What teleporting would sound like

"Hay épocas en que uno siente que se ha caído a pedazos y a la vez se ve a sí mismo en mitad de la carretera estudiando las piezas sueltas, preguntándose si será capaz de montarlas otra vez y qué especie de artefacto saldrá" -T.S. Eliot


Sometimes I feel like I am outside of my body looking at myself. It happens quite often when I feel completely despondent; watching my life pass before me without feeling like I'm actually participating. But then there are moments or phrases or songs or feelings that remind you of what is important and all of the sudden you're snapped back through the time warped abyss that so far removed you and placed back in the mess of it all. Maybe this curse of alternate realities doesn't plague everybody but every living thing can be affected by sound and everybody nostalgically ties certain memories to specific sounds.



Every time I hear Astrud Gilberto singing "Gentle Rain" I am transported back to the first time I ever performed music in front of an audience. I can feel the excitement and picture every small detail. But more than the visual recollection of that specific moment, what comes rushing back to me in and unstoppable wave of nostalgia is the emotions I felt at the time and the people I was playing with. After listening to the song, I can hear every note the pianist hit in his solo that night and the tone of the dialogue we created when we were trading fours.

This type of experience happens not only with musical memories like that. There are songs that can transport me back to a time and place back in a memory I had come to neglect. Remind me of people and places but mostly emotions that I have come to associate with the particular sound. I think H.G. Wells should have incorporated sounds and music when he created the time machine. Music is a time machine that transports us back to distant mementos and serves as a mirror to remind us of who we have been in the past.