Nick

Notes on Silence, Synesthesia, and Circus

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New York City. The packed 3 train screeches to a stop at Times Square. I disembark, and on the platform, a sea of people bottlenecks at the base of the escalator. Above ground, I am a speck in a skyscraper valley of illuminated advertisements. Cars honk, not to solve anything, but to communicate frustration. I dodge distracted bodies moving toward me, weave through the slow pedestrians. Within five minutes on my journey, I receive offers of: drugs, last-minute Broadway tickets, more drugs, and a bottle of water. Someone asks me for money. Blue lights flash, and a man is handcuffed across the street. A performer in a bulky SpongeBob SquarePants costume dances at the corner.

It can be difficult to discern what stimuli to let in, and which to shut out. What to feel, what to numb myself to. To live in this city is to immerse myself in the highest heights of the technological sublime, which can feel intoxicating. It is also to witness up close many contrasting facets of human experience, including suffering and injustice so plainly visible at every turn, which can feel destabilizing.

Call it the Anthropocene, late-stage capitalism, the deterioration of social fabric at every level, the promises and dangers of soon-to-emerge artificial general intelligence. The world, to me, can feel cacophonous. Noisy with appeals to my exasperation. It can feel righteous to engage in the spirals, even when they disenchant everything. What passes for oppositional thinking might in fact be a further entrenchment into the terms of urgency, stuck-ness, and distrust that I would like to resist.

I have come to this iconic, tourist-oriented part of the city to train on aerial rope at a circus studio nearby. I do this several times each week.

In her 1967 essay “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag wrote that “the ultimate weapon in the artist’s inconsistent war with his audience is to verge closer and closer to silence.” To insist on silence, according to Sontag, is a form of resistance against the constant overstimulation of modern society – even, or perhaps especially, if that insistence displeases, provokes, and frustrates the audience. It is not the artist’s responsibility to fill a void. Instead, the best art stares into oblivion, as horrifying as that may be, and brings it to the audience. What is the value of silence in a world that expects “expression”? Emptiness in a world that commodifies attention? Vacancy in a world dominated by ego?

The circus studio in Hell’s Kitchen is crowded when I arrive. In early stages of this Circosonic project, I recorded voice notes on my phone in several circus spaces to pick up the ambient soundscape of artists practicing their various crafts. When I played back those recordings, however, I was surprised at how cacophonous they were. Background noises layered together as if they were on par with the foreground. Every sound was almost equally weighted, so that no input felt important. It was just a wash of noise.

This isn’t usually how subjective experience works, of course. Most of the time, intense focus on one thing – my aerial rope practice, for example – dims all other irrelevant stimuli. The kind of concentration I’m referring to isn’t always easy to achieve. For over a decade, I’ve had a habit of occasionally training on rope with earplugs. What I am trying to induce is a trance-like state with varying degrees of intensity. Plugging my ears sometimes has the effect of heightening my inwardness and sharpening my corporeal experience. When I blunt the noise and slip into a flow state, I feel closer to a mysterious and always fleeting condition that, to indulge in what Sontag called “a coquettish, even cheerful nihilism,” I will call nothingness.

In one of the public discussions Cirkus Syd held in the early research phase of this project, fellow rope artist and researcher Gaia Vimercati talked about this nothingness, too. When the void is attained through silence, both literal and psychic, she said, it “gives the opportunity to listen to your body more carefully, to feel all the particles.”

If the body is like a drum that interfaces with a broadly conceived vibration-scape, which blends kinesthetic experience with the sonic and vibratory field, then the listening that Gia talked about might border on synesthesia. At least in my experience, deep embodiment and attentiveness to somatic resonance often unleash a primitive, transcendent, oceanic perception of my separate senses blurring into each other. A flow state can trigger synesthetic perceptions for me – the most visceral combination being tactile-visual. That is, powerful tactile sensation often evokes colors and shapes that blot out my normal vision.

By now it should be clear that I am working out a spiritual-ethical project in my meditation on silence. I do this in Sontag’s footsteps.

There is something undeniably transcendent about synesthesia, and about contact or glimpses of oblivion or nothingness. Sontag said it first: “Silence is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.”

So, what is the sound of circus, and what is it called to become? What would it mean for circus – popularly associated with chaos, frivolity, over-the-top spectacle – to “verge closer and closer to silence.” Would it look like doing nothing on the rope, just to hang quietly and calmly by my hands until my grip runs out? Would it demand a different kind of ethical engagement with the parts of the world that I am conditioned to answer with speaking, when the greatest transformative potential might in fact lay in my own willingness to pause. Pause long enough for a vibratory resonance of some charged elicitation to land and register in my body. For something to be emergent within the space I’ve cleared and cultivated, rather than filled too quickly and reactively.

Sontag published her essay collection Styles of Radical Will, to which “Silence” belongs, at a time of dramatic social and political realignment. I have often lamented, in recent years, that she is not around now to comment on our particular historical-technological-cultural-ecological-existential juncture and predicament. I miss her voice.

I have missed her voice especially this year, because I so badly want to know what she’d have to say about breakthroughs in AI and the prospect of AGI – and the daunting, unfathomable intelligence “singularity” this will precipitate – arriving sooner than humans may be prepared for.

Singularity, as a concept, is difficult to fathom. It refers to the exponential, the infinite. It is the point beyond which everything-ness and nothingness are effectively synonymous, at least in my limited mind. It feels akin to a kind of silence that is comprised of all possible permutations of expression, just like sunlight contains every color within it, even though it passes invisibly through air.

If humans are still around when singularity is attained, what will humanity have to say? What will circus be – here in this transcendent, otherworldly, yet very real reality?

“One recognizes the imperative of silence,” Sontag wrote, “but goes on speaking anyway. Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that.”

Part II

I have been experimenting with using AI to generate sound from film photographs I created, a certain kind of artificial synesthesia, albeit rendered through entirely different processes than my human ones.

Each photo is paired with a ‘synthogram’ and ‘sound effect’ audio file.

The first image is taken from the balcony overlooking the circus training hall at l’École de cirque de Québec. The soundscape in this space was diverse, because there are many pockets of activity, each contained within their own architectural niches in the large, renovated cathedral.

The second image is a composite of the first overlayed with an X-ray scan of my lungs. Two architectures. Two cavities for vibrational resonance. The inner somatic experience and the outer environment.

The third image is a close-up of me training on my aerial rope, captured by a friend. Because it is slightly blurry, I like to think of this image as a representation of a flow state.

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