the night unheard, the silence unseen — on here, a nut falls twice: absence here

born in a sealed womb, where night is origin, i will say that something always remains from anything, even from nothingness.
—etel adnan 

when i first received the invitation to write about ‘here’, i asked myself how to describe the ineffable? it is impossible, i thought, as much as it is to capture the moment when the nut falls for the second time. indeed, this piece of writing is challenging, because language itself often fails to comprehend experience, especially the kind of experience that is ethereal, flowing beyond the enclosures of cultural and semantic categories. and this could just be the case. i struggle to forage the precise words, with the ecstatic ambition of carefully describing the indescribable moments of ‘falling into … ’ without it being reduced, diluted, lost in the undercurrents of meanings. yet after numerous futile attempts, i realise that the ineffable here can actually never be reproduced through precisions but rather emerging (novelly and unexpectedly) from ambiguities—to encounter here, i must re-create the spaces in between, the orifices leading onto unclaimed terrains, invisible and visible. then it might (or might not) quietly arrive, like encountering the dance of fireflies, or the gradients of northern-lights or … love at first sight—in chinese, we call such fleeting moments of magical encounter ‘可遇而不可求’ ¹. in this way, the only tangible approach to encounter here again through writing, perhaps, is to write with ‘here’—that is, to be ‘here’. 

how to be ‘here’?

in her scribbled notes which she humbly refers as the ‘ambient background’ of the project, yen chun lin, the initiator of here writes, 

imagine immersing in a dark space, all of sudden a dim light shines in from afar. a puddle on the ground turns into a moon, not a full moon, but similarly beautiful. a puddle on the ground turns into a moon, not a full moon, but similarly beautiful. a nut appears in the puddle without its falls being noticed, unexpectedly, the sound of nut hitting the water comes in delay, oscillating in the spaces until the moment before silence … ²

these imageries, as ambient as they may sound, are the sensuous spells that have been cast into the happening of absence here. with and without my own absence, i step(ped) into the darkness (again). here, ground i(wa)s velvet; stillness and quietness gr(e)ow like sweetgrass. their vibrant presence slow(ed)s down my gaze, my movements. i tiptoe(d) among scattered breathing bodies resting in the space like constellations. wandering around, my vision beco(a)mes blurred definitions. in turn, the difficulty of seeing activate(d)s other senses. i smell(ed) scents of earth, and taste(d) the misty air. slowly, as i explore(d) the space with more care and attentiveness—something requested by the space itself—i notice(d) the pulsing lightness chanting in the seemingly darkness, and recognise(d) the subtle frequencies of silence shifting from within. as if inside a womb, these entities ta(oo)ke me into the fantastic realm where nightness was born: observing through stillness, everything move(d)s; seven lotus leaves rising from puddles of dreams; memory dripping into ripples of the not-full-moon; time melting with space where darkness i(was)s porous; then, i sense(d) the drop of a sound … this i(wa)s how i enter(ed) here, an ever-emerging space(宇）time（宙）³ that i(wa)s both mythical and (pre-)historical: darkness unfurls, as well as its shimmers which one gradually discovers, collects, absorbs throughout the trip weaved by the puddle: the not-full-moon, the nut, the water, the dusts, the nocturnal creatures who murmur through lou drago & yen chun lin, the falling, echoes of the heartbeats … and the sound of their animated silence.

to be ‘here’ is to fall
at the very fringe of my awareness. 

in our ever-shrinking days we unconsciously learn to modify our bodies into cognitive machines for the purpose of interpreting data on screens. we grow faster, trying to catch up the speed of the automated optimisations of everything. timespace is distributed into a dominate linearity that standardises modern human’s daily activities into accelerated concepts, consumptions,  configurations of the glaring audio-visual algorithms designed to reproduce our senses into commodities. our psyches numbed; bodies disconnected; overflow of information replacing overflow of beings ⁴. in this regard, within cultures that proliferate the perception of flamboyant cacophony through prioritising ways of seeing, absence here is a rare happening. it emerges as a gentle flow that softly, and at the same time radically challenges the instagram-tiktok-oriented audiovisual politics of our times—not with a voice that is louder than the glamorous, fast-forward spectacles but with a whisper, a whisper sprouting from darkness of the night, materialised into series of prolonged, embodied experiences that evoke our vulnerable state of primordial existence—returning to our mother’s womb, a womb sewed by sound of silence where night comes into being. 

