Silence

Stepping out on a street of the city you live in. Staying home. It doesn’t matter - the noise of public transport, the murmur of people frequenting the most popular places, empty new apartment buildings lined up in endless rows, huge new and old cubes of shopping malls, all the voices coming from screens or backyards… or from down the street in which you live, in case you don’t leave your home. It doesn’t matter. Nothing can be louder than the almost soothing, but very heavy and disturbing, ominous silence that has taken hold.

It is soothing just because so much unrest has visited our beings, our lives; because so many lies have finally been accepted, confirmed, and because that fact has changed nothing, nothing that would affect the state we’re in. And this silence is not of the soothing variety, it doesn’t relax, it is not the silence one needs to contemplate one’s existence and methods because that same existence is today defined by strict rules of spiritual and mental repression. The silence of restlessness and spiritless awaiting of doom reigns supreme, and the only thing left for it to do is to fully establish itself in us as a stagnating status quo, not as something final, something ultimate. This ruin is here to last, to flow, to be invisible, to be deceptive whenever it appears, to always leave a glimmer of hope, just like man does. It favours him, goes hand in hand with man’s nature, such is the silence of our doom.

While companies fall one after another. While actors themselves, not the characters they play in their movies or TV shows, are saving our world. While detergents, toothpaste, toys and chocolates love us and will themselves provide everything we need at any given moment. While out of thousands of murdered and starving children only one name gets to tell their intimate story, i.e. while that story is told through a narrator’s mouth which speaks a narrowed truth of what really happened at that place where all those children died, including the name that was singled out just to provoke a tear in the eyes of the audience, since big numbers, it seems obvious, cannot provoke compassion, only incomprehension and inability to accept a great tragedy. Big numbers win very few people over. Big numbers suppress emotions, we don’t know which being to feel sorry for. All of them?

Hardly. That’s why the intimate stories of people who possibly participated in tragic events are there, but they are told only to deceive us. And to sell us a story so very removed from complete truth. While the Church is the only real political option, even if only as an opposition, and we could think of several other activities it could practice, its new/old role says more than enough about it. Maybe the Church as an institution truly belongs to today’s political reality. Maybe it always was or should have been an option. But enough about politics. Ads promoting loan sharks are in every tram, and every corner sees a new pawn shop for gold and silver pop up every other day. That’s this kind of silence this is. It speaks of the state of the place where you exist.

No one and nothing can interrupt that silence - the silence of long-hidden ruin. The silence of muffled emotions. The silence of all those who sold that noble silence we need to think. The silence that overcame the noise of the world, the noise designed to leave us without thoughts, without contemplations, without the ability to hear ourselves, without conscience, no matter how and how much that conscience is expressed. And now, after all that, we cannot hear the noise they used to saturate us nor the silence they’ve overpowered and which we gave up on all too easily, the silence that was the precondition for us contemplating our lives. In fact, we don’t even want to hear each other anymore. And they’ll always allow us to watch, to see, to stare. They, some people, it matters not why they do it and who they are. The festivals are in full swing, there is a circus in every town, music playing at every corner, but we still don’t hear. We only see, through this silence of ruin, we see that something is going on around us. But the noise listens to us, and that fine, noble silence does not want us. We are standing in a bad dream, with our ears covered with our hands, we are at the entrance to the dark zone, with our backs still turned to it. It must be fear. In front of us are fairly new but dilapidated empty buildings; people who were silenced not too long ago are now completely mute.

In front of us is a wasteland. Behind us is a dark zone of constant danger that will last as long as we last. Each individual. I am not enumerating many examples, I am not stating many facts, if any, because all those similar, distorted facts have brought forth this new, omnipresent silence. There is nothing in us. But who fears anything these days? Who fears this silence, which resembles the silence at the moment when an atomic bomb hits, if the descriptions of all the sensations of such an impact are to be believed?

Only resembles. Because this silence is louder than any noise, quieter than any atomic bomb, louder than any human scream. It is in front of us. Will we embrace it so hard that it never lets go of us? Behind us is the entrance to the wasteland of our being. Will we turn to that and bravely enter it? Is that the struggle that can pull us out of this silent reality? Can we inside, in ourselves, find the way out of this dark zone, the way to the memory that says: “I remember the future. I remember myself.”? Indeed, as Fernando Pessoa wrote long ago: “We own nothing because we do not own ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hands can I extend to the world? The world is not mine, the world is me.” No, nobody has sold us nor did anyone sell something we own. We have sold ourselves. Is that the new terrible null silence of the ruin we embrace? Which surrounds us? Which we are turning into?

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