from SONGS OF OUR LIVES: STEREOLAB’S “PAUSE”
IV.
In The Tempest, Caliban famously confesses, “Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments / Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices,” as good a description as any of spooks speaking to spooks via high-power transmissions over the MHz bandwidth, skywave propagation, and one-time pad decoder. Or of how we remember—how we hear, even in their absence—certain songs we once played so frequently that now they seem etched into our minds and memories if not the air around us. Caliban speaks these lines while he’s advocating the overthrow of Prospero, and recalling a time the island was “his,” a time he still dreams about: “The clouds methought would open and show riches / Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked / I cried to dream again.” In our remembered pasts, everything always belongs to us, if only because the memories themselves are ours; everything, because it is unattainable, seems a kind of treasure, all the more valuable because of its elusiveness.
No comments:
Post a Comment