The Miraculous Transmission of Feeling

Posted on 9th June 2025 Updated on 9th June 2025

A while ago I was flicking aimlessly through TV channels when I stumbled upon The Dance: Fleetwood Mac’s legendary 1997 reunion concert. I wasn’t planning to watch it. I wasn’t planning to feel. But within seconds, I was hypnotised.

Stevie Nicks, her voice swirling like incense through the ether, sounded as ethereal and raw as ever. Lindsey Buckingham’s guitar playing, sharp, intricate, explosive, felt less like performance and more like possession. Christine McVie the steady heart. Warm, grounded, and quietly luminous, anchoring the band’s wild edges with melodies that feel like home.

And beneath it all, the rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie delivered the kind of intuitive, unshakeable groove that only decades of shared experience can produce. It was, in short, exquisite. And somehow, happening right there in my living room.

But of course, it wasn’t. The concert took place nearly thirty years ago. And the real miracle, the one that left me awestruck long after the music faded, wasn’t just the performance itself, but how it reached me.

In 1997, on a Californian stage, voices and instruments moved through the air. Shuddering molecules, stirring pressure waves invisible to the eye. These waves travelled toward microphones and pickups, which converted them, through carefully engineered membranes and magnetic fields, into tiny electric signals.

Those signals were then captured and stored, magnetically, on reels of electromagnetic tape. Information encoded in rust, essentially. Preserved. Archived. Sleeping.

And then, decades later, they’re awakened. Extracted from vaults, digitised, compressed, and broadcast invisibly through the atmosphere in spectrum frequencies beyond sight. These signals travel across fields and rooftops, through brick and cloud, into space even, until they find their way to my satellite dish.

Inside the plastic shell of my TV, circuits decode the invisible. They translate it into pictures and sound, back into moving air, into light and colour. Those vibrations reach my ears; those photons strike my retinas.

And then, most miraculous of all: my brain turns it into feeling. Into memory. Into awe. Into joy.

This, I realised, is a miracle.

Not one with trumpets or angels, or water and wine, but something better: a moment where art, physics, memory and emotion meet and shake hands. A thread stretched across three decades, linking a concert stage to my sofa.

All so I can sit there, eyes a little wet, in wonder.

And as I sat there, it struck me that this isn’t unique to music. All art, when you really stop and think about it, is the best kind of sorcery. A human being, living in their one moment, feels something deep and complex and, maybe, profound. So they reach for tools: a brush, a keyboard, a melody. They work the materials of their world—pigment, language, vibration—until that feeling is woven into something shareable.

Then, sometimes hundreds of years later, someone else picks it up.

They open the book. They stand in front of the canvas. They hear the opening chords.

And suddenly, they feel it too.

Not a copy, not a diluted echo, the same shiver, the same lift of the chest, the same ache. A direct transmission across time and space.

Emotion stored. Emotion released.

How else can we explain what happens when we read a poem from the 14th century and feel understood? Or stand before a painting and feel our throat tighten, even though the artist has been dead for centuries? It’s not nostalgia. It’s not trickery. It’s something more elemental: someone once burned with feeling, and they left the embers burning for you to catch fire.

That’s not just communication. That’s not just craft.

That’s magic.