Berta Rojas is a special person she has as have I, come face to face with death and been blessed instead by the grace of God smiling as He sent her back from the dead to play music again, and again for a world scorched by fire and drenched by rain. And when she spoke to me it was as if she ‘sang’ her lines now bubbling as if cascading through laughter, now sombre as if muffled by the ache of a memory, twisting in the gut, now wistful and blurred as if spoken through the translucency of tears and no matter what, always spoken as if grateful to be alive and present with me – in this case, no matter how separate we may have been, in a place, in space where it felt that if we reached out, we could touch each other and hold hands through shared pain and joy. Although she was thousands of miles away, I ‘saw’ her lips part into a perfect, radiant smile. And when it does happen, I am left breathless as I was when I spoke to the great musician and guitarist Berta Rojas in Paraguay twice over a month and a half. Rarely, if at all, such incredible magic takes place over the telephone. And so hot are these to the touch of my skin that they burn themselves in the memory. I get so ravenously hungry in situations like this that I devour each word, each phrase and sentence as if I were receiving Holy Communion itself. Alphabets strung together and which ring and resonate making a particular luxurious sound, echoing in this quiet space have more meaning accented vowels and diphthongs that are formed by the curl of the lips, blushing purple and rushing to meet the wind between her and I sitting close together from music not only to my ears but seem to float their ghostly visages across my eyes. They are alive, these words spoken by the person with whom I speak. In my view, the talking and listening – more listening than talking, as I prefer it to be – is best done in person, and preferably in a quiet space where I can savour (I use the gastronomic term, “savour”, because it suggests a rather visceral experience), in this case the sound of the words the way they are intoned gives them a particular colour and texture. I rarely conduct interviews using email and don’t really like doing them over the telephone either.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |