The passage between words – Oregon

In a fragment of my pseudodiary I wrote to Elvira: “My working day is over and until tomorrow I can laze around so, as I know that you only go near the computer late in the evening, I will try to contact you again after 10 pm. Maybe, this time, I will be lucky.

Tomorrow I will probably come back to the office after 10 30 and will probably also stay until late in the evening when it will be time to photograph – from inside the room, through the window – the fragment of street outside, in the dim yellowish light of the street lamps, with the trees and vegetation that partially cover the building on the opposite bank of the Bega, you know how it is with the world we revolve in, it’s scary how it tries to totally swallow us up, even at weekends. But tomorrow I can take advantage of being relatively safe from the usual buzz of activity from the office next door and will be able to listen again to a band that has always fascinated me. While I wrestle with the computer keyboard, flipping between different partially finalised pages, I take occasional gulps from my mug of coffee, look out of the window, prepare to receive friends and definitely take it easier, although in a way it’s just that that I’m afraid of...

Fed up with the lounging-around of a Sunday, I made a solemn resolve to go for a spin around the area in the car, whatever the weather, to listen to Oregon (they sound incredible in the car) and to drive along minor roads, slowly, regarding the countryside as a secondary element of this kind of private film, a visual track which would give a complex intensity to the music, the fusion of the anonymous life of this happening, unrolled over the surface of a random time.

And so a diary takes shape (I have never succeeded in persevering with this kind of project) with the aid of an “interlocutor” to provoke me to communicate, although this “conversation partner” seems only to “tick” my messages in return and appears, from the outline glimpsed over time, to be an intricate, sophisticated, ironical and disarming phantom.

I listened to Oregon again and remembered them in concert in Timisoara, in a hall with top class acoustics (according to musicians who regularly played there), and then I remembered what they were like at the The Note club: talking unpretentiously with some of us, scribbling down notes on paper napkins, calmly sipping their drinks, concentrating and interested in the conversation. Not a trace of the arrogance or “celebrity style” you see in stars and especially in petty “great men”, the parvenus of the business world, the female “beautiful people” that people buzz around, or in the condescension of marsupial political animals.

Impressions from then, sequences combining in a whirl of overlapping clichés, the piano’s pure commentary, its light repetitions, the air that holds them and then the acoustic guitar and the thick touches of the bass and the long-drawn-out interventions of the wind player and the dancing of hands over the surface of the percussion instruments that maintain a rhythm (somehow discreetly and then abandon it for a new portion of air to which, like a freely swinging light, comes the sound of the oboe. Silence of a candle – a classic work.

When I recall my times of greatest sensitivity and arrange them in order of intensity, that Oregon concert stands out as the most profound performance experience of my life to date.

I was fascinated by the natural way in which the guitarist, Ralph Towner, the wind player, Paul McCandless, and the bass guitarist Glen Moore passed on the sound, each in turn modeling it and holding on to it for a few moments before sending it back into the shared space enriched with their own touches of colour, silk-smooth descriptions of a nature that is imaginary but becomes possible through the way they lift us above the landscape and into space, and into a magnificent reception of images in a suite of picturesque frameworks, digressions and burst in the metaphysics of this superb act of communication, face to face with our rows of seats, with that which existed materially in us at that moment and with that which we were succeeding in capturing through the chemistry going on in our minds and in sending on into depths that we did not understand but which created pleasure. What was happening on stage between the musicians was probably the result of a long “unspoken” friendship arising from the interface between forces generated by inner overlappings and a sublimated depth of human sensitivity?.

I remember Bruno Schultz (the author of Mannequins) who speaks of “things which cannot exist in their entirety. [They] are too large and too magnificent to fit into this existence. They only try to exist, test the ground of reality to see if it will take their weight. And then they instantly withdraw…”. Music in its intensity of the moment has this same connection with 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?