Unlike most surviving BARDS compositions, We Are the Cloak! appears to have served an explicitly communal function. Contemporary accounts suggest that it was frequently performed during public gatherings, communal meals, and initiation ceremonies associated with western North American Encroachments during the late twentieth century. Several Bell Archive recordings preserve audience participation throughout the refrain, leading most scholars to classify the piece as a processional hymn rather than a conventional song. Its unusual directness has prompted speculation that the work was intended less for established members than for prospective initiates, introducing the daily rhythm of Cloak life through deliberately ordinary imagery.

The repeated references to mines, mills, tunnels, rubble, and ore have often been misunderstood by outside commentators as allusions to literal industry. Nazilic scholars generally interpret these images as metaphors for Phenominomic investigation. Throughout the surviving corpus, knowledge is consistently portrayed as something excavated rather than invented. Cultural artifacts become geological strata, myths become mineral veins, and moments of genuine insight are described as precious ores concealed beneath immense quantities of ordinary experience. One frequently cited Bell memorandum remarks:

"Truth rarely arrives polished.

Most often it must be dug free with blistered hands."

Many authorities identify this composition as the earliest surviving musical description of the work later undertaken by the Nectar Collectors. The refrain's emphasis upon repetitive labor mirrors numerous Bell documents describing Finders, Miners, and Binders engaged in the continual examination of books, films, folklore, conversations, and dreams in search of embedded "shards." Particularly significant is the observation that the workers never "get their fill." Within Nazilic thought, curiosity is intentionally insatiable. The objective is not completion but perpetual refinement of the Archive, which remains necessarily unfinished so long as history itself continues unfolding.

Perhaps the fragment's most striking feature is its persistent repetition of ordinary labor. Every stanza begins anew, emphasizing continuity rather than achievement. Commentators have compared this structure to the daily offices observed within monastic traditions, wherein enlightenment is pursued not through singular revelation but through disciplined repetition. The Cloak accordingly presents scholarship as a vocation rather than an accomplishment. One anonymous Bell archivist summarized the principle:

"No one discovers the Library.

One merely reports for work each morning."

The recurring exhortations—

"Got to get your hands dirty."

"Put your back into it."

"Keep your nose to the grindstone."

—have generally been interpreted as intentional reversals of traditional mystical language. Rather than withdrawing from the world, initiates are encouraged to immerse themselves within it. Books are to be handled until their bindings loosen, films watched repeatedly, conversations remembered, roads traveled, gardens tended, artifacts restored, songs recorded, and meals shared. The Cloak therefore rejects the notion that enlightenment may be achieved through abstraction alone. Knowledge must accumulate beneath the fingernails. Bell Family curator Edwin Bell observed:

"The cleanest hands in the Library belong to those who have learned the least."

"The fever gripping our minds" is a metaphor that has always been used to refer to the disease known as "Shard Fever" in Bell records. 
It has never been seen as an illness but rather an occupational disease. It typically occurs after the subjects have been under the influence of the recursion of symbolic structures for quite a long time. The subjects find themselves unable to experience normal culture without seeing some connections or reflections in it. While being perceived as an illness by other people, it was seen by the survivors of Cloak manuals as something expected from Phenomenomic training.

Scholars have long noted that the title avoids identifying the Cloak as an institution separate from its members. The declaration is not "We belong to the Cloak," nor "We serve the Cloak," but "We are the Cloak." This distinction has been interpreted as reflecting one of the movement's central philosophical convictions: that organizations, traditions, and myths possess no independent existence apart from those who continually enact them. The Cloak is therefore understood less as a society than as an activity—a living pattern reproduced whenever individuals undertake the shared labor of collecting, preserving, and integrating the scattered reflections of the Cycle. Bell Archive Note E-17 includes the following observation:

"The Library has no walls.

Its shelves are assembled wherever two Collectors compare notes."

Modern readers frequently mistake the fragment's repetitive imagery for drudgery. Contemporary Nazilic commentators, however, generally emphasize the remarkable absence of complaint throughout the work. The labor described is strenuous, endless, and frequently incomplete, yet never presented as burdensome. Instead, the song exhibits what later Bell scholars termed Ludic Monasticism—the conviction that disciplined scholarship may itself become a form of play. One unpublished Bell lecture concludes:

"Children call it a game.

Monks call it devotion.

The Cloak never found much difference between the two."