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Shifting the Silence
Shifting the Silence does just that, breaks the social taboo around writing and speaking about our own deaths. In short unrelenting paragraphs, Adnan enumerates her personal struggle to conceptualize the breadth of her own life at 95, the process of aging, and the knowledge of her own inevitable death. The personal is continuously projected outwards and mirrored back through ruminations on climate catastrophe, California wildfires, the on-going war in Syria, planned missions to Mars, and the view of the sea from Adnan’s window in Brittany in a poignant often painful interplay between the interior and the cosmic.
80 pages, Paperback
First published October 27, 2020
40 people are currently reading
2822 people want to read
About the author
Etel Adnan
92 books354 followersEtel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard, and taught at Dominican College in San Rafael, California, from 1958–1972.
In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (1959–1975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, “an American poet.” In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into more than ten languages.
In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books in English, including Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986), The Arab Apocalypse (1989), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry. Her most recent books are Night (2016) and Surge (2018). In 2014, she was awarded one of France’s highest cultural honors: l’Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Numerous museums have presented solo exhibitions of Adnan’s work, including SFMoMA; Zentrum Paul Klee; Institute du Monde Arabe, Paris; Serpentine Galleries; and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar.
In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Then, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War (1959–1975), she began to write poetry and became, in her words, “an American poet.” In 1972, she returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. Her novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into more than ten languages.
In 1977, Adnan re-established herself in California, making Sausalito her home, with frequent stays in Paris. Adnan is the author of more than a dozen books in English, including Journey to Mount Tamalpais (1986), The Arab Apocalypse (1989), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and Sea and Fog (2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry. Her most recent books are Night (2016) and Surge (2018). In 2014, she was awarded one of France’s highest cultural honors: l’Ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Numerous museums have presented solo exhibitions of Adnan’s work, including SFMoMA; Zentrum Paul Klee; Institute du Monde Arabe, Paris; Serpentine Galleries; and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews
January 11, 2022
When you have no way to go anywhere, what do you do? Of course, nothing. But that’s no answer. We let so many replies go unformulated, as a liberation of sorts, so many tides uselessly advance, so many desires are buried (mind gets tired too). In the middle of the night I measure the cold outside, the silence.
*
Watching the hours go by doesn’t help either. Thus, we’re cornered. I leave my door open, pretending it’s because of my difficulty breathing, but nothing is true. Better to admit that with the passing of days we know less about just everything. Let’s let things roll their own ways, whenever they have some.
*
The stars, at night, emit sparks with the rhythm of our breath. My window is blessed. It opens in daylight on the fields of Greece, that’s what I’m trying to believe.
*
We have to reconnect what words separated. The hell with Aristotle, though the most misunderstood of all philosophers! I’d rather give back the leaves to the tree, the waves to the sea.
*
So we searched so much, in erratic ways, didn’t find much. We even returned empty-handed. Time is slippery. With our hands made of wheels, as we said long ago, fortune was not on our side, and we didn’t ask questions. Then, what did we do?
*
You know, sunsets are violently beautiful, I would say that they are so by definition, but there are lights, not even colorful in the habitual sense, lights elemental, mercurial, silvery, sulfurous, copper-made, that make us stop, then lose balance, make us open our arms not knowing what else to do, arrest us as if struck by lightning, a soft lightning, a welcome one. I wait for those lights, I know some of you do too, wherever you are, I mean when you are standing by an ocean, alone, within the calmness of your spirit. Be planetary.
*
So many things are out of reach.
*
I should come back on my statement; am looking for almost nothing. Too much of a past, too little ahead, but wait a minute, we always lived day to day, so where’s the difference?
*Fog brings me closer to what I call my soul. There’s an affinity between those darkening mists and my state of mind, a movement from the one to the other, both ways, probably even an exchange of substance…a mystery I can approach, I can hear, although it’s made mainly of silence.
*
I am back where I belong, facing an ocean. The horizon is clear. There are road repairs down the street, much noise, a lot of dust. But the ocean is doing its favorite activity: up, and down, and up again…the tides
*
Watching the hours go by doesn’t help either. Thus, we’re cornered. I leave my door open, pretending it’s because of my difficulty breathing, but nothing is true. Better to admit that with the passing of days we know less about just everything. Let’s let things roll their own ways, whenever they have some.
