INTO THE SILENCE

To obsessively compose and rearrange those familiar characters that stretch in taut black furrows across the perfect whiteness of the page is what I must do, in much the same way as the spider is compelled to spin its web or the bird to build its nest. Eventually these sentences will assemble themselves into ever more complex configurations, in the manner of atoms forming molecular structures.

It is at this point that the voices rear up. This is not our way of speaking, they murmur indignantly. Your paradigm is not our paradigm. You are most definitely not one of us. Yours is an uncouth, barbarous language. By contrast, we are cultured and our speech mellifluous. Our mouths are dripping with honey.

You must desist forthwith from this foolishness. You really have nothing to gain from this endeavour. In any event, we have taken the appropriate measures to stifle your speech. Your persistence is frankly perverse. We have beaten better men than you.

So it is that the silence becomes my solitary auditor. Neither rejecting nor approving, it affects strict neutrality. It has no opinion. It is merely a receptacle. It is the well for these droplets of rainwater.

My words are therefore destined to be transmitted into the silence. How can it be otherwise? Only one thing sustains me: I brought them into existence. That they exist is an indisputable fact, which cannot be questioned. The voices will never convince me otherwise. My grasp of reality is unimpaired. Even so, I labour under no illusions. Soon they will become part of the silence. Already, in the time it takes to utter them, they are the silence.