posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 9:37 AM
by
Endie
A la Recherche de Temps Perdu
As mentioned in my last post, I picked up two Johnny Cash albums at the same time as Angels and Airwaves. I just tried to listen to them and couldn't. I had to stop after a few tracks.
The problem is not any lack of quality, or any distaste on my part. I haven't listened to old Johnny Cash tracks for a very long time - as opposed to his American series of recordings, where he did unbelieveable things to tracks by people like Depeche Mode or Nine Inch Nails. I love his voice, and his cover of NiN's Hurt was what made me pick up the guitar again after a long break. The video to that, with June watching him (both would die within months), is terribly touching.
The trouble is that memory thing. When I was a little kid - nine or ten I think, but I've been wrong before about this manner of thing - my grandfather had a Vauxhall Viva. Built in Britain, it was a downright horrible car: vinyl seats and a soft suspension, though I'll allow that I didn't notice any of this at the time. But one of the faults was that it swallowed a Johnny Cash cassette and wouldn't let it go. It would play it those 24 minutes or so (no auto-reverse in those days), but that was your lot.
My grandfather must have spent hundreds of hours tinkering with that car up in his garage, and I don't think there were many parts he couldn't fix. But whether it was a reluctance to tinker with a sealed box of electronics, or just an unswerveable liking for the Man In Black, he saw no need to fix the Johnny issue. I must have heard that tape hundreds of times, on the way to visit aunts in Sorn or Catrine or Muirkirk, or travelling to picnics at the Bridgend Burn, or off to the Glen to walk Mac the Dug, the latter hound wisely escaping the repetition by standing over me on the back seat and sticking his big, boxer's face out the window.
I've heard some of the tracks since, on enough occasions to dilute the effect: I Walk the Line for instance. But listening today to Folsom Prison Blues, Ring of Fire, or He Turned The Water Into Wine for the first time since those hundreds of listenings, two and a half decades ago, I was transported back to the back of Mauchline Papa's car, raspberry canes flashing by to the right and crab apple trees to the left as we head over the back road to Sorn.
This shot to the hippocampus won't last. If I use it up, the experience and richness of the memories will go. Like memories prompted by photographs, the recollecion will increasingly become one of the reproduced image, and less that of the moment itself.