*
The stars, at night, emit sparks with the rhythm of our breath. My window is blessed. It opens in daylight on the fields of Greece, that’s what I’m trying to believe.
*
We have to reconnect what words separated. The hell with Aristotle, though the most misunderstood of all philosophers! I’d rather give back the leaves to the tree, the waves to the sea.
*
So we searched so much, in erratic ways, didn’t find much. We even returned empty-handed. Time is slippery. With our hands made of wheels, as we said long ago, fortune was not on our side, and we didn’t ask questions. Then, what did we do?
*
You know, sunsets are violently beautiful, I would say that they are so by definition, but there are lights, not even colorful in the habitual sense, lights elemental, mercurial, silvery, sulfurous, copper-made, that make us stop, then lose balance, make us open our arms not knowing what else to do, arrest us as if struck by lightning, a soft lightning, a welcome one. I wait for those lights, I know some of you do too, wherever you are, I mean when you are standing by an ocean, alone, within the calmness of your spirit. Be planetary.
*
So many things are out of reach.
*
I should come back on my statement; am looking for almost nothing. Too much of a past, too little ahead, but wait a minute, we always lived day to day, so where’s the difference?
*Fog brings me closer to what I call my soul. There’s an affinity between those darkening mists and my state of mind, a movement from the one to the other, both ways, probably even an exchange of substance…a mystery I can approach, I can hear, although it’s made mainly of silence.
*
I am back where I belong, facing an ocean. The horizon is clear. There are road repairs down the street, much noise, a lot of dust. But the ocean is doing its favorite activity: up, and down, and up again…the tides
August 14, 2021
Read most of it twice. Feels like ladling luster in meditative spoonfuls all over your skin.
May 18, 2021
I bought this as a 30th birthday present to me. Adnan talks about being alive, memory, getting older, approaching death. She wrote it at 95. I don't know why I thought turning 30 was comparable, I loved it though, meditations on silence, living, relationships, walking, the climate emergency, wars, space exploration, nothing, meanings. It was a beautiful read and a book I hope I keep close to me.
June 3, 2022
a work written with all the maturity, grace, and wisdom accrued from a life devoted to thought and to art and to History
she seeks to reunite the reader and herself with silence
she asks us to confront Reality boldly
she then asks us to accept the myths of Imagination
her project:
to translate that the voyage of silence is the voyage of imagination is the voyage of Soul is the voyage of water
to translate that water (its image, its significations, its movement) is History
her project:
“The universe makes a sound—is a sound. In the core of this sound there’s a silence, a silence that creates that sound, which is not its opposite, but its inseparable soul. And this silence can also be heard.”
she seeks to reunite the reader and herself with silence
she asks us to confront Reality boldly
she then asks us to accept the myths of Imagination
her project:
to translate that the voyage of silence is the voyage of imagination is the voyage of Soul is the voyage of water
to translate that water (its image, its significations, its movement) is History
her project:
“The universe makes a sound—is a sound. In the core of this sound there’s a silence, a silence that creates that sound, which is not its opposite, but its inseparable soul. And this silence can also be heard.”
January 24, 2022
"We will always be somewhere, and at some point, enmeshed in cosmic forces, tributary to ancestry, involved in social circles, finger printed, filed and identified, meaning never free, but then would death when it comes mean freedom? That radical experience will be no experience, as it won't be shared, and evaluated, and discussed, no, it will be a radical passage, a passing, a spilling over, death as the end of language, the end of being at the heart of Being."
November 12, 2022
@dante xx
March 23, 2022
a friend mentioned etel adnan to me years & years ago as an artist whose writing & tapestries felt Transformative fr them, so have finally been picking my way through her poetry. have not found anything revelatory so far; maybe if i'd been to an exhibition of her work i'd feel differently?
but as a reflection on life from its shadowy final years, this is sometimes v shimmeringly lovely:
“almost all of my beliefs have deserted me. i take it as a kind of liberation, and anyway, they were never too many. our houses are cluttered, our minds too, so a fire as devastating as it can be, can well clear the air, enlarge the space, make room for some silence. year after year all we do is gather dust.
[...]
i need to simplify my thinking: to come to the roots of the olive trees i have planted on my island, sit close to them, look at every leaf. start early in the morning. then close my eyes and let the morning sun touch my face. go to the mediterranean at the street corner, go into its water, its salt, its acid colors, its heat. oh lord, let’s stop thinking. let’s just be, and for many hours in a row, merge with this vegetal and metallic kind of consciousness which is so overpowering.
