it’s because it’s on, but for it to be on it also has to be off.
enthusiasm—“a kind of inner earthquake produced by allowing oneself to be possessed by something larger and more powerful, like a god or goddess”—is as much about being carried away as it is about letting go. to be possessed requires some level of relinquishment.
i am curious about what offers me some distance from myself, what pushes me into a different speed or register (outside of this shrill, desperate one where i must have an opinion about everything and everyone, am up to my neck in judgement and reaction). i’ve found that such interruptions jolt as often as they are gentle.
thinking with Nothing to Say by Sophia Efthimiatou, i’d like to allow myself to be possessed by silence. by way of lamenting art that did not resonate, she draws attention to how art offers us silence: “….I was not there as a passive voyeur but as a human being sharing time, oxygen, and a sacred silence with other human beings. It is the silence of amphitheaters and libraries and cathedrals, of the seconds between the last note played at a concert and the eruption of applause, a silence that enters us all simultaneously like communion and within which a unity grows.”
she also describes the art’s opening effect. art, she writes “to be considered art at all must fulfill its duty to receive us generously, and where successful, create more space within us for reception. By reception I do not mean acceptance. I mean an anticipation of our humanity, in its totality, from misery to glory.”
art helps us recognize and greet ourselves, by offering another angle, another way of looking, and the stillness of being stunned.
i wonder if it is this recognition that gives us pause, that opens that silence within us that’s always there, between heartbeats, available for the taking, available to return to.
the title of this note comes from Alexis Pauline Gumbs describing the writing process for one of her books “And it was these phrases of Hortense Spillers that could get me to have the level of stillness and listening to hear whatever it was. It was the technology for it.”
if you’re in the NYC area, i’m hosting a show on February 28th - What Else? Comedy Toward the Solidarity Economy - we will laugh a lot and ticket sales go to the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City. Come! Or pass it on!