Writings
Paragraph.
Margaret Cameron
collated and original writings developed during the process of creating The Threat of Silence performance.
Writings by Margaret Cameron
Dear Human,
Who continuing in knowing,
Cannot forget fragility—
She walked upon a shore
Pounding with hate
To find a stone battered
By the sea with a word upon it
—a marriage plate
She found a sign to befriend
In the solitude of loss
Searching for meaning
Between said the stone
**
Forest 1
She still carries
The bodies, ringed with thorns
The (crucified) flesh
Falling to sticks
She still (re) collects
The bones in sheets
Encircling unbroken
The last breath
Bending her old arms
To quiet the cradle
**
Forest 11: Tycanol
In a place of deep residing
I walked with boots
Sinking into your flesh
My thumb in a crook of the fallen
Heaving myself through your body
Through the rings of years
The broken and the resting
Shrouds of moss, moist
With living laces
All possible and impossible monuments, of loss and gain
Rest and strength
The humbleand the proud
Enshrined and shouldered here
—Sweet grave, sweet bed, sweet paradise of fable
In every pore, the breath of wood
Grains of change and ages of weavingTime, old as sleep sustaining
**
Her house deep in the forest
Is grown over, her reclusive
Art between the stones
Is placed and replaced
**
Old woman
If only our age
Were as these trees
If these woods were thee
This would be thy art
Surrendering time
To the deepening grain
And breath of years
**
Nevern Yew treeFrom the deadgrownIn the twisting arms of thoseWhose names are stoneLedgers in the wet earth Crooked—splashed with lichenWhite as ancient blood Beneath the dreadful Yews That hold them easyIn the churchyard field
**
For Her
When I am a tree, grown so old
That the sadness of the world
Is held in, and the fear of children
Is hidden in marbling bark
And gnarling Labour is grown in solace
And I am skinned and burnedby light
With eyes of dew
And bones sticking out When my whispering leaves Are the mothers of your smilesAnd your tears—then when I am a tree I will be grown as old as Thee
**
To outlive
Those one has loved Is to enter the world
Of the human—the human
Who by nature of being human
Carries loss
Dear human
Who continuing in knowing
Cannot forget fragility—
The simple loss of breath
That in departing forever
Approaches me always
**
Prayer
Dear Human,
Because the world looks like this
Because the world looks like this
Behold all that remains
O broken angels of the Earth,
Because the world looks like this
Because the world looks like this
Behold all that remains
**
The Angel of History
Her tears are old and dry
Only the sound
Of the curving bodyThe hollowest husk Of language mourning value That has lost words
And words that have lost value
She cries like a woman
**
Listen
Nothing can be said
To say
No thing will sound
Memory
Silent and dimensional
Resounding of catastrophe
Beneath moss
Listen
Time is withholding
The sound of itself
It is not to be spoken
To have hearing
We know that
**
This severed foot
This broken angel
Walled up in the silence
That would, if it could
Hurl itself at history
To be (re)membered
**
The Terrible Bell
The buried cannot be struck againThe broken do not ring
Skull without tongueTeeth without lips
The Terrible Bell
Of terror in the living Shudders and remains
**
A silencethat does not breathweighs upon my heart Killing the quiet
**
Aftermath
In silence Containing nothingNo promiseNo remembranceMade of blackSpanning nothingIn silence That walls up the sensesCannot be apprehendedCannot be enteredIn silence Hearing nothingIn silence Containing nothingNo promiseNo remembranceMade of nothingSpanning nothingIn silence That walls up the sensesIn silence That cannot be apprehendedThat cannot be enteredThat hears nothingUnderstands nothingIn silence That excludes Every memoryEvery promiseEvery cryIn silence that diesIn nothing Resounds nothingIn nothing has a name
**
Once upon a bended knee
A dark horse ate from our heart
It is time now to cut fruit
Sweet oranges and sour lemons
The bare shelves are to be
Lined again with jars
All golden marmalades of sunlight
We are taught what stock
Libido claims for passion
And when words are coins
Jam is especially common
When what is given is not made but taken
For the things of each that we have
Not the things of each that we are
**
Think of lettering
Angles and curves upon the page
Writing something flat
With the plainness of saki
Tasting of paper
Imagine a tender stem
An untouched neck
A breath on the nape of meaning
And tilting the teacup
We bring it to you
Completely emptied of thought
There are small things
On shorelines of dappled sun
There are ruined things
On shorelines of hate
Blinding as weather
Where gulls shriek for justice
We have unspooned grief
As it pounced from the forest
Unforeseen and gutted us
So that we have lain down
Upon the carpet where we stood
To be mauled by it
We have sorted through
The clothes in the drawer
Put away our worn bodies
Folded them wordless
Smooth as sleep and slipped them
Under time without a wrinkle
And now we are deposited
So much older in our bed
On a shoreline with the usual cast up
Spooning our biographies
Fresh as linen
There is a bird piping
There are conjurors
The skin-thin water
The mineral smell of hot weed
The daub, daub, daub of land
On the weak horizon
In the tidal sands
In each erasable print
Sun-whitened skeletons
And delicate maps
Nothing is required
Except to proceed
Through haze of salt
Into a distance we understand
Other texts
At moments in our ‘damaged lives’, particularly moments of true aesthetic encounter, genuine experience still occurs, and when it does, it does so with a shudder
(Ester Leslie 2009 on Adorno)
The Threat of Silence is an evocation of the languages of quietude and silence. We have attempted to slow down and mould the essentials of theatre—space, image, text, action, and sound—to recover the resonances of silence. We wanted to create a refuge from the bombardment of noise, information overload and escapist trivia that satiates contemporary living and to engage performance as a place of reflection. This exploration took us on a journey into an immemorial forest and an empty room. Silence and quietude reside in these places of uncomfortable beauty and in a paradox of absence and remembrance.