[...]
our words don’t suit prophecies anymore. that power is left to other species: to oak trees, for example, to the tides, which through their restlessness carry a phosphorescence we’re not equipped to hear.
to sit on a beach and rest our aged bones, that’s already a privilege. and to stop the car by a curve and throw an eye on a blazing horizon, that’s a victory, but not to sleep at night because of some memories’ sheer weight means what?
there are still cathedrals with silent corners in them, dispersed over the world. we have to cover miles. there’s also a particular silence to some mountains, vast expanses unfolding and not stirring, standing next to the sound of their waters, in distinct areas, with caves under cliffs. and when deer sleep, you know they ask you to watch over their safety, and most of the time you say yes, you will.
[...]
when stacks of nightmares were delivered to my door, i pretended that i was looking for houses with huge gardens around, but that was a game, a poor game. i was trying, very regularly, to convince myself that i was alive, and that was still another game, and the world fell apart. i had a rendez-vous with some sort of destiny, and i arrived late, very late. the sunset had subsided. only a few lines, badly lit, were still lingering on the sky. i cried, oh not too much, but i sat and cried.
what did i do next? my memory here is failing, for lack of use, probably, as i tend to “put order” in my past as i do in my drawers. yes, the house is cluttered, the brain too. we’re people of accumulation, and therefore, ironically, of waste. i dream of a room with no furniture, of a past with very few friends, of a country with no weapons. we are tired beyond our capacities for renewal. oh, what’s left!”
but as a reflection on life from its shadowy final years, this is sometimes v shimmeringly lovely:
“almost all of my beliefs have deserted me. i take it as a kind of liberation, and anyway, they were never too many. our houses are cluttered, our minds too, so a fire as devastating as it can be, can well clear the air, enlarge the space, make room for some silence. year after year all we do is gather dust.
[...]
i need to simplify my thinking: to come to the roots of the olive trees i have planted on my island, sit close to them, look at every leaf. start early in the morning. then close my eyes and let the morning sun touch my face. go to the mediterranean at the street corner, go into its water, its salt, its acid colors, its heat. oh lord, let’s stop thinking. let’s just be, and for many hours in a row, merge with this vegetal and metallic kind of consciousness which is so overpowering.
[...]
our words don’t suit prophecies anymore. that power is left to other species: to oak trees, for example, to the tides, which through their restlessness carry a phosphorescence we’re not equipped to hear.
to sit on a beach and rest our aged bones, that’s already a privilege. and to stop the car by a curve and throw an eye on a blazing horizon, that’s a victory, but not to sleep at night because of some memories’ sheer weight means what?
there are still cathedrals with silent corners in them, dispersed over the world. we have to cover miles. there’s also a particular silence to some mountains, vast expanses unfolding and not stirring, standing next to the sound of their waters, in distinct areas, with caves under cliffs. and when deer sleep, you know they ask you to watch over their safety, and most of the time you say yes, you will.
[...]
when stacks of nightmares were delivered to my door, i pretended that i was looking for houses with huge gardens around, but that was a game, a poor game. i was trying, very regularly, to convince myself that i was alive, and that was still another game, and the world fell apart. i had a rendez-vous with some sort of destiny, and i arrived late, very late. the sunset had subsided. only a few lines, badly lit, were still lingering on the sky. i cried, oh not too much, but i sat and cried.
what did i do next? my memory here is failing, for lack of use, probably, as i tend to “put order” in my past as i do in my drawers. yes, the house is cluttered, the brain too. we’re people of accumulation, and therefore, ironically, of waste. i dream of a room with no furniture, of a past with very few friends, of a country with no weapons. we are tired beyond our capacities for renewal. oh, what’s left!”
January 25, 2024
The early hours of the day are more mysterious than the evenings: there's freshness to them, the paleness of youth. You wouldn't mind if night returned, but it doesn't. You will have to put up with the chaos you know too well, and suddenly, sometimes, you will recover the pre-dawns that preceded your early-morning dreams.
