Cowboy Gregori

Lyrics

(1)

You heard about unseen knowledge
Now you're gonna hear the facts
And the title it was "Cowboy George"
And dreams have died in the golden age
And the bankers and unseen footage

Dreams have died in the golden age
With bankers and unseen footage

They had no unseen... seen knowledge

You've heard about unseen footage
And all the squares did take umbrage
Because they had no unseen knowledge
With bankers and unseen footage
And they hear it's really cool
Because they had no unseen knowledge

I will not do what
I've been doing what people say
They weren't sold anyway

Indian summer, it never came
And anaesthetic didn't work anyway
Ah-any other - for doing what people say
And what I was told
Anyway
Unseen knowledge
All chances will never
Over the hill

You've heard about unseen footage
I told you 'bout unseen knowledge
Turns out it was a pack of shit
Unseen knowledge and unseen facts

Notes

1. This is a companion piece to "Cowboy George," with which it shares key lyrics. Here we learn that the unsees knowledge referred to in both songs may in fact be a "pack of shit." Despite the lyrical commonalities, the song's do not sound alike musically.

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Comments (3)

dannyno
  • 1. dannyno | 22/04/2017
"unseen knowledge"

There's an Islamic concept, called "Al-Ghaib", sometimes translated as "unseen knowledge", which means something that is known only to Allah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ghaib
Doc
  • 2. Doc | 21/04/2019
Reminds me of Glass Onion by the Beatles where it's just a rehash/repeat of other lyrics on the album.
david rathbone
  • 3. david rathbone (link) | 04/11/2023
https://youtu.be/42EfHW5npko?t=777

As well as Al-Ghaib, there's also a Greek tradition called "Negative Theology" which maintains that human conceptions of divinity are all inadequate, so we can only indicate divinity negatively, as an "unknown knowing and unseen seeing.". It began in 400 AD when some monks wrote a collection of manuscripts then claimed to haved found them, and that they had been written by the Dionysus that Paul converts in the Agora in Athens after hearing him preach about "the unknown God" in Acts 17:34.

"Into the dark beyond all light
We paray to come,
Through not seeing and not knowing,
to see and to know
That beyond sight and knowledge
Itself: neither seeing nor knowing
For by the denial of all that is
one sees, knows, and beyond-beingly hymns
the beyond being." (Psuedo Dionysus "The Mystical Theology" Chapter 2.)

Nicholas of Cusa wrote a book in this tradition called "Of Learned Ignorance" in 1440 AD, in which he explains how "in theology negative propositions are true and affirmative ones are inadequate" (p.61) -- his doctrines of "unknown knowing," "learned ignorance," and "unknown learning."

This kind of mysticism says that we are mute when it comes to expressing our experience of divinity, and the attempt to put that experience into words leads to contradictions ("unseen seen knowledge") and denunciations of one's own utterances ("a pack of shit") -- a suspicion of language and it's ability to delude us.

Perhaps this is one reason why "Cowboy Gregori" and "Cowboy George" are in parallel in this wierd way: to show how when we speak of mysteries we stammer: when we try to say one thing, two things come out; we can say something, but we can't help also saying it's opposite as well. We can't really say what it going on with divinity, we can only show it.

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