Page 45 - Jazz

the material ephemeral and yet it endures in the memory like the recollection of a perfume combined
with the unit of time into which it dissolved. And if we have succeeded in concentrating and being
open to the moment, the perfume will not be able to disappear entirely, it will stop belonging only to
time past and will accompany us for ever.

But, on the other hand, I realise that my portion of life has not been as rich in public events (I
mean memorable concerts and performances) as I could have wished. The period of the dictatorship
robbed me of many years which could have been spent totally differently and sowed in me a fear that
is hard to conceal, a fear of communicating that fermented and increased beneath the surrounding
world’s layers of makeup, a hesitancy in every impulse towards closeness, the corroding of the
silvering of the mirror that ought to have displayed the ideal image of the world in front of me and
the world glimpsed over my shoulder. But the world that we keep talking about – and still can’t
stop doing so – insinuated another mirror, parallel to the first one, and thus rendered me captive
to a restless and dissatisfied feeling of twisting, because the hideous, grotesque and sick images
that had been reflected there in the earlier period of history reappeared, now distorted and more
diffuse, in the postrevolutionary era. There was a mix of impurities and burn marks, the shadowy
and hallucinatory echoes heard in Oregon’s Silver Suite, the hypocrital faces of old and new arrivistes,
their rapacious stares typical of omnipresent meddlers with “refined” and luxurious tastes, those
arrogant smiles and the mist behind them, unseen by them, on which flicker the frescoes alive with
funereal demons and dwarves, the cortege that waits for the final moment before seizing what cannot
be foreseen and seems unimaginable.

The brief, implacable sound of a recycling bin being emptied. I too want to write and to empty
myself of all the anxieties that have accumulated from the uneasiness caused by constantly switching
between the corroded surfaces of the mirrors and to ask myself a question about the purpose of
doing so and I recall what Octavian Paler said: “I do not know who I am writing for, but I know why I am
writing. I am writing to justify myself. In whose eyes? I have already said it, but I can face being laughed at
for saying it once more: in the eyes of the child I was”. And what is left of the child that I was? Perhaps a
fondness for this kind of playing with the music, a love of collecting now satisfied by Internet piracy,
downloading torrents and spying through the crack at music and film sites. Neither the Golden
Age nor the present Plastic Age has managed to rob me of this. I listen to Ecotopia and that superbly
scenic Green and Golden from the Beyond words album, with its symphonic architecture interwoven
in the sketching of a rich instrumentation, and think that I am still using words but that what I am
experiencing now does really lie beyond words. And then I listen to Crossing, an album that has
inflexions of New Phonic Art, with melodic returns, repeats and reprises via piano embroidering
and percussion accents, musical phrases and interrogations, especially in Kronach Waltz, a piece that
conjures up scenes from the films of Fellini. And now I realise that I ought to stop because even if I
leave it here I have typed too many signs. But will they remain signs ?

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