January 13, 2025
Etel Adnan!!!
p42. I am not in a hurry to live, am not in a hurry to die; I am just talking to you. You could be coming back from Delphi, where I would have liked to be, there, under a stormy sky, with clouds trembling, with the columns hiding in the fog, with the past intact, …, with everything waiting.
p69. I consider the light that enters the room in the early hours of the day as a messenger of the sun, a direct voyager, a particle, a wave, who knows, but an object of sorts that left its solar source, covered miles, and landed on my skin.
p42. I am not in a hurry to live, am not in a hurry to die; I am just talking to you. You could be coming back from Delphi, where I would have liked to be, there, under a stormy sky, with clouds trembling, with the columns hiding in the fog, with the past intact, …, with everything waiting.
p69. I consider the light that enters the room in the early hours of the day as a messenger of the sun, a direct voyager, a particle, a wave, who knows, but an object of sorts that left its solar source, covered miles, and landed on my skin.
July 13, 2023
Reminded me of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, which I like. Can’t/ don’t know how to describe Adnan’s book, but to put it very simply, it’s pretty much a meticulously curated bouquet of beautiful, poetic prose. A few excerpts that stuck to me more than others — shared below :
‘Word-languages are a trap, aren’t they? They created chaos and made us sink in incoherence. When someone tells you “I love you,” all he means is that he needs some orange juice for his thirst. That explains why so many of us spent a lifetime on poor literature (and once in a while on a masterpiece such as War and Peace). Our words don’t suit prophecies anymore. That power is left to other species: to oak trees, for example, to the tides, which through their restlessness carry a phosphorescence we’re not equipped to hear.’
‘My favourite time is in time’s other side, its other identity, the kind that collapses and sometimes reappears, and sometimes doesn’t. The one that looks like marshmallows, pomegranates, and stranger things, before returning to its kind of abstraction.’
‘To use the nobility of language for all the trash we hear is such a punishment. I’m in search of a special state of silence, not the one when you can hear the circulation of your blood in your veins, not the one that’s heard when the music's over, not the one…a silence between eons of silence.’
‘Silence is a flower, it opens up, dilates, extends its texture, can grow, mutate, return on its steps. It can watch other flowers grow and become what they are. — The live thickness of the silence makes sounds free themselves and expand — Night functions like the snow. Erases the landscape.’
May 18, 2024
Stunning. I find it best to read Adnan in a day if possible. This was refreshing
March 25, 2023
"We're on a planet sustained by nothing, carried through pure space by a willful star made of fire and in constant ebullition. We're travellers covering traveling grounds. Going, always going."
Beautiful, although I so deeply wish I could understand poetry more without having to pause and do an in depth analysis of every line. It is a form of art that I appreciate (which is why I continue to try and read it) but that I have trouble understanding. It really is like another language. Its not something I read often because I literally stare at the pages like this 👁️👄👁️ but I admire people who can indulge in poetry and are able to make sense of it.
Beautiful, although I so deeply wish I could understand poetry more without having to pause and do an in depth analysis of every line. It is a form of art that I appreciate (which is why I continue to try and read it) but that I have trouble understanding. It really is like another language. Its not something I read often because I literally stare at the pages like this 👁️👄👁️ but I admire people who can indulge in poetry and are able to make sense of it.
April 13, 2024
favourite lines:
“has this day ever been before, or has it risen from the shallows, from a line, a sound?”
“Does the discovery of origins remove the dust? The horizon’s shimmering slows down all other perceptions.”
“the pain of dying is going to be the impossibility of visiting that site one more time.”
“Dreams lack any power of decision, but come in bunches, flood the spirit, shake the bones. They favor love-making while we refuse what we yearn for. Watching sunset after sunset doesn’t heat the house.”
“Let’s wait even when we don’t know what for, a faint line on the horizon always more welcome than this void.”
“Death abandoned us, not coming when it was due, not answering. Its enemy, a form of life unstoppable, I mean the Oceans, used to appear on stage for events of gigantic dimensions. They spoke human languages besides their own. We pushed them back gradually, polluted them to the brim. We heard not a single cry.”
“The oceans are helpless. As for us, we can neither live, nor disappear. The stars, at night, emit sparks with the rhythm of our breath.”
“Our houses are cluttered, our minds too, so a fire as devastating as it can be, can well clear the air, enlarge the space, make room for some silence. Year after year all we do is gather dust.”
“I need to simplify my thinking: to come to the roots of the olive trees I have planted on my island, sit close to them, look at every leaf.”
“Our words don’t suit prophecies anymore. That power is left to other species: to oak trees, for example, to the tides, which through their restlessness carry a phosphorescence we’re not equipped to hear.”
