An extraordinary silence, like no other silence heard. This is an unassailable silence. It has a space of its own, its age and its root, and a gaze grown into the other being. This is a silence between two bequeathed ones.
This space, a meekly lighted circle, almost warm, is their bequest.

One cannot know if this silence is a boon or a curse, if it takes place between two human beings, if it is a man and if it is a woman, if they are dead, if they are alive, one cannot tell.

That which happens in the arch-like opening of silence from brow to brow - this prevents knowledge and thus deepens life.
The same life that heaves when the eyelid, following a gentle surprise, slightly lifts up for a hair's width. That moment, of opening toward fascination, of acceptance of the catastrophic presence of the other, the marvel, and deletion of time. In that instant wonder achieves its purest shape, and failing to notice this, lets this silence prevail, now that everything else has worn out and vanished.

Or, perhaps it is not silence that reigns between the two worlds. Perhaps it is fullness, dust or soul. In any case, a trace of flames can be sensed in the air.

It all started with a quiver. Was it the air that quivered around the one or the other, was it the darkness of the body or the soundless mortality laid through space, through the sparks that pass between molecules? Certainly the knees shook, moved something ancient inherited in the marrow of the shins; something that mantles and stratifies with adulthood, but then it bursts out when the bones grow old, and as fragile, helpless water gropes the space around. Everything started from that quiver.

It was not old age the first time. It was not illness, nor envy. There was something like a hand laid over the heart, when someone looked and the other suddenly took in a deep breath. The manner of breathing was different: like when on a divine feast ashes are thrown in the air, and, falling, they alter into heavenly dust. Ashes from the heart and taking in a breath almost weightless. This breath on its own accord flows through space entering its golden heart.

From that breath, on the forehead where it returns to space, a circle appears, as real as a rainbow, a mere dismissive movement of shine and water accidentally met. This circle is the sense that recognizes that quiver and silence.

2.
Doubtlessly nothing happened. Perhaps somewhere birds chirped, perhaps it was night. Perhaps it was a humid and fake, personal day when nothing ever took place. Certainly words were uttered, something was whispered, perhaps painful, rather warm; if these were everyday words, if they begun or ended something, there is no record and it matters not. Anyway, from that spot steps stemmed, and one by one, nothing worth mention, they arrived to today. Thus come the essential moments of one's time, imperceptible, insignificant to anyone else.

It is essential to love. It is essential to take that resolute step in a real lustreless instant, especially in the most hapless, the most exasperatingly devoid time, when there is nothing to be done, all roads worn out and all will exhausted.

Even when the roads are scattered and they throw away the man to fall under all his thresholds, when all rescue belts have been thrown far from reach, when one loses the desire to be saved. In the unrecorded defeat which no eyes, no history will remember. It is essential to fall in love with that instant.

When a man falls on his back into a black sea with a pale waning sun above, the ice cuts through his heart, the breath is lost into senselessly merry moons, the mind falls into darkness and one dies with that overspread cry whose resonance delimits the world. And in that moment to make a decision to love, that affirmative 'Yes' to a non-existent question to which all our life is a body, and all our time we try to put together the mosaic of tiny, lost, forgettable, insignificant Yes-es.

Yes.

3.
It is good to advance. Still, one learns abundance from losses. On the force of the void which suddenly bursts out furthest away from itself.

Space is a need. Space to explode, space to contract. A space of a fresh breath. The innermost space rarely is beautiful. It can be grey and brittle, bordering the sight. Faced with this space, man finds himself before a black wall whose gaze has followed him incessantly, but now it paralyses him. There is no breath that can face that wall. It resembles the ultimate defeat, the end of the reach of the will.

Still, one can enter and dwell inside: it suffices to unleash defeat and let blackness of the wall fill in the body. Although each though departs, although it annihilates memory and quenches the heart, although the mind lets out it final breath. Opening toward the inner death without witnesses.

And when death breathes long enough within the body, there can be felt another body within, one built of the rhythm of death; then one starts breathing in accord with it, the sensible presence of death. The shadow leads the new breath like a little child, and, quick to learn, the breather startles and opens the eyes. The piercing light may be heavier than death.

What happens in the new space, under that pitiless blaze from which death had been protecting us so carefully?

Perhaps a forgotten and strange communion, in a land that for ever has been gasping and beating. Another land, a dangerous field of game, where the stakes is consciousness, the feeling of one's self.

Nevertheless, the black sun opens up to pierce the eyes with a more ruthless mercy.

3.
Sometimes we are presented with a gift which we do not know what to do with. A tiny box, for example, a pair of slippers, or a sewing needle. Take away the love from the hand, and one receives a heavy stone, or dynamite from the box, the needle becomes a dagger playing over someone's body. One can turn the world into an embroidery of holes, of rejected life pleads; one can tattoo the most senseless games of cruelties on someone's affectionate and benevolent skin. The slippers can become a boat, but without love in the legs, the road turns into the same senseless needle-game of invisible insanity, aimless wondering of damage through worlds. A trip that scathes people's loves, and wastes the traveller.

