They are four.
They don't know where they are.
They don't know how long they've been there.
Around them, there's nothing.
It's uncertain whether they are confined in a closed place,
or lost in an undefined space.
It's neither hot nor cold; the horizon is dark.
A light source oscillates around them.
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A
Are you sleeping?
(a silence; sighs)
B
It would be simpler to wake us directly. By your question, you invoke an invariable response.
C
I can sleep and pretend that I am awake. None of you ever realize.
D
Silence! I want to sleep. A pure sleep, uninterrupted forever.
B
You're not going to start again with this annihilation project, it's absurd.
A
I really need your point of view. I can't determine if we are merging more and more or if we are differentiating ourselves. What do you think?
C
What does it change?
A
It changes everything. What we are. Our future. The possibilities.
D
I think your answer lies in our immediate condition. We are together. We bother each other, constantly. We cannot get rid of each other, otherwise it would have already been done. If you want to anticipate the future, just multiply our situation by itself, exponentially.
B
On the contrary, the question is interesting. Because it assumes evolution. A real evolution. Not just this change of postures and these loop exchanges that we repeat ad nauseam. The problem is that none of us remembers before our situation.
D
There may never have been a before.
C
We are amnesiacs, yes, I don't doubt it. But from a specific point in time.
A
What specific point?
C
I remember screaming when I opened my eyes on your face. I was surprised to discover you there. I was terrified. A terror of the unknown. The experience of your face was a frightening novelty. So I must have known something else before.
D
You scream every time you wake up, or almost. You never remember us.
C
I can't be terrified for nothing. If our situation was normal, if I had only known this, I would be serene upon waking, necessarily.
B
Terror is perhaps more normal than serenity. Serenity is perhaps even the culmination of a long experience of terror, an habituation.
A
There is nothing around us. But we are here. And we know how to speak, think. Feel terror and serenity. If we were like our environment, we would hardly exist. We would be fixed shadows.
D
You think you exist, but it's a difficult concept to prove. I may be alone, elsewhere, inventing all of you. I have no proof of your reality other than my own awareness of your presence.
C
That's a ridiculous argument. Impossible to validate. I am certain that I am none of you.
A
We are not the same, I am also convinced of that. We know how to think separately. And we have different ideas, each, in parallel. We are together. But we are not one.
D
Precisely, we have already wanted to explore; we have gone round in circles in every direction. We must draw the necessary conclusions: we are stuck here, together, we have no other alternatives, except to find sleep, to forget all about this unbearable enigma.
A
Just because we haven't found anything doesn't mean we have discovered everything.
B
To answer your initial question, I think we evolve in a closed circuit.
D
That makes no sense.
B
A slow evolution, perhaps in a spiral, winding around an original knot. And since evolution is not material, but rather temporal, it does not need additional space to unfold.
C
Which means we don't need to ask ourselves all these questions. Everything is already given, here and now. We can sleep peacefully.
A
I think I understand: we confuse ourselves AND we differentiate ourselves. In alternation.
D
During sleep, we are nothing more than a single breath.
B
Upon waking we operate our individuation. Interesting hypothesis.
A
We may need to choose to find a way out. To sleep or not to sleep.
B
I am willing to experience perpetual awakening.
A
So, let's not sleep anymore.
D
I choose sleep.
C
Me too.
A
We will not be able to differentiate ourselves if you sleep, or rather if we sleep half the time.
C
I'm sleepy, I can't help it.
D
We do not know if there is really a way out of all this. Sleeping here, or elsewhere later in the darkness, it's all the same.
B
What if it could be otherwise?
C
But what do you want, exactly?
A
I have no idea what I could want. I feel like I could be somewhere else, differently.
D
I understand. But your chatter exhausts me.
B
For me, it's the excitement that exhausts me. Perpetual awakening is a novel perspective. But I haven't slept enough yet to get started on it.
A
Me neither. This question has kept me awake for too long. Shall we start upon waking?
B
Absolutely.
C
I'd like that. But I would like to sleep really long first. To be well rested.
D
I will never have slept enough to do anything else. But I can make an effort. Wake me up when you are ready.
A
Have you noticed how much we end up agreeing, just before sleep?
B
Everything goes without saying.
C
All tensions disappear.
D
All of them.
3D modeling | digital images | text : KAROLINE GEORGE
