Strange Loop

Strange Loop (Exile in Guyville) has never been one of my favorites... I figure it's about someone leaving someone for someone else, looking for more, finding less, then returning, again. Strangely, this waywardness is attractive to the other.

But it does have interesting connotations. The actual term, strange loop, comes from Douglas Hofstadter's 1980 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Godel, Escher, Bach, where he uses it to explain some really complicated shit. It's a really great book. Put simply, the strange loop describes a "tangled hierarchy" where, despite steady progress, a process or system arrives at its starting position. He uses the paintings of M.C. Escher as the visual examples (the always ascending / descending staircase, for instance). Some of Bach's music apparently does the same thing, rising through the scales, or octaves or whatever, always increasing, yet actually looping. Godel's part is much harder to describe, talking about inconsistent formal systems, blah blah bah, but it can be reasonably understood by considering the following, non-understandable sentence:

"This statement is not true."

Which is of course, both true and false, flip-flopping endlessly, and is, formally, undecidable. The problem is that the statement refers to itself. It's a true example of a false assertion, in a single sentence. Get it?

I suppose it's possible that Liz read Godel, Escher, Bach, understood its ironic "always going, yet always coming" theme, and mapped the idea to how relationships work. I wouldn't be surprised. She's pretty fucking smart.