Edelweiss (Yes, Edelweiss)

From a lovely piece of music writing by Ann Powers, former music critic for the New York Times and Village Voice, currently curator at the Experimental Music Project:

Everybody knows that the flow of life constitutes a great forgetting. It's worse than you think though. Let's consider what we have let go, what's let go of us. We trust that it's the stupid stuff...

The mind is kind, though, and such momentous lapses occur unbeknownst even to yourself... Soon enough, the fiction you offer others becomes your own reality. Our history is what we tell ourselves, until disaster strikes. That's why, to confront the genuinely frayed relationship each of us has to our own histories, it's much more useful to start with a song. You can't fake someone else's lyric - it's in there, like a prayer, or it's gone. The lyric or melody forgotten is like a termite spotted on your brain's basement floor, its tiny presence signaling the rot within the identity you've lovingly constructed...

The melody penetrated my ear like a parasite... Every word came back to me effortlessly. Suddenly I had no favorite songs, I had no memories at all, except what I had stumbled into utterly by chance. The notes in my head bobbed up and down, erasing the fiction I clung to with such pride, replacing it with a sort of jolly sense of pointlessness. It's not that I realized I was a different person at all, at least not within a definition that included straight lines and neat boundaries. I, like you, am just a drawer full of circumstantial evidence, though I'm also the one given the job of making sense of the case...

And so I have been reminded of memory in all its cruelty: a real reflection of the tripping coincidence of days that add up to life, beyond legacy and the partial joke of free will...

Passages from Edelweiss, by Ann Powers, reprinted in Best Music Writing 2005 from DeCapo Press

More on this piece, the volume from which it comes, and the subject of music, memory, and reality over the course of the weekend...