Song that comes from a show I really like, I find that I connect with the overall message: although endgames are all well and good, it definitely won’t hurt to look around you and enjoy the present. Life moves on no matter what, and you should do your best to live in the moment. The song only echoes the emotional impact: it reminds me of better times and of the moments where I wish I had done more to have fun.
The song has an interesting history that stems all the way from 1899, to a 1930’s pop song using fragments of the original, to being covered as a guitar piece in the late 60’s, to being sampled and remixed by the man considered to be one of lofi hip-hop’s godfathers, into the classic song many know and love today.
Dominic,
I love this. The rehashing of the melody from Ravel is so cool—this sounds both like anime music and 90s hip hop while also sounding so familiar. I feel like I’ve heard that melody in the strings throughout early 20th-c Hollywood films.
Can you say a bit more about where you’re deriving the “message” of the song from? I get a similar vibe from it, but I want to know more about how you’re listening to it.
M
For the ‘message’ of the song, I got it from the way Aruarian Dance differs from its source material. If you compared ‘Aruarian Dance’ and Laurindo Almeida’s cover of ‘The Lamp Is Low’, the stark difference is that Aruarian Dance has a drum beat over the guitar notes that Nujabes sampled from ‘The Lamp is Low’. In Almeida’s song, the guitar by itself makes me see my past in a sad and remorseful way, as the slower tempo and lack of drums has my brain “slow down” and think more deeply about the past, dissecting what was good, bad, and what I could grow from and change; whereas in Aruarian Dance, the more upbeat pace of the song doesn’t leave me with time to reflect, instead the memories just surface and pass by as quick as the song does, and all I can do is just watch the past and remember how good it was and how I both could’ve done more to be happy and how I am doing more to be happy.
Another way of getting the message of the song is this: my memories are eternally on playback, and the speed of how I sift through them is dependent on the music I listen to. Aruarian Dance has that bittersweet feeling that the Mandalorians of the Star Wars universe call “aay’han”. Aay’han is the feeling of being in the present and cherishing the good life you have, while at the same moment looking back and remembering the good things/people who aren’t there anymore. That same form of bittersweetness is what attracts me to Aruarian Dance: the song reminds me of how good the memories are today with the friends that I call my brothers, while also having me look back at my past and remember the good times with the friends and family I left in the past.
Although it stings a bit that the past is the past, looking back gives me the drive to push myself and live in the moment because we never really know the value of a moment until it has passed. As summarized by James Luceno, “Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action.”
I, again, love these thoughts Dom—particularly the detail on how the presence of drums in Nujabes’ re-mix push your mind forward rather than allowing it to slip into the past as it does with Almeida’s track. The thought that the speed of memory is influenced by music is also quite interesting and poetic.
But is it always true that the “past is the past”? One of my favorite old American writers, William Faulkner once wrote that “the past is never over; it’s not even past”; I wonder about what he means by this quite a lot. 🙂
I’d say that the past really is the past. Time through my eyes is seen in two ways: what’s happening now, and what has already happened. What’s happening “now” is a fluid concept that allows me to focus my attention in the present, while giving me the elbow room to plan a bit for the future. Although I do plan for the future, I refrain from a lot of solid dreams because I know that life’s events and happenings are very fluid. This sort of holding myself back is a self-check that I do in order to be comfortable in my present. If I ever wander too much into the future, I risk the feeling of despair and failure if my dreams don’t come to fruition; but if I don’t wander into the future at all, I feel stuck and stagnated in the present, where I start to grow negative emotions regarding the pacing of my life. Looking at life through vague ideas for the future allows me to be as adaptable as water, because I neither expect too much nor do I lower the expectations for myself. Through this, I allow myself to live my days with full awareness of what’s happening. Along with the capability to be aware of my life happening around me, being in the present allows me to keep my mind off the past. Although nobody’s past isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, I like to forget some details about mine because they just suck or because I don’t like spiraling into my past and hyperfixating on what could have been. For me, the past is the past because it sucks too much. I never had the whole “two-parent” thing growing up, and I severely dislike one of my parents from when he started doing his parental duty until now. Me and my sister have never had the best relationship with him, and the difference between my mother and him was a real shock because of how much a dick he was most of the time. I changed who I was in order to keep myself going, and that led to problems with my social skills, emotional development and just how I see people in general. I don’t have any regrets about the change I had to do, since it’s what I needed at the time, but I prefer not to think about my past too much. Coupling the coincidences of my less-than-stellar home life with the fact that I grew up bullied, never having a lot of friends, and making a lot of mistakes in trying to grow up, I eventually decided to just let go of the past and make myself disconnected to it. Like the German physicist Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg wrote, “Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.”
What I think Faulkner had in mind when he wrote that was that the past is always going to be with us; that it helps make us who we are and that we should apply the past into our growth and well-being since it’s never truly gone. Although I do agree with the idea of using the past to better yourself, I do have to disagree with the part where he thinks that we should constantly apply the past into our present because sometimes the past sucks a little bit too much to be constantly revisited. What we agree on is that the past is a lesson, but the difference is that I prefer to be selective about which parts of my past I want to learn from. I think that Lichtenberg also sums up the reason why I’m selective about learning from my past when he wrote “What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don’t deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don’t we just as often draw the wrong ones?”