The sky, when it first opened, did not know it could open. The open sky above you now—look at it—it’s still opening. It is the open sky and the total of many little opening skies. You’re falling from Eden now: the sky splits to let you in, you split to let the sky in. A red, shimmering, silver apple seed finds a drawer in your brain to lodge itself in. It picks the bottom drawer. You know very little still. But your body opens even if it doesn’t exactly know it can because it’s opened before—a lily, a weapon, a mirror, an acorn covered in snow. Scientists have reported they’ve heard the sound of a black hole singing. At the center of August, when heat bleeds into the muscles and the island is a theatre of dryness, there is a black hole of silver, singing cicadas. But there is always something inside of something else, like when you’re inside fog looking at fog. You still do not know how much you are capable of but the singing also hasn’t happened yet. A small, singular song, hung into the non-air like a jewel. From this song, everything has come and will continue to come: the blackness, the fog, the drawers, the gleam of the cicada wing, the silver pit of the apple. On her desk, under a sonic light, the philosopher Hélène Cixous is thinking of the apple laminated by the force with which she is challenging it. In its fibers she recognizes this: ‘knowledge begins with the mouth, with the discovery of the taste of something’. Let it be red then, there goes the death drive again, arcadian and in the fibers, and out of a drawer in her brain she pulls a black bowl of wet fruit: ‘knowledge and taste go together’. 

Text by Penelope Ioannou