jackie scutt writing

write-now
Music stirs memories. My sister turned seventy and I’ve just returned from a few days marking the occasion with my family, my siblings, my cousins. Sitting out together on a balmy evening in our July heatwave, my brother spontaneously started to play intros from the sixties and seventies, the soundtracks of our lives, and we vied to name the tune.
My reading project this year has been Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, started and neglected a few times in my past lives, now almost complete as a retirement/lockdown indulgence. For Proust, a particular sensation (for him, the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, the sight of hawthorn in blossom, a phrase in a piece of music) transports you back to the essence of an experience. It is as if the young-self rises within the present-self and time collapses.
Those songs have filled my head and heart, left me thoughtful, nostalgic perhaps, for my own lost times.
First Notes
An endless
enveloping evening,
congenial
summer warmth
building over some days
like the sea
surrendering its chill
after a stretch of sun,
we compete to name the song,
first notes
misleading memory
before we get it.
‘This was my favourite.’
‘Me too.’
‘Reminds me of …’
‘Where were we?’
In the lingering moment of
digging familiar grooves,
shared memories shuffle
into the set of snapshots
we hold in our private albums.
No longer the same old song,
we move on before
the end.
22.7.21