Far North Coast, New South Wales, Australia
May 2024
3,824 Words
When it happened I was sitting in the front seat of a taxi deep in the bowels of the Americas. It was so humid that I could see the moisture in the air as it passed through the yellow orbs emitting from the streetlights. Even though the roads were rural enough that there were no other lights it wasn’t long before the taxi, with just me and the driver inside, would reach a point where the only light was the comforting neon glow of the center console and dashboard gauges. It connected us, with the sounds of the radio, to the greater electricity-dependent world, and it made me and the taxi driver feel less alone in the way that breathing oxygen does because you can’t be that alone if someone, somewhere, is doing at least something that you are too.
Neither the radio signal nor the stock speakers were of good quality but there was enough cumulative distortion to remove any type of gloss that could have hindered the music that was coming from it. They were playing country and folk songs, most of them from up in Mexico, and the imperfect quality made it more intimate. Occasionally they played a global pop hit and I must confess that when The Song started I thought it was one of those. But then it hurt. Hurt in a way that pop songs can’t. It was like the music was reaching into my chest and wringing the blood out of my heart into its gaping jaws. Sonically it was all over the place; one moment it was glaciers of sound glistening in pure Himalayan sunlight, the next a capella crooning that captured the essence of a drunken solitary walk home singing to nobody but the stars, and everything in between the two was of such discordant styles that it shouldn’t have made sense or even have been possible that they were seamlessly connected. It was unfair. It was unfair that it was this good. It was unfair how it was making me feel. All of it.
The taxi driver saw me staring at the radio. “Esta bien?” I heard him say, although who knows how many times he’d had to repeat himself.
“La canción. El nombre de la canción, que es?” I was barely whispering. I sounded and felt like someone I loved had just died.
“La canción? Asaber. Creí que era uno de los tuyos.”
I was not ready to begin grappling with the fact that I might never hear The Song again. I was soon hyperventilating.
“Que onda maje?” the taxi driver said to me, turning from disgust to worry as soon as the words left his mouth. “Hey, hey, take it easy buddy.”
I will never know why he was not as affected as I was, but I have since reminded myself that although many are called, few are chosen. I was not thinking about this in the moment and honestly didn’t think about it for quite some time. In the moment I was not thinking at all. It was more like I was being thought. I opened the door and rolled out of the moving vehicle as soon as the driver began slowing down. I left at least one piece of luggage in there. I was up and running before he could turn the car around. The headlights disappeared not long after. We were well past the middle of nowhere. The darkness, having transcended merely a notion, flowed into my mouth, ears, and nostrils like a liquid. I ran until I had to walk. I walked until I reached a town that was simultaneously every town but also couldn’t have been anywhere else. I was literally stumbling down the street muttering to myself. I can’t imagine what my hair must have looked like. Even the people who were still awake, all of them marginal characters in their own right, stared openly, and I think one of them may have even started approaching me until he thought better of it. I imagine it was not because of my hair or even my expression but because of my eyes, reflecting back at him the all of everything upon which my gaze was now permanently affixed. I would have given anything to be able to turn away like he did but I could not. I kept walking. I neither slept nor drank and thus could not have gone far, but I went through a few more towns, at least one farm, and many a dirt road. I could shake nothing, and soon stopped trying.
