/ Overture /
Silence in the Awakening of the Worlds (SAW) is part of an ongoing research into the limits of the form of experience and understanding of modern Western civilization. Limits that give consistency to a reality that has become untenable.
Is there no more reality than what I can see, touch and count?
If I cannot touch it then it does not exist?
But then, as Kierkegaard suggested, would not love and friendship be the first thing we would lose?
And would we not then be the first to be deceived?
«Life cannot be just this» said El Taxista Ful recalling a brutalised life destined to work. «What they tell us we are is what they want to do to us» says the recent Manifeste conspirationniste, thinking on the detailed governance of techno-capitalist democracies. Governance that, if it has freed «free-time» for private leisure, it has been by designing in a more perfect way the problem-box, so that the anthropomorphic rat can feel free while it is strictly driven. Governance that from its beginnings Tocqueville had described as consisting of a formal freedom to choose leaders, granted under a strenuous administrative despotism that reached to regulate even the smallest gestures, such as taking a chair out into the street, having a beer outside the house or the "normal" use of any place, even domestic.
Franz Kafka shrugged his shoulders and made a helpless gesture with his right hand. (...) In reality, I am nothing but a very mediocre and sloppy draughtsman. Edschmid claims that I incorporate wonders into ordinary events, which, of course, is a big mistake on his part. If the ordinary is already a wonder in itself, I am merely making a note of it! I may also light things up a bit like the lighting technician does on a darkened stage. But that's not right! In reality such a stage is not in semi-darkness, but full of daylight. That's why people close their eyes and see so little.
Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka
With its avalanche of tasks and claims it is the excess of daylight that hinders the deployment of a special attention to the silent whisper of the blossoming of wonder.
SAW pursues a similar intuition: that there is too much light and too much noise, and that these dull our sensitivity. In the midst of the confusion no agitation is going to be able to find a way out.
SAW starts from some points acquired by a part of the anarchizing thought of the time, such as «no politics will free us from the world of the duplicity and falsity of politics», «no organization will free us from the asphyxiating administratively organized world», «no power will free us from the oppressive world of governmental power». - We must look for other ways to open cracks in a world frozen by its own impotent sentimentality in the face of all the suffering in the world.
First, we have to subtract ourselves from the continuous flow that assaults our attention. Subtracting ourselves from daytime illumination and its noisy atmosphere does not immediately leave us in any pure and safe «interior» place, for there is no interior other than that which is formed in relation to a language and a precise epoch... Although in the depths may pulsate a restlessness of stars, winds and chthonic tides, we do not gain access to this pulsating depth only by turning off the metropolitan noise, closing the door or entering the darkness.
There, the whole outside world we carry with us continues to buzz, its rumor and cries continue. Teresa of Jesus called the mind "the madwoman of the house", Abdelmoumin told us, for it never stops still, carrying to and fro all the noise of time.
It is necessary to find a way, a practice or a precise technique to be able to look into the cosmic gale that inhabits us below the words, or above the little houses we spend our lives playing with.
Our journey has gone more or less backwards. We have gone from the farthest to the closest, finding on both sides something else, an uncanny twist that left us in the throb of a tumultuous restlessness, never in the stillness of a perfect round.
SAW was built in three different moments, from a name where an experience was coined: the journey; the vision; the threshold. Is there an experience of the threshold? Yes, although like the experience of the journey and the visionary experience it is an experience of transit. Transit between sleep and wakefulness, in torpor and awakening. Transit of birth and transit of death.
SAW has functioned as an open research. We made some meetings with friends and close people whose experience and journey seemed inspiring to us. From these meetings emerged some interviews and with some of these interviews we made three videos taking advantage of the possibility of showing them at the ASM (Ars Santa Mònica).*
photo: Lili Marsans
