Excesses are the privileges of those decided to die young. Words are so full of space between them, you could take a year to swim between a hello and a goodbye. And all of that to say nothing at all. All this time, I’ve been nothing but words and they never ran out, but I get emptier and emptier. Words are the coward’s retreat, there, I said it. They’re the water to fill any cup, the dresses of the whims of a hungry mind, that never stops to shoot a fabled dead horse. Why say anything at all? Why try to shield myself with a phrase, so harsh and frail, when the knife of the love in front of me is louder than the wind? Silence, yes. The last wonder of the universe.

But too much silence. That wouldn’t do. Silence is the ever-friend, the ever-enemy and the ever-death. I’ve been hurt by silence, too, and I’ve used its knife on many people. I hate it, I can’t stand a second more of it. Silence is the coward’s retreat, I’m sure of that. Words can only be active, they can only act and offer a position on things, even through a resigning cough. But silence, silence is always a loud withdraw, the subservient call of the white-flagged mind.

I think I’m just hurt. It’s been too long. Too many people I’ve said too much to, too many people I wish to say more. That is the path of a stray dog, I suppose. To decipher any troubled mind is to venture in their loudness and their silence. To live within someone’s breath is to listen to the vacant room inside their tiniest effort. That is love, too.

The song we’ll talk about today is a song about love. The first moment in time where this band learned to balance the wind of their silence and the ocean of their words, modestly creating the landscape for a feeling that may be eternal, while they tell the story of two stranded beings aimlessly stumbling through a quiet hurricane.

Japan’s Nightporter, from their 1980 album Gentlemen Take Polaroids, was for a while one of my two favorite songs of all time. The other one was Ghosts, from their final album titled Tin Drum, released the following year. Two very similar and distinct songs from their catalogue, but they were one of the only instances where the band, spearheaded by vocalist and songwriter David Sylvian, were getting mellower, undressing from their glamorous and eccentric New Wave kimonos and experimenting with quietness and introspection.

After listening to it for the first time back in 2022, I fell in love with it. It’s funny, because I wasn’t even the biggest Japan fan — in fact, I practically only listened to these two songs from them, even if I always knew Sylvian and his wonderful hair. I guess I felt connected with Japan’s two slower tracks because through their introspection I could see a part of myself that was as true as my face in the mirror. I could see something that couldn’t hide, something loud and tender, like the eyes of a lover seeing through your thin phrases.

Nightporter is mostly just a piano. There’s an oboe, a cello… But the echoed piano leads the way. In the Oil on Canvas live version, the piano is replaced with a synthesizer, but also keeping the calm mood of the studio version. Throughout these lines Sylvian would sing, I remember listening to them as if I was being loved, finally, as never before, like a sheltered dog looks at their new owner for an embrace so strong it shall never be received.

Could I ever explain?
This feeling of love, it just lingers on
The fear in my heart that keeps telling me which way to turn

We’ll wander again
Our clothes they are wet; we shy from the rain
Longing to touch all the places we know we can hide
The width of a room that can hold so much pleasure inside

The song talks about two lovers that drifted apart, from the perspective of this delicate man remembering his times with his one and promising for a future that simply has to exist. I always imagine this gentleman with his cigarette on the train station, à lá Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter, while waiting for the rain to cease. The way it tears lovingly through your flesh is very sensual, so I can imagine that maybe he’s remembering too of an other day of rain, where he had a company of a lost woman.

This picture took from my brain’s camera is simple, but at the end of the day, the lines get simpler; the rain he talks about can just be a metaphor.

I’ll watch for a sign
And if I should ever again cross your mind
I’ll sit in my room and wait until nightlife begins
And catching my breath, we’ll both brave the weather again

Sylvian wants to meet this person again, this night cat that filled every room he walked in even through their absence, defying his mind that carries this love with so much fear. He promises they will see each other again. They will have that day in the rain once again.

He’ll wait for a sign — oh, that’s silence. Dangerous silence. Meaningless silence. As in the cover for the single, he lies in an empty room, like Batman looking through his window waiting for the sky to have his symbol. Silly. But through his respectful and coward silence, perhaps, he saw time’s petals to be picked by a gentler hand, expecting for all the bullets of reality to somehow miss him, for the room of tomorrow to be his deathbed, without knowing his end lies in today.

Am I projecting? I am projecting.

Here am I alone again
A quiet town where life gives in
Here am I just wondering
Nightporters go, nightporters slip away

“Nightporter” comes from the 1974 italian film The Night Porter — I have never seen it, apparently it’s pretty controversial, carrying themes of isolation and forbidden love, according to the description of the song on the site Genius.

I guess now I understand why this song has always hit me so hard.

It’s the way in which I communicate; it’s through the flood of words and the nothingness, it’s this distance in an embrace. Following the theme of this publication’s last post about Everyone Asked About You, when I look behind me I always see a trail I want to go back to, because the path where I braved the weather with someone else was much more beautiful. The rain was a miracle before it was water, and it was bountiful to be near the end of the rainbow, to find a home to this sheltered dog.

But I’m not innocent. I’ve hurt and hurt, tiredlessly. And they’ve hurt and hurt me, like a match melting an ice cube while being put away by the water. Can it be undone, the tears of the other, before my own? I want to know. And are they, also, cleaning their windows to see better the symbol in the sky, stretching the spaces between my words to see their own mirrored faces?

It’s always been like this. I have to believe that this path leads somehow to my favorite places, long past the coastline I live in now. There’s not a quieter and more destructive resolution than to believe a living one is dead, than to follow a path of songs in silence, retreating in the shadow of lovely, past conversations.

Listen to Nightporter in our playlist for October, titled Tender!

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About the text: I think the last post messed a lot with me, so when I was deciding in what to talk about for this week’s post I guess it felt natural to keep the theme, since the heart is stubborn and can’t forget a face. At the end of the day, I feel happy quite often these days. I just wish I could brighten some days of past dark people, for these smiles always seem like they wait for a better, prettier reason.

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