The Song That Brought Me Here– At Principle Gallery
What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.
–Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
We all carry a lot of baggage with us on our journey through this life. It’s a rare moment when we find ourselves free from all the traces from the past that we lug along– all the snippets of conversations, faces, song melodies and lyrics, pictures, smells, film clips and everything else we have input into the hard drive of our mind is always whirring around. I know that I will sometimes pull up some fragment from the past and wonder how I was still holding on to this piece of information. It might be the name of someone that I barely knew forty or fifty years before. Somehow it hangs on and occasionally pops out, confounding me with the idea that this seemingly useless bit of data is taking up space that could be occupied by truly meaningful information.
Like old Popeye cartoons. The one with Olive Oyl singing What We All Need is Brotherly Love runs on a loop in my head.
Or the year that Humphrey Bogart died–1957.
Or the name of the book that influenced the original Superman comic. (It was Philip Wylie‘s Gladiator— an interesting and fun read, by the way.)
Or the names of obscure musicians and their songs. Many times I have cursed Jay Ferguson and his one hit song, Thunder Island— a song that I didn’t even really like– for taking up valuable space in my brain when I can’t retrieve something much more important from my memory.
Or the name and minute details of the life of someone I met once forty years ago. This becomes even more maddening now when I can’t remember the name of someone I have just met ten minutes before.
But somehow, despite and because of all this detritus, we emerge in some individual form.
A single distilled version of everything that we take in.
A single voice. One song.
Now here’s a little Popeye along with Wilco. It’s a video for Wilco’s Dawned on Me from last year [2012] and it features the first hand-drawn Popeye cartoon in over 30 years. I can’t remember if Olive Oyl danced like this in my memory but now I will. The data has been entered.
This post is from 2013 with a few additions.
Redtree Times 