a philosophical discussion on the nature and meaning of — wait for it — meaning

Apart from the eleven complete songs that channeled in the first phase, there were several stubs of what seemed to be songs. Most were just a few lyrics with no sense of melody. They had been written down at the time and I had kept those documents across the years, and reread them now and then.

About the time Teddy bear 1.0 was resurrecting itself as a new/old asynchronous collaboration in late 2016, the song If I Could Tell You by Yanni was tingling my spidey song sense. I had another tingle happening about the same time — lyrics from one of the longer stubs.

when i look into the future
and i see what will come to pass
and when i look into the past
and see what i've survived through

then i have to ask is there meaning?
is there meaning?
and who decides that?
and why?

The tingles superimposed and a new asynchronous collaboration resulted.

It was the 24th karosong to start channeling, the 9th with music by Yanni, and the first but not the last 1.0 stub to emerge from its long sleep.

The stub had three verses but no chorus per se and — even though they were written more than a quarter century before — their lyrics simply slipped into the first three verses of If I Could Tell You like they'd been written together.

when i look into the future
and i see what will come to pass
and when i look into the past
and see what i've survived through

then i have to ask
is there meaning? is there meaning?
and who decides that?
and why?

and when i look into my soul
and see the striving there existing
and when i look into your eyes
and see the loving there embodied

then i have to ask
is there meaning? is there meaning?
and who decides that?
and why?

and when i gaze into the sky
and see eternity beckon
or when i gaze into the sea and
hear eternity calling

then i have to ask
is there meaning? is there meaning?
and who decides that?
and why?

It was one of the more out-of-the-ordinary karosong experiences, and to me another sign the karo energies do not operate inside our conception of linear time. It begged the chicken and egg question even more than the 2.0 reversions had. And the even deeper questions — Where and how do these asynchronous collaborations originate?

(No, I still don't have complete answers to that mystery, even after all these years, all these songs. I doubt that I ever will.)

In any case, I ran out of stub lyrics before Yanni ran out of music — three or four or maybe five verses before. I wasn't certain how many verses because I had hit the idiot musant wall; my inability to differentiate within certain kinds of music, especially when there's no obvious chorus to bookmark the structure.

In my professional writing work, I had become adept at creating document templates for project plans, television scripts, and web pages like this. So I developed a prestructured song lyrics template to help me identify the verses and choruses as I listened to the async track. That template became the standard for all future karosongs, and would be started when a song first named itself.

The template helped me work out there were an additional three verses in If I Could Tell You but it couldn't tell me what their content should be. To this point the lyrics had a strong start but no conclusion, no denouement, no apparent point. I knew there had to be at least one new verse, maybe three, but nothing came for weeks.

Eventually, just one verse channeled, but it was enough to complete the song lyrically and provide the missing denouement.

there's many ways said just what's the meaning?
from a giant eagle devouring our lived experience
to a meaningless 'life happens then we pass into nothing'

what i say is the meaning is simply to be human
and experience what that means — good and bad
as it will be

but to be human is to ask
and never stop asking

is there meaning is there meaning?
and who decides that?
and why?

But that still left two verses as instrumental only, which felt musically okay, but I wasn't certain if they came before or after the fourth verse. I settled on the instrumentals coming before the final verse at the time was never absolutely certain.