THE ALEPH was written on the request and suggestion of composer Diana Syrse to serve as the libretto for the third and final movement of her work CONNECTED IDENTITIES, concluding a journey started with Mayan poetry and culminating in the multilingual fragmentation of a cosmopolitan life. Diana’s intuition was that the Aleph imagined by Jorge Luis Borges (in his 1945 short story of the same name), a point in space in which all points of the universe are simultaneously visible from all angles, provided a fitting vanishing point for the entire work. I wrote a free interpretation in the form of a song.
CONNECTED IDENTITIES was premiered on October 17, 2017 by Diana Syrse (voice) with the LA Philharmonic conducted by Gustave Dudamel. It was completed with a second song cycle, THE INVENTION OF SEX, the diptych receiving its premiere in 2021 at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, with Diana Syrse singing both pieces and Secession Orchestra conducted by Clément Mao-Takacs, in a staging by Aleksi Barrière.
Many years later, singer-songwriter Anni Elif was looking for a text to replace the lyrics of a song she had composed on a text for which she ultimately didn’t get clearance from the author. She asked whether she could use THE ALEPH, which I adapted for this purpose.
The Aleph (2017)
I have lost myself in you All of you
Like splinters under your skin
Too small to notice
Is it me speaking or is it you
Is this pain I feel from your entangled nerves
I stand or do not stand here
Trapped in a city
Trapped in a language that is not mine
Gah
O-Open skies
I am lost in a forest of pictures
What you see I see
What you know I know
That mother feeding her fearful child
That worker paving the road with blocks of eternity
That fisherman hunting a whale Ice-flowers in his eyebrows
That woman stepping on the moon It crumbles gently
That child telling stories to the shadows of her lamp Their secrets passed in hidden forms over time are mine
And I seem to be all of them together and at once
Like a cloud gliding lightly
Despite its five hundred kilotons
I am heavy with you
Heavy with all your voices
Buzzing with your dreams
Familiar and bizarre
But there is a human shadow on the street corner
I follow him under a scorching sun
I know this shadow Wherefrom I have forgotten
I catch him up in an alley (maybe the shadow himself)
And gently curl up in his lukewarm bosom
The rumor of all your voices fades
And suddenly I hear a voice
That I know is mine
Child of the Aleph (2026)
I have lost myself in you All of you
Like splinters under your skin
Too small to notice
Is it me speaking or is it you
Is this pain I feel from your million entangled nerves
Trapped in a city
Trapped in a language that is not mine
I am lost in a forest of pictures
What you see I see
What you know I know
Secrets passed in hidden forms over time are mine
And I seem to be all of you together and at once
Like a cloud gliding lightly
Despite its five hundred kilotons
I am heavy with you
Heavy with all your voices
Buzzing with your dreams
Familiar and bizarre
In oblique light I follow the shadow of the cloud
Until our feet touch and the dark figure is no taller than me
I bend down and against burning stone it is like kissing ice
As I lie in the shadow the rumor of all your voices fades
And suddenly I hear a voice
That I recognize as mine
