AbsurdBeats

Saw that printed on a tote bag the other day: there is thunder in our hearts.

My first thought: Cool, in sturm-und-drag kinda way. (And yeah, okay, cool and sturm-und-drag don’t really go together, but you get what I mean, right?)

Second thought: I know that line, I’ve heard it somewhere.

Poem? Speech? Hmm. No. Song lyric.

Thunder. Thunder thunder thunder. Springsteen coulda written this, but no, that ain’t Springsteen.

I kept repeating the lyric, trying to call up the sound. No dice.

Then, this morning, the sound came. There is THUNder in our haahrts.

I know that, I thought, I know I know it. But from where?

Why not just run on a search on the lyric—easy-peezy, you’ll get the answer.

I did not want to run the search. I wanted to remember.

I then thought of asking a co-worker if she could remember, which seems like cheating but it’s not: I wanted SOMEone to remember, someone to have this info in her noggin and be able to pull it out.

But then I didn’t ask, because I wanted to be the someone who remembered.

And then I went back to work and the melody went underground and then, and then, it bubbled up.

Kate Bush! Yes!

Running up that hill! Yes!

There is thunder in our haah-ahrts/. . . /You and meeEEEEeee/ . . . / I’d make a deal with God/And get him to swap our places.

I was going to write a whole bit about how I want to be able to recall things that can be looked up, that maybe exercising this recall is like exercising one’s body (e.g., even if pushing around weights isn’t useful in and of itself, that I push around weights equips me to do other, useful, things); alternatively, that while there may be a good to being able to free one’s mind of trivialities in order to create room for more important matters, the process of amassing and sorting and remembering those trivialities may be—quite unlike pushing around weights—pleasurable in and of themselves; and, finally, that it used to be really super important for me to memorize song lyrics and be able to recite them on command and that while I no longer go out of my way to do so I still sometimes wish I went out of my way to do so and thus when I can remember a song lyric I’m raptured up shoeless to a place when a song could fill my whole heart. With thunder.

But then I decided not to write about all of that, and instead note that I was oddly giddy for having remembered, a giddiness which may have been due to having Kate Bush in my head for the day.

She can be trouble, but she’s my kind of trouble.