Cicero’s music by doomed people. Jimmy Carr. Donny Hathaway. Donald Drummond. And the others. She liked to hear madness, which she said she was a connoisseur.
A voyeur, more like.
Cicero was always on the hunt for Grundstimmungen in the arts, she said. She collected them. Savoured them. She was always on the lookout for Grundstimmungen artists.
She relished their tragic endings. Suicides. Drownings. Throwing themselves from great heights. She could tell you all about their deaths. It was ghoulish.
Cicero wanted to see us in the grip of those Grundstimmungen. To see what would happen. She liked to subject us to her doomy oeuvres. Play us James Carr, on a loop. Just as an experiment. To see what would happen.
Cicero loved our doomed intensity. She got high on it.
She was a vampire.
She called herself a connoisseur. An appreciator of doomed moods.
Maybe it reminded her of something from her doomed youth. Back behind the iron curtain. Of an Eastern European attitude. And an Eastern European resistance.
Cicero wanted to raise us as high as she could. Just to enjoy the dissonance. Just to draw from our impostor’s syndrome. Just to watch us squirm.
She was cruel. She liked to wreck things. She liked to turn the screws – on you or on the world, I’m not sure. She wanted to make thing … interesting. She was a torturer. By proxy.
Was it sexual do you think?
You always think things are sexual.
Cicero wanted to increase the tension, increase the polarities. Between high and low. Between the lofty and the lowly. She wanted to confuse the hierarchies. To invert the order. Play the devil’s advocate.
She liked to distort. To grotesquify. It was some weird form of camp, in its way. Some form of ironizing.
Was it her deep lesbianism? Queer behind the iron curtain: what could that mean? Can’t have been fun. Didn’t she lose her lover at twenty. A terrible loss.
Work in Progress 