Presque vu, as I learned recently, is the official name for that feeling of having something ‘on the tip of your tongue’, an idea or a concept which is right there, but you just can’t grasp in its entirety.
It is the worst feeling in the world. Well, no, but it is terrible. And it happened to me the other day. I was at work, when suddenly one word came into my mind, supposedly with music. I knew it was a song, and I tried to remember, at the very least, the rest of that phrase so I could move on.
Two hours later, I was still unable to gather any further recollection. And, even if I had internet access at work, to look it up, the word i did remember is a fairly common one among songwriters.
Here are the only ”clues” I had:
1) Maybe due to said word, my mind settled on the idea that it was perhaps a ballad, or at least a softer song. )This was proved to be not the case, though).
2) All I could remember was the word “sometimes”, and that there was only one more word after that phrase.
3) For whatever reason, thinking about that song which I couldn’t even place made me think about patriotism, or something related to the United States. And I’m not even american.
That’s all I had, and I swear I wasted more energy that day trying to remember the song than what I spent getting to work.
Then, all of a sudden, an epiphany. From out of nowhere, just when I was trying to convince myself not to torture my brain anymore, this exploded into my head:
“Coca Cola, sometimes war”.
It was Rammstein’s “Amerika”, all along. Not exactly a ballad, and not at all patriotic.
The Iceberg.
