Today we need to talk about Pink Floyd’s debut album The Pipers at the Gates of Dawn and interrogate our misinterpretation of the structure of the individual self. Or is this just an excuse to populate space and time with brazen, nonsensical claims about my favourite band’s debut album? One can’t be sure either way.
“I can barely define the shape of this moment in time”
Final Cut, Pink Floyd
Our socially sanctioned cult of the fixed individual self is a performative one, as defiantly indulgent as it is perplexing. This paradigm thrives on cultivating an illusion of the fixed identity as resistance to the clarion call of dilution and oblivion. For what could be more unnerving than the possibility of the center of one’s psychosomatic gravity being untethered, permanently unmoored? The cultivation of a fixed self is a rampart against this troubling fate.
But there is a middle way between the insistence on a fixed, unyielding self and the threat of the mortality of the spirit. The acknowledgement that our mythology of the self is, at heart, unreflected in the nuances of the human experience. We are ultimately fragmented beings. The dominant culture would have us resign ourselves to quietly acknowledging the fractures, stoic and resistant against abiding by them. We are encouraged to revolt against the amorphous forms our desires and impulses take and to anchor ourselves on the legend of a fixed identity.
What happens when we surrender our attachment to the illusion of the fixed identity? The Piper at the Gates of Dawn invites us to reflect upon this possibility, providing a visual map of the fluid self. Here one self is overlaid over another, reflecting the kaleidoscopic merging of internal self with the boundaries of fluid social identity. The dizzying blend allows us to chart the ways in which the self intermingles with its surroundings. The fluid self is in essence a bibliography, a sufficient, but never complete, collection of different references and citations.
We remain just as intangible and ethereal to ourselves. Our experiences are constantly beckoning us to spawn new responses, embolden certain tendencies, and abandon worn-out attachments. We are being sculpted into new forms, populating our lives with shadow editions of our base identity.
The album cover was designed to mimic the spatial and temporal breakdowns encountered by the perceiving self during an LSD trip. The title takes its name from the 1908 novel The Wind in the Willows, one of founding member Syd Barrett’s favorite books. Shiny on You Crazy Diamonds and allow yourself to encounter the specters that haunt the quaint illusion of your fixed little life.