“I’m telling you: we’re carried by tornadoes we barely notice, whirlwinds we barely feel, aggressions we barely acknowledge, because we’re half awake.”
“ We’re people of accumulation, and therefore, ironically, of waste. I dream of a room with no furniture, of a past with very few friends, of a country with no weapons. We are tired beyond our capacities for renewal. ”
“I am asking for help, merging my voice to the winds”
“We have lost the whole for it’s parts;”
“We’re on a planet sustained by nothing, carried through pure space by a willful star made of fire and in constant ebullition. We’re travelers covering traveling grounds. Going, always going.”
“And the killing goes on, and has reached the point where it becomes a matter of personal survival to accept it, and we see morality as a luxury we can do without. The bloody feast goes on, and we stare at it with total hopelessness.”
“Life is daily, death is eternal; it means that eternity is useless. We live as if we knew that: we hang on details, keep searching, to keep the illusion alive, the illusion that things matter. But is that a mere illusion?”
“My preoccupation, now, concerns a requiem that I have to write; it cannot be for planet Earth, as it is slowly dying, but not dead. What’s gone is the earthly paradise it once was.”
“At this very moment that memory is painful, my arm vainly wanting to reach them. They leap across the years. If you wait enough, you may go back to that garden in one of your lives.”
“The ocean is not just advancing and receding; it’s responding to rhythms within its rhythms, frequencies, symmetries, accelerations…it’s an organism with a complex and regulated system of breathing, with ways of life dwarfing those that govern us. The ocean is used, and misused, while it’s utterly unknown.”
“In silence, in the dark, the tides shine, get slippery, their fluidity turns them into a mirage. There’s a persistent hum to the ocean that translates into a back-and-forth movement of our body. Walls disappear and new visual formations invade the imagination. One is not in usual dimensions. Sleep belongs to the past, and the hours too. Luminosity enmeshed with darkness makes us cross over new territories. You move into galaxies in a few seconds, space-time becomes just a game.”
“Thinking is dimmed when familiar forms of reality disappear. This is not a loss. Long periods of inner silence favor clearings, they let the light in, the flooding, the blinding, the bedazzlement.”
“I’m a passenger on planet Earth, itself a passerby. The empire crushed as if it were made of cardboard, and we retrieved some memories which will die with us, or survive, for a while…But everything lasts just for a while, probably eternity itself.”
“we flip-flop toward that core of reality we call silence by talking and writing, illustrating the degree of incoherence our humanity has reached. There’s something hypnotic to aligning words, something addictive. That’s probably all there is to writing.”
“Those days have gone to where days go, in their own cemeteries. Today I see eternity everywhere.”
“Then, again, this sentiment that nothing is happening returned! The world is thick with events, and I dare say, it’s empty. That’s our predicament. I don’t believe that it’s empty only in rare moments. Watching the tides gets me close to the absolute, an absolute which is in movement, and watery.”
“We have to deal with hopelessness. We hoped, and hoped, and ended up with the the atomic bomb and the death of God.”
“I hear the fog as if it were the swish of the leaves of a forest. I see it swell. As it is possessed, I see it slide over the land as a divine warrior. Sometimes I wonder if I won’t end my life in a kind of a fusion with one of its curves.”
“While you’re young, you die many times. It’s an adventure into which you run head-on, it’s the great discovery of loss. Then, years go by, or pile up, they carry you on their waters, and show you that next time death will be for keeps, that the space I just mentioned has a single door opening on the Void, and you realize that reality used to come only in bits”
“Ever since, we’ve been floating in the universe, attracted by its boundlessness. We will have to chase away whatever has occupied our mind up to now in order to contemplate these new territories (and solitudes) that we will face.”
“The solitudes will be new experiences, their newness may bring defiance to our curiosity, may shake off the weariness we will for sure carry as a shadow. ”
“We will always be somewhere, and at some point, enmeshed in cosmic forces, tributary to ancestry, involved in social circles, finger printed, filed and identified, meaning never free, but then would death when it comes mean freedom? That radical experience will be no experience, as it won’t be shared, and evaluated, and discussed, no, it will be a radical passage, a passing, a spilling over, death as the end of language, the end of being at the heart of Being.”
