The Same Sky

"The sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had broken) such an absence that all has since always and forever been lost therein—so lost that therein is affirmed the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond.“
Blanchot – The Ordinary Sky

In this key scene from „The Ordinary Sky“ Blanchot describes a childhood revelation, the encounter of a little boy with a black, empty firmament. A distinct appeal characterizes this apparition – a spark of absolution from the human need to orientate, seems to drizzle down from this dense, dusky blanket. The dissolution of the unfathomable space. 
Growing up in a reality that we perceive and construct as unambiguous, coherent and organized, generates a constant striving towards situating ourselves, in a fictitious sense of wholeness. Confronting the image, Blanchot created, and the realm of our reality it differs from, it becomes evident that the individual steadily needs to position itself in the context of an alterity, that is always an imaginary one. 

The processes of originating identity and subjectiveness lurk behind this very scene of the child by the window and the same sky, a phantasmal firmament, that does not exist as the ultimate other, as an entity,  but is needed in order to create a coherent structure of our reality. 
The body seems to remain the one and only thing that insists in this ambivalence, exposed to its own illusionary parameters of perception. Our skin is permeable, our flesh is porous.  Within this blank space, where proximity and distance constantly oscillate, the individual creates narrations of relations, of memory, of ways to mould and shape its own identity. In the confrontation with matter, form, line and surface, the essence and existence of our bodies become tangible while the imaginary other smoulders in the interstices. 

Anna Gien