backwards and in high heels

I remember the first time I watched Swing Time, huddled on my dorm room bed in the white middle of winter, comforter at my neck – my roommate’s 15inch TV/VCR combo balanced on my chair. I remember sitting there, face inches from the screen, my eyes fixed on its grainy glow – and I remember watching Fred Astaire glide effortlessly across the dance floor like an ice-cube on wax paper, so fluid and so very smooth. I remember the songs, and the way you look tonight. I remember thinking Ginger Rogers was beautiful – so graceful and charming, so lithe. And I remember sitting there smiling, uncontrollably, until my cheeks started trembling. And when it was finished, and the credits rolled, I stopped the tape and pressed rewind and watched it all again.

It was the same when I first listened to Revolver, and Blonde on Blonde – the same when I first read Frost. The discovery of something so completely in tune with your person – something that cuts through all your caution and guarding like a scalpel through fat and touches, in one pass, your heart – is an amazing experience. You are in this moment of discovery completely vulnerable – you are in this moment at your most human.

I have had, on this trip so far, several moments like this. The first on the streets of Amsterdam; the second at the Borghese Gallery in Rome beside Bernini’s amazing marble sculptures of Apollo and Daphne and Pluto and Proserpina; and the third most recently in Florence at the Uffizi Gallery, standing before the works of Botticelli. I had seen the Birth of Venus before – who has not – but to see it in person – to stand inches from the canvas – was, for lack of a better word, breathtaking. The colors are so soft and temperate up close, but so striking at a distance – and the whole scene is at once both beautifully comical and deeply reverent. And to discover for the first time his Fortitude and his Columny of Apelles, and to discover new artists like Bronzino – what an experience.

I hope the rest of my life is filled with such firsts. And I hope one day to feel so moved by some woman, sitting there – smiling at the wind for no apparent reason. But until then I am satisfied to feel as I do for my poetry and prose, my movies and my music.

Feel so – for my art.