Silencio

From Eugen Gomringer, Book of Hours, 1968

I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know.... If I could speak and yet say nothing, really nothing? --Samuel Beckett

    Concrete silence. How to hear? Differential reading. It is the silence which allows the word to be heard and read. The blank space which allows the mark to be visible. Yet, the word ''silence'' cannot speak, even of itself. It is not silent. It is the place where both silence is heard and not heard, read and not read. This word is  merely a mark where both the act of saying and unsaying intersect. The unspeakable mark is not the opposite of noise or speech, but the dynamic moment of emergence of perception as such.

     Thus, this silence speaks the silence which allows it to speak, and which lets language speak, not as an unequivocal vocal/aural full plenitude or presence. It is the empty place where we perceive what by all rights we do not perceive. By silence, by naming that which is not itself, breaks its own sense, empties itself of its reason to be, its own meaning. Silence is not silence, and by this negation, makes itself heard, makes us hear and perceive what it is not. Yet, by unnaming itself in naming itself, it resounds as if by some miracle of perennial resurrection.

     Pure mark without meaning, it can now be seen but not heard. It ends by finally saying nothing, by becoming indistinguishable from the white spaces around it. Silent, it is unsignifying, and is now ironically full of itself because emptied of itself, without the need of language to speak. It has become what it speaks about, concretely true to itself by denying itself its own truth, its own possibility of being.

    Its self-repetition is a material and immaterial multiplication of perceptibility and imperceptibility. It implies the occupation of the entire material and phenomenal page of reading, both in its concretely imperceptible manifestation and concretely perceptible non-manifestation. What actually unfolds is a physical mark whose meaningful aura is indistinguishable from its reiteration as an opaque material event. It voids its status as a perceptible semantic event by assuming it fully.

    We are suspended between a phenomenal word we can say but whose meaning forbids its reading  to mean what it means, and a physical mark which in its muted form already embodies what it means but forbids its expression as perceptible word. Silence becomes a word we can say but whose meaning is emptied by saying it, or a word whose meaning can be perceived only by fulfilling its wish not to be perceived. If ever the word ''silence" would like to be faithful to the meaning it intends, it must fold within itself and hold its peace, that is, remain silent, and intend to say what it should not say, or should say what it does not intend to say, to say it. Thus, it loops upon itself, forever failing to succeed (in all the ambiguous senses this phrase conveys) to say what it should and should not say.

     In speaking about it now, can I really imagine to add anything more eloquent?