• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 472 0

or depressing, but I do know that The Marble Index scares the shit out of me. But what scares me even more is what most people seem to want instead. Every time I see some kid with concentration-camp-cropped hair maybe tinted green with maybe a garbage bag over his or her genuinely pathetic belittled frame, I want to puke and maybe even cry a little at the same time. Because so much of this punk rubbish is based on the stupidest apprehension and declamation of how proud one can be that “We don’t feel!” when they don’t even realize the horror and irony Johnny Rotten spat into that particular phrase. When The Marble Index was released a lot of record buyers wanted some vainglorious apocalypse and now most of them want either to be mommied Frampton-style and told that everything is okay snookums, or they want to be bludgeoned into a kind of terminal insensibility that they mistake for freedom from the contradictions in their lives and surroundings which are eating them alive, or they want to be told that it's all just a bunch of shit and the best is as good as the worst. But it just ain’t so, and they know it in their guts, so they resort in desperation to something like Elvis Costello, who, when he last played a big hall in New York and mouthed that cheap line about how he doesn’t wanna be your lover/“I just wanna be your victim,” the audience actually fucking cheered, as if there never was anything alive between the hand-in-glove poles of happyhappy and what is finally merely banally disgusting mean-spiritedness.

Maybe this would make more sense to you if I told you that I want to run so far from presuming to define or even describe this record because I love it so passionately that I’m terrified of what that might say about me. There are no cheap thrills on The Marble Index, no commercials for sadomasochism, bisexuality, or hard drugs dashed off for a ravenous but vicarious audience—rather, it stares for a relatively short time that might just seem eternity to you into the heart of darkness, eyes wide-open, unflinching, and gives its own heart to what it finds there, and then tells you how that feels, letting you draw your own value judgments.

I played The Marble Index for a woman I loved about a year ago. She had never heard about Nico, never heard of John Cale, never really heard the Velvet Underground except in the context of this whole humorous but basically jive media game I set up with Lou Reed for a while. She listened to the whole thing in a state of mesmerism bordering on shock, then said of Cale, “He built a cathedral for a woman in hell, didn’t he?” I called her up again today when I was fucked up about this article and she said, having still only heard it that one time, that she thought Nico was lost in her own blackness. I said, “But there's a pearl in there.” I could hear her shudder over the phone, and suddenly she started talking very fast, and this is what she said as I madly pecked at my typewriter struggling to keep up: “Her whole body can glisten, she's just like a seed, the original seed of intercourse, her whole body can shine like the sun hits the water with sprays of light, and yet she's chosen to de-create from the surface to de-create again and again until the only message is ‘I’m the life force itself, I’m the will to live,’ a human embryo without hope of maturity, just sending signals. SHE's IN THE WOMB, and what you call the pearl is just the pearl inside Mama's belly, the pulsebeat. She's accomplished de-creation: ‘Let me be behind everything human, oh god, the fact to catch a star in your eye or touch another human being, to feel another human being, to touch another universe is nothing, is just a frozen borderline’—that there is no nexus, just retreat, until the frozen borderline, until all you feel is the white light of survival and the abyss is the ocean around her. It's one teeny star, one microstar in the macrocosm of her body, and it's all she's chosen to have, she's obliterated them all, stamped them out. She is a black hole in space with one point left. And then this is what she says: