Showing up is the hardest part. Only then is one able to even consider authenticity. This was made clear through everybody who showed up today. Many of us had our doubts about just being able to be here at all. Yet despite the unknowing of what this experience will be for us, I’m looking at a room full of people who showed up. And at the end of this first day, that is as authentic as can be.
This rare sight of a pure sky, unpolluted by electricity or the dimming reflections generated by cities, makes for a good start to a time-segment dedicated to exploring notions of authenticity and how they apply to an ever more polluted world.
As I took the plane to Paris this morning I felt one particular emotion: a great relief. Basically a relief of having the time to be out of what I do on my daily basis. But then when I arrived to this huge and stunning castle my only emotion was fear. Fear of not knowing what I was going to find in such a big place with all those rooms, walls, stairs, windows that have been hosting guests for centuries. And then it hit me, that fear is just an alarm bell of having time and a place to turn inward and search all those locked rooms, walls, stairs, windows inside of me and free them in order to speak authentically. It was an Abbas poem that set me free of that fear: “I´m the hero of a story, which has neither a story nor a hero”Abbas Kiarostami So I will go step by step opening every room and looking at each very closely. I will not expect anything, I am just a listener, by being rather than doing.
It’s taken about 10 hours, door to door, to get from Edinburgh to the Chateau de Grillemont. As the last one to arrive, I’m a little anxious about being too late to fit in, to find a seat in the awkward musical chairs of first encounters. But when I do, it feels immediately comfortable, safe. Laughter, food, and drink constitute a simple, yet delightful sofreh over a long, wooden table in a rustic kitchen. This first dinner at the residency is already pregnant with promise. At the discussion later that evening for the first of the check-in readings, ‘4 Poems’ by Abbas Kiarostami, I’m struck by how the poems connect art and life, a glimpse of a liminal space where reality may reside, discernible but ungraspable. The third poem, ‘I’m the hero of a story/which has neither a story/nor a hero’ was a reminder of our individual lives, just as they are. Often absent of drama or hold or interest to anyone other than ourselves. And yet that ordinariness did not necessarily mean that it was not of worth. Rather, as the fourth poem ‘The wild flowers / no one smelled them / no one picked them / no one sold them / no one bought them’ suggested, that lack of attention did not take away from the flowers’ central purpose — to bloom, regardless. Perhaps art (and artifice) is one of few frames through which we can examine, appreciate and be awed by a reality so large, that it otherwise — and often — appears banal, and we remain, to our detriment, oblivious to its power, magic, and mystery. The second reading, Heinrich Boll’s ‘Anecdote Concerning the Lowering of Productivity’ was a relatable tale of the balance between doing and being, of mentalities of scarcity and abundance. The central question here was, ‘What is of real value?’ And how do we balance individual freedom and choice (and even pleasure) with a responsibility to the wider communities and societies of which we are a part? We’d all like to be the fisherman, knowing when the work was done, was enough; and then doze, or just be, when our needs were met. But can all of us be fishermen? All the time? And should we?
