Old Roads: Where You Find Yourself.

 

When music finally tells you how you feel.

This most recent bout of maudlin nostalgia, which I have apparently been writing through for over a month now, has been an eye-opening one for me. One could almost apply the Aristotelian concepts of anagnorisis and peripeteia to it. Though, in a most anti-Aristotelian way, my reversal of fortune was for the better, not worse. We can discuss catharsis and hamartia as they pertain to me in another essay.

Every so often I get very (there I go again, lazy tool of a weak mind...) down. Depressed, I suppose, is more accurate. I know everyone has these periods, I am not complaining about it, just explaining. When mine hit me I am overwhelmed by a profound sense of nostalgia. A longing for the '70s and '80s when, at least in my memory, bad as it is, things were simpler, understandable, and enjoyable.

Do not get me wrong, consciously, I know that life has always been complicated, no matter when you lived. But I am talking about the stuff around life. In 1979, when I was eleven, I got my first computer; it was an Atari 800. This is the kind of simple I am talking about. Find a photo of the motherboard of an Atari 8-bit computer and compare it to the photo of a modern PC motherboard. You will see what I mean. I knew that computer inside and out. I knew what every chip was and what it did, and how to modify it to make it better, or sometimes, accidentally, worse.

Phones were simpler, cars were simpler, appliances were simpler, life was always complicated. I wrote before that I was, at the time, a hacker (I did check and yes, the statute of limitations has long been over). I never stole anything, or broke anything, but I did spend an inordinate amount of time in other people's systems looking around. I compare those heady times to the layers of nonsense and shenanigans that I have to deal with today (as the guy who now has to stop the hackers from getting in). and I shudder.

It is therefore no surprise to me that when I do dip into depression, my soul yearns for those romanticized and incorrectly remembered simpler times. The reason I bring all of this up, and to get back to my original point, is that I never really understood why I felt this way, or why my bouts of depression pulled me back to these times so strongly.

It took music to explain it to me. Two songs in particular. I have been listening to them both on an unyielding, unending, and unrelenting playlist loop. Hundreds of times over and over (hence, unrelenting) and still, it took until what must have been the three hundredth loop for me to really hear what the songs were trying to tell me all along.

The first song is called Caledonia. In my playlist it is recorded by The Derina Harvey Band, though it is not their original song. The lyrics of this song are eerily close to my own thoughts. I mean, OK. It's about Scotland, and I am not Scottish, nor have I ever been to Scotland, but if you forget that and listen to the sentiment, you get it.

I don't know if you can see the changes that have come over me
In these last few days, I've been afraid that I might drift away
So I've been telling old stories, singing songs that make me think about where I came from
And that's the reason why I seem so far away today

I have moved and I've kept on moving, proved the points that I needed proving
Lost the friends that I needed losing, found others on the way
I have kissed the ladies and left them crying, stolen dreams, yes there's no denying
I have travelled hard, sometimes with conscience flying somewhere with the wind

Now I'm sitting here before the fire, the empty room, the forest choir
The flames that couldn't get any higher, well they've withered, now they've gone
But I'm steady thinking, my way is clear and I know what I will do tomorrow
When the hands have shaken and the kisses flow, well I will disappear

I mean. Wow. Right? I cannot believe it took so long for me to understand. It almost drips with anagnorisis. Sometimes even the wisest people, which I most certainly am not, have to be slapped in the face with the truth before they finally understand it. Figuratively, of course, before someone writes me a letter.

The second song was How I Got to Memphis, though, honestly, I first encountered it years ago in an episode of The Newsroom. Yes, Aaron Sorkin again. He is one of the best writers whose work I have ever experienced.

In the episode, Charlie Skinner explains that his grandson once told him that Memphis was not really Memphis. That That’s how I got to Memphis uses Memphis as a stand-in for wherever you are right now, that it really means “That’s how I got here.”

At the time, I thought it was a clever line, a nice little piece of television dialogue, a Sorkinism, if you will.

But somewhere between the two hundredth and three hundredth loop of the playlist, all of it suddenly converged for me. The song, the scene, the nostalgia, the depression, the endless pull backward toward old stories and old versions of myself.

Memphis was not Memphis.

Memphis was where you found yourself, after all the roads you had walked, all the people you had loved and lost, and all the stories you kept returning to because they still felt like home.

I can still feel the slap, right across the face.

And yes, maybe, that was the real reversal of fortune.

Not escaping the feeling, but finally understanding it.

Till next time,

     -John