In the context of the Dark Side of the Moon album, as a catalog of the pressures on life, this song is about the senselessness of war. It began as a piano piece Rick Wright came up with while working on the soundtrack to the 1970 movie Zabriskie Point. It didn’t make the soundtrack, but they worked with it at the Dark Side Of The Moon sessions and it eventually became this song.

The director of Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni, rejected the song for being “beautiful, but too sad… it makes me think of church.”

This song is about binaries. Black and white.
Us and them. Cats and dogs. It criticizes the cut and dry narrative that is given in a time of war.
This song reveals that we’re all just ordinary people, and when one takes a deeper look, war is senseless death.