“I see sometimes an openness and I hurry into it. I understand the need for an absolute, but the absolute never has become an entity, an object, even spiritual, or God. I reached the absolute, in rare moments, but as a form of radical thinking, thinking pushed to its end, to its silencing, to something like the revelation of itself.”
“An absence is a form of silence. Is the space from which language has vanished. The disappearance of answers. But it’s not necessarily a void.”
“The silence that surrounds me makes her absence most acute but at the same time gives her a strange kind of presence: I get to be caught within metaphysical mirrors. I am confused, or, rather, I am realizing that being, or not being, cannot be dealt with with thinking, but are matters of experience, experienced often in murky waters, and that their intensity creates waves that invade us, that leave us stunned. There’s no resolution to somebody’s final absence.”
“I want the sun to be soft.”
“the ocean is itself life’s immensity.”
“The wind returns. It carries voices.”
“I will disappear without having solved the turbulent emotions that seize me when I think of her: its whole colonial past and the remnants of that past that are stuck in my throat.”
“Silence is the creation of space, a space that memory needs to use…an incubator. We’re dealing here with dimensions, stretching inner muscles, pushing aside any interference. We’re dealing with numbers, but not counting. Silence demands the nature of night, even in full day, it demands shadows.”
“I consider the light that enters the room in the early hours of the day as a messenger of the sun, a direct voyager, a particle, a wave, who knows, but an object of sorts that left its solar source, covered miles, and landed on my skin. So the universe constantly visits us while waiting for us to reverse that itinerary.”
“My eyes are no instruments. They moved over that area with the power of the imagination, a power borrowed, but more trustworthy than anything else.”
“has this day ever been before, or has it risen from the shallows, from a line, a sound?”
“Does the discovery of origins remove the dust? The horizon’s shimmering slows down all other perceptions.”
“the pain of dying is going to be the impossibility of visiting that site one more time.”
“Dreams lack any power of decision, but come in bunches, flood the spirit, shake the bones. They favor love-making while we refuse what we yearn for. Watching sunset after sunset doesn’t heat the house.”
“Let’s wait even when we don’t know what for, a faint line on the horizon always more welcome than this void.”
“Death abandoned us, not coming when it was due, not answering. Its enemy, a form of life unstoppable, I mean the Oceans, used to appear on stage for events of gigantic dimensions. They spoke human languages besides their own. We pushed them back gradually, polluted them to the brim. We heard not a single cry.”
“The oceans are helpless. As for us, we can neither live, nor disappear. The stars, at night, emit sparks with the rhythm of our breath.”
“Our houses are cluttered, our minds too, so a fire as devastating as it can be, can well clear the air, enlarge the space, make room for some silence. Year after year all we do is gather dust.”
“I need to simplify my thinking: to come to the roots of the olive trees I have planted on my island, sit close to them, look at every leaf.”
“Our words don’t suit prophecies anymore. That power is left to other species: to oak trees, for example, to the tides, which through their restlessness carry a phosphorescence we’re not equipped to hear.”
“I’m telling you: we’re carried by tornadoes we barely notice, whirlwinds we barely feel, aggressions we barely acknowledge, because we’re half awake.”
“ We’re people of accumulation, and therefore, ironically, of waste. I dream of a room with no furniture, of a past with very few friends, of a country with no weapons. We are tired beyond our capacities for renewal. ”
“I am asking for help, merging my voice to the winds”
“We have lost the whole for it’s parts;”
“We’re on a planet sustained by nothing, carried through pure space by a willful star made of fire and in constant ebullition. We’re travelers covering traveling grounds. Going, always going.”
“And the killing goes on, and has reached the point where it becomes a matter of personal survival to accept it, and we see morality as a luxury we can do without. The bloody feast goes on, and we stare at it with total hopelessness.”
“Life is daily, death is eternal; it means that eternity is useless. We live as if we knew that: we hang on details, keep searching, to keep the illusion alive, the illusion that things matter. But is that a mere illusion?”
“My preoccupation, now, concerns a requiem that I have to write; it cannot be for planet Earth, as it is slowly dying, but not dead. What’s gone is the earthly paradise it once was.”
“At this very moment that memory is painful, my arm vainly wanting to reach them. They leap across the years. If you wait enough, you may go back to that garden in one of your lives.”
“The ocean is not just advancing and receding; it’s responding to rhythms within its rhythms, frequencies, symmetries, accelerations…it’s an organism with a complex and regulated system of breathing, with ways of life dwarfing those that govern us. The ocean is used, and misused, while it’s utterly unknown.”
