Flagellationist
This song is about a man who finds a means of escape through self-mutilation. Similar to how religious zealots physically whip themselves as a means of moral correction, the “flagellationist” narrator in this song uses self-mutilation as a means to justify his own conscious experience. A central theme of this song, as well as many other Lord Gorgeous songs is that once you have anointed yourself as “moral” in your own mind, you divorce yourself significantly from the rest of society. Morality is relative. Just as you need to be free with respect to X in order to be free, in order to feel moral you must be moral with respect to something outside yourself. The very notion of morality suggests that there is a overwhelming presence of immorality. The narrator of this song confirms his moral code by hurting himself, by endure self-inflicted pain. We see this in our everyday lives all of the time. People put themselves on a pedestal by moving through hardships and pain, whether it’s exercise, dieting, abstinence, or simply working hard. The endurance of pain seems to align with the confirmation of moral sanctity. Of course, the narrator in this song is a exaggerated, hyperbolic example of this near-universal phenomenon. He is in fact, an insane personal as is illustrated by the opening line “In my head, there’s too much whispering”. The “tell my baby I’m far from home” refrain is supposed to suggest that he’s reached some sort of enlightenment that is distanced from “home” or normality. He claims that he finds “it hard to speak to these pigs in my cage, tying chains into figure-eights”. He’s divorced from the immoral gentry of society, the “pigs” as he deems them. They have no common ground, yet they both inhabit the same world or in his mind they share a “cage”. The “chains into figure eights” is alluding to the concept of eternal imprisonment. He’s a moral soul stuck in this rotting physical plane. “Moment to moment the ceaseless involvement with cowards with nothing to say”, once again he’s stuck with all of these immoral members of society and has to deal with them on a regular basis. “I want to escape”, self-explanatory. “Pulled six nails and counting, I want to escape”, he’s pulled six out of ten finger nails out of his hands in an attempt to find escapism through self-mutilation. The narrator goes onto say that “pain, it’s my pain, you can’t take that from me, it’s too sacred and I don’t see any other way to view the face of the divine”. This line essentially sums up the point of view of the narrator. He sees physical pain as a sacred means of becoming closer to God. The repeated lines at the end “all I know is all alone, I’m so remorseful” suggests that the root cause of his unhealthy psychological state is a lack of fulfillment that he experienced trying to live a normal life. This could have been trauma or his own personal failures, but whatever it was it caused him to lead an unhealthy, painful existence.