B-Side: On Rememory and Music
By Malin Curry
There’s a word for this. This descent into the past that starts with a song. That finds you lost in the museum of your mind, marveling at memories that become exhibits, brusque statues and garish paintings. Memories affront new senses; you can smell the scene in front of you, feel the sights around you. As you orbit around the confines of your mind, and you’re made to spin faster and faster around this chamber of memories, you feel everything all at once. It’s disorienting, terrifying, euphoric. There’s a word for this.
Rememory: the process of returning to memories again and again, in such a way that they affect a person’s processing of their present.
No, not that one.
L
I’m on a beach. The spray of ocean peppering my face, my shirt filling with air from updrafts at random, deflating just as quickly. A balloon. It’s the type of beach that only feels complete when it’s packed with people, so much so that by the time you’ve made it through a throng of sunscreened visitors, my voice is exhausted. “Excuse me.” “Sorry about that.” “Let me just step right over here.” Everywhere I look, there is sand, stretching even past to the horizon; one of the few places where even the ocean pales in comparison to the vastness of this place. I find a seat away, removed from the reach and apricity of the sun, off in the corner where the parents have another round, the children fight over the boogie board. I settle into an abandoned beach chair, finally at peace and begin to drift away as the sun sets, softening the scene and preserving the world and all its inhabitants in amber. I close my eyes as the world falls asleep.
1987 saw the release of Beloved, a surrealist work from a young Toni Morrison that explores the pervasive nature of slavery and the personification of Black trauma. Taking place shortly after the American civil war and the abolition of slavery, the story follows a former slave, her daughter and live-in partner upon meeting a spector with unknown intentions. Many suspect the spector, spook or simply ghost to be the reincarnation of a child Sethe (the main protagonist) killed during her enslavement, presumably to protect her from the cruelty of slavery.
L-O
I play this song at night because it sounds better in the dark. When the night washes away day and turns the world placid. The song begins with the ding of xylophone. Then come the drums, subtle and thunderous, all at once. And finally the first lyric “a new world hangs…” spills into the room, breaking up the peace, transporting me to a place part dream part real life. As the song continues I teeter on the edge of reality, balancing between what’s real and what’s not. And in this memory, I see you, and I make a choice. You’re here, present, alive. So, I choose to slip off the tightrope. To fall back into reality, back into myself and into step with you. We dance until the last note.
Moral dilemma aside, the novel presents complex ideas about the concepts of trauma, memory and processing that remain relevant even now, more than 40 years later. These truths are communicated via rememory. A concept used to describe the process of carouseling around one’s mind and reliving a memory so vividly you feel, smell, taste and hear it even in your presence. You are ejected from this life and transported to an old one, like switching out CDs in your car. Beloved deals with memories of trauma that have this quality, memories so vile and depraved they haunt you in your waking hour. But, I’d argue that the concept of rememory, while traditionally associated with more serious issues and memories you’d like to forget, lends itself well to understanding the mysticism and effect of music, both contemporary and otherwise, has on listeners.
L-O-U
Sometimes, I think of sounds as colors. The growl of an exhaust pipe becomes a stormy grey. Running water a brilliant silver. For me, this song is red. A bright neon red you might see lining the sign of a diner, disarming and blinding all at once. When I hear this song I’m in a car headed to an airport for a trip abroad. It’s early morning, and the sky’s taken on a lavender hue. I am one of few cars hurtling toward a destination. The fingers tap a staccato rhythm, egged on by my nerves and uncertainty. I play this song to occupy my mind, put it to task elsewhere. The song grants me a reprieve from myself. And when it ends, I play it again, and again, until I reach the airport. Hours later, I will sit outside my gate, earphones in, still listening.
Some studies have sought establish the connection between music and feeling. How the slightest uptick in tempo can communicate alarm, create tension, amplify anxiety. Or how there are rhapsodies so powerful they can literally cause a listener to release high levels of endorphins. Instruments, melodies, voices, ad-libs all blending together in perfect harmony to invite you back on the carousel of memory. To take you to a specific moment in time, one that the music tinges blue, purple, green a swath of different colors, but the images are just as you remember.
L-O-U-D
Loud. There’s the word. Reliving these memories, each vignette of my life overlaid with the sound of a different singer, a different anthem; it all sounds so loud. In each of these moments I felt alive. The lyrics breathed into me life, an appreciation for the people around me, the clarity needed to slow down, take a breath. Each of these memories brought me closer to true enlightenment in their own way. Each of these memories showed me what life is. It’s loud, booming, quiet, a wail, a vibrato, a shriek, defeanening. But in the noise is where I feel the most alive.
