Have you ever stumbled on a song you haven’t heard in years, maybe decades, that used to be central part of your emotional world? Have you ever found yourself listening and thinking: ‘Wait! I know this. God, I remember this song – I forgot this even existed’? And then you’re pulled back into all the images and sensations of that time?
That happened to me this morning with the song Strings That Tie To You by Jon Brion, from the soundtrack to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
I wanted some background music I hadn’t heard a million times, and chose that soundtrack – which I often listen to, but clearly not all the way through. Because I probably haven’t heard this song in a decade and a half.
Listening to it, for some reason, just made me feel incredibly old.
It’s a film from 20 years ago, so should that be a surprise? Well, not every old piece of art makes me feel old. I remember seeing Return of the Jedi in the cinema, but that film doesn’t make me feel old. So I started to try to pick a part why Strings That Tie To You particularly did.
And I realised that, listening to the soundtrack, I could remember this exhilarating feeling at the time the film came out… that this was the future, and it was great.
Here was an example of the talent that was going to shape movies and music and culture in the future.
Remembering this film makes me feel old, because that didn’t happen. The talented people behind this film either faded into the cultural background or became rich and successful in a way that eroded their liability and relatability.
This film just became a blip, not a trend.
This is one of the harder parts of aging that I experience all the time, I think: seeing talented people with huge potential have just a fleeting moment before it fizzles into nothing.
And it would be easy to follow this down a nihilistic rabbit hole, and conclude that everything is pointless and doomed to failure. I do not believe that to be the case.
But I have been thinking today about how to process this in a constructive way.
And the conclusion that I’ve come to is that it’s on each of us, individually and collectively, to hold onto those fleeting moments of beauty that are created by talented people, or just created by moments in time. It’s up to us to hold onto them, and to use them to inspire us to make more beautiful things.
We need to keep trying to push new flowers up through the layer of ash and decay.
It’s ironic that this song that triggered this whole process was a song about dealing with painful memories that itself with soundtrack to a film about painful memories.
From the wrinkles on my forehead / to the mud upon my shoe / everything’s a memory / with strings that tie to you.
And particularly:
And though a change has taken place and I no longer do adore her / Still every godforsaken place is always just around the corner.
I mean, I realise that I have rewritten this song 100 times myself!
But maybe that’s not a bad thing.
We just got to keep pushing the flowers through the ash.