Some thoughts on yesterday’s everything and today’s nothing but rain.

Who needs a story? If I were questioning myself, I’d say “I do”. Who needs a narration? I do. Who needs a tale, a myth, a reference to another story, a hidden story, an invisible story, a love story, a dying story, a hoping story, a hopping story, a frightening story, a bleeding story, a laughing story, a smiling story, a crying story, a playing story, a story craving to reveal under the floor, a story crawling on the walls, hanging from the ceiling, walking through the public. A story behind the door, under the seats, sewed on the costumes, sweating inside the lights, flowing in the veins, shivering beneath the skin, behind the body, under the body or inside it.

No recipe. Our bodies are stories, they do not have to tell one. Samuel Beckett writes in his Texts for Nothing: “There has to be a story, apparently, since there is a language, what does a story need, one doesn’t have to have a story, just a life, that was my mistake, one of my mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, as if life was not enough” (1954).

But the “thing” we call “Art” and all its genres is something more than life. It is an entrapped desire for the absolute, for the divine. It cannot escape, although it has the intention to. It needs millions of bodies, millions of stories or only one. It keeps repeating the same story again and again. It becomes a fractal, a labyrinth or a chaos. So what would change if we named our stories “non-stories”, what would change if we called contemporaneity “Alice” or “Tamtamtam”? Or if we changed our names to new ones? We would just be relieved of a huge or less huge weight and we would stop looking for a meaning inside the names, but in the body, in the context, all around them. Beyond the encoding that names the story, a story; that names the body, a body; that names everything, everything.

To be present is the present. The gift. One can give, destroy, sacrifice it in the name of. It is the blessing and the curse that consist the drama of existence; drama, Theater and oh, look, Art is present again. To keep the art present means to keep it alive or mummified, otherwise it will start rotten. A decision. Recall a time when your eyes started sparkling, recall a time when your heart turned totally black or insane of lust and desire. Heartbeats in crazy tempo. Motivation. Who needs a story after all?

Here is a Chapter of Alan Lightman’s book “Einstein’s dreams”, a book that I often go back to, in my work. Some of you may find it inspiring.

Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman. Warner Books, New York, 1994.

24 April 1905

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.

Many are convinced that mechanical time does not exist. When they pass the giant clock on the Kramgasse they do not see it; not do they hear its chimes while sending packages on Postgasse or strolling between flowers in the Rosengarten. They wear watches on their wrists, but only as ornaments or as courtesies to those who would give timepieces as gifts. The do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires. Such people eat when they are hungry, do to their jobs at the millinery or the chemist’s whenever they wake from their sleep, make love all hours of the day. Such people laugh at the thought of mechanical time. They know that time moves in fits and starts. They know that time struggles forward with a weight on its back when they are rushing an injured child to the hospital or bearing the gaze of a neighbor wronged. And they know too that time darts across the field of vision when they are eating well with friends or receiving praise or lying in the arms of a secret lover.

Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock. They make love between eight and ten at night. They work forty hours a week, read the Sunday paper on Sunday, play chess on Tuesday nights. When their stomach growls they look at their watch to see if it is time to eat. When they begin to lose themselves in a concert, they look at the clock above the stage to see when it will be time to go home. They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection of chemicals, tissues, and nerve impulses. Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock. As such, the body must be addressed in the language of physics. And if the body speaks, it is the speaking only of so many levers and forces. The body is a thing to be ordered, not obeyed.

Taking the night air along the river Aare, one sees evidence for two worlds in one. A boatman gauges his position in the dark by counting seconds drifted in the water’s current. “One, three meters. Two, six meters. Three, nine meters.” His voice cuts through the black in clean and certain syllables. Beneath a lamppost on the Bydegg Bridge, two brothers who have not seen each other for a year stand and drink and laugh. The bell of St. Vincent’s Cathedral sings ten times. In seconds, lights in the apartments lining Shifflaube wink out, in a perfect mechanized response, like the deductions of Euclid’s geometry. Lying on the riverbank, two lovers look up lazily, awakened from a timeless sleep by the distant church bells, surprised to find that night has come.

Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their separate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.