My Mind Was Seeded

The other day i found myself inwardly hearing (but also a little singing i suppose (not at the same time, mind you)) "the Mississippi Delta is shining like a national guitar" and "as if I never noticed the way she brushed her hair and farted". I was enjoying Paul Simon's (with the help of Africa's musical heritage) warm, fluid and bouncy tune and I wondered how it came to sparkle through my synapses. It didn't take me long to realise.

I suppose the most common mode of musical infection is aural. You hear a snippet on the radio or while you're on hold to some godforsaken customer information line and later in the hour, you find yourself humming it. Involuntarily, too. But reading it can be just as effective. Upon very little reflection, I think cw's transmission was more effective because it alluded not to a song title, which one encounters relatively often, but to an emotive line in the song. Titles are often (but not always) texts within the song, but they are more readily hermetically sealed off as separate categories, independent on the actual sound of the song. Other lines within a song depend on the surrounding words and music and invoke them strongly. "National guitar" triggered the whole musical roundabout in my head, plunging me immediately into its lyrical waters and away I sped, naked on the back of a dolphin towards Graceland.