Reading Day 8
SittingRW #sitting To transfer your weight to your sitting bones. Sitting in a classroom, distracted by the birds outside. Sitting on a bus, watching the landscape go by. Sitting and being in a hurry, hoping time goes faster. Sitting in a corner, facing the wall, head lowered. Sitting underground, dark and damp. Sitting still. Sitting silently. Sitting in a silent space amplifies your own noises. Sitting silently is to sit more quietly, a silent body does not exist. To sit and only hear your surroundings your mind needs to stop commenting, questioning, and thinking. According to Barthes, in Latin, ‘silere -stillness, absence of movement and of noise- would refer to a sort of timeless virginity of things, before they are born or after they have disappeared’. I wonder how you could not be silere before you are born, or after you have disappeared since you do not exist anymore/yet. Even more, I wonder how something can have an absence of movement and of noise altogether. The earth is turning in its solar system which is moving in an expanding universe, whilst the molecules of which everything exists, consist of atoms with moving protons, electrons, and neutrons in a lot of empty space. When Latin was a living language, the general worldview was different from now. If silere is physically impossible, it refers to a conceptual stillness, absence of movement and of noise. An existing before and after of things in the minds of other people. Silere was used mainly for nature while nature can not be silent. I think it is the longing for silere by people who project this timeless virginity on nature since it’s tempo used to be slower than the tempo of humans. Changes would not be noticable to us and therefore we might feel silere when we were in nature. Tacere was used to refer to a verbal silence, not by nature but by people. This differentiation angers me, people are nature and other animals can be verbally silent as well. The language’s I use, Dutch and English, cut people off from the natural world. We are animate but the rest of the natural world is inanimate. Language has a huge influence on how we look at our surroundings, it cuts things off, divides, clusters, builds a world which might not correspond with the actual world. It is constructed by people and should always keep on moving with changing people in a changing world. To sit still is to move as little as possible. To be almost silere. Almost, since a body is always moving.
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