the absolute

The corridor is in deep silence. The lights just went out suddenly. It is sleeping time for everybody alike. Each boy is in his own room. Some are still reading with a pocket torch under the blankets. The educator is walking back and forth through the corridor. He listens out for every suspect sound. He is a fool whose attention is easily diverted. It is a time when the young boy exercises an intense activity on himself, uncontrollable and frenetic. Every evening a lot of warm liquid is launched into infinity, poured as a flood of nothingness. 
Alternately it is also a time of kneelings and joined hands. In the dark. At the foot of this metallic bed, in a natural impulsion he pronounces words like 
‘truth’, 
‘perfection’ 
or 
‘achievement’. 
He closes his eyes and whispers soundlessly 
‘ineffable’. 
He lets the words resonate for a long time in the dark. Just to go on with 
‘redemption’, 
‘excellence’ or 
‘infinity’. 
Everything falls into silence again. 
And then again he pierces the night with 
‘salvation’ 
or ‘immutable’ 
‘deliverance’. 
He is not waiting for an answer. Pronouncing those words is giving meaning to them. Pronouncing them is believing in them. Pronouncing them is making them exist.
And then time passes by. 
Nightly activities change. 
No words to pierce no silence.
To the critical mind, the semantic field those children words belong to, is a subject of suspicion per se. We (I assume here that ‘we’ belong to an illusory community of critical-minded people) accept only reluctantly things that we cannot think in gradation. We need to be able to say that we are very tired or immensely happy. At the moment when one asserts that he is absolutely humble or completely accomplished, we enter another realm, where processes of individuation, conditions of development and contextualisations all are erased. Things are brought to a point. Es ist vollbracht. It is the vocabulary of monotheism and it is at the core of totalitarian ideologies.
The urgency for completion can take numerous forms. We probably all have our own, very intimate form for it. It is a basic longing and need that has been exploited in all its variations. It will not be cured so soon. Most of the times the years exert a slow but very effective erosion on it. Things become more intricate.
What to do then with those obsolete and worthless words? Do they belong to the reactionary and the naïve, to the populist and the simplistic? Are they to be banned as relics of another time?
Maybe that’s exactly what they are. They are our very personal fine relics. They are the remnants of wasteful resonances in the night from which the echo is not silent yet. 
How precious could that be?
David Weber-Krebs is an artist. He lives and works in Amsterdam 2008-09-10T13:06:28Z 42 true the absolute

2008-09-10T13:06:28Z