Words and music - vehicles of resurrection.
It was a simple line tucked snugly away in the middle of a paragraph, in the middle of a novel. It went something like this. ‘Words and music are instruments of resurrection.’
What the author was adroitly and succinctly saying was that there are some words and some music that take us back to a place, a time, a person. All of a sudden we are there. We didn’t plot this moment, we could not have ordered it online, but by some weird coincidence we are given the right vehicles for the memory to be resurrected from the murky mire of our memory and it comes back to life. It stands before us. Sometimes mocking, sometimes taunting, sometimes making us cringe, sometimes making us lovely, sometimes stirring that pool of gooeyness that is deep within us and which had lain calm and untroubled until… that tune, that phrase becomes a vehicle for us once again.
It might have been a piece of music at a wedding, a funeral on the dance floor or during that special first smooch. The encore from the show you saw on Broadway last year. It might have been the words on a card that you received just at the right time from the most obtuse person. The least likely of all candidates to say the right thing, because up until now they have always managed to say the very wrong thing.
My hope is that you have experienced these vehicles of resurrection. That the song came on the radio or your playlist. The card fell through the letterbox, the email flashed up on your screen, the text full of smirking emojis finds you and you breathe again, remembering and living and resurrected.