London, October 1982
There is a club on Meard Street in Soho that opened this year. The Batcave. I have been three times now, standing in the back where the sound is slightly less total, watching something happen that I recognize from other moments in other centuries: a form finding its shape, a vocabulary of darkness becoming precise.
The music reaches for something real. Not the performance of darkness, but the actual texture of existing at the cold edge of ordinary human life. I have been at that edge since 1510. For the first time I am hearing someone else describe it accurately.
The Sisters of Mercy have been playing in the North. I have not seen them yet but I have heard recordings and what I heard stopped me the same way Bach stopped me in Leipzig: the recognition of a mind operating at the absolute limit of what the form can do. The guitar. The atmospheric weight. The cold inevitability of a sound that does not explain itself, does not comfort, does not pretend. It simply arrives and remains.
I have spent five centuries trying to find language for what it is to move through the world the way I move through it. Perpetual witness. No anchor. Every warmth temporary. Every connection marked from the beginning by a horizon I can already see. This music does not solve that. But it acknowledges it. That is more than most things do. I have been thinking, for the first time, about writing something myself.