Shriram | Week 13 | Can You Hear The Music
“Life is Simple in the Moonlight”
→ It’s an atmosphere I couldn’t possibly replicate for you, no matter how hard I try: it’s night, but the sky is a deep cerulean blue. Dark, but as if the sun could jump out at any moment and bring the world back to life. We’re all asleep, my family and I, but my sister and I aren’t sleeping, our parents’ snoring is far too loud. We aren’t talking to each other either; it’s far too quiet.
Had I gotten out of my bed and taken five steps towards the door, I would have been greeted with a captivating view of the bay, but I chose to stay inside where it was warm. I put on my headphones and listened to music.
Even today, the music I listened to takes me back. I couldn’t give you a list off the top of my head, but every so often I’ll hear a song and feel a strange sensation, like the wind against my face, or hear a strange sound like the waves falling on the shore.
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| what a calming view. |
"Feel Again"
→ It’s not so much an atmosphere as it is the blur of life over an extended period of time: it rains often, even in the morning. I don’t feel like I’m doing anything important, but the rain makes everything feel more important, like I’m acting with intentionality from my house into the car into the store. The people I talk to the most aren’t my close friends—yet—and I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything significant—yet.
Life is a series of afternoons and nights spent in the school gym and on the car ride home, always in court shoes yet never putting them on; I barely know how to use them.
It’s a small white screen, talking with wonderful people who will fall apart, who will fade in and out of my view but never twice in the same light, who carried me through the dullest enjoyable experience I can recall, who I have long since missed the opportunity to express gratitude for.
“Count Me Out”
→ It’s stress. I’m stressed out, lying in my bed in a short-sleeve shirt with the window wide open. I’m outside, and the heat has made everything still. The world doesn’t move as I walk through it, on the side of the street, through the grass and occasional gazes of strangers. Sometimes I’m alone. Sometimes I have company, for which I’ll always be thankful. I had friends who would do so much even if my mind was on other things, and it often was. I think I just hid it well, and so they often didn’t notice.
“Part of the Dream”
→ I think they started noticing. Which is strange, because I’m less preoccupied now. It’s car rides to Berkeley and new earbuds, taking them out to talk with my sister for the first time in a month. I feel suspended in a strange state of closeness with my friends; if one of us doesn’t want to be here, I’m not sure it’s not me.
“Selfless”
→ It’s an absolutely amazing song. It’s the melody, the lyrics, the vocal range of the singer. I think it’s right now.
"Can you hear the music, Robert?"
ReplyDeleteShriram, damn. This blog was deep, and this blog was beautiful.
ReplyDeleteI feel like I found it relatable but not like directly?—if that makes sense. I agree/relate with how powerful music is. The “it’s far too quiet” line was so poetic; I loved it so much.
Music has definitely played a significant role in my life as well, in terms of characterizing events and memories. Something as simple as a rap song that was trending in 2020 takes me back to all the videogames I played with my friends and the late nights spent on call. Or maybe more specifically, Interact camps tend to play a singular song throughout the camp experience; these songs become the camp theme song; I don’t actually know if this is intentional, but it’s definitely beautiful. Two summers ago, I went to a summer camp. The song “Unwritten” was played genuinely more than 5 times a day. We sang, danced, and a lot of people cried. Now, every time I hear the little guitar piece that opens the song, I transport back in time, and I’m sat in Scotts Valley.
Right now, I play the song—sort of as an experiment. I am trying to process how the song has such a profound effect to this day. This lowkey insane.
I loved your part about rain—specifically the part about intentionality. That’s so real bro. Rain—like music—is so powerful and has so many inexplicable superpowers.
Overall, this blog was a very enjoyable read, as your blogs always are. This is lowkey glaze, but I always find your writing extremely poetic; idrk why, but it reads extremely soft and with lots of deliberacy. Anyways, thank you for the invitation and go listen to nostalgic music to take me back to fun times of my past. Looking forward to next week’s blog.
Shriram, this is really exceptional. Like Romir, it feels like I’m totally glazing, but your writing is extremely efficient in conjuring a full picture in the mind. I really relate to how certain songs can immediately send you back to those times you often listened to them. I enjoyed the moods you’ve conveyed here, and I find the “calming view” you included to be fitting in this atmosphere—nice touch!
ReplyDeleteWith select songs, I also find myself overwhelmed with the sense of how things felt way back when. It runs deeper than nostalgia, like a very special kind of memory. I’m definitely a music looper so I’ll loop a couple songs on end until I can’t bear to hear it for a second longer. This way, some music becomes rooted in that cut of my life without me even realizing it until that day long past, where it brings back how the sun fell in my room those days. In this kind of memory, I don’t remember how I looked or felt about myself for once. I just see. I see the light of my lamp, the afternoon sun ricocheting onto my bed, or the cloudy beach day that didn’t really amount to anything. These things never trouble me, though they might’ve back then. It’s just an enveloping feeling now, reminding me of that particular past.
Now that you’ve reminded me of this unique feeling, I think of the songs of my present too. Thank you for this!
Music truly does have the curious power to invoke such raw, physical reactions and emotions. A specific 72 minute long album, one that truly entered me into the world of my music tastes, brings back extremely detailed memories of being a volunteer test writer for a Science Olympiad tournament, writing questions on topology and quadrangles and highway maps that I spent way too much time perfecting. Another album by one of my all-time favorite music artists invokes memories of staring at the vertical support poles on a BART train to San Francisco, imagining shooting a laser off of the edge of one of the three cylindrical poles in such a way that it would go straight into the next train car. (if you couldn’t tell, my mind tends to wander)
ReplyDeleteAmong all the beautiful imagery in your blog, though, I most presently noticed the gradual transition to living through memories, speculations, and regrets, to living in the moment, from listening to music as a distraction and missing out on beautiful scenery of the bay, to being captivated by every minute detail of a specific song playing “right now.”