Writing Silence
Auckland, 2015
This performance explores an idea of writing into silence, or enacting silently sustained writing that leaves (almost) no trace. What does it mean for writing not to leave its trace, and why is this significant for this research? Normally, we write in order to record, to set down something that we are thinking. Paradoxically, this pressure to record thinking through writing can also cause a block in thinking, where instead the face to face of the spatial white page entity leaves us mastered and unable to think. Heidegger in his writing on poetic thought in reference to the German poet Hölderlin suggests that authentic thinking does not produce anything; unlike science it is not an instrumental act, it is not ‘useful’ for this or that means to an end, but rather thinking is the act of poetic dwelling within the modality of silence for the de-distancing of Being to being.
In removal of writing’s demand to say something rather an essential solitudinal nothing was at work in this act of trace without tracing. In the ‘removal’ of writings trace (the image of words on paper) I pondered the experience of writing, experimenting with various types of paper, each of which silenced the trace to varying degrees. These silent writing experimentations uncovered that silence is not singular but rather that there is a continuum of silences some of which are more silent than others. I found that there was a point of equilibrium in which the silence of the trace was ‘just right’ for me in this experiment. Absolute silence (no trace) was as distracting to the writing process as seeing the letters on the page in black and white. The most successful outcome of this performance resulted from using a typewriter without an ink ribbon, in combination with 300gsm watercolour paper. During the writing process it is virtually impossible to see the trace, meaning that in the time of writing, a silence shrouds the writing – this shroud created a space in which thinking more easily flowed from fingertips to keys. Upon completion, the paper is rich with lettered indentations, held in the right light the thinking becomes writing as the trace becomes visible. Thinking is poetically drawn here in line with Heidegger’s concern that finds a different course of instrumental, and techno-cratically enframed living —here the writing does not live to archive the content and form, but rather archives the material activity of what cannot be discerned except the materialised (faint trace) of thinking as writing and writing as thinking.