Dance Capsule #4

Dear,

My freedom of writing to you expands as your memory gets blurrier to me.

The “send” button is ever present in me as I articulate this letter. An otherwise terrifying gesture, going back to adjust and clarify my words is easier when I do it for you. These words become thus geometrical forms, blocks of material, blocks of marble if you wish. “I have to take into account the nervures in the marble, the cracks, all the geological layers in it. I can’t just do whatever I want.” I twist and shape the chaos within these phrases until they become nimble, as you say. I didn’t know the word nimble existed before you mentioned it, but yet I had a diffuse intuition for it when I read your letter. I looked up a random definition —quick and light in movement or action; agile—and I thought about the disequilibrium between these nimble words that you read from me, and my unintelligible words to myself.

There is a line in an Italian song of the sixties that goes Ti senti sola con la tua libertà.

I feel alone when I re-read many of my notes; I discover a past-me who was boiling-writing, perhaps too free, in a state that does not make much sense anymore. I read my past-self writing with an explosive excitement, or out of a deep nervousness that must have felt eternal at that time. I can feel a touch of eternity in some of my texts. At re-readings, it does not however hit me as it should; as if it was only a fugitive eternity, a green ray of writings. I feel an uncomfortable parental empathy towards my notes of two weeks ago. They hurt my eyes when I go back to them. They appear out of a completely different movement than my letters to you.

I take many notes to myself while stranding myself at the roman bar that you know. I go there with a diffuse hope that something will happen, that something will come to me out of a-nowhere. I hope and wait for something completely alien, a-something that could surpass in intensity everything that I already know. I expect something precise and yet I can’t describe it. This process of passionate waiting for a-something-anything makes me feel precarious. I read definitions of precarity as if I didn’t feel a primordial, precise definition within myself. I believe that the precarity I feel there is something particular to the life of bars. The movement that brings me there is something new to me, and it translates into a phenomenal movement of writing notes that do not make sense ever after. You said you envy my nimbleness because you feel most opposite states, like water overflowing; here is my water overflowing.

Some times I watch other people stranding themselves around small tables, which are stranded in their turn at all ends of the dancefloor. The dancefloor is empty and dangerous. A metaphor of an ocean-dancefloor is boiling in me. I promised myself however that I will try to ditch the metaphors in my writings. I know that when I will re-read them they will be already old and dissolved. I know that they contribute to this fugitive eternity that I try to discard. I need more images in my words. When I read them back, I want to be touched by my writings electrically, as touched as I am by that bar nervousness, by that waiting for something to touch me in unknown ways.

Writing about my turmoil of writing makes me think of a phrase that I read in Anti-Oedipus, an image of how nature might reveal itself to a schizophrenic: He does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production. I didn’t finish the book and perhaps it is a mistake to take this line out of its context, above all with such easiness. I don’t feel nervous to take the lyric above out of its context. The singer tells his lover that she will eventually feel lonely with her freedom and return to him. I am curious if you will google the lyric and find the song. There is a part of me who likes my unaddressed words, and who wishes sometimes that a complete stranger would discover them, that they would touch him or her in ways that they can not touch me.

Some times when I watch the dancefloor I try to tell whether if those that dance are happier than those that talk. One time, as I was stranded at the bar, I remembered the image of yet another dancefloor: the living-room of a house that I used to live in. My position made me nervous-unstable and I tried to find memories to attach myself to. A metaphor of an ocean-everything is still following me, deriving into new metaphors of the bar-boat, the memory-boat, etc. Your sensation of water overflowing did touch me. I wrote:

“I try to remember the living-room-dancefloor of our previous house, I try to project it onto the surface of this bar-dancefloor. I try to imagine this past dancefloor into this now-room. I try to remember, as vividly as I can, that blurred dance that we did on the Bolero of Ravel. I remember that we were four in the room, that you played Bolero and that at least I was absolutely there in that now-then-room. I was there dancing with Ravel on my own. I want to know why you chose to drop Bolero in that precise moment. I know you wouldn’t play it anywhere, anyhow. I am trying to understand what exact parts of this bar-dancefloor remind me of that living-roomdancefloor. I can’t wait to translate this hot writing into something abstract-distant.”

I asked him why did he play Bolero that night, what made him drop it precisely there and then. He didn’t remember why, and he didn’t remember this night almost at all. I insisted because the memory was already active in me, and I wanted to re-live it even more, to strengthen it by adding yet another’s memory to mine. I think he tried but could not manage to remember. It is true that most of the nights we spent together on that dancefloor resembled each other, which makes it even more difficult to take one of them out and think it through. It is easier to remember them piled up as a period, as a block. I feel my block of taking chaotic notes at this bar coming to an end, and it makes me sad. As you become more of an imaginary address, I write to you like I write to myself.