How to preserve silence and darkness

The festival moved to Belgium and after a solid five hours’ sleep we followed it there. The landscape on the way to Antwerp was hypnotically monotonous. I looked at the geometry of Dutch forests: strange, chessboard-shaped woods, as if marked out with a ruler. We came to an enormous lighted greenhouse, which looked like an incubator for a gigantic alien creature. On the horizon the silhouettes of cranes rose over the harbour. Everything trailing off into the mist, and the raindrops on the bus window.

I explained to Wiam how to pronounce the Czech word ‘řeřicha’, which, as it turns out, is unpronounceable. I learnt a few unpronounceable Arabic words and then we started talking about silence. About people who claim we are infected with noise, who capture silence, collect it and try to secretly reintroduce it into the world like a rare plant. About John Cage who composed a piece of music for four and a half minutes of silence.

We talked about people who try to slow time down. Once I read an interview with the chairman of the Society for the Deceleration of Time: he prescribed everyone at least an hour of boredom a day, because when you’re bored you immediately begin to feel the passing of time, almost as a physical sensation. We talked about people who try to preserve darkness, like a threatened species of light. They set out to combat light pollution, to limit light in big cities, where darkness has died out completely, replaced by a greyish orange fog enveloping the streets at night.

All these people are crossing borders in the opposite direction to current world developments. We should support them in their attempt. I too sometimes long for darkness that really allows you to see the stars. Forests that don’t look like a mathematical problem, dangerous forests you would be afraid to enter. Silence in which you can hear your own breath and heartbeat. Sometimes I feel homesick for childhood boredom, when days were at least as long as weeks are now and the world sometimes stopped moving altogether, stayed still, frozen in the dizzying present.

Wiam says that’s precisely what we’re missing: the present. Someone should set up a Society for the Conservation of Movement. We live in our pasts and our futures, but the present eludes us. We’ve long been unable to deal with the present, whereas in childhood it was the most ordinary thing in the world. I woke up in The Hague, fell asleep in Antwerp, awoke in Prague. All of it like flashes of light when a film roll breaks. A strange world.