By The Landlord
“We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.” – Philip K. Dick
“The moments of déjà vu were coming more frequently, now. Moments would stutter and hiccup and falter and repeat. Sometimes whole mornings would repeat. Once I lost a day. Time seemed to be breaking down entirely.” ― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things
"History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies the same defeats
Keep your finger on important issues
With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues
I'm just the oily slick
On the windup world of the nervous tick
In a very fashionable hovel." – Elvis Costello, Beyond Belief
"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water." - TS Eliot, The Wasteland,
“Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time... I think I've forgotten this before.” – Steven Wright
Phil: Do you ever have déjà vu, Mrs. Lancaster?
Mrs. Lancaster: I don't think so, but I could check with the kitchen.
Phil: What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?
Ralph: That about sums it up for me. – Groundhog Day, 1993
The Hollywood actor Charlton Heston was once known to have suffered a temporary, traumatising psychological condition when asked by executives to reprise a role in a big budget Hollywood sequel. Feeling a disturbing sense of odd recollection, and perusing the exhaustive filming schedule, he suddenly had that strange sinking feeling – he'd Ben-Hur before.
OK then, I'll get my coat (or Roman breastplate). You may, with a groan, have seen that one coming, or perhaps it was a visual pre-echo, your eye catching sight of the key words on the next line. Or it only seemed familiar, just a split second afterwards.
Anyway, joking aside, in all sorts of contexts, this week we examine songs about, but also inducing a sense of deja vu, that illusionary state of memory, a psychological phenomenon of feeling of having lived through the exact present situation in the past, whether that is seeing the same faces, feeling the exact same emotions, scenarios, sounds, sights or more in a tangible sense of repetition.
We've all likely experienced it to a greater or lesser degree, but this week's song theme is twofold - songs that lyrically or thematically focus on the process and experience of déjà vu, perhaps be that falling in or out of love, or of memories of personal or other history repeating itself. But also songs, perhaps not directly on that may have induced some sense of déjà vu, in other words a false memory of having heard or experienced the same before and it inducing memories. If sharing the second category, please add your personal description or associations of the experience.
Déjà vu is a term first coined by the French philosopher Émile Boirac in 1876 in his book L'avenir des sciences psychiques (The Future of the Psychic Sciences). “These experiments have led scientists to suspect that déjà vu is a memory phenomenon. We encounter a situation that is similar to an actual memory but we can’t fully recall that memory .... Our brain recognizes the similarities between our current experience and one in the past ... left with a feeling of familiarity that we can't quite place.”
Sounds familiar? The term is also sometimes falsely used in as shorthand "seen it before" when it is the perception and memory that is false.
Déjà vu can be caused by a neurological disorder, such as temporal lobe epilepsy, or can accompany the experience by those suffering from migraines with aura, or various forms of anxiety, or even schizophrenia, but for most of us it is a trick of memory. And experiencing occasional déjà vu, as is common, can actually be a sign of a good memory, a sign of a healthy mind reaching out to make connections, to see familiarity, to create tangible shapes. Induced by sounds and people, I particularly experience it in crowds, such as at live music events, and elsewhere. The chances are that many of the same faces have frequented the same venue before.
Our brains are designed this way, to be alert to familiarity, in part to recognise faces and recognise aural and visual patterns in order to learn language.
We are all soaked in memories and connections. Running or regularly frequenting a Song Bar with multiple associations, tunes and themes can also induce this. 'Have we had this song or theme before?' is a common feeling. In this case, not exactly, but there will be some enjoyable echoes and memories in the fact that over Christmas 2018 we explored an epic two-week session about songs that sound like other songs, resulting in very entertaining playlists picked by a former regular Olive Butler here.
Naturally, when you've been listening to music for many decades, hearing a song for the first time might sound exactly something else, but that could also be déjà vu.
That's certainly part of modern life with multiple channels of stimulus. The Waste Land, TS Eliot's epic poem published in 1922 captures this by a fusion of voices and literary references from Greek myth to Chaucer to the then present, expressing a period of massive change and turmoil in a post-First World War modernism, and employing a particularly key phrase: "mixing memory and desire".
