mon 4 dec
Mon 4 Dec
‘Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they are closed forever.’
These are the words of the professor - his voice travelling across the airwaves (shortwave frequency 13.10) in 1930s Europe in the novel ‘All the Light we Cannot See’ by Anthony Doerr. Years later, amid the battle of St Malo in 1944 a young German radio operator tunes into that same frequency that taught him there was more than the fascism he was born into - ‘if you open up the frequency and talk reason and sense and literature then maybe the insanity of this old man’s war might come to an end.’
He listens in to a blind young French woman reading Jules Verne as story and code, interspersed with memories of the professor’s lessons. Light lasts. Burning coal or peat awakens ancient sunlight. And critically in such bleak times – darkness does not persist. It is gone as soon as you turn the light on.
Light and dark have made the news recently – relayed as warped justifications for genocide - but as holocaust survivor, physicist and author Dr Gabor Mate says ‘I completely agree with Netanyahu. The light will triumph over the darkness. He’s just a bit confused as to what represents light and darkness. He’s one of the darkest minds on the world stage right now. He dares quote prophecy. I ‘ll give him prophecy. It says in the Tanakh: ‘Thou shalt not oppress the stranger. For you know the heart of a stranger. You were yourselves strangers in Egypt. And what Netanyahu has devoted his career to is oppressing the other. And he dares prattle on about light?
I tell E about the story as we sit in the waiting room of Specsavers. Of a blind girl reading braille - her voice transported beyond a town under siege. A TV screen advertises hearing tests. A member of staff on the telephone repeats “I’m sorry….you’re cracking up…..” I read that Doerr’s book was prompted by a fellow passenger cursing the fact their phone cut out on a train journey – the realisation that we are surrounded by miracles of long-distance communication that we don’t appreciate or even understand.
Tuning in and out. Connections broken. It’s something of an obsession. Tuning in and up. I spent my MA studies in Scenography frequenting the rehearsals of Amsterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, tracing the movements of conductors, creating soundtracks of the cities I inhabited – becoming an odd vision running next to a Czech train carriage with a radio blaring a ‘composition for railway’, devouring reading from Murray Schaffer’s ‘The Soundscape: Our Sonic Landscape and The Tuning of the World’ to Avital Ronell ‘The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech’. Practices and philosophies of listening. Leaping across locations and destinations. The deeper implications of ‘You’re cracking up’ in loss and mourning and madness.
For me it was what happened in those gaps in the city or sound scape - the cracks in meaning and understanding. Something more than Kintsugi as static golden fix. Something akin to Bayo Akomolafe’s call to “make room also for the spirits of the fault line, the new gods that scream through the cracks with musical notes of the worlds to come.” Tuning into the pain, turning the dial through the crackle of radio static, voices from now and future, of darkness and light. Cracks where the light gets in… and the screams get out.
E sits behind a machine with giant automated lens. Every time I visit the optician I think of artist and filmmaker Agnes Varda. Just before her death she collaborated with paste up artist JR travelling France in ‘Visages Villages’ or,in English, ‘Faces Places’. They playfully enact the opticians eye chart of ever decreasing letters in life size form. He says ‘You see everything blurry and you’re happy’. To him, wearing his signature dark shades, she says ‘you see everything dark and you’re happy.’ All with our unique lens. Every time I ‘m at the opticians I also think of my Tadcu (grandfather) – who by the rules of Welsh nicknames relating to professions would/could have been ‘Dai the eye’ – training in later life to be optician to the coal mining community of the South Wales valleys. As a child I used to sneak into my father’s desk drawers – taking long puffs on an unlit tobacco pipe whilst feeling for the glass eyes held in velvet cases. Fascinated by these sightless orbs. Terrified by the thought of such absence of vision.
We leave down carpet tiled stairs. There is an overwhelming smell of sewage that no one else appears to notice. We march down a street polka dotted with chewing gum in random patterns of carelessness. This paved road really does feel the ‘longest market in Europe’ without its stalls and with a deadline. More smells invade. This time of ‘fish from around the globe’ - here via Billingsgate market where fish are traded in the shadow of Canary Wharf. I think of International waters and Territorial disputes. Brexit and borders. Attempts to enclose and divide all that flows.
E is back in school just in time for a French test. Practicing the future tense. ‘L’avenir, qu’est-ce que tu vas faire?’ What will you do in the future? Are they really learning about the future? What will they do? Is this education system fit for purpose? How do you prepare for a future so uncertain? Janusz Korczak, educator and children’s rights campaigner who chose to accomany Jewish orphans in his care into Treblinka death camp understood – “children are not the people of tomorrow but people today. They are entitled to be taken seriously. They have a right to be treated by adults with tenderness and respect – as equals. They should be allowed to grow into whoever they are meant to be – the unknown person inside each of them is our hope for the future.”
Schools in Gaza are bombed. The rights of the child to grow up in a spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and solidarity desecrated. It’s only 2.30 but it is dark. I turn on the Christmas tree lights looking for some illumination.
“It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness” (Chinese proverb and the motto of Amnesty International). Sometimes it is good to do both.
