To attain silence one must listen to others, and in order to listen to others one must listen to oneself, start from oneself.
Noisy breathing is not a physiological need, but a merely histrionic act which means: look and listen as I labor, I, full of energy, I, etc… In reality one burns one’s own energy more quickly in order to consume it in the shortest possible time.
On the contrary, it is necessary to decrease the noise of breathing which disturbs our attention of all the other noises; we need to minimize the impact of the feet and body on the ground; to listen to the heartbeat and enter into the silence.
If you can do this yourself, others can begin to feel the silence themselves. Silence is not the absence of noise, but a different quality of noise, it is a space in which a much wider range of sounds can be heard.
François Kahn, from “Le Jardin- Récits et reflexions sur le travail para-théatral de Jerzy Grotowski entre 1973 et 1995”.
Image: John Cage, Watercolours, Series II, No. 1, 1988. Watercolor on paper.