Talking of desire and memory, popular young adult novelist David Levithan writes in his 2012 book Every Day: “What is it about the moment you fall in love? How can such a small measure of time contain such enormity? I suddenly realize why people believe in déjà vu, why people believe they've lived past lives, because there is no way the years I've spent on this earth could possibly encapsulate what I'm feeling. The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations—all of them rearranging themselves so that this precise, remarkable intersection could happen. In you heart, in your bones, no matter how silly you know it is, you feel that everything has been leading to this, all the secret arrows were pointing here, the universe and time itself crafted this long ago, and you are just now realizing it, you are now just arriving at the place you were always meant to be.”
For some the experience of deja vu is almost dream-like. American actress Rachel Nichols describes it with a double-meaning Wimbledon tennis metaphor: "How come I love having an episode of déjà vu? It's akin to an out-of-body experience, I would think. It sits with me, happily, begging me to delve into my memory to find its match point."
And here's Marilyn Manson's take on similar, but different lines: "I feel like I've dreamed half of my life that hasn't happened yet, so a lot of times I'm going along, and I do stuff, and I know that I've done it. I have deja vus more than I have regular experiences. If half of your day is a deja vu, then you start to wonder, 'What is real and what isn't?'"
American writer Chuck Palahniuk takes a harder edge, and goes in the other direction: "There's an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar."
But Isabel Allende, in Island Beneath the Sea captures a sense of readiness to the experience. “Sometimes I have these premonitions and I don't forget them, so I will be prepared when they happen.”
Mixing then all these things – memory, surprise, falling in love, life, death, tricks of the mind and senses, the experience of deja vu has also been extensively explored in films, and sometimes I get that myself, watching what I thought was new to me, only to realise I've previously seen it, but until I'm at least halfway through.
From Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, starring James Stewart with a repressed memory of height trauma and being mysteriously mesmerised by Kim Novak, to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a rom-com about two heartbroken lovers, Clementine and Joel, who both decide to undergo a weird procedure to erase each other from their memories forever, to the brilliant current TV psychological thriller series Severance, about office workers whose minds and memories are affected by an inserted brain chip, dividing their selves between their respective professional and private life (of course people are messily complicated, so that doesn't quite work ...), it's a theme that remains fascinating.
There's also the industrial espionage thriller of dream infiltration and layers of time in Inception, or the Denzil Washington secret agent thriller Déjà Vu (2006), but perhaps the two most interesting films on the subject is the clever 1993 fantasy comedy Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, playing a cynical TV weatherman covering the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, who becomes trapped in a time loop, forcing him to relive the 2nd February repeatedly, each time trying to improve his day. This is what happens the first time he begins to experience it:
But for me, the most powerful, and chilling film on the subject, is the 1945 British thriller Dead of Night, a series of psychological stories inside a story, beginning with a man who visits a house the country, and is certain he has seen all of the characters within before, only in a dream...
In one of the stories, one of the other characters recounts a premonition dream experience of seeing a funeral procession in the street outside his window, serving then as a warning as he later avoids being killed in a bus crash. Here is that that sequence, recreated as a silent film with a soundtrack, but the key phrase is repeated by the funeral driver/ bus conductor. "Just room for one inside, sir."
It's particularly chilling for me as we approach the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 (7th July 2005) terror attacks in London. I'd seen Dead of Night the previous evening (not for the first time but I'd forgotten most of it so it was the usual sense of déjà vu). And the next morning I remember weighing up whether to take public transport or the cycle to work across the capital. Perhaps subconsciously remembering that scene, I had a very particular strong, oddly feeling that it was safer to ride my bike. I'm sure there are many similar stories to this whether they are a form of premonition, deja vu, or a trick of the mind but it’s a memory that remains very strong.
Anyway, over to you then, learned Song Bar readers, with your songs about or inducing a sense of déjà vu. Delving into our minds and the music, is this week's wise musical sage - the superb Shiv Sidecar! Place your nominations in comments below, for the deadline at 11pm UK on Monday, for playlists published next week. It's a familiar routine, but will also always be different...
It’s that time again, but it’s not quite that time again …
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