A new cup of green tea - Vijay Iyer

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 modicums 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 to fit into a little square. A face cupped in the hands and gazing outwards, which means that it is to be found in a miniature open window in an interminable row of little bluey-grey circles, constant and cold and turned off. But I sit here unseen and wait for the leaves in the grains of green tea to unfold, so that I can pour the first cup of tea of a long morning whose peace will be interrupted only by the sound of my fingers pressing and lightly tapping the keys, the monotonous fluttering of the ventilator and the tinkling of the hot , tawny-yellow liquid as a new cup of tea is poured.

Nor do I think I could say anything about Vijay Iyer beyond what I have found on allmusic, and it would be ridiculous for me to try to do so. I recall that here he is accompanied on the alto saxophone by an alter ego by the name of Rudresh Mahanthappa, and this strikes me as having an empty resonance with the name of a photographer friend in London, Suresh Karadia, a really nice person with whom I have never communicated on Mess and to whom I would like to send an emoticon invented by me, only that in fact it will certainly remain…uninvented. Which however I would not venture to do if the opportunity arose to write to Vijay Iyer who is at this moment more than a friend, is actually the person who can touch the keys of my inner piano with a huge, gentle irony and send me into a trance to repeat after him :“Today…I’m All Smiles ”.