“In silence, in the dark, the tides shine, get slippery, their fluidity turns them into a mirage. There’s a persistent hum to the ocean that translates into a back-and-forth movement of our body. Walls disappear and new visual formations invade the imagination. One is not in usual dimensions. Sleep belongs to the past, and the hours too. Luminosity enmeshed with darkness makes us cross over new territories. You move into galaxies in a few seconds, space-time becomes just a game.”
“Thinking is dimmed when familiar forms of reality disappear. This is not a loss. Long periods of inner silence favor clearings, they let the light in, the flooding, the blinding, the bedazzlement.”
“I’m a passenger on planet Earth, itself a passerby. The empire crushed as if it were made of cardboard, and we retrieved some memories which will die with us, or survive, for a while…But everything lasts just for a while, probably eternity itself.”
“we flip-flop toward that core of reality we call silence by talking and writing, illustrating the degree of incoherence our humanity has reached. There’s something hypnotic to aligning words, something addictive. That’s probably all there is to writing.”
“Those days have gone to where days go, in their own cemeteries. Today I see eternity everywhere.”
“Then, again, this sentiment that nothing is happening returned! The world is thick with events, and I dare say, it’s empty. That’s our predicament. I don’t believe that it’s empty only in rare moments. Watching the tides gets me close to the absolute, an absolute which is in movement, and watery.”
“We have to deal with hopelessness. We hoped, and hoped, and ended up with the the atomic bomb and the death of God.”
“I hear the fog as if it were the swish of the leaves of a forest. I see it swell. As it is possessed, I see it slide over the land as a divine warrior. Sometimes I wonder if I won’t end my life in a kind of a fusion with one of its curves.”
“While you’re young, you die many times. It’s an adventure into which you run head-on, it’s the great discovery of loss. Then, years go by, or pile up, they carry you on their waters, and show you that next time death will be for keeps, that the space I just mentioned has a single door opening on the Void, and you realize that reality used to come only in bits”
“Ever since, we’ve been floating in the universe, attracted by its boundlessness. We will have to chase away whatever has occupied our mind up to now in order to contemplate these new territories (and solitudes) that we will face.”
“The solitudes will be new experiences, their newness may bring defiance to our curiosity, may shake off the weariness we will for sure carry as a shadow. ”
“We will always be somewhere, and at some point, enmeshed in cosmic forces, tributary to ancestry, involved in social circles, finger printed, filed and identified, meaning never free, but then would death when it comes mean freedom? That radical experience will be no experience, as it won’t be shared, and evaluated, and discussed, no, it will be a radical passage, a passing, a spilling over, death as the end of language, the end of being at the heart of Being.”
“I see sometimes an openness and I hurry into it. I understand the need for an absolute, but the absolute never has become an entity, an object, even spiritual, or God. I reached the absolute, in rare moments, but as a form of radical thinking, thinking pushed to its end, to its silencing, to something like the revelation of itself.”
“An absence is a form of silence. Is the space from which language has vanished. The disappearance of answers. But it’s not necessarily a void.”
“The silence that surrounds me makes her absence most acute but at the same time gives her a strange kind of presence: I get to be caught within metaphysical mirrors. I am confused, or, rather, I am realizing that being, or not being, cannot be dealt with with thinking, but are matters of experience, experienced often in murky waters, and that their intensity creates waves that invade us, that leave us stunned. There’s no resolution to somebody’s final absence.”
“I want the sun to be soft.”
“the ocean is itself life’s immensity.”
“The wind returns. It carries voices.”
“I will disappear without having solved the turbulent emotions that seize me when I think of her: its whole colonial past and the remnants of that past that are stuck in my throat.”
“Silence is the creation of space, a space that memory needs to use…an incubator. We’re dealing here with dimensions, stretching inner muscles, pushing aside any interference. We’re dealing with numbers, but not counting. Silence demands the nature of night, even in full day, it demands shadows.”
“I consider the light that enters the room in the early hours of the day as a messenger of the sun, a direct voyager, a particle, a wave, who knows, but an object of sorts that left its solar source, covered miles, and landed on my skin. So the universe constantly visits us while waiting for us to reverse that itinerary.”
“My eyes are no instruments. They moved over that area with the power of the imagination, a power borrowed, but more trustworthy than anything else.”