Senselessness is an illness. 'I like this box opening and closing, I like this needle that pierces in and out. I enjoy the leanness of the movement.' So say most people.
Tears are not senseless. True, grieving cannot mend things, but it can change the griever.

A lot of tears have amassed in human beings, enveloped with a callous layer of senselessness, tattooed with insanities.

We, human beings, love each other. We crochet upon each other's skins the ugliest of curses, the most helpless of threats, the weakest of loves.

The quiver around people can be seen exactly through the bars of tattooed messages, the ones expressed with the coldest, the most withheld passion. The final condemnations whose punishment requires love, a shared damnation. Nothing makes us so important, so present in the beloved one, as acceptance of shared destiny.

Several of these lines assembled together, lines of such prophesising condemnations tattooed over the body, with each line throwing mental light, and in that light-beam one can see the rules of the love-life games of the person. 'What all I shall suffer, and what wisdom I shall attempt to learn thus.'

Take away now the black beams and the bars from the human body and see what is left: something shiny, something that is a flowing light but not formless. Something a bit baffled, startled by the bars that capture its hands and hinder the touch with those whom it is naturally kindred with.
That bafflement, soft and meek pain, is the quiver.

4.
It all started with that quiver. I noticed it around his body, or was it mine, while he was trying to say that distances are human destiny, that love exists only across perfect distances, that abstract desire is what connects human beings. I knew that, and yearned for wordlessness, because of the shine that started beaming out of him at arm's length.
It was more bewildering, as the strike of the bars kills, as those quiet shimmers behind them are dazed from futile waiting for a touch.

And then he placed his hand on my heart and somehow he got through the bars, and finally the shared fate of distances became salvation. A salvation without a curse or progress. Invisible salvation, because that which it saves from does not exist. Only an echo. And ever since silence reigns.

The smoothness of the tear is so much like a white sun.

5. Perhaps this is a book of silence. Not the soundless silence, the lack of need to speak. The latter silence wakes up in pallor and waits for the gathering of experiences, senses, the surface gleam of things, a silence that indifferently waits for the gleam to connect into something, in a flash, a breach of blackness, or simply a passage. Miracles happen in waiting. But this is not the silence this book is about.

Neither is it the silence of memories, when a person pours over the brim of what he has been, so that a hand revives, someone's fingertips, a shared gaze into the horizon, when with another's or our lips we speak again words that has meant something in the past. We smile again at an old joy, pierced again by a former grief, shrink again from a vain fear. It is not the reborn flood, which is the silence of the observer. This book speaks of a different silence.

I speak of an always different silence, because I have to speak of it in order to remain in touch with it, an essential touch, although I suppress it by every word I speak. I must learn speaking silence from within. This book is an exercise of it.

6.
THE STORY OF THE KNIFE
There was a knife, smooth and curved. Borne on the power of the inevitable, it placed itself into a body, there it ended its life path for which it had been preparing all its time. It placed itself there, fell and flamed after it was dead; and then it said: "There it is."

It was not the cut that suffered; the flesh does not know why it flows one way or another. For the flesh the cut was as natural as its curves were. Later the flesh even liked to have something to rely on, on someone more powerful than itself, so strong and solid and right. Against the fragility and changeability of the body, the knife seemed to it almost like a god. Thus the flesh leaned on the knife. So do victims.

The tip of the knife touched something painful. Something wiser than the blood which flows over the bones, deeper than the sound of urgency that creates the body. There the tip of the knife stabbed, and remained.

And as the blade and the flesh were in opposition and thus holding each other, so the marrow created itself to oppose itself and to hold itself together. It existed and it did not, it could not decide, as it would have been lost to itself if it decided. And so they lived together, the four of them: the flesh, the knife, the void and the fullness. Who can tell who created whom and who was the first to appear?

Their stories, unaware of each other, thus started:
The knife imagined that the flesh exists to mantle it, and it dreamt of it as of its sky.
The flesh laid around the knife and found its peace in it.
The marrow flipped and looped: as a void it summoned the knife, and rejected it by turning into fullness. When the fullness would grow, it would stab itself on the knife, and then it would want to disappear in an instant.

This is what we call natural cycle, or destiny: diverse things bound in invisible loops, whose mutual destruction and rebirth maintains the stability of their worlds: destroyers attract or repel each other, but they move through the same circle. Life is secured while no one is winning. The blade turns blunt, the shine turns dull, things must be continually born and die. One is certain, life always opens up a passage. The passage is the magical being. One born of silence.

7.
THE STORY OF THE PASSAGE

(continues...)

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