Haluat kadota kosketukseen, graniitinpunaiseen pehmeyteen, kun yö hohtaa jo kirkkainta valoa ja huone, jossa ei ole kuin raukea patja, on tuoksuistanne täyttynyt, kuten sinäkin. Tahdot kuun kellahtavan selälleen, sakarat tähtien välissä, meri hulluna tuulesta, aaltojen välissä viisaus ja aallonharjalla hurmio, uit pitkin vedoin selälle, ulappa kiiltää vähäisessäkin valossa, jokainen kuiskaus saa tärisemään, sormet vatsalla ovat huokaus, huuto kaikuu olemattomuudesta, katsot, kuten olet aina halunnut, unohdat itsesi, ja sitten aamulla toinen katsoo kuin sinua ei enää olisi, olette jo unohtaneet toisenne.
Pläräsin vanhoja tekstejä, tämä pisti silmään. Jotenkin osuin tunnekohteeseen, joka on aina epämääräinen: yksi ihminen voi haluta kadota fyysisessä kontaktissa, unohtaa itsensä intensiivisissä aistikokemuksissa, ja silti jos toinen kokisi sen haluajan täsmälleen siten, pelkkänä lihana ja liikkeenä, on se merkki läsnäolon puutteesta ja toisen käyttämisestä pelkkänä välineenä. Minästä käsin kyse voi olla vapautumisesta, toiseen kohdistettuna se on välinpitämättömyyttä tai jopa kahlitsemista.
She really should have inspected the flat more carefully before signing the contract, because on the first night she realised that the room was actually on fire. At night it was tolerable and the flames were not too hot, but usually in the evenings she had to strip down to withstand the heat.
After a while she got used to it and felt quite liberated walking around with no clothes on. Sometimes she tried to read in a corner where the flames did not reach, but more often she danced, arms high above her head, swaying her hips, swirling around and making sudden kicks, jumping over and around the flames as though they were just rocks.
Other times she played sad melodies on the violin and watched darkness descending into town. She began to get admirers who stayed outside casually taking walks on the other side of the street where they might catch a glimpse of her dancing, but nobody dared to approach her. She complained to her friends that it was not her fault, she was perfectly normal, it was just the flat playing tricks on her. But the friends soon stopped listening and suddenly she was all alone, a lighthouse in a sea of flames.
It was getting more and more difficult for her admirers to see her because her body was becoming effulgent and crimson from all the dancing and they could no longer distinguish her from the flames. It looked like she had become invisible in her own flat, but when she went out to walk by the river people stared and walked across the water to a safe distance because they could see little flames around her mouth and eyes, and dogs barked so furiously that their owners got quite frustrated.
But among her admirers there was a boy, there always is one, who stayed behind when all the others were gone. He did wait to see the apparition of her naked body in the window, just like everyone else, but what he really wanted was to hear her violin.
He played the cello himself and one day when everyone else was either dead or eating toast he gathered his courage and asked to play counterpoint for her. It was not that exciting at first, rather too mechanical, but the longer he stayed in her flat the more he learned to let go.
The walls of the flat are very thin and often I lie awake at night listening to the music they make. It is so beautiful that it still makes me weep in gratitude.
Taj Mahal might not be considered a traditional love song, but it is still about love. The lyrics are very simple, an explanation rather than a narrative. To paraphrase: I’ll now tell this pretty story of love I was told, the love of the prince Shah-Jahan toward the princess Mumtaz Mahal. But where is the story, if this is more or less what’s said?
Instead, it’s all told by means of music. The simple lyrics contribute to a sense of lightness and humor. The version posted here is the second recording Jorge Ben did, and compared to the first one this is faster, with more complex rhythms that make you want to dance, much like the whole album, África Brasil, which successfully combined samba with rhythms from African music and funk.
