Last night, you were with me again, those equal halves of your face like the bow of a ship on my chest. I was surprised to see you but not inordinately, and you explained your presence somehow, and I believed you. I rested in us, and there was so much that had passed that you needed to know but it was enough tonight that you were still alive and in this, my world. Somehow you too were a dozen years older, in little ways. Your hair fell on me as it used to; your familiar hips.
Then I woke up and I washed my face and looked into my eyes and even the image was vanishing, was going around the screens in my mind, was gone. I was alone again with my eyes; deep and ringing as a well, good to swallow all of me whole. I could disappear like you.
R.E.M. – Country Feedback – 1998 (with Neil Young)
What I know now is no good to me. I know if ever I found myself in splendour again, the sun on you and I sparkling, the days running easy, if ever I had control again, if ever I had a line on the lodestar, I know I would not cash out of anything. I’d push in all my chips, and fall straight into the future.
Pink Floyd – Echoes – 1971
Imagine this – here David is again, forty five years later, in Pompeii of the ashes. This is the first public performance in that theatre since the gladiators two thousand years ago. He is here now without Roger Waters, who has not been around for thirty long years. Without Richard Wright, whose fleetfoot traceries were so much of the Pink Floyd sound. The song they are playing is for recently dead, but long lost, Syd Barrett. An old man in a shaft of milky light, singing a song for the departed, on a sacrificial altar.
David Gilmour – Shine on You Crazy Diamond – 2016
Is this not what it means to be human – forever enacting what came before us? I’m here in the half light, and the film of the past is so thin in my fingers. Holding it up to the light, watching life in reverse. I cannot take my eyes off it. I would be this man again. Who would we be without our own cursed magnetic histories?
[Note: During the great quarantine of 2020, Pink Floyd put some of their legendary live concerts out on YouTube, to encourage people to stay home. There was famously no audience in 1971, at the “Concert for the Dead”, a truly spectral performance.]
