Does it feel like jazz?

As I write this text, the members of parliament of the country where I live have told us that our social demands and the demonstrations on the streets do not impact them enough for them to work so that we can live with dignity. In a way, it feels like the apocalypse and there are those who say it is. The problem is that it is always the apocalypse, and the reality is that it is people with names, real names, who work to make it feel that way. And we agree that we disagree, just as The Felice Brothers say in their magnificent song Jazz on the Autobahn. There will be those who say we must take the car and hit the road in a sort of Thelma & Louise escape, and there will be those, stupefied, who are already on the autobahn but for other, more alienating, more productive reasons – working for those who say it is the apocalypse and that it is time to flee to Mars. Humanity seems unnecessary to them unless it is at their service.

But sometimes, the apocalypse happens in your house – a sudden awareness hits you when you realize that one day your brain will be so worn out that you begin to lose your memory. For example, Agatha Christie. After writing prolifically for many years, she understood that elephants didn't forget, but she did. We do too. In her case, the author began to notice and left proof of it in her work: she began repeating the use of words, simplified her writing, and little by little, witnessing this firsthand, her life, her memory, her imagination slowly blacked out. The apocalypse.

In the verses of Ian Felice, however, it happened like this: Helen told the sheriff that the apocalypse was like a tornado with human eyes, with poisoned birds, chemical rain, and heads of state hyperventilating in clouds of methane. Or rather: a sunset in the human heart.

In my case, I thought the apocalypse was setting in while I lived in Iowa. I was leaving a party in the early morning and walking down the streets of downtown when the song Days of the Years started playing in my headphones, and I felt mirrored and filled with the same fear of drowning in a shallow bathtub or being poorly dressed for the aching cold of the Midwest. But it wasn't the apocalypse; I didn't cross the autobahn – I left by plane, and I can still vividly remember that winter and that spring as the best and worst thing that have ever happened to me in my life. I suppose that's what Christie thought before dying and before being conscious that she was conscious that she was getting lost in the sea of oblivion and that she was soon going to die. There, the Thelma & Louise escape becomes impossible. Fate catches up with us. Dear Agatha Christie, I understand you. We are all afraid of forgetting and dying. Those are the days of the years of our lives.

I want to return to Iowa, where I walk and arrive home and wait for the best friend of all those I found in those lands, and I save the melancholy for another season. We are going to say goodbye in a few weeks, and from that moment on we will see each other little, very little. So, I get in bed and turn on my phone and play the unforgettable voice of Ian Felice again, and I feel like it's the apocalypse. I want to leave now; I never want to leave. The apocalypse. If Ian Felice saw me walking with my brown skin, my short stature, and my long hair – just as Latinas in this American country know how to wear so well – would he write a song for me? I doubt it. But if he did, I want it to be about Agatha and about her memory loss, which according to the episode Vanishing Words from the RadioLab podcast goes like this: Professor Lancashire studied 16 of the author's novels and noticed that in Christie's 73rd novel, she had already lost at least one-fifth of her vocabulary. When do we lose the ability to remember the words we have accumulated over the years? And as a writer, at what moment did she begin to experience humanity's true apocalypse? We lose everything when we forget.

I want to return to Iowa, the tiny drama of Iowa and to me imagining Ian Felice singing and describing me confined to a small room trying to tell a story that, in turn, is the story of Agatha and the elephant that doesn't forget. I wish we were elephants of eternal memory. I suppose that's what music is about. The rhythm, the lyrics, the instruments, and the melody stay in our bodies, and we remember our favorite songs with the same emotion as the first time, or even with more enthusiasm. I am sure that when we listen to a song, we perpetuate memory and share it, and it becomes a collective matter. Collective memory.

So, I imagine Agatha Christie holding onto words to remind herself that she is capable of remembering, and I am thrilled by the idea of the Felice brothers singing to the two of us in a car – maybe Christie is driving – that passes Helen and the sheriff, and we too ask ourselves about the distinction between death and extinction, and we eat hamburgers, and we also ask each other: Does it feel like jazz? And both of us understand that, indeed, if we can be elephants in the apocalypse that we don't forget, it would feel like living in a jazz song. Does it feel like jazz, jazz, jazz on the autobahn? Yes, it does feel that way. Our apocalypse goes like this: We all move, there are no borders, we don't die, we are all worthy of being told in a song.

Now, I no longer live in Iowa, nor do I feel melancholy, even if I want to live in all the Felice Brothers’ songs. Although, for now, I let myself be carried away by the tide of people who are still present in the Puerta del Sol square in the city of Madrid. We have rage and we are angry because the rulers have applauded that our demands have failed. But we don't escape, we are not the sheriff next to Helen eating fruit, we are something else, we are another kind of song, nobody flees, we are alive and it feels like a great jazz song that we are building so as not to forget that we are singing collectively, and it will be of some use – I suppose it has to be of some use.

Brenda Navarro is a sociologist and writer, appearing at Hay Festival Forum Dallas 2026 on Saturday 17 October. Her first novel Casas vacías (Empty Houses) won the Tigre Juan Award and the Pen Translation Award. Her second novel, Ceniza en la boca (Ashes in the Mouth) won the Cálamo Award, El Premio de la Asociación de Librerías de Madrid, the Todos tus libros Award and the San Clemente Award as best book of the year 2022, as well as being a finalist in the Vargas Llosa Biennial 2022. She has been an editor, scriptwriter, and she teaches creative writing workshops. Navarro has collaborated with media outlets such as El País, Pikara Magazine, La Marea, El Salto, Milenio, Tierra Adentro, and more.