New York City, December 1988
I was in a club in lower Manhattan last night. I do not remember the name of the club. What I remember is a particular moment when the music hit something that had been sealed for a long time, and the thing inside came loose, and I left at two in the morning and wrote for the rest of the night in the room I am renting on Ludlow Street.
What came out is called Hate Love. I do not know if it is a good song. What I know is that it is the most honest thing I have put into a form in longer than I want to calculate, which is to say since the poetry I wrote at Lorenzo’s court that I have never looked at since leaving Florence.
I have been in this city since 1985. The post-punk scene here is doing something I recognized immediately: reaching for the same darkness that the London scene reached for, the Gothic understood not as costume but as honest material about what the world actually contains. The music names something I have been living inside since 1510 and never heard named accurately before.
There is a Sisters of Mercy record I have played more times than I can count. The cold inevitability of the sound. The atmospheric weight. The distance from warmth that is not posture but fact. This is the tradition I am writing in, though I am the only person in the tradition who has actually been alive for five hundred years. Something has opened. I intend to use it.