The Kraken

”There’s something sublime about listening to The Kraken (from the score Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest) in my car. I don’t know, it does something to me. The thoughts and imagery I get… dang it, I just want to do more. Long distance friendships are getting old. This piece of music evokes that sense of high adventure with people who share the idea. It transcends the source of the music itself. I mean, yeah, it’s an adventure film, but this music is much more than that. Ah, this is still too vague for me to explain. Too abstract. The Kraken is another blog post entirely. Another time, perhaps.”
--excerpt from the entry Camaraderie, May 2008


Well, it’s “another time,” so let me dissect that further.

I guess we create mental associations sometimes simply through patterns. By sheer coincidence, you play Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon on two separate occasions when you are sitting on the porch in the rain, then all of the sudden you realize that you have associated the CD with… sitting on the porch in the rain. Then you make a habit of maintaining that consistency.

It’s not just music. They say smell is the sense most tied to memory. You create patterns for yourself that gradually become a tradition of sorts. Maybe the smell of pine makes you think of sledding, which makes you think of Christmas as a kid. You buy pine scented candles to evoke that sensation on command.

All senses are connected. Something in the memory latches onto a familiar sensation, be it the smell of banana bread or the sound of a box fan, and the mind does things to connect the dots subconsciously.

Maybe that’s part of it. Part of my “mental associations,” part of what is evoked in the abstract part of my brain. Part of why it sets off the pleasure centers of my brain. Let me describe the history of associations with The Kraken.

When Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest came out in theaters, I bought the CD and listened to the first couple tracks on the way to the movie. After the movie, of course, the score was the focus of my car listening for a good week. Naturally.

By coincidence of circumstance or by deliberately capitalizing on the summer storms and their obvious relationship to the corresponding cinematic experience, I listened to that score several times thereafter when a storm was rolling on the horizon of Bowling Green, Ohio.

Yeah, it’s a film score, so yeah, I’m likely to associate it with the scene it’s used in. A giant freaking squid attacks a ship. It’s awesome. The whole movie is a rip-roaring good time. But as I said, the music transcends the context of the movie.

Sometimes I would find myself listening to it in anticipation of a group adventure in Ohio, when I had time to kill or a drive to make first. So maybe those circumstances contributed to it being associated with a group adventure, in addition to the adventure film behind it.

Much later, I found myself both reminiscing and looking to the future when I listened to it on the way to Hannibal one summer weekend, indulging in the abstract vision in my mind.

After that, I would find myself popping it into the car stereo while driving to Lee’s Summit, idly wondering what was over the hill of that exit I never took but was always curious where it led. I wished the right people for the job were with me, but I went ahead and capriciously took the exit anyway, just to know. By the way, it was Exit 5 on I-470 E… it leads to a golf course and Longview Community College on Longview Lake. Nice scenery. I would never have known. That area became the staple of my Sunday afternoons for a while. J.P. Coffee is pretty good. It’s good to explore with good music.

”This piece of music evokes that sense of high adventure with people who share the idea.”

I guess this piece of music captures the essence of what I was trying to explain in Camaraderie (in my mind, at least, which can’t be communicated because music is NOT a universal language). The Kraken puts me in a very pleasant place in my mind. That’s about as best as I can explain. I still suck at explaining the abstract, huh. But then again, that’s why it’s called abstract.

I should probably have been a cinematographer instead; at least then I could just shut up and show the images.

A history of subliminal (and sublime) associations in escapism. That should be the title of my portfolio.

”Hello, Beastie!”