the memory of recorded things

I. There is a Balm in Gilead / Somewhere Deep in the Jungle

A skipping CD retains nothing romantic: the sound doesn’t atrophy like a baked cassette; it doesn’t surrender to cacophonous fuzz like a vinyl; it doesn’t age, it just ceases to exist. Still, one doesn’t readily throw away dead discs; case in point: 1992’s eponymous album by Deep Forest, laying dormant here in the entertainment cabinet at my father’s suburban house. Its shelf-mates: K.D. Lang and Melissa Ethridge, Yanni and Enya, Enigma and Clannad; the musical guides who taught my mother another world was possible.

You have to imagine a seafoam green mini-van; it’s gliding over forever-constructed concrete highways; and at its steed is a desperate woman depressing the brake pedal with every bass-line. This an agreed-upon ritual without words: how long we can delay arriving home. In this way, my father’s ailing memory that he had been abandoned is partly true. But, those night-drives, both dissociative and invigorating, reminded us we’d been betrayed in ways more fundamental than Catholic matrimony, domestic violence, insurance companies,  incessantly green lawns, and school tuition. As the sounds of anthropological field recordings mixed with early ‘90s techno made clear: we civilized people in grey-seat Ford Winstars gave up something more primordial; we traded in something like really-being-alive for an endless list of banal bureaucratic responsibilities.

How else can one explain the prevalence of “Pure Moods” aesthetics in the 1990s? A more historical approach would have to include the fall of the Soviet Union, the subsequent ushering in of imagined global communities: a profound reprisal of the original tenets of communism in favor of impoverishing the global majority via institutions like the World Bank. By the early ‘90s, it seemed like the 1959 kitchen debate—wherein Nixon and Khrushchev debated the two systems in a kitchen mock-up at a National Fair in Moscow—had given way to a more fundamental question: should we even have electricity? Of course, you cannot make techno synth-scapes without it, but it’s fun to imagine: pure life, pure food, community, and pure savagery.

But, beyond the realm of the definably geopolitical, there is my mother: speeding down a Texas highway as she sings along to Pigmy chants, chopped up and remixed with synthesizers by two French men. But they weren’t the only ones: there were the Germans who layered panflutes with Gregorian chants and the Marqui de Sade: “Sadeness,” a song whose lyrics I couldn’t understand, but knew without a doubt was about fucking. While that song was situated sometime between the medieval ages, the French revolution, and plastic keyboards, a song like “Return to Innocence” was happening in an unknown ethereal plane where native Taiwanese chants duet with a breathy androgynous voice:

“Don't be afraid to be weak / Don't be too proud to be strong / Just look into your heart, my friend / That will be the return to yourself /  The return to innocence!”

Did Enigma give my mom permission to consider divorce?

One of her drives lasted much longer than an evening. It entailed packing up upwards of forty gerbils and a labyrinth of plastic tubes my brother and I would watch the critters crawl through or lay dead in. I cannot remember how many changes of clothes we had stuffed between the rodent-colonies; but, surely we stayed in some historic bed & breakfast in Fredericksburg, Texas for almost a week. This was in the days when that was both quaint and as affordable as a Motel 6. The memory is time-stamped with a film, 1996’s The Spitfire Grill; though, given that it was a little theater in a tiny Texas town, it could have been much later. In the movie— keeping with out-of-pocket 1990s cinema—a Mainer woman named Pursey Talbot is released from prison for “man-zlotter,” and tries to create a new life in some podunk town where Ellen Burstyn runs the only diner: the Spitfire Grill. Of course, there is an emotionally abusive husband and his trapped wife who confides in Pursey, who we learn killed her own abuser in self-defense. But, the film climaxes with Pursey Talbot running into the nearby woods to commune with Burstyn’s estranged son: a Vietnam vet turned primitivist, something like a very tall medieval gnome crafting folk-art out of reeds and bark. He doesn’t speak, but Pursey narrates for us aloud, and imagines a kinship with her silent Viking Santa: “I don’t even know what to call you, I reckon I’ll just call you Johnny B. ‘cause you’re so good.”

While Pursey lays in the tall-grass valley, she sings “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” with Johnny B. standing over her. His birth name is actually Eli—Elijah being the prophet of Gilead—but the image creates another Christian icon instead: a reverse gender Pietà. And indeed, like Jesus, Pursey Talbot will sacrifice herself to the town of Spitfire, Maine. She will jump to her death. In her failed flee to nature, attempting to recreate herself in the image of the humble savage, she will become a proto-feminist martyr to abused women.

I don’t know what my father did or said to lure my mother back to the suburban home, the highways, and the old rituals of driving around to world music. As much as she may have wanted, my mother was not Pursey Talbot. But, at least she’d managed to program her Windows ‘95 laptop to reboot to the sound of a Deep Forest pygmy sample: a duet of tongues being sticked out like toddlers pretending to be Indians in a Thanksgiving pageant. She either engineered it, or it was simply a glitch since the bulky grey machine wouldn’t eject the skipping CD. 

Looking at the disc now, it has a wide slash through the iridescence; stored away in the dusty shelves of creme-lacquered memory and trauma: Pursey Talbot, Cynthia Ann Parker, Deborah Richmond, they all got away.