The song itself is hard to explain because it’s an experience of rhythm and a couple of melodic hooks that repeat several times, much like thoughts of the loved one may enter your consciousness repeatedly, no matter what you are concentrating on: Tê Tê Tê, Têtêretê! It’s simple, uplifting, and it sounds like love, the joy of just thinking that such feelings exist and we are capable of feeling them, even if there’s nothing like that currently happening. It’s the thought that love can break us apart and rebuild into better versions of ourselves, even if the flip side is that when unrequited it can also break us without any glue of affection to make us stronger.
As lovely as ballads may be when trying to capture that feeling of tenderness, maybe this music captures better the excitement, the jubilation when discovering how wonderful the world can be. It could be all projection, even when mutual, but it is about the realization that you don’t have to see the world like you normally do, with relative indifference. It’s like suddenly discovering new sounds and colours never heard or seen before. It makes you want to dance and sing even if you can do no such things in a controlled manner, to jump around the flat, climb the trees and feel the wind as if you are a part of the forest, a part of everything, one with the world.
Loving just one person feels like loving the whole world more. Even if the lovers concentrate on each other, it feels greater than focusing on one body, simple sensations. The whole world is contained in this one touch, one moment. Everything disappears, yet everything is present. There are no words that could express the complexity of these feelings, the elation when nothing bad could happen, though vaguely you might be aware of such things happening. Trying to explain love, it seems that you end up in an endless cycle of reiterating everything, infinite variations that never capture the true feeling. Yet it’s all here: Têtêretê. What more could we say? I love you, maybe it’s all that’s said, but much more is present, the darkness and the light both part of the same joyous delirium, the delusion that may be the only reality that matters.
Some of the technical aspects may be obvious, but I thought I’d clarify them a bit for the casual reader.
The rhyme scheme is the same as what Dante used, terza rima, in which the first and third lines of a tercet rhyme with the second line of the previous. Each canto has 48 tercets + an extra line to complete the last rhyme. In other words, they’re all 145 lines long. In The Divine Comedy the cantos are of varying lengths, but my impression is that their lengths on average are something similar. I found that having a precise number as an aim made it easier to write, because I had a goal by which I’d have to express what I had to say on the topic.
Also, having a precise number was necessary because I didn’t write the cantos in order in the first draft. I mentioned earlier that I wrote the book in a cycle of 3 days, which made it easier to handle the distressing scenes which are all close to each other. While it may seem like this would make it difficult to make the work coherent, I felt it was the opposite.
At first I wrote around 30 lines of all 100 cantos, and then continued from that. Thus, by the time I got to the end of the canto, I had long since already written how the work would continue in the next one, so I constantly had an aim where to go. Before starting the book I had a general outline of themes, emotions and plot developments, which made this possible.
The book is written in iambic heptameter with regular variation. Iamb is a basic building block of English poetry, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, and heptameter means that there are seven of those in a line. Usually there’s a caesura after the 8th syllable, which means that you might hear a slight pause there in your head.
Regular variation is absolutely necessary in a long work such as this. Sticking to the rhythm strictly will probably make the work monotonous, and besides always using iambs restricts the vocabulary. Introducing more unstressed syllables enables me to use words longer than 3 syllables quite commonly. However, the problem with variation is that it often sounds unintentional, a lapse in the meter. I have solved this problem by placing my variations always in the same spots.
In short, in iambic heptameter each odd syllable is unstressed, each even syllable stressed. My modification is that syllables number 4, 8 or 12 can also be unstressed, just one in a line or all three. This makes the beat feel regular while I can keep changing rhythm just slightly to avoid monotony. Perhaps it also helps the feel of regularity that it’s always the syllables divisible by 4 that get this treatment.
I cannot recall how I came up with this form, it’s not anything I remember seeing anywhere in the English literature. I’m pretty sure it arose as an answer to the problems mentioned above, especially the need to use longer words. I did try early on some other solutions, even using feminine rhymes, but quite early I settled on this form as the best choice for my book. In the end I had to kill some of my darlings for the sake of sticking to the form, for example remove the word “buckminsterfullerene,” which would have been great.
