In how many languages can one keep silent? Do we need to translate silence? Is it that silence belongs to the realm of articulation, to the air pregnant with word strings? It’s only silences that encompasses language, there is the stillness before, and there is the stillness after . . .Silence does not impose its own media, it’s a part of the sound.

The silence that invites no interpretation versus the generation of languages.

The generation of languages implies the negotiating of territories, the adoption of lands: territories to be inhabited, the limits of existence, the paradigm of survival, the terms of preservation, articulation, of fusion and emanation. The foreign language marks the alien’s land, warns for an unknown territory. It introduces a different context, alien to your own. It is the Sezamm cave you are trying to get into with the magic power of your mother tongue awareness.

Going into the alien’s land is being on the alert. Just being there: your casual presence generates chaos, and your own measure only can accept it, invite it. . .

There’s the silent presence, there’s the silent absence . . .what makes our silences possible, anyway?

The language is the order that fills in the absence of sound and gives birth to silence.

I can’t help interpreting silence, pushed by my vanity, my fear that keeping silent may turn out to be nothing more than keeping quiet. I need to explain my silences in words: how can that be?

Why should I speak? Why do I keep silent: how come that I want it?

As long as we talk we don’t talk our language, it’s our desire to be understood, to be approved by our newly come big brothers: these are the rules of the game that we call modern art. Or imagine we find the courage to keep silent: how to express our refusal to speak, what is the way to make them know that it’s not just that we don’t speak the language, or it’s not that we haven’t learnt our lesson. How to make them know this is our story. Pretty difficult. . . How can we render silence: our refusal to reach them is already in there? For what sake should we then need to interprete silence. It’s maybe because there’s a response hidden in silence, it’s the response that refers to the helpless and useless articulation, to the ever failing effort to bridge languages . . . it’s a response to preceding effort. Obviously silences should be recognized as efforts to gain the strength of ‘active stillness’. Silence is presentation: it pre-sents, pre-supposes distance, pre-serves what the words can destroy, it’s the air-cushion that guards the attacks of words ( silences of pre-logic origin, that we presently refer to as ‘love’/’hatred’ make an exception here). Silence should be recognized within and via language in order to leave the realm of stillness.

Can you imagine silence without audience, silence without somebody’s presence, as ficticious as that presence can be? There’s response in silence, there’s the lack of response in it, there’s the lack of response as the response itself . . . As long as there is silence, there should have been a question asked. . .

Ventsislav Zankov