David Comes to Life
"What is Wilsim Publogy?
Wilsim Publogy was an offshoot of Romanian Manicheanism, and the whole Gnosticism trip. It sees cosmology in the same way as the Gnostics, in that the universe, or the being, or whatever, is split into these two forces, "light" and "dark", or what have you, but differs in that Publogy doesn't see the forces as neccesarily opposite, but the same. It's more into dualism, more along the lines of Vedantic Hinduism, who thought in terms of the "non duality of duality". The whole Kabbalist "two poles" idea where the opposing forces are actually just different expressions of the same thing. We tried to be influenced by this when we were making Hidden World, and it shows up in songs like Triumph of Life, and Two Snakes and was the inspiration for the cover art. Actually, that's another way Mircae comes back in, the quote we used from him in the record; "to be no longer conditions by a pair of opposites results in absolute freedom". Especially in the world now where you've got your two political ideas, everyone has these strong feelings of wrong and right - we're living in an age where the multitude has been slashed into these singular opposites where life is a series of choices between two opposites, and there are really only two ways of existing, you know "right" or "left". It's important I think to try and pull the crate back open, try to release these other ways of existing. And to do that we try to just take away the divisions and the opposites and just shine through Wilsim Publogy."
"Well its the Wilsim Publogy trip again - we just feel the constant hum of unification throughout the cosmos. That piece ("Looking for Life") is about seeing the cosmos as one massive conduit for creating life. One of the quantum realities deals with the idea that maybe when you turn your back there's nothing behind it, that the physical reality we're surrounded by is manifested inside our heads, rather than outside it. So if there is no human consciousness, who manifests the universe? It's this nice one-sided romanticized view we decided
to run with - there is a picture by Kubin we used on the Year of the Dog 12" that shows satan ejaculating humanity onto the earth, and it's sort of the same view - the 14 billion years of space was the preparation for the consciousness that would be able to bask in the glory. That text is trying to follow the evolution of life through time and into the future. We like to see the balance in the cosmos as just that, a cradle for life. How there is the pattern of self-replication, at every level, that manage this constant reclycing of materials to keep pushing life and existence into the future."
"The theme for Year of the Pig is exploitation and violence against women, using prostitution as a main symbol. We recorded this while the Robert Pickton trial is picking up here in Canada - Pickton is a farmer from British Columbia who has been charged with the murder of 26 prostitutes from one of the poorest districts in Canada. We feel that violence against women, represented here by the issue of prostitutes rights in particular, is an issue that is still taboo, and rights for sex workers is an issue that people are still afraid to look at head on, and deal with in a meaningfull way. Sexism exists everywhere and as we've seen in the Pickton case, it can far too easily manifest as abuse, rape and murder shut out from the public eye. This violence is more easily accomodated when working prostitutes aren't protected by the full scope of the law in their workplaces, and when their role exists outside of the purview of our collective morality. In this way, we also view violence against prostitutes as symptomatic of our society's tendency to try and launder our collective guilt and shame through a third party, in this case prostitutes. They exist as a special part of our culture where we can lash out at them, of our own shame and guilt with sexual issues of shame and possession, and blame and exploit them, instead of dealing with those issues ourselves. Sexism and violence against women exist, and as long as there are classes of society that we keep beneath our collective moral societal obligations, those classes will bear the full brunt of the hatred and fear we can dish out. We also with to state that "Year of the Pig" is not the attempt to condemn Robert Pickton, or any other individual specifically for any specific crime - the scope of these issues are broader than isolated incidents. The habitual compartmentalization of these sorts of crimes is part of the problem - we wish to state that sexism and violence persist not simply due to the actions of a few deviant criminals, but because as a whole we refuse to properly deal with these issues."