MICHAŁ BUDNY

Silence is also a pause, a sign of separation, a space, a gesture parsing the dense and onrushing stream of events. In a certain context, such as the present situation, it can be more significant, more pregnant with meaning and profundity, than high rhetoric.

Not only a dream, also an everyday experience, even the most mundane and, it would seem, unremarkable, can leave one feeling unsated, as it is communicated through words. The mystique of the fleeting second shines through the canon of trivial circumstances. For though often, or so it seems, everything is just like ‘before,’ it looks quite different each time around. And that ‘different’ cannot be, it simply will not be grasped through the existing and available gamut of forms, for it does not fit in the pigeonhole of well-established and conventional meanings.

Trying to define it through the available repertoire of words and expressions, we destroy it, for we cause the differences to vanish. We reduce everything to a common denominator. And this, essentially, culls out and emphasises what is shared and evident, such as vertical and horizontal, black and white, light and dark, silence and sound. It is a more comprehensible yes/no, a kind of dispensation from searching, thinking, gaining knowledge, interpreting. It levels the nuances, the chiaroscuro, and everything that distinguishes, individualises, gives a distinct face to things that only superficially appear to be identical.

Another way past these clear and enduring categories that give us the illusion of constant support is to break through their tyranny. This is a path that runs ‘in-between’ extremes—which are actually forced to converge, as night and day do. The grounds for this encounter is unclear, flickering, ineffable, like an attempt to tell the story of a dream, a hallucination. Instead of those clear categories of time and space, lines and segments, it offers the confusion of vague contours, a whole repertoire of semi- gestures, whispers, rustling sounds and eclipses, shapes poking out from the gloom.

Sharp edges and rims, streaks of light and the shape of a shadow, rings, semicircles, and concavities— these are like footholds, pretexts from which one might begin wandering into the unknown, into the depths of one’s own experience. This is the road on which the memory industriously blurs contours and colours. In clearing a path to find one’s own way, one needs directions, signs, and hints. One needs to find them, to recognise them, and to be able to use them skilfully.

The road in-between need not be a clear trail, one that can be rationally pinned down from beginning to end, it can also be a legend or a myth, a word that remains a mystery. As in a children’s counting game; as in garbled or half-heard names. Like a message hidden in a word calling a previously un- known space into existence—like conjuring up a space that never existed, contained in the sound of an unfamiliar word: hatakma.

Marek Troszyński