Because I felt then, and still feel now, like Borges after he viewed The Aleph, except I, unlike him, didn’t care about the possible existence of other Songs and knew that this was not a false one. Also unlike him, I lacked the requisite mind to wrestle with such knowledge in solitude: that The Song was so all-encompassing that it contained an element of every piece of the perceivable universe, no matter how small, big, or abstract, and so in every shimmering windowpane at a Sunday mass, in every arpeggiating horn blast from a passing public bus, in every whispered snippet of overheard conversation in a crowded marketplace, I heard echoes of The Song, all jumbled out of order but still immediately placeable in The Song’s runtime, from just one unprepared listen on a crackling taxi radio. Now I did not walk through the world or even engage with it; I was swimming through the cascading sounds and piercing vocals, seeing and hearing and feeling nothing before me, my mind wandering somewhere out in oblivion on a journey to wherever each moment of aggregate perception sent it. I was hollow beyond repair because, in addition to the maddeningly endless feedback loop of The Song and the sounds that reminded me of it, it instigated a metaphysical closeness to the long-lost bigger-picture reasons humans fell in love with music in the first place: any song creates a bridge across time through realms otherwise unaccessible to mortal beings; backwards to existing memories of moments when we’ve already heard the song, and forwards to a time in the future when we will listen to the song and look back on this moment now. That moment in the future is written, it’s just that the human brain lacks the requisite hardware to see it before our bodies arrive at that time. My current state of sent-to-the-brink-of-sanity came from seeing all of those moments in the future with utmost clarity: running through the back of my head faintly at the altar on my wedding day; covered by an obscure American drone-folk band at a basement show in Tulsa exactly nineteen years, to the minute, before my death; coming over the loudspeakers at a 7/11 in Osaka on a chance November day seven years from this today. There are many more that I will spare you of, but all of these future moments, connected to the past moments through my present, began to form a network instead of a linear path as past and future became equivalent and interchangeable with the eternal now. They went on, endless and uncountable, repeating and simultaneous, even bleeding over into moments when The Song was played somewhere that I physically was not present. I was stationary in time and space while the rest rotated around me, displaying all the different places a song can exist that I previously never could have imagined.
Out of ideas and facing profound spiritual alienation I, naturally, started making threads on online forums, both little- and well-known, describing details ranging from the the above synopsis to the finer points of the music within The Song. Recollection proved no problem as The Song and the events surrounding it were branded onto my brain. It took years for any of my posts to gain traction and still longer after that for people to stop dismissing me as nothing but a crank.
I only started to hear whispers of confirmation from others who had heard The Song when I ventured into English-speaking forums. Until then I had only been trawling Spanish-speaking forums since The Song was in Spanish, and I only mentioned The Song on an English-speaking forum in passing when commenting on another post. Another poster picked up the reference immediately. They, too, had once heard it drifting through their car as they drove past a live venue in D.C. on a warm spring night and they, too, had been desperately searching online forums after their real-world pursuits turned up empty handed for years on end. We knew it was the same song because of the tenacity of our obsession, unmatched by even the most diehard of music fans, and because our feelings about the song were identical: the unbridgeable void within us that it seemed to fill with the hope that anything was possible.
Anything except tracing the origins of the song, that is. Our discussions were on a public forum and thus available for anyone to read, although they must have come across as the digital equivalent of bathroom graffiti or sidewalk eschatology. Case in point: “There’s about three bars in the bridge that are unmistakably influenced by gamelan but played on a mandolin, and although the lyrics are referencing the Holodomor, I most often remember this part of the song when I’m in the grocery store, of all places.” Nonsense to the uninitiated, even moreso if only two strangers agree, and pure babbling if they’re so far apart across the abyss that they can’t even see each other.
Salvation beckoned in the form of a third user who was bilingual. “I’ve been watching you lunatics spam this board with your drivel for too long and I’m so sick of it that I’m going to help you figure this out so things can go back to normal,” said their first post in our threads. “I can’t think of any songs that sound anything like what you’re describing so post some of the lyrics.”
I was the first to chime in but my accomplice soon followed with a corroborating story: “I can hear the lyrics, or rather the sounds the singer is making perfectly, just as I can hear the instrumentation. But I’ve tried writing them down and even just processing/translating them in my head and I can’t. Never been able to. But somehow I get the essence, on a large level, of what they’re about. I chalk it up (mostly) to differences in regional dialect.”
“What language are the lyrics?” asked the third poster.
“Spanish,” said my reply.
“English,” said my accomplice’s, almost immediately after mine.
There was a brief sweet moment of digital silence in the thread. Somewhere across the vast network of the Internet I knew, with utter certainty, that the three of us were staring at our respective screens in confusion and disbelief.
As it turned out, the second poster who originally replied to my pleas was a native Spanish speaker. His grip on English was excellent, as was mine on Spanish, but both of us had grown up speaking only one language and our brains were wired as such. This explained how both of us could hear the same song and assume, because we did not fully comprehend it, that it was in our respective second language. But it did not explain the obvious, namely, how two people could hear the same song in different languages and, more importantly, in which language it was actually written.
