The Old New Memories

Sometimes, events from many years ago can feel much closer to the present than much more recent ones. I was thinking about how just 6 years ago, Steve Bannon was a White House adviser and Mike Pence VP, and both of them apparently on good terms with then-President Trump. ¹ Now you couldn’t gather the three in a room together without fisticuffs. The reality in which they were all somehow chummy feels like it may as well have happened during the Napoleonic Wars:

• Pictures from that era already have that dated look of several-times-superseded digital photography (the iPhone 7 was the latest generation at the time).
• Places I visited while fretting constantly about the carnage of the Trump-Pence WH have long since shut down, and so I feel like my one-time very tangible worries are now shapeless, homeless memories with no anchor in physical space.
• It wasn’t far from the COVID era (only 2 years and change!), so the immediacy to that rupture puts its datedness in even sharper relief.

And yet a The Mars Volta concert I went to more than 18 years ago—that feels like it just happened.

Like a lot of the music I discovered in the mid-2000s, I found out about them via Pitchfork, a music site now owned by Condé Nast but back then still indie and staffed by people as convinced of their own righteousness as any Twitter or Bluesky shitposter who thinks their addiction to what amounts to a digital casino gives them superior insights and even credentials as some kind of enlightened, hardened online laborers. Although I found and purchased plenty of albums on account of positive Pitchfork review, it was a nominally negative review of the first Mars Volta LP—penned by the same guy who wrote the worst album review ever—that drew me in:

The Mars Volta mistake sonic piling for complex architecture. No melodic themes are carried. Often you’ll find yourself lost in a epic passage of dripping noises (“Cicatrix ESP”) or a robotic bleepdown (“Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt”) where the song even forgets itself, before the opening riff and chorus blare back in an “oh, right, this one” kind of way. Even acoustic interludes, like the one during the opening of “This Apparatus Must Be Unearthed”, can’t pass without Amazon bird recordings and distant e-bow.

Amazon birds? Epic passages of dripping noise? Where do I sign up?

Both that album (De-Loused in the Comatorium) and its follow-up (Frances the Mute) were the soundtracks to my hazy March 2005, a month of major awakening and pain in which I began struggling with academic work but also saw a path toward a new identity and life as a 🏳️‍🌈 person. I’ll always remember blasting “The Widow” while working on art projects in my dorm.

Maybe it’s that association of the band’s music with a pivotal moment in life that makes even a concert from 2005 feel so immediate in my memory, more so than the much more recent Trump-Bannon-Pence triumvirate. That, and the fact that I have no photos or recordings of it, nothing to go on but my thoughts. So it’s a distinctly analog experience that has to be recreated anew from the raw materials of the mind forge each time.

The way the human brain works is that it doesn’t store perfect digital copies of anything that can be transported and recontextualized outside of the body that it’s apart of. One person’s memory is unique, even of events simultaneously experienced by numerous others. Accordingly, it’s possible that the aforementioned context made me uniquely predisposed to be blown away by that concert, at which they opened with a 20-minute song and ended with a 32-minute one, with their relatively concise “hits” (used loosely) “The Widow” and “L’Via L’Viaquez” sandwiched in between.

Was it really that great, objectively? Who can even say, given how each of our minds contextualizes and evaluates events differently? I’ll conclude with a passage from one of my favorite essays on this subject, “The Empty Brain”:

Whereas computers do store exact copies of data – copies that can persist unchanged for long periods of time, even if the power has been turned off – the brain maintains our intellect only as long as it remains alive. There is no on-off switch. Either the brain keeps functioning, or we disappear.