Where am I doing?
Yesterday I was watching an interview with Pink Floyd’s drummer Nick Mason where he wasn’t annoyed to answer over and over why The Dark Side of the Moon has been such an interstellar success over the years. Of the entire explanation he gave, one detail made me think a lot. Essentially he explained (or tried to…) that Waters’s lyrics weren’t just very good but also very durable, still actual and understandable by any generation because essentially never old or outdated (and somehow never new!).
This made me think more than a typical 3 to 5 minute mumbling session. I’ve always been thinking you can’t please everyone. I had to live with this cruelty, also because my (miserably artistic) life is split between music and writing. Splitting further, writing makes me face the problem of the language. I wrote most of my (long) stories and novels in Italian but lately I am enjoying writing in English more and more. The reasons are simple and the clock is ticking.
But some people (those ones they can read Italian and English) tell me they prefer my stuff in Italian. Some English friends (those ones they know my music which is, incidentally, 100% English) said they finally can read my stories too. Difficult position, isn’t it?
Also, some of my Italian friends can’t understand a word in English so they feel left out.
No, I can’t translate everything I write. I tried and the style is different. It works only with some good effort in adapting whole paragraphs and the clock definitely ticks louder, if I do that.
Plus, lately I decided to seriously dive into the world of time management, where I have been a “natural living prototype” for a number of years. So I wrote a couple of articles about it and about to publish a method I invented. Publish in English, obviously, as I really would like to reach large numbers with it.
Result? Italians weren’t very happy, Royal Britons and the Occasional American… not sure if they read any of the two articles at all. But I am sure about Polish and Dutch.
Moreover, some (two) of the loyal readers of my “imaginary stories” really didn’t like to find out I was writing something work-related. Some others, those ones they always considered me “just a strange guy” actually enjoyed the seriousness of my new area of interest.
Almost like those ones they prefer “That thing there for me” (my cleanest pop-rock song) and those ones they really like my quite complex composition called “Dracula”.
(… and I didn’t tell you about horror stories and avant-garde)
But Roger Waters wrote something that pleased everyone and still does. I think he didn’t adapt it to include more and more audience. I think his work of art and his social and artistic research have been so wide in content quantity and at the same time so deep in quality that hit millions of different brains at any latitude and age and background just naturally, and inevitably.
So I go on in my little solar system, building my planets, trying to energize them and make them gravitationally balanced and rotationally independent.
Maybe you will be attracted, maybe not. Maybe I will lose you after a song, after a story, after one or two blocks at the traffic lights.
It’s a whole gigantic painting, year after year, and the completion seems to be a little light, there at the end of this highway.
Yes, in case you spot a grammar mistake, let me know. Same if you don’t like the verse of a song as there’s absolutely nothing I can change, and Spice Girls are even coming back.
But let me know if I ever gave you goosebumps, please.
Oh, one last thing…
If you liked what you just read, click the little hands (you can click more than once!) so other people can enjoy it, poor them.
