every heart vibrates to that iron string

"After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." - Aldous Huxley

Twice in recent weeks, I have found myself walking home to the tune of "Jane Says." I am half expecting to open the door to my apartment tomorrow afternoon to a private performance by Perry Farrell. A few weeks ago, I turned the corner of my block to an acoustic finger-picked version on the steps of the building just next to mine, the singer's voice subtle and sweet, sealing a moment that will forever change the memory of the song for me. And then, several days later, as if to insist that I not ignore this shift, it haunted my night crying out in its original recorded form through the window of a parked car.
It was more than half a lifetime ago that Jane's Addiction released Nothing's Shocking. It was, in fact, August, 1988, a few days before my best friend and (eventual) muse's 16th birthday (oh, but we were not so young as that, never). My family and I had just moved out to the Rockaways, and those first few days in the new apartment, in the new life that we would find ourselves in, were as brain-tryingly hot as they have been in NYC these past few days. August has always been a stormy month for me, and not just for the thunder and lightning that seem to strike my thoughts this time of year.
The sense of the mutable (I have always loved that word) is not something I often encounter when I have a song with a specific point of reference for me. When a memory is displaced, as the thoughts that follow when I hear that Jane is done with Sergio now do, it makes me reconsider remembrance and the power of the subconscious. It is a curious thing; the past is still there, the original connection, not completely disappeared--no--rather, it is as if its potency has been smudged. All the more curious as the associations within the two memories--summertime, the heat, proximity to home, the significance of the just completed conversation, the recognition of an important moment in your life--don't fall into each other, they remain parallel, layered as thoughts, not quite touching, but almost.