°°°•••°°When the text is in between those signs, it is not the voice of the characters speaking but a direct intervention of the author herself, which comments the story.°°•••°°°

°°°•••°°The story travels between an undefined future and an undefined past, dreams, daydreams and non-dream.°°•••°°°

 

Ani always had nomadic ears. Often daydreaming and slumbering. Listening to the echoes of a forgotten civilization. As if enchanted by a siren call from the past, navigating in an elusive, eclipsing, broken memory. Ani hears the murmuring voices of her ancestors. She listens backward to imagine forwards. Ani is a musician and collector of sonic fragments, phonograph records, erased tapes, and almost-forgotten songs. She likes the ephemerality of wild, flying sounds that no one managed to catch. Finding melodies where they have been silenced. She believes that songs have to travel in time. On their path, melodies mutate from body to body. These bodies have the power not only to remember but also to invent something new from fragmentary archives. Her own body must become a trembling-score, open to movement, listening to dislocated sounds through the cracks of time. She plays forgotten lullabies to make them resonate, resound again. Sometimes, she wonders: what traces are left of all the lost songs? What is left of all the lullabies which used to make the world so much alive?

Ani swims in fragments, fragments of memory. She lives next to the Celtic Sea and she loves to listen to the rocking sounds of the waves. Her wooden house is crowded with collections of archives, instruments, and objects that she found here and there. As she strolls along, she listens to the wood crackling and whispering sonic treasures. She seeks to uncover the last glimmering traces of her ancestors, the Armenians. Memory is fragile, just like the stems of a delicate dried flower. Each culture claims artifacts, songs, or melodies to be its own national “property”. But the sonic waves of songs aren’t trapped in the shackles of arbitrary nationalist borders.1 Music is composed of nomadic waves. Sounds are constantly traveling, moving, evolving; sounds dissolve into the air. Songs are portals to the far-away, the oral memory, the forgotten stories. Lullabies are taking Ani on a nomadic voyage : from a distance, she can feel all the emotions enclosed in a song, even if she is unfamiliar to the landscape. When she listens to lullabies, even though she cannot understand the language, she feels emotionally connected to the singer. An invisible thread is woven, as she welcomes intimate stories in her heart.

Ani also travels, walking on the traces of her ancestors. She sits in ruins of memory and closes her eyes, letting the breeze whisper in her ears forgotten songs. Songs are like fireflies, shining in the night. Fireflies, even if threatened by extinction, resist by flying, eternally moving, furtively appearing, ephemerally landing on the hearts of those who are still alive.

°°°•••°°I call the threatened oral cultures “sonic fireflies”, in reference to the poet Pasolini and the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman.2 According to Didi-Huberman, the fireflies are still alive – we must search for them, and we must become, ourselves, fireflies. This is what the character of the story, Ani, is striving to do. And she might need allies in her quest.°°•••°°°

From all her travels, Ani collects small woven carpets, and when she is lucky enough, sonic fireflies. She strives to collect the whispers of a story, waiting to be told to the future. She navigates, amongst lands and archives, hoping to find evidence of a chased-away, suffocated life. Yet, in national archives, she barely finds any. She remembers very well the day she went to Germany’s musical archive of the world. Artifacts were stored in compartments, organizing and separating one culture from another with labels. While her hands rummaged in an enclosed darkness, Ani got lost. She felt discouraged about not finding more information and requested help. But they told her, coldly, to ask the artificial intelligence Musicalia.3 Musicalia, they said, can teach you the secret of any sort of music. She can guide you to browse the vast musical repertoire and she can even create new songs from archival documents. Ani tried, many times, to ask for the help of Musicalia, but most often, she felt frustrated and disappointed. Why would she trust this AI, who never experienced a musical encounter? How could an AI help her to feel the emotions of her ancestors? Because humans came to believe in AI more than in musicians, ancestral knowledge is getting lost.

Overall, she couldn’t find anything conveying the energy of life that she was looking for, the traces of musical emotions that she hoped to feel within her body. In these archives, songs are like dead butterflies pinned on a board, labeled with savant scientific names. Ani went out of this national archive, without finding a breath of life.

