The Song Ended. How Much Time Passed?

A song lasts three minutes. The place it takes you does not last three minutes.

Melodies carry a person into the past. But they don’t only carry; they hold a memory with you for the length of the song, a memory that under normal conditions might surface for an instant, a few seconds at most. For three or four minutes you stay inside it.

For the things you want to remember, that’s a gift. For the things you don’t, it’s something else.

What we call “damar” music in Turkish — the vein-tapping kind, the sort that goes straight to the ache — usually works this way. But it needn’t be the genre you’d expect; depending on the memory attached to it, a jazz record can take you to exactly the same place. What decides isn’t the kind of music but which memory got stuck to it.

I wrote “Mütemadiyen” during a hard stretch. In those days I’d become unable to listen to any music at all, which is a strange condition for someone who makes it. The song came out of the very thing I couldn’t listen to.

Years have passed and my life has settled somewhere opposite to those days. Even so, every time I hear “Mütemadiyen” time stops and takes me back there. When the song ends the minute hand has moved three minutes. The duration of what happened in me is another matter.

I no longer see that as a flaw. A melody being able to hold a memory this firmly may say something about how firmly the memory itself was made. But I’m not sure. Maybe music is simply the best container we know for carrying time.