From where I sat, very close to the stage, I saw the shadows of her harp strings fall across her face. And, earlier, the lacquered wooden body of the support act’s guitar flash out as it caught the light. Wonderful to hear Emily with the whole orchestra there – that song, and the last one on the album, are the ones I really like. But Only Skin is too long for me – my concentration lapses – and I don’t like the strings on that one.
And what of the others? I think it’s just Emily is the one, a song for her sister – a song of remembering, almost remembrance, and aren’t you suppose to write pieces like that for one dead? Isn’t she, Joanna Newsom, too young for those kind of memories – too young to be caught back and fascinated by the past? But then I remember that children, too, live a distance from the past, and with a sense of loss.
Didn’t I, as a child, dream of a narration that would stop at nothing, that would double the whole day, but then, in its doubling, would make the day other than it was? For wouldn’t the narration be part of what had to be narrated? Mirror fell into mirror, and I remember my joy at this thought, back then at junior school. I was going to set down what Chocca said – so called because his skin was brown, but not unaffectionately. I thought, he’s the key, and I think what I sought was his unobtrusiveness, as if by noting down what he said, I would have seized also on the inconsequentiality of the whole, doubling it, and letting mirror reflect into mirror.
That’s how, I think, I learnt the superficial can have a kind of depth. But I also remember learning by watching a family friend the art of lightness in conversation, of wandering from topic to topic like a robin alighting and then moving quickly away to alight elsewhere. A flurry of wings – activity – and a little pause for stillness, and then another flurry, and so on. Light speech, lightened speech that froths around us like the bubbles in that Rolling Stone video.
And another memory, very dim, of the dinner party in Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald straining his prose to evoke what he could not show through reported speech alone. Marvellous conversation at the outset of the book, everything right with the world, everything dazzling, and then the long and slow decline: we know, his readers, how it will be. But that is because they did not know lightness: because they sought to be witty or topical – because they wanted conversation for themselves, wanted to seize and mark it, like dogs in their territory. True speech is inconsequential; real speech says nothing at all.
Lars Iyer's Blog 