Delicacy is the domain of ghosts. Folks down here, feet planted on the ground, we can’t afford delicacy, we can’t hold it in our thick, clumsy hands lest we break it. Delicacy is not for humans to objectify.
Vini Reilly is perhaps the kind of man who, like me, is half-ghost, trapped in the limen, for better or worse. I can only assume this given the spectral photo of him that adorns the self-titled Durutti Column album. Not self-titled after the name of the band, mind. Self-titled after him. I go on assuming this because this self-same album does not have any of his singing until the final track, but is also not strictly instrumental prior, instead drawing on a variety of scattered vocal samples from other music. These are the kinds of gauzey, contradictory half-measures that make up the flesh of people like he and I.
If I scour Reilly’s Wikipedia page for similarities I notice his parent didn’t allow him to watch TV growing up, which I relate to, and that he was a talented footballer while I ran away crying when brought to a soccer field as a child. But Wikipedia does not note, between the line describing his birthplace and his musical genres, that he is half-ghost. Wikipedia does not mention that he understands delicacy. It couldn’t. To do so would be dangerous, would be too close to bringing down a hammer on what, to certain specters, is something resembling a heart.
And so the half-light remains, thank god. The delicacy, the fragility, it hurts like hell, but to imagine not having it is thousands of time worse. Imagining the guitar falling to pieces entirely, the distant aspirations fading out for good, it’s the same sort of terror the fully living describe when they talk about death.
So let us continue, let us feel and think delicately, let us always be at risk of shattering, let us stand as indistinct figures at the top of staircases, in the back of family photos, spiraling out of graveyards and pipe organs. Let me hold your hand, if you’re insubstantial enough to touch me, and let Vini Reilly go on playing his guitar.