Page 31 - Jazz

A new cup of green tea

On Sunday morning, after pouring boiling water onto the green grains in the teapot, I
turn on the computer and immediately cast a curious glance in the direction of Messenger and
then at the Chat that I have been spying on for some time without writing a word.
I select something that I have not listened to for a long time and come across a pianist
with a name I find almost impossible to pronounce: Vijay Iyer. Faced with a choice between his
latest album and Reimagining, I opt for the latter, which has insinuated itself “into a little corner
of my soul”, as Truman Capote slightly affectedly puts it, and from there , probably, sends out
signals that are intermittent, subtle and of variable strength.
At that time of day the little being-online circles (the emoticons) are generally turned off;
in other words, there is peace and quiet, but still I don’t really know how to begin and I keep
faffing around, now putting a teaspoonful of honey in my cup and now settling myself more
comfortably in my armchair, thinking all the time that I’m going to succeed in squandering a
new day and that I won’t be capable of opening up and writing down what has been passing
through my mind recently, the fragments in the lives of my characters, imaginary ones of
course, who surround me with their restless agitation that is half imagined and half mysterious,
restlessly mixing the world “as it is” with the escapist world, that place where things slip away
so easily from any apparently stable position in a particular time and where every scene is acted
out in so many ways that on my return, when I manage despite it all to bring some degree of
order to my thoughts, everything becomes even more unclear and nebulous and my capacity to
understand it still more fragile.
And although the screen of my monitor is covered in brightly coloured icons and the
desktop background picture emanates the energy of a familiar encounter, the little being-online
circles on Mess are bluey-grey, constantly cold, as if they will never again break out into a
bright golden-yellow smile but will remain far away in their list of assumed names, like a banal
catalogue of incomplete addresses from a parallel world.
And almost always my curiosity is quashed by the predictability of it, because only rarely does
it turn out to be different. In the list of little bluey-grey circles there is a breach, a small square
like a miniature window frame which is scarcely large enough to contain the lower half of a face
cupped in someone’s hands, implying that the person looking out is standing with her elbows
resting on the unseen surface of a frame, in a room which there is no point in your imagining
because it would be only a minor exercise of the imagination, but if you are still tempted to do
so you would turn the camera lens the other way up and probably it would be simpler for me
to look into my own room which is becoming smaller with every day that passes, until, through
some alchemical contamination, nothing is left of my own face but that same cutout too small

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