Scenes from 'Divine Metropolis': v. 1
A text in five movements, in search of a meaning. You will hear the music if you listen.
The voiceover at the top of the file is a recitation of the text that follows, set to music. The text is an extract from a longer work-in-progress called ‘Divine Metropolis,” a personal, literary and spiritual response to The City. It does not as yet belong to a genre (though you may assign it one if you like); it is neither prose nor poetry, drama or documentary, fact nor fiction. The music was composed and produced in my domestic sound lab on Grand Street in Manhattan.
Options include:
1. Skip the audio and read the below text only; 2. listen to the audio only; 3. press play and read along with the recitation; or 4. any combination thereof.
This is an experiment of sorts, in “enhanced reading,” an attempt at integrating modes and media, to combine speech, music, written text and photography in a single utterance. I’m very much interested in how it works for you, or how it doesn’t, or just how you experience it.
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It is not what you add, she said, but what you remove. Speak what you would speak, then subtract. A warmth will envelop you, the closeness of women and food will return. Your beloved stride will come back. Your loins will open like a lion’s.
Free to walk the streets, to enter the Lebanese diner for coffee at dawn, your appetites quelled by sacrament, the beauty of your practice, watching women walk silently for dinner or cognac to sip by their trembling fires.
There was a river that flowed briskly through night. Upstream avenues of America. Sixth heading north toward Bryant or knocked sideward and swallowed into the maze of O'Hara’s haphazard Second.
At the tavern tables you find the warmth and friendship. Blanketed words with the liveliest colors. Liveliest art. No concealment. No philosophy. Just hand clasps and kisses. The high art of nakedness, still yearning for all that passed by on the banks.
The bundles wrapped in fine cloth balanced on elegant skulls on elegant necks. Feet trammel Earth. All this elongated by striving, by motorcades and singing, brother embracing brother, a hunger for words that speak.
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To read, see and listen to more, visit me here at Question Everything With Peter Catapano. Essays, meanderings, photography, music and micro-poetry readings await.
Thank you.