Living in the past

I got a radio.

I’ve been reconstructing my life lately. It’s something I’ve done once or twice before, but on those occasions it was caused by dissatisfaction with what had gone before. Now it’s because it’s really necessary. Like when you’re living in a house and, maybe because you haven’t been looking after it properly, you suddenly realize that it’s not actually a structurally complete house any more, but is actually something of a ruin, maybe even just a pile of rubble. If you were more observant than me then you’d probably have noticed the state of your house sooner, but if not, then you’d certainly acknowledge that now it needs a bit of rebuilding.

I suppose if you’re of an optimistic persuasion then you’d view that rebuilding project with excitement, thinking about how your dream home could be realized at last. If, on the other hand, you’re like me, then you’d probably be wondering where you can find anything to build with, anything at all, and what you could possibly make with it that would have any chance of giving some shelter.

Without consciously entering into that process too much I seem to have arrived at the decision that music should be a key part of this house. This decision, though taken with little consciousness, was based on what parts of the old house seemed to be most solid, and most to my taste, unlike, say, the furnishings installed by previous owners and merely inherited, reluctantly, by me.

I suppose I knew that music had been a key part of a previous rebuilding process. Learning the guitar was an essential part of one of my earlier reconstructions, and one that I was pleased with. Tracing further back, although memories are getting very blurry, I can recall that listening to a walkman (cassette-based, of course, we are talking in geological timescales here) was a significant part of earlier, less comprehensive, reconstruction work. I am aware of some of the details that went with that walkman (I could tell you it’s colour, brand, which shop (no longer extant desde hace siglos) I bought it from, it’s price, and how I came to have that money, I could tell you about its silver plastic case with the blue velveteen lining, trust me, I could go on and on). But I had never really dug further back to find out why I wanted a walkman. “Find out” is obviously the wrong term, since I must once have known this. But that knowledge is locked in a person that I don’t think of as myself, so the me I am now really has to discover this as a genuinely new piece of information.

And the discovery process makes me recall that I acquired a radio. It was some kind of swap with a school mate, though I can’t recall what I parted with in exchange for it. What I can recall was the feeling that it set me apart. Not that I was special because of having a radio, and certainly not unique. But I listened to it alone, in my room, and for a long time never discussed with anyone what I listened to. In fact I’m not sure there are many people yet who know of the number of times I heard “Boy named Sue”, “Nutbush city limits” or “Cleaning windows” on a Saturday morning with Dave Cash. But in that solitude something spoke to me. I’d never really been exposed to much music before, but the radio gave me the opportunity and started something that is still going on.

So I can trace it all back to that radio. And I can say that the radio came to me by pure chance randomness, and therefore that’s an end to the story. Except it’s not, is it. I could have listened to the radio and been untouched by it. But no, the radio’s seed fell on fertile ground. So the next question I have to tackle is what made me so vulnerable to music. Hmmmm. I’ll probably get back with an answer in the next 10 or 15 years.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 11:58 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.