…sssssssshhhh… 

..
.…f
    a
    1
     l
i
  n
g…
…….
..
.
… into such wombly frequencies of absence here, silence and night exist as pulsating forces that conjure ‘magic’. here, magic refers to the fleeting moment when shifting one’s sensory perception into a synaesthetic state. that is to say, the experience stimulated by absence here is not merely subjected to its live sonic acts but is rather transformative through variant entanglements of all senses. within a form of delicate slowness, silence becomes a space where sound emerges. here, slowness and silence are interlaced. in particular, slowness is less about an indicator of speed than it is about awareness—offering the in-between milieu that allow us to be ‘empty’, to observe more closely and listen more deeply. slowness turns into a form of silence which could be sensed in an expansive way. when the sensible silence expands into space, it also changes its relationship with sound. in shifting the silence, etel adnan writes, 

the universe makes a sound—is a sound. in the core of this sound there’s a silence, a silence that creates that sound, which is not its opposite, but its inseparable soul. and this silence can also be heard. ⁵

adnan’s poetry profoundly resonates with how the space of silence and sound, or rather, how the space of ‘silencesound’ (ssssssssssh…) manifests itself in here. the ontological presence of silence  is channeled through the happenings of lights, shadows, ripples, dusts, the lotus leaf sculptures and all the matter that forms absence here. just like the porous darkness that allows lights to travel through, silence in here is also permeable. it can be heard, seen, smelled, touched, blanketing the entire here where sound drops within. in this way, instead of creating silence and sound as separate sonic entities, the emergence of sound takes place inside of silence—it unfolds the interiority of silence, and at the same time transmits it back to the (outer)space.

while being held by the tentacles of night

tenderly calling for a return to our, using yen’s own rhetoric, ‘fragile ears’, this ‘sssilencessoundsssspace’ harbours multiple rhythms and temporalities. marginal voices and the not-yet-hearable voices become crystallised, echoing shimmers of the stars. not because they are being artificially amplified, but because all of a sudden, we realised that we are able to ‘hear’ more through noticing the fine details and attuning to subtleties. all of these experiences could be described as synaesthetic because they engage us within a larger, more complex web of sensual relations from which we were born but to which we have became blind. yet, the idea of ‘fragile ears’ do not merely appoint to its material specificity. it proposes a different and ancient way of nakedly being in and of the world, that is, a ‘fragile state of being’. and this is the moment when silence blossoms into nightness. night is a place where very little happens and at the same time everything happens; a place where mysteries and unknowns fabricate into fantasies and nightmares; a place not everyone is willing to enter as it is often associated with shade, darkness and terror. ⁶ in absence here, night flows as foaming energy that inspires wonders. yet, the night is vulnerable here. it is vulnerable because it is easily disturbed, disrupted, torn apart, and simultaneously wet, elastic, transfusable between (in)visibilities. because all the bodies that participate here are holding it, while being held by it. connected by empathy, such strength binds softness and hardness together, penetrating the impenetrable armours that encapsulate these vulnerable bodies—it embraces these vulnerable bodies through its own vulnerability—to let them breathe, to let them transform. 

being 

here,

… night is formless, carried by tender matters of the porous darkness that tastes like an island. on this island inhabited by memory beings and spirits of all kinds, emergence and transformations of sound, as subtle and barely-perceivable as they may be, turn into a ‘touch’ that elongates the horizon. its shimmering slows down all other perceptions. within this impalpable slowness, i tremble, as i sense the wings of waves, the skin of winds, the gaze of a shy seashell; i sense a tectonic splash, caused by the echoes of their sneeze; i sense the drop of a crystal tear made by her dragonfly lover from past lives; i sense the untuned encounter, the images of forgetfulness; i sense intimacy, desire, confusion, resistance; i sense delayed love, entangled with pain from far and near; i sense letting go and coming back like the beginning of a fable ‘serenade out’ from finger tips … i sense the polyamorous ‘play’ of yen and lou (—as they camouflaged into fractals of the silence night, they are played by the silence they cultivate, becoming the night they fabricate). in here where darkness is the awareness of light, silence drops a sound, night becomes the sun. when the wind veers to the east and the tides dip into the clouds, they whisper, drifting(in)between …

o

n

l

y 

here.

Bibliography 

etel adnan, night, new york: nightboat books, 2016.
etel adnan, shifting the silence, new york: nightboat books, 2020.