Looking out the window on the side of a running train, I hear the jolts of every large boulder falling from the mountain, while stretches of wind imprisoned in the valley create frayed rhombuses of sound that slam on the sides of the locomotive. They do not slow down its run, which is quiet only when it arrives at the destination in another movement.
The electric blue wall crumbles into many shells that scratches the slight bottom of the sea, a few doors slam and the tide mounts, occludes, blunts, sprouts in low rivulets and transposes the breakwater of the pier.
The white waves spread over the smooth sides of the big boat and mess up the green barbs of the old algae encrusting the waterline. My eyes dance and cling to the sun, white at noon. Distant echoes of silence dampen the clang of trees in the wind. Silence exists when there is no wind.
A skyscraper collapses and then immediately another becomes a small point on the ground as we fly away up: the vertigo of the change is powerful.
From afar – often, always, – we can see a song-form, the bell tower of an old church, a left platoon in progress, a thousand vacuous submarine voices surrounded by galvanized walls. The door, the last one, shuts.
Diana Marrone, (unpublished), April 24, 2004
This story was written while I was listening to a live by Janek Schaefer at the Sintesi Music Festival, Naples, 2004. While reading it, I recommend you listening to his compositions because each word was created only as a result of its rhythms. http://www.audioh.com
Cover: Icelandic Pavilion (Venice Art Biennale 2019), ph. Tommaso Listo