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OCR
JAROSLAW FRET the eye, in the very process of seeing; in the eye of the Creator “that sees, in the first eternal gaze, all things as they were to be”; in the eye of a newborn baby; the eye that is memory. Eyes wide open with surprise until the moment of death. To understand this, one would not only have to collect all testimonies, but then smelt them into a single moment; one would have to collect the whole of life, all human flesh, and smelt it. To remember is the primary task of the singer, actor — the singer in the lineage of the Homeric Aoide who remembers, who spins a story, but who remembers mostly with her own body, with each minutest quality that flows from her soul, that even flows from the spheres that she “does not remember.” MUSIC AS MEMORY Musical memory becomes a wonderful thing — the purest model of memory vibrating all for itself. Of course, one can work on musical memory by developing particular skills, but it is not the kind of memory I am talking about. I am referring to developing the “state of remembering”; a certain sensitivity, sympathy, hearing. One cannot perfect musical memory without perfecting hearing, without perfecting feeling; no one can escape from sound, from the vibrations that are sound. One cannot perfect the “state of remembering” without understanding life as musical vibration: listening for the remnant sounds of the Big Bang; the aural mode by which we start discerning the world when we are still in our mothers’ wombs, through voices that reach us; a person can be perceived as a sound; even God enters a woman’s body through her ear and she becomes pregnant. An actor becomes a chord, a multidirectional figure imitating ancient protagonists. One cannot perfect memory without the belief that song precedes all being and can condition all perception, that song can reveal the ineffable. We approach the songs gathered during our expeditions as texts. Songs are texts, and all texts are songs that are impoverished, severed like arms from the body. We meet them like we meet people, and they give us solutions, give us certain directions, like travelers do. We hear them, recompose them. We listen to them, trying to recognize human fortunes, changeable, decomposed, deformed. I also know that silence is indispensable. We cannot imagine a music or theater event without pauses, silences, just as we cannot imagine poetry without a falling into silence. It is silence that we try to measure, tune out with the clock of music; the silence that can be heard after each meeting that life gifts us. Silence is not darkness, it is not absence, it does not remove, does not put aside the foundation of our being, does not lord it over us. Just the opposite — it places us in the very center. Silence itself is the center. + 220 +