Some years ago, there was an almost total eclipse of the sun. My valley went eerily silent. The confused birds stopped singing. It was a very special silence of waiting. There are many kinds of silence. This one has remained in my memory.
Silence as threat; Silence as refuge; Silence as a practice; Silence as an aggressive omission; Silence that demands listening; Silence as a protest and force of resistance; Silence that is imposed; Silence as history; Silence as fear; Silence that betrays; eloquent Silence; Silence as a baby goes to sleep, as we sleep; Silence as recognition; Silence as renewal; Silence as suppression; Silence as strength and resolution; Silence that withholds; Silence that beholds: the Silence of an ancient language—these silences and many more haunted and impelled us to acknowledge peril and loss in the forgetting of listening in contemporary living.
I have had the privilege of working with a wonderful team of renowned and experienced artists, each generous in their distinct disciplines and approach to the creative challenges this project demanded. Their trust and dedication to a complex thematic and set of questions has created the foundation of what we present to you this evening. We do not know what to call it. Is it performance, a concert, a ceremony, a prayer, an entreaty or a call—perhaps all of these? I simply hope that the work resounds for you.
Jill Greenhalgh Director (Sept, 2010)
Letters from Margaret
September 14, 2008
Dear Jill,
I have not thought before, about what might be the methodologies of silence, nor of quietude as an aesthetic principle. It seems to me that your proposal also has a lot to do with the practice of art.
You ask: “Where is the caesura in an image?” Is it in the suspension, as if we are poised inside of the image in an—‘in-between’? Caesura is ‘the audible pause’. I am suspended between the breath-in and the breath-out in a place of listening. In English, silent and listen are anagrams. It is as if silence is to do with hearing what silence says. And it is not that in pausing one is necessarily still. There is a movement of experience and perception within silence. Caesura also brings to mind thresholds as when waves conjoin from different directions or when meanings divide or overwhelm boundaries and when meanings occur as events in a resonance that is stretched by time.
And you ask “What is the line between surrender and resistance?” I send the word ‘shudder’ because as a word and a sensation it apprehends the physical, emotional and psychological response when differences meet and divide. Yes, the shuddering realisation of difference and the assimilation of paradox in my being, like acquainting myself with the shuddering reality of solitude or the shuddering realization as Simone de Beauvoir writes “that ones subjectivity is separate from anothers”. And then you sent that material by Adorno on ‘shudder’. Isn’t it interesting that the answer I send you is discovered by the question of the work before we know of the theory in Adorno’s discourse. That gives me courage because it points again to art as “philosophy in action” (Brian Massumi) and that we are engaged in performing philosophy, in the questioning of fundamental matters of existence that must include ourbodies.
“Solitude” writes Margeurite Duras “is made not found”. And I imagine this takes a practice of listening. Perhaps it is in ‘making’ (in practice) that value resides. I am interested in resonances of value and in quietude that beholds. But there is a silence, as you say, that destroys value and it is a silence that withholds. I am sure our dialogue will have to turn the lens again and again on the many faces of silence. And I hope The Threat of Silence is the first movement of a trilogy that will be The Quietude Project.
…Continued March 21, 2010
As you suggested, I have read John Berger’s “Hold Everything Dear” … through some tears. He does not so much politicise but humanise the world. He returns me to a human response that I have lost in so much complexity. He allows me to hear by quieting the noise, as he speaks of value, returning me, no matter how painful, shaming and alarming, to my humanity.
I received the video footage. The forest is like the aftermath of a war zone, a graveyard, muted and shrined by time. Yes, it is a place of remembrance. Then I read “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy and I could not stop. Trying to eat before going to work, I found myself sucking duck bones in a dark corner of a Thai restaurant in Melbourne with the book propped up against the pepper and salt. It was a horrible reflection in the context of ‘The Road’.
So we come to the dark face of silence. The Terrible Bell that rings when it is already too late. The thought of no sound in this ringing, no resonance, no value … a mute, hollow alarm. The angel of history walled up in silence when the bell that tolls is dumb. Is this the Threat of Silence? When human-ness is only a consumable thing where is value?
Margaret
Other texts
Forest: It is a place of verdure, of fresh green; of wind – windy places, in wind, windy; a place of cold: it becomes cold; there is much frost; it is a place which freezes. It is a place where, there is affliction – a place of affliction, of lamentation, a place of affliction, of weeping; a place where there is sadness, a place of compassion, of sighing; a place which arouses sorrow; which spreads misery….There is fright, there is constant fright. One is devoured; one is slain by stealth; one is abused: one is brutally put to death: one is tormented. Misery abounds. There is calm, constant, continuing calm
(Aztec definition of Forest – Technicians of the Sacred
**
A forest is a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant. Waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangable and within touching distance.
Neither silent
Nor audible
The diametric opposite of such a silence is music. In music, every event that occurs is accommodated within a single seamless timescale of that music. In the silence of the forest, certain events are un-accommodated and cannot be placed in time. Being like this, they both disconcert and entice the observers imagination for they are like another creature’s experience of duration. We feel them occurring, we feel their presence, yet we cannot confront them, for they are occurring for us somewhere between past and present.
(John Berger – Hold Everything Dear)
Listen to the unbroken message that creates itself from silence
It rushes towards you now from those youthfully dead.
Whenever you entered didn’t their fate speak to you quietly
(Rilke, Duino Elegies)