°°°•••°°The problem with technologies of memory is the following: can they store what is forgotten, untold or erased? This sentence in itself is an oxymoron. Can technologies recollect what is underground? Or does it depend on our human will, our arts, primitive technologies and faculties, to make these underground cultures survive? Sometimes, I am scared when I imagine a future that would only rely on archival technologies such as AI. And I start to wonder: Who will remember what is not archived, not protected? Who will remember the silenced voices, the destroyed archives, the omission, the cultural genocide? Let’s not forget that technologies are shaped by the politics of memory and by the bias of their conceivers.°°•••°°°

Ani feels much better here, in her house, which has become crowded by her immense collection of sonic memories, musical instruments and various other curiosities. Walking around her house is like entering her brain. Here and there, space is left for the unconscious – she even has a dedicated space for her dreams. As she gets lost in all these fragments, she finds herself attracted by a small carpet. They encountered each other in the ruins of a house, next to the lake of Van.4 She could stare at it for hours, wondering how to break its code, its hidden memory, its forgotten language… Do weavers send secret messages to the future? What is the perfume of each color, what does this sign sound like, and what memories do these symbols enclose? Is each thread a gateway to a forgotten souvenir? With which emotions were the weavers playing?

Her fingers caress the weaving as if slowly traveling in an unfamiliar landscape. It sounds soft and calm like a cold breeze, almost like walking in a dune of snow. Following the woven threads, she walks the path of the weaver’s mind. She can hear the fast movements of their hands, pinching the ropes of the weave like one would play a harp. The sounds of the weaving tools are beating in a strange hypnotic rhythm. The weaving frame becomes that of a tambourine. A flow of dreamt memories comes to her mind. The memory of her dreams or the memories of the weaver, she cannot tell. She wonders whether each of these handmade knots is a mirror, reflecting the lifetime, the landscape and the emotions of the person crafting it. Do weaved colors murmur songs of the past? Or do colors ask for new songs to be invented?

Ani dreams of being an Anatolian troubadour, a nomadic poet, storyteller and singer. At night or during daytime, she often dreams of Ashugh Naïri.5 She embodies the myth of a once oral, lyrical memory, when songs and poems were freely flying, like fireflies.

She travels with Naïri, amongst beautiful landscapes, to the top of the Ararat mountain, the highest volcano of the Armenian plateau (is she dreaming?).6 Naïri plays an oriental luth, the Saz,7 a beautiful pear-shaped instrument, with double strings and triple strings, giving it a particular sound and unique, long-lasting resonance.

Naïri listens to the landscapes’ melodies, while Missak, the weaver sitting next to her, transforms sounds into colors. The weavings’ colors enclose memories of the landscapes. They sing about the carpets of violettes, the wild roses and all the fragrances that adorn the mountains.

°°°•••°°Even though Naïri and Missak are fictitious, real historical links exist between weaving and music – some weavers were singing lullabies while weaving, some weavers were also improvising with musicians.°°•••°°°

Missak travels on the sensitive frame of the carpet. And while weaving, he sings along with Naïri. They listen more to the other than to themselves, flowing into the fleeting sound of the present moment. They listen to the breath of the wind, they hear each butterfly landing on flowers. They attune the song to the bird’s chant. The repetitive melodic pattern of a nightingale seems to inspire the next rhythm of their improvised song. Naïri engages in a conversation with the nightingale, telling him about her intimate life. The bird becomes a character in the story of the song, a secret whisperer, but also an inspiring figure. Together, they sing about the cycles of life, celebrating their aliveness and survival. Human creation is itself a cycle, reflecting the love of every being sharing the same earth. After spending a day with the bird, the river and the violettes, the wild roses and the poppies, they return to their horses and continue their nomadic lives. As they come closer to the ruins of Ani,8 a medieval Armenian city, Missak says to Naïri:

– “I weave these melodies for unknown souls, in unseen realms, for they might recall the passions we shared through our nomadic art. My tapestries are open-scores, inspiring future ballads.

– I wonder how many moons flickered in the night since a voice sounded in these ruins, says Naïri, in a broken whisper.

– Even in the darkest declines, their voices echoed…

– In a mournful swan song?

– No, says Missak. An ode, resisting oblivion and tyranny. A song proclaiming that there are still some breaths left to sing, despite all the murders, all the roses’ thorns that our enemies have planted in our flesh. Our sights, sometimes, might be flooded by the color of the pomegranate, yet, the diversity of cultures and identities is bound in a beautiful tapestry. Cultures – strings of different colours, all special, particular and different – are intrinsically linked, by their very structure. What would happen if one of these strings is completely shattered? Would it be destruction, or absorption…? Would it get invisible, completely invisible, or will its presence still float in the air, in the mountains, in the rivers…, he says in a quiet whisper, almost only for himself. All the already forgotten languages are still allusively present in their absence, he adds. Please, never forget to recall all the languages and dialects that used to be spoken. These languages may be composing ours.

