[Transcript] Side B: Rain
It was raining when I thought I had understood. It was raining on that spring night, when I danced on the roof to ‘La valse à mille temps’ by Jacques Brel in my socks. It was raining on that night I was wearing make-up, when he gave me a lift on his bike, and he told me he’d never believe I’d take out an umbrella instead of just letting myself be soaked.
Maybe it’s because I was born in winter. Or because I am made of earth and sky. Maybe it’s because I have longed more than anything for the rain to teach me how to let go. But I believe I’ve known rain since before I could know anything.
Because that is what rain does: to exist, it lets go. Albeit in uncountable different ways. When I was living in the monster city, or in the silent royal city, it didn’t rain in the same way it did in the foggy jewel city. I used to say: ‘This is not my rain, falling now. My rain falls differently, this rain is not letting go of anything: my rain, to exist, lets go.’
Is rain woman or man? It’s been both and neither and at the same time. It’s been a flow and a drizzle; it can shut everything down in exhaustion, or break down, free, and release; it can fall like remembering, or fall like forgetting.
It has been a long standing belief of the people living in the valleys surrounding the Mediterranean Sea that you can recognize where the different kinds of rain come from, distinguishing those that just freed themselves of salt water from those that the Mediterranean sun has wrung from parched lands.
Rain rhymes with pain, and I believe that’s the main reason why it’s been featured substantially in song lyrics since song had lyrics. And yet, sometimes I am moved by what writers have come up with when they talk about rain. Axl Rose gets me every time when he sings that: ‘She's got eyes of the bluest skies, as if they thought of rain’. Did he know that Gustave Flaubert wrote of Madame Bovary: ‘Et elle était ravissante à voir, avec son regard où tremblait une larme, comme l'eau d'un orage dans un calice bleu.’ (‘And she was ravishing to look at, with those eyes in which a tear still trembled, like the water from a storm cupped in a blue flower.’)?
It was raining on that spring day when I was biking back home completely drenched, and a man biking in front of me was whistling ‘Under the Sea’ and I knew that nothing, not even the rain, could drown us if we didn’t let it. It was raining that time when I came out of the subway and stood confounded, dumbfounded in the middle of the street, wanting only to vanish into nothingness, until I was completely soaked, and an old man came near me and offered me to share un petit coin de parapluie, un petit coin de paradis. I cut my hair short that day, the rain had them dripping wet.
I don't know what it is about rain that makes it so easy for humanness to flow from human to human like a gift from somewhere not human at all, or maybe from somewhere more human than anything.
There’s a song by The Swell Season called ‘The Rain’. It goes: ‘I know, I'm not what I promised you I would become. I know, we're not what I promised you we'd be by now. Had enough, had enough. Feeling bought? Swallowed up? We got hours on you now. Still on top? Still crawling up? We got hours on you now.’ The song is structured as a crescendo and I love how it recreates the feeling of wanting to let go as much as rain does when it falls over us: the ‘I don’t care’ it drowns us with every time it floods our schedules, our moods. It just needs to let go of itself, it doesn’t care if somebody’s plans were ruined, if somebody’s make-up was smudged. But that’s what I love about rain: it gives us permission not to care for plans or smudged make-up any more than it does. It was raining all the times I didn’t care about nothing but being alive.
My favorite love song is ‘Sweet Thing’, by Van Morrison. Because it says exactly that: that you shouldn’t care for anything else but being alive. ‘And I will not remember that I even felt the pain. Just to dig it all and not to wonder, that's just fine. And I'll be satisfied not to read in between the lines. And I will walk and talk in gardens all wet with rain, and I will never, ever, ever, ever grow so old again.’
It was raining that time I made new friends under a porch as the Japanese band on the stage kept playing despite the fact they were completely soaked. It was raining that time I wanted to slip away like the raindrops on the car window. It was raining when time meant nothing. It was raining when time meant everything.
When I first read the poem ‘La pioggia nel pineto’ by Gabriele D’Annunzio, I wanted to tattoo it in full on my back.
Sometimes, you lose so many of your dreams that you forget how to dream new dreams. You feel overwhelmed by such an arrogant, deaf loneliness that nothing, not even the sun, or the rain, not even a memory or a word from heaven can give your life a meaning.
‘Taci. Su le soglie / del bosco non odo / parole che dici / umane; ma odo / parole più nuove / che parlano gocciole e foglie / lontane.’
