tree is the same as the field around each blade of grass and tree on the surface of Earth.
Notice that if you drive on a road perpendicular to the cylinder axis, you will increase gravity driving one way and decrease it driving the other. If you drive opposite to the spin and at the radial speed, your gravitational field turns Minkowskian, and you are in a "free fall" or inertial coordinate system. That is, you and the car become "weightless."
That means this: The value of a gravity field can go from a surface-of-a-planet value to a free-fall value by a coordinate transformation among systems that are moving at a constant velocity with respect to each other.
At any instant of time, a car moving at the radial speed is in a Minkowski field, and a system at rest on the cylinder is in a planet-surface field. A ...
"Aja" is the title track of Steely Dan's 1977 album, and its meaning has been a subject of interpretation rather than a straightforward explanation from the band themselves, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who were known for their cryptic and layered lyrics. The song doesn’t tell a linear story but evokes a mood and imagery that fans and critics have analyzed over the years.
The word "Aja" is often speculated to refer to a person, place, or concept. One popular theory ties it to the name "Aja," which Becker and Fagen reportedly chose after learning of a Korean woman named Aja who married a friend of theirs. This fits Steely Dan’s tendency to draw inspiration from real-life fragments and transform them into something abstract. The lyrics—"Up on the hill / People never stare / They just don’t care / Chinese music under banyan trees"—suggest an exotic, serene escape, possibly a romanticized or imagined refuge from the complexities of modern life.
Musically and lyrically, "Aja" ...
"Deacon Blues" by Steely Dan, released in 1977 on their album Aja, is a richly layered song that invites multiple interpretations, blending the band’s signature irony, cynicism, and romanticism. Written by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, the lyrics follow a narrator who seems to embrace a life of reckless abandon, yearning for a kind of mythic, self-destructive freedom often associated with jazz musicians or countercultural figures. Let’s break it down:
The title "Deacon Blues" itself is intriguing. It’s been suggested that it references football—the "Deacon" could nod to Wake Forest University’s Demon Deacons, a team whose colors are black and gold, though Fagen and Becker have said it’s more about vibe than a literal connection. "Blues" ties it to the musical genre, evoking a sense of soulful melancholy. In a 2003 interview, Fagen described the song as being about "a broken dream of a broken man living a broken life," but delivered with a sardonic twist typical of Steely Dan’s ...
