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"sometimes you get so lonely, sometimes you get nowhere, I've been all over the world, I've left every place"
Don't tell me to stop now when it's beginning all over again. I'm rumbling in treno via Empoli a Pisa, brain moving faster than all words, towards my own Sonic Youth, with 3 Babbling Devils on my shoulder, eagerly absorbed into the whole of the night, like a sponge sucked into the drain. Don't ask me to stop singing, oy, fare le laude ai compagni assiem wherein their words and hairs fly so causeless in the wind headed into the nowhere we never been before. Through rushing air of window late, November as it was, moon a daub of semen or milk (some of us think like both) (some can tell the difference)(across the black velvet skirt (sky). The sky (skirt). Blends in with all the advertisements of the sky (of Tuscany) you see in Nature Magazines, sky porn, anna livia plurabelle, just ahead, anywhere. Skies backdropping the architectural crusades of progress: churches, tenements, malls, aracades, factories, living graft, then skies again, full, empty, the train's throttling intonarumori. Like the lovely lies my friends here tell me about the future while we laugh empty the mind and the bottles while filling up the heart with something like a ladleful of Italian sky-noise and by then I'm already hearing opening primordial haywire feedback space junk whistlers revolutionary spin (dreams that rise in wavelets thereof whistler's mothra, therefore) such dreams as music is made of, the wasteland, the Arno flooding in the heads of the Santa Croce residents, the abandonment of the City of Flowers in time of Re Pesta il Terzo, the paper boat we chilluns float upon, oh, well, someone else will tell the history of it all, the hooked trout, the factitious bait. For the moment there's only this grinding and fleshly feeling of moving into unknown Pisa Centrale Stazione, getting out &... no one is sure of where to go. Yet.
Where are they playing someone asks. Scott's laughter backwashes into recalcitrant Coke's lattina. Danielle is doing up the Botticellian whiplash tresses into a golden wasp's nest. (We are still on the train, we haven't even arrived at the station but the wheels are starting to whistle). Jill laying down between us how we in young adulthood or old age exploit our teenage scandals in later ages to extract legendary gold from the rank ore of coal dead dinosaur paddies. I'm the only one listening apparently. My dad, she says, has been, she seems to say, the has-been, hus-band, house-band freakin'... she seemed to have said, something. * About. We've all been wearing the wedding ring on the wrong finger lately. And if you have begun, my dear and be-mildewed reader, to lose sight of our narrative ship, then rebel! Stand aghast, don't give up the fight: I must remind you this is a facet, a fragment, a colored tile in a Byzantine mosaic of a life made of all our lives and you may, if naughtier than nice, see the assemblage therefrom years down the line. We await a bus at the second piazza up from the train station and ticketlessly steal ourselves into orange colored butt-holds of the pullman where I get involved talking to a pixyish Pisana fashion-plate who sells English lessons (by the pound) from swank portofolio and she's going our way. Score. We scramble off the bus and confront.
Illusory and deceptive as all hell, we confront the unknown people, the official wall, acting as if common granite. We dissimulate normalcy while feeling out of place, we decollatoed this and capitoed that through the well-suited lines of gently grunting nodding carabinieri, admitted, ushered or shooed along. We are all too legal these days to be long-detained and we got our skins, visas and hairs gathered into a vestibule. Once inside...
The venue was like a tent, huge big-top or some modern gymnasium ** but once inside, we melted into the warmth of the throng. Huddled just a ahead a ring of steamy-headed Italians backs turned to us, smoking up an incense storm some sacramental hocus-pocus making us feel fine, smoking up a storm in fluted columns, hookahs, rising as the censer in some Tibetan shrine, murmuring outward, inward...
(Pavement is in the distance on the set, a band I know di nulla).
Outward, inward, suddenly pressed up near the stage, without knowing how it happened, leather flesh fur denim scents hairs overlapping. The year is 1296, 1965, 1992 as far as I can see. Dante verses in my mind but babble in the ears, modern europes, Coltrane on the house-system whoozing so misty blue dark enraged out of nowhere but gently over the gen-X crowds, manna, some De La Soul, but the Trane back with the Sophic rain of the journey there and back again. Soothes. Excites. Ethiopian freedom saxophone. And then the Sonic Youth come out looking not so young as before but ageless as ever and I find myself in this ancient physical colloquoy of smiles, moving bodies, shaking out the dreads, the damp musty falanges, the rug of willied souls pressing as they roll out the first few noise-eloquent numbers (where's the fiasco of Fibonacci?), the whine of feedback, the barrel of the skull-drum thudding as the pit shyly at first seems to form out of the pointless core the spiral. Advancing into kindredness, oblivious to cause. Or several causes clicking. And we go weaving into the whorl, the ravished flower of this many-petalled collective dance. Girasole. We are all too temporary to withhold, not get thrown about, it's bloodless, there must have been this, always, but I only know this, now. Too eternal. Lest we forget. Mixed into this Mill of Life again. Heads and hearts in one silver bowl. Orphic, Sapphic, Bacchic all one. Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot reconciled in the time-machine with flappers. Who do they think they are anyway? God it sure is hot here in Heaven. I step back and fan my jacket a bit, still swaying. For the first time in my life a girl boldly pinches my ass, an Italian, unknown, giggling, during "Tom Violence" , then goes rushing back to her circle of friends. I just smiled and waved. Not running away, not chasing anything.
And someone on the stage says, "you better stay away from poets" and we all know why Henry James said "paint loneliness on your banner", if you would write your culture inside out. And that's what this is, this moment, flipped, Sonic Youth in Pisa, leaning over the stage, my inverted expatriate consciousness straining to see where the two shores meet. (That's what our notebook says, take it or leave it). The crowd is friendly genuinely the gentle throttling of the pit is nowhere aggressive. They seem to have a hard time hoisting anybody on top of the hands for too long since they are not packed tight enough. Stage-dives don't come off too well. Given my own imperfections, I am all open arms. Hope of open arms stupidly wasted on the perfect. Each song comes smashing out like baseball bats on windshields. That song's name takes a long time to come to mind while its goes, ah Drunken Butterfly.
I love you, I love you, I love you, what's your name?
Then some new songs I don't know too well, maybe improvisations, then something like "don't you touch my breast" very no-wave this one and after Sex, God and Angels, surprisingly or unsurprisingly, since it's been more like an hour and a half of something that one can't believe is here and happening anyway it's up to that tristesse, that sad, detached, fatalistic moment when we realize we must forever leave.
Let us the fuck out. Nothing is worse. I am always the-forget-to-leave-early-dumbass-king.
Mezzo kilometro camminando. Following hunches, some people seen on the train here, ears bleeding, following the red trails, winding up at Cascine Stazione, chilly, waiting with the Florentine resident contingent of the throng, Chilly, waiting (you typed that already). Then talking until 4 in the morning about our lives in motion then at home more talking more until deep night alone talking in the mind then...
no more talking... what's that sound like?
"I am going to hate to leave this Earthly Paradise" ***
Notes.
* This is a lovely moment to recall. It's too loud to hear what people are saying but we all were smiling and happy and acting as if we understood. That had become our habit in daily life: hearing much spoken and pretending we understood everything so as not to be too conspicuous. Pretending to understand when you don't but also because by pretending you also understand something else: it's being together that's important.
** Teatro Politeama, Cascina, Pisa
*** quote from American poet, Charles Olson
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