ABSTRACT
'Brain Damage' and 'Eclipse' are the last two tracks on The Dark Side of the Moon. Since Revolver established the principle of the 'final cut', as it were, as the signpost position on an album, pointing to possibilities beyond the world we currently inhabit, the final track on a rock album has borne or been expected to bear the added burden of an expectation of significance. This chapter traces how the search for corrective images of the kind, seeking harmony and empathy, have been both goal and driving force in the work of Pink Floyd. It explores how this urge to go forward and the compulsion to look back, drawing in both cases upon a mythologized past, both unified and fragmented the group. One of the virtues and difficulties in writing about individual cuts from The Dark Side of the Moon is that it is such a powerful and coherent whole that to isolate elements might be said to reduce them.