The third poster continued to argue the obvious points that we were “first of all insane and second of all talking about different songs, and I will continue to believe both statements until you can each DM me identical lyrics.”
At the risk of inciting conspiratorial accusations I did not collaborate with the second poster on what we would send in. We instead decided to run the risk that our submissions would have no overlap. I, as did my accomplice, ran through the song in my head until I could pinpoint a few phrases, words, and snippets of what at least sounded like human language. I submitted my conclusions to the third poster and it wasn’t long before they posted a reply.
“Neither of you gave me much to work with and I still can’t identify what fucking song you both are talking about but there is something very interesting that I noticed, which is that both of these perceived lyrics sound similar when I read them in my head and identical when I say them out loud:
‘Que la mierdas’
‘Key’s the mirrors’”
And there it was, our Joycean corpus collosum, bridging two vast language worlds in the small space of a few syllables.
I can already hear you saying these lyrics sound nothing alike. I can promise you that at first, I was more skeptical than you are now. But I ask you a few things. First, how many mondegreens have you ever been guilty of hearing in your favorite songs in your first language? Second, how many lyrics can you discern in a song of your second langauge? Third, have you ever heard of The Dress, where people all around the world saw two completely different sets of colors in the same image for reasons that, a decade later, are still unknown to science? And finally, have you ever heard of the Dominican man who mistook “This is the rhythm of the night” for “Esos son Reeboks o son Nikes?” on a local radio station? So ask yourself again if they sound so different. Say them each to yourself a few times and see how long it takes for your mouth to start drifting towards one consistent pronunciation.
I hope you’re convinced, because that is ultimately the conclusion the three of us reached (I’m surmising days of Internet arguments for you, you’re welcome). But now we had enough to go off of that we could take to other parts of the forum and other forums altogether, and now people were coming out of the woodwork claiming to have also heard it. What had happened to us was happening everywhere: Spanish speakers with at least decent English had heard “key’s the mirrors” and English speakers with at least decent Spanish had heard “que la mierdas.” I sensed a ruse early on but everyone who claimed to have heard it had new lyrics to contribute. I sensed, again, that they were making them up, until we, collectively, were able to cross-reference alleged lyrics between the languages to find homophonic words, phrases, and lines, until we could patch the whole thing together and get two identical sounding sets of lyrics reflecting back at each other. The key was, indeed, the mirrors.
Yet even with two full sets of lyrics and with what now felt like the whole world doing their best detective work, we still didn’t have a name for The Song. Even stranger was that a direct translation, from either language to the other, yielded a completely incorrect set of lyrics. But if one transcribed what they heard while sticking to one language, a correct set of lyrics could be obtained and then interchanged, based on phonetics, with the other language, and, miraculously, retain the overall message and thematic mood of the lyrics, which was that almost all beauty in this world was the result of artificial randomness derived from the infinite pervasiveness of an omnipotent technological blanket, and so these coincidences and combinations, despite being objectively beautiful, were merely a consequence of living in such an artificial world, and the question was, was it beautiful because of the unprecedented complexity of surface-level aesthetics, or was it frustrating because it had the feeling of being programmed into the system by advertisers instead of evolving organically? And if there was one true genius of The Song it was that somehow all of us had seemed to encounter it through the same tension of beauty/frustration that it described in the lyrics. Not one person had heard it intentionally in any language. It was always from coincidences that could not be traced across the labyrinthine techno-capitalistic infrastructure, like in car radios, DJ sets in cities with names that couldn’t be recalled on nights that were scarcely remembered, hummed by a passing stranger on the sidewalk who, once the listener had felt the seeds of a few measures sprout into the entirety of The Song, could not be found no matter how desperately they were searched for on that same street. The one commonality, it seemed, was the feeling that when one heard it they had been hand-picked by some all-powerful force to awaken to the truth of existence and be the chosen one to see the hidden meanings behind the appearances of this illusory world and forever be a seer amongst the blind.
