The Golden Age

Words and rustlings

The speech of the islanders was one of the things I liked most about the island. Before I was able to understand the language, I used to enjoy listening to the fluent stream of sounds from which all sharp edges had been smoothed, in which all impacts had been softened, how they mixed peacefully with the chatter of the sea and the palm leaves on the shore and the gentle trickling and dripping of water in the upper town. The chatterings and rustlings of the island were tenderly accepting of the sounds. When a word sounded, it was never as it is with us in the north; in our own towns and countries a sound suddenly and without portent penetrates an empty silence, where nothing is waiting for it and where it has nothing to catch hold of, or else it sinks itself into a strange, hostile noise, which it must then drown out and suppress. On the island, words tended to emerge in crystallized form on the surface of rustles, sounding as if they had long been in preparation at their core. The finished word-crystal seemed to be of the same fabric as the other sounds, and there was no fundamental difference between what they had to impart and what the words were saying.

All this might give the impression that the speaker of the language was indifferent to his listener, that speech was incapable of genuine dialogue. But things were more complicated than that. It is true that I often had the feeling the islanders spoke more for themselves than for others, that they tended to listen more to the sounds around them than to what their conversation partner was saying. But the country and the moment gave up to them so many sweet juices, which gathered and solidified in words; by their tantalizing appeals and magical suggestions again and again these drew the speaker away from the realm of ready-made, already-dying thoughts, so that sounds embedded in the landscape ultimately granted the listener more than he gleans from conversations in our part of the world, where all we attend to is the words of the other, severed from their roots and drying out, while we remain indifferent to and indeed erase all other sounds. And in this way we are so completely taken in by the childish exchange of ready-made thoughts and dried-out words that we would fail to notice — were it to resound right next to us — the most wonderful piece of music that held in its notes the germs of magical answers to our questions and possessed the ability to tell us what angels and demons thought of our affairs. The islanders were convinced that such a marvellous musical composition, in which fluttered sources of questions which were also germs of answers, resounded around us all the time; at any given moment in a conversation they were prepared to submit themselves to this surface of clear sounds.

And so, although I often had the feeling that the islander with whom I was in conversation was not really listening to me, curiously enough I learned to find in words born out of the whispers of places and moments more answers to my questions than my discussions in the north tended to grant me. Perhaps the islanders did not listen to the words of the other person directly; they did not concern themselves with his thoughts in their final state, rather persisting in turning their attention outward, to the murmuring sounds — and also the shapes — of the country in which the dialogue was taking place. In these murmurs and shapes the words and thoughts of the other re-appeared, transformed. The sounds, lines and colours of the landscape undermined thought. Words and thoughts — when they came into contact with the music of the landscape and the magical script of rough shapes still free of the prison of things — began to disintegrate, to release old rhythms that had been present at their birth; movements unfurled whose unrest contained the beginning of a question, whose mysterious gravity held the germ of an answer.

And because speech was of the same matter as the other sounds of the island, the meanings carried by words were merely an appeal issued by the material of sounds. Speech was a dream of noises, and from these noises it did not move very far. The islanders knew that the murmurs were really composed of hundreds, perhaps thousands of utterances made simultaneously, that they were generated by the unfolding of an infinite number of stories all told at the same time. They were aware that a murmur was a wise, blissful richness which held words in contempt and shut itself off from them, but they felt, too, that every murmur contained an urgent longing for the liberation of at least one of the story-lines of its blend, that the thread of one plot at least should be unravelled from its fabric. This is why the islanders listened in silence to the sounds of the island, and this is why they spoke.

Another consequence of this homogeneity of speech and sounds of the island was that there existed on the island no sound which did not communicate something in some way akin to speech. The sounds of the island were germs of speech or traces left by it, reverberations of words which were not only the decline and disappearance of meaning but also its liberation and cleansing, as it is when in a broken, decaying, no-longer-usable thing a hidden scent is aroused that expresses the truth of that thing’s existence. For this reason there was no silence on the island. After some time, I, too, learned to perceive that which I had taken for silence as an open country of subtle sounds, as speech, as the whisperings of a faceless god.

And for this reason it seemed to me that conversations on the island had no beginning and no end, and that they contained no pauses. A dialogue was the continuation of noises and murmurs, weaving its somewhat darker thread into their fabric; and moments when the communication desisted were just moments when this thread was lost without any split or break appearing in the tissue. Even at those moments when the quietest sounds were subsiding, I felt that the fabric was continuing to unravel; now it was completely white, although it was still of the same smooth, unbroken material. For a time the words dissolved into the murmur, giving up their meanings to it and satiating it by them, perishing blissfully in the murmur and allowing their silent current to crystallize into new words. The islanders did not speak to fill the silence, as they knew no silence; they spoke because in the river of rustles they discovered the germs of words, utterances and images, because in the sounds around them they discovered the thoughts most inherent to them — thoughts which before then they had not known.

But I never thought that the islanders had discovered some kind of paradisiacal state of language. They were so afraid of losing the live source of thought that they never removed themselves very far from it; the vaults of their thoughts were not characterized by courage, the desperation of blind fumbling and the anguish of work; they resounded with sounds from the depths and shone with the lustre of life, but even so I could not help holding them a little in contempt. It is necessary first to lose the music of beginnings before it can return as a dreamlike echo in the architecture of thought. Although the language of the islanders was beautiful, it was a beauty which made weary.

The silence that was lost on the island never returned to me, even after I returned north. The ability to perceive an unbroken, endless fabric of sound stayed with me and became both a source of torment and a well that nurtured a strange happiness. During the day there are so many images woven into the fabric that absorb my attention, that I am hardly aware of the feel of its material; but at night when I am unable to sleep I feel it pass over my face, over my whole body in a slow, gliding movement. Just for a moment I would like to extricate myself from it, to enter the space beyond it, a space unknown to me; I have a desperate longing for silence. But in the material there is no opening, no chink, and now at night there are no pictures against it that might draw my attention away from the fabric; all there is here is a scattering of small, featureless and vague shapes that remind me of the patterns on the duvet cover. At night I appreciate how everything mutters and whispers, how the things of the world rustle, giving sound to the flow of time; I appreciate that all sounds, of the day and of the night, bear the same monotonous, nonsensical message.

But sometimes the disagreeable sense that I am unable to tear through the fabric of sounds in which I am wrapped like a mummy, is transformed to delight; then it seems to me that the murmur of being is the most beautiful music one could ever hear and I feel joy and gratitude that it is given to me to listen to such a concert. Of course, what I hear is no longer the beautiful sounds of the island, the call of the waves and the babbling of springs falling from rocks; now in the dark I hear the sounds of the rain, the trams and cars in the distance, the roar of an aeroplane, and also the sounds of my building at night, its wheezes and groans. But another thing I learned on the island was that the character of sounds is not so important: all sounds are parts of a single musical composition.