Editorial on Nothing

Radio On transmits something by John Cage. It is the lecture on nothing. It was recorded at a museum. In the background you hear sounds produced by Christian Marclay. Helped by the acoustics of the museum it sounds like a garbage truck loading all the bottles, cans and other dirt left on a parking lot after a night of partying. In the foreground a woman’s voice reads the text. Go read it for yourself. A metronome ticks all the way from beginning to the end. Tock-tock. The mission is accomplished once you get bored.

I don’t like this silence shit ift it is part of a program or a doctrine. Furtheron I don’t like this silence crap, because I have tinnitus. And when I listen to silence, I listen to my tinnitus, and when I listen to my tinnitus, I realize there is this sound ringing in my ears. So silence as ordered by someone who bears higher spiritual motives for his action, is not what I hear. I hear the creator of the action, and think that he or she is a pompous self-indulgent ass.

I also don’t like this buddhist shit about ‘nothing.’ I even don’t want to think about the ‘nothing’ he or she wants me to think about. It is not only buddhist shit, it is also Osho crap. Go on, if you can’t think for yourself, and look at your ‘self’ as a big nothing in an ocean of nothingness while the smell of incense almost makes you puke.

I don’t like the sound of water dripping in the sink. I don’t like the sound of the door banging without reason. I don’t like the sound of a leaves blower and I don’t like the sound of a construction site at 8 o’clock in the morning, when it is right next to my door and you know it is going to end only after six months. I also don’t like the sound of someone whistling, and I don’t like the sound of a metronome.

Listening to Lecture on Nothing is a pure waste of time. It is not a waste of time, because it is boring -I don’t know what it is to be bored- and it is not a waste of time because it is annoying, but it is a waste of time, because it is my time that I dedicate to something or someone else, and all I get in return is a coquettish proof of wit, that might have done well in a gay parlour in New York sixty years ago.

Still you will hear it on Radio On. If you share my view and you have a computer you want to throw away anyway: try this. Connect. When the program starts, listen. Once you get annoyed, throw the computer on the floor. If the voice continues reading, pick up your computer, put it on the table and repeat the action until the voice stops. Don’t document it, don’t talk about it, just forget it after it’s over. It was not art, not a performance or a happening, fluxus or whatever; it was silly.