Theme
12:47am July 4, 2015

Songs I used to describe language comprehension problems and shutdown.

echoesfromnowhere:

So last time I posted these Beatles lyrics from the song “I’m Looking Through You” on the album Rubber Soul:

Your lips are moving
I cannot hear
Your voice is soothing
But the words aren’t clear

There’s also a set of Pink Floyd lyrics, from “Comfortably Numb” on The Wall, that I used in the exact same situations:

You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying

Both these lyrics are completely out of the context of the songs, but I’d use them for describing situations where my language processing had cut out, I was completely meaning-deaf and meaning-blind, and I generally had no idea what the meaning was of what anyone was saying, or even that what they were saying could have meaning.

That second set of lyrics were part of a larger set of lyrics, that (in one instance, it changes throughout the song) went like this:

There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying
When I was a child, I had a fever
My hands felt just like two balloons
Now I’ve got that feeling once again
I can’t explain, you would not understand
This is not how I am
I have become comfortably numb

So when it was part of that larger context, it became something I’d use to describe autistic shutdowns and other situations where the world seemed to be at the other end of a long tunnel, and nothing felt connected anymore.  Which sometimes involved shutdown of language comprehension too, but not always.