Since being introduced to the idea of Anarchism in my first year of university it has gone on to influence my world view, it has been a framework with which I have been opened to Queer, anti-capitalist, and de-colonial thought. It acts not only as a political system but a lens through which I view the world and a set of principles with which I try to live my life.
One of the main things I find appealing about Anarchy is the idea of the total freedom it affords to people to simply exist as themselves. I find it to be a philosophy where people are the most important thing, and matter more than any other wealth or benefit. The one poem that surmises this attitude to me is “No Man Is an Island” by John Donne
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
It’s this attitude that works its way into all of Chain of Being, and especially this scene with Adam and the Noecelia. Adams’ entire arc in season 1 and 2 is his journey to, as is explicitly said in the show “join the continent”. One line that summarizes this in the original script is “Apathy is death”. The idea that Adam is only ‘alive’, in a more abstract sense, while he cares about People, and that his immortality is meaningless if he does not feel kinship with his fellow beings.
When I mentioned this line in a tutorial with Annie she pointed out the AIDs activist slogan “SILENCE = DEATH” and Ultra-Red’s approaches to silence as it relates to activism. I did some research and found a very interesting influence on Ultra-Red in the form of Paulo Freire.
“[Paulo] Freire described the ‘culture of silence’ that had to be broken, for the liberation of the dispossessed to be realised.”
(Groom, 2021)
Reading more into this Ultra-Red seem to have the approach of deploying silence as a voice in itself. They state:
“The equation, Silence=Death compels us to fill the silence with voices. However, silence is itself a voice: an object that conditions our interventions whether they be screams of lamentation, rage and its pleasures, or some other action pieced from our current affective state.”
(Liner notes for Ultra-red’s An Archive of Silence)
In terms of its relation to Chain of Being and the pieces as they feed into an album. While I don’t have any active and practical ways I will take this research forward. Ideas of allowing more room to breathe already come to me now. In the original script there are gaps for Adam to speak which are not present in these recordings, perhaps leaving that silence, and that space, would be a way to deploy silence as a voice itself.