Abstrakt

Wojciech Kalaga
Institute of English Cultures and Literatures
Faculty of Philology
University of Silesia in Katowice
Poland

Er(r)go...

failure of speech – please be silent, because silence is the treasure hold of sounds, their saturation, the accumulation of tones. And further: active silence, the energy of silence, poetic language as the music of silence, the landscape of sound, silence of the plants, performativity of silence. Penetrating the silence, we reach the world of sound and of whatever is not silence: intonarumori – rumorarmonio, ululatori, rombator, scoppiatori, sibilatori. Murmurs, humming, noises, knocking, grinding, howling, groans, laughs, human and animal sounds, drones, clatter, din, boom, crash, creaking, scraping, rubbing, wheeze, hiss, gasp, ping, pop, machine music, tonal cords of words, the harmony of murmurs, vibrations and resonances, unwanted sounds.  Reversing presence and absence – internal physiology, mute dramatization of the heart and the breath: noises, moaning, breathing in and breathing out, periodic cadence. Moans, grunts, billing, whizzing, blowing, quiet strikes of the upper and lower lips of the diva, quiet rubbing of the body of the instrument.

Silence turns to thunder. Industrial noise: machines whizz, howl, boom, crash, groan, hiss, whistle, toll, hammer, clatter, grate, grind, beat, whir, hiss. Music as the effect of silence – it is the silence that gives the sounds their strength, makes the darkness less still, when the tiniest noise becomes a wraith. A silent piano – the art of noise and 4’33”.  And several figures: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Salvatore Sciarrino, John Cage, Jacques Lacan, Arnold Schoenberg, Wassily Kandinsky, Maria Pappenheim, Anna O., Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leris, Colette Peignot, Francesca Woodman, Bracha L. Ettinger, Tres, Dan Geva,  Noit Geva, Gillian Wearing. Muzak. The audiosphere of communism: the singing, mystical body of the collective, the trumpet in the hands of a young ZMP zealot, the buzzing of flies, the jabber of the enemy. In addition, the voice as an incestual object. The transcendence of the sounds of the surrounding, the ringing in the ears, tinnitus, the musical rollercoaster, the funeral march at the burial of the deaf, a second so full that it does not fit into half an hour, cord as discord, the soundness of our bodies, the hum of a gesture, the noise of  an object, electronic clatter and clamor, musical loops, drumming of fingers, recital of re-playing, The Banquets of Changing Moods, and, finally, embalming with sound.

Friendship as silence; silence that speaks in order to hide better, a muted, ashen sweater, nonverbal torrent of words, reading with the ear, listening to the difference, hearing oneself. One must go beyond the staff. Muteness and dissemblance. Silence as power and a form of shaping bodies, the muting of buildings, the sucking out of sounds.

Tacet. Silence does not exist. “In absolute silence, everyone will eventually hear something.” What do I hear?

Wojciech Kalaga