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Fireworks always make me feel oddly melancholy and nervous but I don't understand why. On one level I know it's because the sounds remind me or make me think of the sounds of a city of war. Sitting at home on November the 5th I think of Sarajevo, of the destruction of streets, of the TV footage of war reporters in the hills watching the city being destroyed. This is what war would sound like, I think.
What I don't understand is *why* it has such a strong effect on me. I wasn't young enough to be hugely impressionable at the time of Bosnia, 10 or so by then if I remember correctly. Or is that still an age at which fears are formed? Or was there another conflict in my earlier childhood? One that I was too young to remember the name of, but remember the sound of perfectly? Help me out, you older people.
What I don't understand is *why* it has such a strong effect on me. I wasn't young enough to be hugely impressionable at the time of Bosnia, 10 or so by then if I remember correctly. Or is that still an age at which fears are formed? Or was there another conflict in my earlier childhood? One that I was too young to remember the name of, but remember the sound of perfectly? Help me out, you older people.
Fireworks
Date: November 6th, 2002 08:39 am (UTC)From: (Anonymous)Fireworks displays are often a falsely jolly thing, and particularly Guy Fawkes' Night; after all, we are "celebrating" an occasion when a passionately-committed set of people were prepared to kill a lot of other people; and Fawkes died an horrible death. Not really that whoop-de-doo lighthearted frivol one might have on, say, a midsummer evening when an outdoor "Proms" concert finishes with some sparkly bits over a lake, after a lovely picnic and the entire brass section has done a Mexcian wave for no apparent reason during one of the pieces.
I find that a lot of ambient and house music has a recurrent sound of what my brain says are tracer bullets. Can't bear the stuff for that reason. But I know why; too much exposure to tv coverage of the Viet Nam war. I was 10 in 1967 and there had been four years of it already and another 5 to go. I hate the sound of tracer fire; and some fast fireworks sound like that too.
Don't underestimate what exposure to war or war-type sounds does to minds of children; we are hard-wired to tune in exquisitely sensitively to sounds which indicate there might be a threat to our lives and the more vulnerable we are the better tuned we are. Ten is still very vulnerable and the brain is not yet pruned to interpret those sounds as other than threatening.