A CATASTROPHIC SILENCE

Soundscapes of Disintegration

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…Or of the fragmentary, Of that which remains, Of what is no longer.

Mariam Abonomai |  Vincente Boguszewski  |  Jennifer Caras  |  Quinntin Kwok

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Soundscapes of Disintegration: Or of the fragmentary, Of that which remains of what is no longer.

Solitude is the state of initial confrontation with this manifold that we must endure – the alienation we sense at this particular moment has not been an unfiltered indifference we’ve been lead to accept and assume on behalf of the people that once surrounded us; but at this precise moment, following a stark realization, due to a chain reaction of the elements.

Our bewilderment surpasses our capacity, as an individual, to affront it, to deal with it, this experience as an aftermath of the amplitude of the phenomena itself. Nor is the evident failure of humankind in its acquired cognizance of science –built in order to prevent and withstand such unanticipated and astonishing forces through a rational, collective effort– none of this is any longer, ever an issue, for now the we has become I, despite the undeniable seamlessness of a total lack of prevailing identity, a loss of sense of oneself altogether.

Given my relative absence of power in this context, that of which I am obliged to unravel and grapple with in this instantaneous shift in sensibilities; I am forced to sever with all that is past, and understand that in spite of myself, now the only essential focal point of my immediate existence is that of survival. No, the absence of my potential, as that of those apart of my race – not to mention others, has become, in fact, real.

“Solitude or non-interiority, exposure to the outside, boundless dispersion, the impossibility of holding firm, within bounds, enclosed –such is man deprived of humanity, that supplement that supplies nothing.”

• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster.

  Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1980

Disillusionment and ethereality have surrounded me; I have re-discovered myself to be found in a nonsensical cave of isolation. Hollowness of the cell that holds me, if not to further the metaphor as to say that I am a prisoner of this blackened room, my sense of orientation has been altered. I am at a fitful loss before the natural state of panic that sets in, aroused by the scene that I apprehend in front of me, before me, in opposition to the window. An opening, it is no longer a window. I should cease to search for structure.

Have I ever before sought out the dynamic loose-ends of chaos in the most nonsensical, primitive sense of the term? No, never before this particular moment. This is not the unequivocal aftermath of the event of war, but far more sinister, for the ecosystem of the planet has been affected. I do not know how many hours I have to live through the pain of my recognition and awareness of this impeding reality.

Why do I sense and tactically and audibly withstand a metallic screeching noise? What is the spectrum of the indefinite, rhythmic booms I am forced to ascertain yet undergo while gazing upon the horizon? Are there others caught beneath the acidy mist of the rubble? The rust of our existence is now reflected upon the metal; a weltering, and pressing, inasmuch as lengthy agenda for the various processes of corrosion.

The depths of the original, bass-filled boom I hear within this vast lapse of time –I am nonetheless quite sure of it, unmistakably audible from many hundreds of kilometers away– it is prevailing and dominant, exponentially invasive ; its supremacy and thrust have taken away my own primal scream. Silence in the surrounding cell. Though, hollow, weak echoes fill my perceptions.

Staid emptiness, no, this thought is unfathomable. Even in spite of this state of affairs, I find myself truncated, brought to the final limit. That is, located within a denial and negation of possibility for the human condition caught as it is into the extension of the future.

The exterior world neither can nor shall offer me any further hope for sustenance, nor nourishment; it may have otherwise provided me with a gradual or continual ascension towards the reassurance of my needs; that to be found in the promise of solace, polarized in context by an eventual offering of the opportunity of creation – or re-creation. All of these possibilities have been unilaterally annihilated in one false movement in this unequivocally incalculable oblivion of dynamic chain reactions that has come to truth.

I am the organic body that has been reduced to absorbing the fleeting experience of the imminent spatiality that surrounds us. The content of my metabolism shall not withhold the omnipotence of the past event. I see gasses lifting. Vegetation has not weltered – I gasp at the revelation – it has entirely disappeared. My conscience can no longer distinguish that of which I once knew of the vast landscape laid out now to my dismay. I can only hear a torrid of water. Oceans of dampness. Yes, however, seeping in towards me from which direction? Chemically, elementally speaking, this is has surpassed all logic.

The labyrinth of chaos has set in. Set somewhere amongst –and not within- moral, phenomenological, existential, physical, apocalyptic chaos. No solutions are to be found. All science that may have proved to be a resource in the past has lost its source, its basis for understanding, and therefore for a plan of action practical enough to provide an attempt at pragmatic immediate and long-term solutions.

I am left only to assume the overlapping yet contradictory breadth of the soundscape. Only that I find I can measure. Whether fluidly threatening, as it is ominous and potent, the permeating sound provides me with a sense of inevitability of the reaction and counter-reaction within the earth’s natural ecosystem. The prognostic is bleak. Only the imminence of a vast and total silence of the future provides me with a sense of the environmental organization to be.

All of it has relinquished me to a critical loss within my heretofore crucial reference to structure. The only sense of limit that my cognitive mind shall prove capable of accepting at this particular time is the memory of all that was once rational.

Given that I can neither visually, reasonably, intellectually– accept– nor withhold all of this terror, given the landscape before me of all that which has been lost, an spectacular event of mere coincidence with my lifetime, in essence; while only the sound and the way in which it shall lead to program a sensation of the inevitability of death – never has the impression of personal trauma been so unmistakably linked to the ultimate catastrophe.

Victimization no longer has its place.

“(…) the overwhelming overturning of nothing. – Which breaks, by the smashing of a pane (behind which one rests assured of perfect, of protected, visibility), the finite-infinite space of the cosmos–ordinary order–the better to substitute the knowing vertigo of the deserted outside. Blackness and void, responding to the suddenness of the opening and giving themselves unalloyed, announce the revelation of the outside by absence, loss and the lack of any beyond.”

• Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster. 

  Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1980