A Valentine's Rose for Whitney: Une Déclaration d'Amour

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February 14, 2012 | by Walter G Tonetto

The music world paid emotional tribute to legendary US singer and actress Whitney Houston.

Her voice reached three octaves. It had it all. The tremolo, the soaring alkahest, like the small red helium balloon I had as a five-year old. I had opened my intense little hand, and then it kept climbing and climbing, until it was out of sight. But even though it had gone, it remained a thing of delight as my neck was stretched and eyes were affixed to the great blue unknown beyond.

I adored Whitney Houston, and when she got married, I thought I was there in spirit. After all, her sensitivity could drill right through the Nautilus chambers of time and space and reach your expansive heart! "Didn't We Almost Have It All", one of her classics, is maestoso, full of that delicious risk, a sure-footed walk in the glades of the highest altitudes, without the need for oxygen. She was our heart, and our lungs, our love, and that means there is never fatigue or decline. While this bravura piece encompasses the acute frailties of living, and charts her very own life, the song more poignantly epitomizes the stunning range and the pliant textures of possibilities. Love is always high risk, a dance on the precipice, but the only real thing there is. When in song, she was ever-free. There was clarity and command of spirit that was ahead of the fissures of song-craft.

I imagined her in a bagheera and velvet dress, color and cut of earlier ages, but unpretentious, her features soft, but the full mouth and big brown eyes standing out against an almost chiseled Medusa shock of hair, every strand alight. And the gospel spirit was licking the flame higher and higher. It was all second-sight reading, with eyes closed. One is not surprised to learn that the great Aretha Franklin is in her bloodline. And so is each of us, for those who have ears that turn to sleek Brancusean “birds in space,” tapering out to aureate infinity, as one in her avian family. Great art has this capacity: it sloughs off the petty reservations of ego, prejudice and other delusions, such as the illusion of “death,” to present things as they really are.

When Hendrix unstitched The Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock to sound like strident bombs, the whammy bar-dives in the mid-section ripping the heart out, he was rubricating the divisive and destructive currents in the psyche. Houston showed that genius can turn the critical gaze into steady eyes of love, the unguent after the horrors of war and death. Her performance of the US national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl has us still reaching for words, but finding the more dependable solace and assurance of silence. After the martial rataplan had escorted her into song, she had taken off, sleek bird, and from above had healed the scars of war. Find that take-off point in her life-performance before thunderous applause breaks the spell. Yes, when words fail, lips are predestined to take over, and they indite with kinetic abandon! And in that silence our love deepens, not just for Whitney, but for all created things.

It would be a lie to say we never met Whitney. What has never separated has no place to go to, nor any need for returns. There is only illusion. And voilà, that young boy has his red balloon in his tiny fist again! And, yes, this is my timeless Valentine's declaration to you, Whitney: for how could I say that I mourn for something that has never gone, or call you a “legend” and all that other hackneyed stuff that draws no spark from the flint. It needs steel, not tin, and why put stoniness where there are pearly waters that lave the desert stretches, and invite dragonflies to hover above the riparian fringes? And that give buoyancy to the balloons of our yearning?

No, Whitney, you are soft and the unguent of love's perfection.

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