January 3, 2023
The artist's mind meanders here, there, and everywhere in this brief meditation from near the end of her life. Interesting given our normal interpretation of time and consciousness - this is neither.
Quotes:
-"You know, sunsets are violently beautiful, I would say that they are so by definition, but there are lights, not even colorful in the habitual sense, lights elemental, mercurial, silvery, sulfurous, copper-made, that make us stop, then lose balance, make us open our arms not knowing what else to do, arrest us as if struck by lightning, a soft lightning, a welcome one. I wait for those lights, I know some of you do too, wherever you are, I mean when you are standing by an ocean, alone, within the calmness of your spirit. Be planetary."
- "Thinking is dimmed when familiar forms of reality disappear. This is not a loss. Long periods of inner silence favor clearings, they let the light in, the flooding. the blinding the bedazzlement. We need spaces for the reshuffling of new cards, need to be nowhere. Thinking doesn't always come from preceding thoughts I suspect it's always being born, even when it seems related to the past."
Quotes:
-"You know, sunsets are violently beautiful, I would say that they are so by definition, but there are lights, not even colorful in the habitual sense, lights elemental, mercurial, silvery, sulfurous, copper-made, that make us stop, then lose balance, make us open our arms not knowing what else to do, arrest us as if struck by lightning, a soft lightning, a welcome one. I wait for those lights, I know some of you do too, wherever you are, I mean when you are standing by an ocean, alone, within the calmness of your spirit. Be planetary."
- "Thinking is dimmed when familiar forms of reality disappear. This is not a loss. Long periods of inner silence favor clearings, they let the light in, the flooding. the blinding the bedazzlement. We need spaces for the reshuffling of new cards, need to be nowhere. Thinking doesn't always come from preceding thoughts I suspect it's always being born, even when it seems related to the past."
August 1, 2024
kinda inspires you to start writing your diary and take notes more religiously
January 31, 2023
Then, again, this sentiment that nothing is happening returned! The world is thick with events, and I dare say, it’s empty. That’s our predicament. I don’t believe that it’s empty only in rare moments. Watching the tides gets me close to the absolute, an absolute which is in movement, and watery. The feeling that each moment repeats the one that presided over the creation of the world overwhelms me with bliss. But then, I also don’t believe in creation, but rather in the universe’s eternity, which then will imply its immobility, and that thought fills me with sacred terror. Things go that way.
Read
September 23, 2024How can I assign a star-rating to a meditation on mortality written by a 95-year old poet, the year before she died?
While you’re young, you die many times. It’s an adventure into which you run head-on, it’s the great discovery of loss. Then, years go by, or pile up, they carry you on their waters, and show you that next time death will be for keeps, that the space I just mentioned has a single door opening on the Void, and you realize that reality used to come only in bits, to each his/her allotted package, to each his/her particular length of rope.
While you’re young, you die many times. It’s an adventure into which you run head-on, it’s the great discovery of loss. Then, years go by, or pile up, they carry you on their waters, and show you that next time death will be for keeps, that the space I just mentioned has a single door opening on the Void, and you realize that reality used to come only in bits, to each his/her allotted package, to each his/her particular length of rope.
February 4, 2024
There are moments here of utter clarity. There are also some moments that feel more like a personal journal than the finely tuned work of a poet—but on the whole this book (largely a reflection on mortality) is excellent. More Etel Adnan, please!
December 19, 2024
What a great way to begin the day. This book has an unusual ease and scope, room to be with the earth and moon, tides, Barrett Watten and Heraclitus. I feel lifted out, peeled up, sort of aloft with its scale and sense of time. Stars seem wholly appropriate here. But not the ones I can give.
January 7, 2022
When Emily Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” this was what she meant.
March 8, 2022
reshuffling of new cards; the needing to be nowhere
February 10, 2023
But in all my wanderings I never forgot the light
July 31, 2024
really quick read but im not sure what i read if im being honest. this probably isn’t BAD writing, i think the stream-of-elevated-consciousness style is just not for me.
December 31, 2024
Everyone should be reading Etal Adnan’s work all the time.
January 24, 2025
nice words in a nice order
October 11, 2025
Un rico postre.
November 15, 2025
La brillantez puede resumirse en solo 70 páginas. Wow.
December 9, 2021
Thoughtful, fluid and confessional prose poetry♥️
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