NAKEDNESS

I'm looking at old photographs, and I hear my mother saying: “you're a dreamer and you're also perceptive. A rare combination that will cause you pain, but also profound joy.” That was when I was four, and my head was tilting backwards, gazing outwards. Now, at 41, I often find myself with my nose into things that don't concern me. Mother was also perceptive. Yet her dreams were more real than mine. She once dreamt of building a house every night for exactly one year. She would report at the morning table what standing the house was in, with a new roof, new floors, and so on. When the house was finished she saw father in it. Three days later he was dead. Go figure. — I'm immersed into the sounds of Beethoven's string quartet opus 132, and I catch my head going backwards once more. Music makes us transcend both our dreams and our perceptions. It has an inner intensity akin to a naked body. The poet Juan Ramón Jiménez insists however on gender: “Music—Naked woman, Running mad through the pure night.” I think I'll wear something white for dinner tonight.