Sitting

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.

To sit on the bottom, while the weight from above makes it hard to breathe. To sit in darkness, a falling mind. To sit whilst you owe your time to something, someone. To sit because you cannot stand. To sit across, next to, behind, on top of the one you love. To sit and have a seat at the table. To sit and be heard.

‘To sit with eight people within the horizon of a conversation. At what moment and how many times is it appropriate to speak if one does not wish to be considered silent?’, Kafka wondered.

Sitting with others whilst feeling deeply alone. Sitting on a roller coaster, moving up, down, sideways, inside out.

To sit and slowly merge. To sit and listen. To sit and embrace.

Sitting on a horse, the lower body relaxed and moved by the animal.

To sit uninterrupted, with no demand, no task, no responsibility. To sit, seeing yourself mirrored in all that is in front of you. To sit, wanting to be tacere.

Sitting still and zooming out, seeing yourself from above, on the map, you are in the middle of the mountains, such a small dot on this map while this map is such a small dot on earth. To sit and feel how small you are.

To sit and interrogate. To sit and never move again. To sit and wait. To sit and sigh. To sit and cry. To sit in the rain.

Sitting still and zooming in, through your skin, connective tissue, bones, fluids, organs, cells. To sit and feel how big you are.

Sitting while screaming out loud your name, your desires. Sitting on a plane is high, not the same as sitting on a mountain.

To sit on a mountain. To sit with the sea. To sit and see the sun moving. To sit and do nothing, without being wrong, without being in debt. To sit and be heard.