Friday, June 03, 2005

Three days around the hips and back

Last night I watched hippies spin hula hoops around their bodies in a park while I ate a slice of pizza and talked to my mom on the phone. A girl stopped to compliment me on my socks. There was a can of Comet on the bathroom sink instead of soap. I did not use it.

Last Sunday at a record store I found a Slowdive import, a two-disc anthology. Slowdive goes deep in me. Here is how it works:

Part A: Kristin Hersh and her various personalities (solo, Throwing Muses, 50 Foot Wave) are tautly anchored in my psyche so that when my brain scatters in periodic hysteria, lines from her songs surface spontaneously and uncontrollably in me like Tourette’s ticks. When I am unstable her rhythms and tenors hammock me, wagon me. They may not heal me but at least they help me not to plummet irretrievably. (Nevertheless, I still say "Hats off!" to occasional necessary plummeting.) I don’t feel I can dissociate from the songs. I have no idea what other people hear in them. When I pinch my arm the final repeating guitar in "Bea" plays. Pinch harder, louder.

Part B: Slowdive represents a similar but more distant element in my psyche, just as vital. I knew the music before I heard it, but it is not kin in my psyche. It is otherworldly familiar.

I first read about Slowdive twelve years ago when I was in high school, in a xerox-made ’zine. Living midst cornfields I couldn't just go out and buy the album, their second, Souvlaki. I had to search. At last I found it, played it, and thought: this is what I’ve wanted music to sound like. It was. It was lush and vast in spirit. It put me in places without walls, awash in full multi-dimensional color. It played through me. Warm full-body arousal through the ears. I then bought the first album, Just for a Day. Eventually I heard the third album, Pygmalion, as pristine as pristine can be.

I do not own this album. The CD was available only expensively as an import, and back then I was tight with money, allowing dirty green paper in the abstract to impinge on my general happiness. Dumb girl. Finally when I decided to buy it, it was nowhere to be found. Lesson learned: do not deny material pleasures when what hinders such are mere materials in the converse, nebulous devils. This two-disc treasure I found last Sunday contains some of the songs from Pygmalion. It's been repeating in me all day, psyche nicely awash on the office walls.

Part B/C: Slowdive, Italy. When I went to Rome, I felt more right in a place than I’d ever felt. I knew little Italian and only patchworked histories of its ancientry, but I felt comfortable and home. Florence was the place I’d fantasized about but didn’t realize could exist. Stone paths, cathedrals, museums, Christian crumbles clumped on top of pagan crumbles, wine down the rows, flame-throwers, pretty guitars, scent of sauce. The stone paths! I didn’t know where I was or where I was going, but I didn’t feel lost. I didn’t feel like I could become lost. I could not be thrown. Something known before the fact. This is what Slowdive sounded like to me, only after the fact. Italy came later, but linearality is just convenience, a gauge, like a clock.

Part A/B/C: 50 Foot Wave + Slowdive + Italy cause the girl to slow down and wake up watching and watchless, to hip-swing and cast her hula hoop up and out of the park.

4 Comments:

Blogger {illyria} said...

i love the fragments in this story. and how they all fit together perfectly--even if they don't seem so at the beginning.

9:48 PM  
Blogger Sara said...

thanks--i didn't know if the fragments were going to come together or not. they go together inside my head, but that's much differet from outside. or not.

8:49 AM  
Blogger glomgold said...

I know nothing of 'Slowdive' but good call on not using Comet to wash up.
I think there was an english teacher in my high school whose name was Souvlaki. I never had her but I remember she used to pronounce Odysseus as "Oh-dishus".

1:25 PM  
Blogger Sara said...

there are indeed those people who pronounce odysseus that way. they are in a class of their own. i think souvlaki is some kind of edible.

8:17 AM  

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