Until, that is, all of us realized that we could not all be the chosen one, and thus we returned to that age-old dilemma of determining who was the true prophet.
As before, I will spare you the weeks of Internet arguments trying to solve this. Like the broader Internet itself, Internet arguments have the effect of making the combatants believe that nothing in the observable universe matters outside of their discourse despite the obvious truth that anyone else who happens to come across it could not be less interested. I will say, however, that actual, real-life wars have been fought over lesser prophets, and that the scope of the argument became so far-reaching that I was seeing posts in no fewer than six other languages, at least two of which were outside the Indo-European family, and I was told that these posters had also heard the song in their respective languages and that, yes, it meant the same things to them.
It felt like the world was in flames as it sank into the ocean of space. I feared I would walk outside and hear anarchic gunfire but instead found empty streets and heard nothing except The Song. Inside buildings I saw and interacted with people going about their lives and I heard them discussing the trivial events of their days. I wondered if they knew a war was waging, an ideological one with unimaginable consequences, while they figured out what groceries they still needed.
And I wondered. I wondered if the beauty of The Song really was tainted by the conspiracy it seemed to imply: that it is reading the script of our lives out loud to us. I didn’t, and still don’t, want it to be true. It’s not because I can’t stand the thought of my own insignificance and lack of free will. It’s because I want the world to be beautiful and I’m afraid there’s none of that left. I want the world to be a miraculous, gigantic middle finger to all of the forces rippling through the vast vacuum of space that we can’t live under the pressure of and yet, against all the odds, we do.
I would think about this as I continued to go through my life and hear The Song in every passing moment. I still thought about the first time I ever heard it. The memory is so vivid that it occupies a delineated space in my mind with a membrane. I can enter it and replay it forwards or backwards, leave myself and drift to the outer edges of my perceptions in that moment, closely scrutinize details to a degree that would never have been possible when it happened, all while hearing The Song meander along its path. I have visited this memory so many times that I hardly hear it anymore and instead hear what I want to hear. This phenomenon began to seep out from my memories into my present. Before, I had at least heard the sounds of the world which served to reflect The Song back at me, but by now I had stopped hearing them altogether, and so the chatter of shopping cart wheels, the kickback of car exhausts, the wails of newborn infants, the exhaustion in dying breaths, the intimacy in “I love you,” were not sounds that I heard outside of me that reminded me of The Song but mere stand-ins for moments in The Song which I played to myself in my head incessantly. I stopped having any sense of wonder and lust for life because there was no longer anything unknown. Everything was so interconnected in such an obvious and predestined way that the smallest piece of information led to all others instantly. There was no longer a need to search; all that was left was to live, except not live by doing, live by sitting back and watching it all unfold. By now I couldn’t help but slide into a deep anger at whoever made The Song. I blamed them for how cold I had become, I blamed them for replacing the beauty of natural harmony with the plasticity of hyperreality, and I no longer wanted to search for The Song; I wanted to search for The Band. And make them pay. I was tempted to return to the coliseum that the online forums had become and unite the disparate tribes under the common goal of destroying whoever had cursed us this way, but I couldn’t help but second-guess myself: could it really be that one Band had captured a snippet of sounds that really did encapsulate everything all at once? What level of divinity must they have attained for that? And why had it taken this long to even consider The Band? I started to question that anyone had made The Song in the first place solely on the grounds that such a perspective must have been impossible; there were simply too many moving parts in reality, even in one sliver of time, to be accounted for and portrayed. But I had heard it. I had felt it. Many others had, too. For what felt like years I wandered in forests under moonlight, drove down arterial country roads without a destination, lied supine on my couch staring at the white ceiling without blinking, always wondering. I could only conclude that The Song existed in our heads, and that societal currents had pushed a certain group of us into the same hallucinated tributary where we heard something that did not actually exist outside of us. That didn’t mean that we weren’t hearing the same thing, or that it was without justification that we had heard anything at all, and that there wasn’t a direct link between our world and our thoughts. It just meant that there was no Band. There was never even a Song. There is only music, and we the listeners.