Sometimes, the smell of rain can stun you more than that of a freshly bloomed lily. Sometimes, the rain waits for you to leave before weeping over the world. Sometimes, you wait for it to rain just so that you can have someone to weep with you. Sometimes, as Bryan Adams would say, the sun shines through the rain and for a moment the whole world could change, suddenly free is all you got to be.
‘Hush. On the edge / Of the woods I do not hear / Words which you call / Human; but I hear / Words which are newer / Spoken by droplets and leaves / Far away.’
Sometimes, it rains as if it wept, as if a hand touched all the chords of the piano. There’s something in this kind of rain that sounds as if it were saying: ‘Stop, it’s enough, all of you just stop now and let me come through, let me see through you. Just stop there and shut up, shut up and listen to me.’ There is such a sparkling, violent innocence in this kind of rain that my wrists tremble. It’s frightening, slamming itself down with such brutal solemnity. There is much to wash away, to rub away. When it rains like this there is nothing but guilt.
Sometimes, I believe there are things that can only be said when it rains. Sometimes, I believe that the best words you can ever speak are the ones that sound like rain.
‘Ascolta. Piove / dalle nuvole sparse. / Piove su le tamerici / salmastre ed arse, / piove su i pini / scagliosi ed irti, / piove su i mirti / divini, / su le ginestre fulgenti / di fiori accolti, / su i ginepri folti / di coccole aulenti’.
Sometimes, when it rains you need to open the windows and turn off the music to listen to the world listening. The birds’ tweets are muffled, people walking by talk softly as they try not to fall in the puddles, the cars slow down. There’s only the sound of rain, smearing everything into something more unreal, faintly. It’s a good rain when it rains like this. The kind of rain that drenches you from head to toe, falling in big drops almost caressing your skin as they drip down, feeding the earth and cleaning the air, putting everything into perspective. Teaching us that waiting can still be an occupation.
Sometimes, I wonder how free we’d be, how magical and luxuriant, how honest and unrestrained we’d be, if we let ourselves live like rain. Will we ever have the courage to live like that? To live and not care for anything else that isn’t living?
‘Listen. Rain falls / From the scattered clouds. / Rain falls on the tamarisks / Briny and parched. / Rain falls on the pine trees / Scaly and bristling, / Rain falls on the myrtles- / Divine, / On the broom-shrubs gleaming / With clustered flowers, / On the junipers thick / With fragrant berries’.
Sometimes, raindrops sparkle like tears, like pearls slipping out inadvertently. Sometimes, it rains with heartbreaking anger, with despair, with lust. Sometimes, it rains and you feel the world is going to end. Sometimes, it rains and you feel the world is going to begin.
I never believed in hiding from the rain. You can hide from the cold, from the wind. But when it rained, I just always felt I wanted to melt into it, become rain: forget, or remember.
Sometimes, it rains like kisses on your hands. Sometimes, only the rain knows how to find us.
‘[P]iove su i nostri vólti / silvani, / piove su le nostre mani / ignude, / su i nostri vestimenti / leggieri, / su i freschi pensieri / che l’anima schiude / novella, / su la favola bella / che ieri / t’illuse, che oggi m’illude’.
It was raining when Holly stepped out of the cab to go and find the cat. It was raining when Roy Batty compared his life to tears in the rain. It was raining when Elio’s dad gave him the best advice any human could give to another human: ‘We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should, that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty, and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!’
Aleksandr Blok once wrote: ‘It’s raining today, all the trees are happy.’
‘Rain falls on our faces- / Sylvan, / Rain falls on our hands- / Naked, / On our clothes- / Light, / On the fresh thoughts / That our soul discloses- / Renewed, / On the lovely fable / That yesterday / Beguiled you, that beguiles me today’.
It was raining when Miss Pettigrew said to Delysia that she was not an expert of love, but an expert in the lack of it. It was raining when Mulan cut her hair. It was raining when Totoro appeared at the bus stop.
I believe Shostakovich wrote the second movement of his Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major, Op. 102, thinking about what rain would sound like if it could speak.
There’s a poem by Michael Krüger entitled ‘Just before the Storm’. ‘Even rocks start moving / looking for a shore. […] All that is still visible remembers / all the invisible that always, for eternity / remains invisible, when the storm / erupts.’
It was raining that time I spent three days writing him the most impossible and beautiful letter I ever wrote. It was raining all the times I can’t remember. It was raining when it seemed I could die without struggle. It was raining when I splashed in the puddles. It was raining when it seemed that life, in the end, could be endured.
