mozaikmage

There's a bit in The Mysterious Benedict Society (the first book) by Trenton Lee Stewart that's stuck in my head since I read it. The villains are disseminating evil messages through television and radio waves by having kids read lists of words and then broadcasting those lists at a subsonic frequency, or something like that, it's been a while. But to transmit large amounts of information through his evil machine, the bad guy figures out a way to "package" whole lectures the best students memorized by having them say key phrases. And the bit that stuck for me was this excerpt (paraphrased):

And at least for me, a lot of information ends up packaged into single phrases unintentionally. Like, if someone says "draw a circle and that's the Earth" everything I've ever learned about Hetalia against my will floats right up to the top of my brain. If someone says "let me tell you about Homestuck" I have a whole peer-reviewed lecture ready to go. A lot of my memories are tied to key phrases, and I don't even realize they are until they're called to the forefront again.

Some memories I don't know I have at all. 

A few weeks ago, I was at this Russian-American music festival thing with my family. I feel like I don't know a lot of the Bard Music Standards, mostly because I hate camping and have aggressively avoided these festivals since I was old enough to stay home alone while my mom and grandparents went off into the woods for a weekend. I also avoided the "sitting around the dinner table singing songs with a guitar until 2 am" parts of my family dinner parties (as best as I could, although my childhood bedroom was directly above the kitchen so I could still hear them through the floor.) I actually made a comic about all this so if you're not up to date with this part of the Masha Lore here's the link.

So anyway. I was at this festival, and I was walking back from the bathrooms to the campsite my family was staying at (the furthest from said bathrooms, annoyingly enough) and I passed a group of strangers playing guitar and singing As People Do At These Things. And I can't remember what song they were singing anymore, I can't remember the lines, but I remember that as I was hearing them, I realized I knew the line that came next, and I sang along absentmindedly as I continued along my path.

This song I didn't know I knew was absorbed entirely without conscious effort through years spent on the periphery of relatives and family friends singing around me, my grandma singing me to sleep when I was a baby, my mom humming in the kitchen when she cooks. And the memory of this song, formed gradually over time like a sedimentary rock, was pulled up out of the water for exactly as long as it was called for, before bobbing back down below the surface.

I don't know what I don't know, but when it comes to things like Russian bard music that's been in my life for as long as I've been alive, I don't even know what I do know. On the drive back from the festival, my mom started singing a song I later learned after googling lines from it was called "the Motorway Song" by Juliy Kim, and I knew, like, a solid 60% of the verses and the whole chorus. I can't remember where I learned it. I think my grandma sang it to me when I was little. I'm pretty sure my mom did too. When I looked it up later I learned we all remembered the onomatopeia at the end of the song differently from how the original singer did it. 

This happens a lot, me looking up a song and discovering the original sounds totally different from what I've heard in the background radiation of my life. The nature of bard music is that a lot of it is passed on orally by being performed at these festivals or small domestic concerts, and is riffed and remixed and twisted by dozens of people that come in contact with it. At the festival my mom got into an argument with someone over how the melody for something was supposed to go (they were both wrong, if the youtube video my mom found was accurate.) But also just, memory is fallible and my mom is super tone deaf. The original records and cassettes my family collected this type of music on all stayed behind in Russia when we came to the US, so the way they remember the songs is the way the songs are, for them. 

I don't really have any conclusion or anything, which is why this is a blog post on the site I have exactly 3 readers and not something in a place where people actually look. I was just thinking some thoughts.

As a treat, here is the Motorway Song in English (but not singable because I have my limits at 12:13 a.m)