Florence, 2013

One thought on “Florence, 2013”

Lev M. Loewenthal says:

June 2, 2018 at 6:48 am

A doughy motionless cloud hovers over the flat building of the railway station. It resembles the enormous figure of a wandering man, suspended above the rooftops. Suddenly a red window closes against the dense greyness.
The Florentine houses begin to rise up into the air, freeing themselves from the terra firma. Rooftops fly away.
Cupolas are umbrellas in the wind, the entire city is about to ascend. The shattering of thousands of fragments of breaking glass keeps the sky awake, vibrantly enlivened by the flight of celestial blue and green goldfinches. From Platform #16 the lives of children, women and men flew to snowy fields in the North. The marble spouses, like their ancestors of the Etruscan sarcophagus, turn their heads not to attend the crime.

Sudden glares of light
Eradicating the roots of the universe.
Only seven lit candles
illuminate the world.
The donkey is green,
And with his viola tunes
the soul of every creature
with the harmony of the cosmos.

The absurd is converted into a tale. A ruby red reflection flickers, bites, burns : so much fire in my reality and so much turquoise blue and amethyst purple and adamant green in the tale’s world!
People who have been abducted live neither on earth nor in heaven, but still occupy an intermediate space, above the rooftops and below the sky. In this neutral zone, they defy earth’s gravity but aren’t swallowed up by the heaven’s absence of gravity. Everything is in harmony, a eurhythmy of the soul in accordance with the universe, because here the absurd becomes reality: azure lovers swaying in the wind, coloured counterpart to the white marble couple, emerald green donkeys playing the viola da gamba.
A tangling maze of memories.
Songs and tales, before falling asleep, in an ancient language.
I perceive the lone voice of a woman reciting, chanting syllables in a language that I don’t understand. But I recognize her clear declamation.
“Can you hear them, התינוק שלי? At this moment, in a place by the sea, far away from here, stones creak and crackle in the sun. Whitened, streaks of sand. Like fallen clouds crystallized and chalked by time. Two musical notes blend with the tremulous cerulean. It’s the sound of the sun, shining clearly now, speckled with celestial blue, rising slowly in two notes, each in three-eighths time. Come, my dear, place your ear close to this page. If you listen closely, you can hear the andante in C major veiled by an even more delicate image, in a chord of babbling fountain water, hurling onto a pentatonic cell rippling from a gentle breeze!
The breeze – minor seventh chord with B flat fifth (dominant seventh flat five chord) – is damp, as it dates back to the gardens dampened with dew. If you don’t want to catch an ear infection, don’t place your ear close to the page for too long!”
When I open my eyes, it’s dawn. The sun, motionless, white, the light opaque. Humidity remains in the air from the night gone by. For a moment, outside the houses, everything appears in a shade of saffron. It is the moment when the sun first wakes up and begins its journey skyward. Then Florence becomes orange.

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