– Naïri’s eyes spread like the sea,9 deeply searching for something in the void, vaguely looking for an answer hidden amidst the scattered ruins of Ani. Ani,…, Ani… she murmurs. This city recalls so many things to me… it recalls… this dream! Every night, I dream of someone called Ani. She has very pale blue river eyes. She has my eyes, but she lives in the future, says Naïri. She is inquiring about us. I think that, somehow, I may be singing for her.

– Do you think that she exists?… Or rather, that she will exist?

– You may find it uncanny, I do not know how to describe how I feel… It is as if I can feel inside my body all the women who will be born after me, and I think that she is one of them.

– Uncanny, it is not so, answers Missak. Sometimes I have the feeling that my life is a tale that will be told to the children of the future.”

As Missak’s horse carefully walks among the ruins, many deep thoughts invade his misty eyes. So that of all the complex questions he asks himself, he no longer knows which is the one guiding his mind. He feels dizzy and disoriented. He stops his horse for a moment, listens to the calming sound of its disbudding, and looks back. His sight crosses the one of Naïri, and he can read in her mind that she is thinking the same.

°°°•••°°It would take many pages for me, the author, to retrace the path of their mind. Oftentimes, the deepest questions are the hardest to share with others, and it is so frustrating to be understood by our beloved on the mere surface of the iceberg.°°•••°°°

But Naïri and Missak, because they are improvisers, are very good listeners: they have the ability to listen to what is unsaid and to read in between the lines.

A smile, and then a laugh, illuminates their eyes, at first quite dark.

– “What matters is that our sung voices dance with others, that the love we share together spreads its vibrations and, hopefully, reverberates through time. – But what if no one remembers… What if all proof of life, all the tapestries, all the notations, have been destroyed, erased, or didn’t survive the passage of time…

– Singing, in the community and sharing emotions through music, may be the only thing left. Souvenirs, hidden in unconscious dreams, can emerge, through the practice of improvisation. I believe songs are portals of time and emotions felt through generations. As we improvise songs together, we compose in the moment, listening to the landscape, but also, to our subconscious memories. Our ancestors travel inside of us and with us. This is why, sometimes, we can hear the mountains murmuring.

– The mountains might be our ancestors?

– You know, as much as I do, how tales narrate the legendary stories of our kings who transformed into mountains.

– “Sometimes,” says Missak, “I even think that when we play together, the echoes of the weaving can resound, years later, in someone’s ears. The winds of Ararat will carry our songs to the future.”

°°°•••°°You may wonder why the characters are so preoccupied with oblivion, the destruction of cultures and their potential extinction. Why are they talking about violence, when the title of the story evokes music, love, poetry and weaving – as, indeed, was composed the art of the troubadours. The technology of weavings, its metaphor, and orality as technological means of recording is genuinely and profoundly what animates the characters. And troubadours, in fact, sang of love, through their transcultural encounters, in a very deep relationship of listening to the landscape and to one another. Yet, at the same time, troubadours were also overwhelmed by contradictory feelings. Let’s not forget the violence of medieval times and long after. The “colour of the pomegranate” really did flow. All these apparent contradictions and reflections are part of a reality made up of contrasts. Memory couldn’t exist without forgetting. What is extinguished, threatened or at risk of being extinct, becomes precious… It becomes something that can have the power to gather communities of love and desires. The disappearance of cultures is multiplying with the phenomena of globalisation, mondialisation, but also, the various forms of colonisation and cultural genocide, which unfortunately concerns many cultures. The disappearance of languages accelerates every year. Yet, the threat of extinction, destruction or loss, at least to me, arouses a nostalgic desire to play music, heal wounds and feel connected to the distant. Music brings back what has been taken away – it makes the past real and liveable again in the present.°°•••°°°

What would happen if we could be, literally, weaved to one another? If you feel moved, I’ll feel it too. And your song will become mine. And your past is my present. And your language, I will cherish as I cherish mine. Because I need to understand you. We are linked with invisible threads. Threads of love and threads of blood. Your pain is conditioning mine.

Ani opens her eyes. She feels dizzy and confused. But suddenly, she understood that she was not dreaming. She can hear the echoes of the players. She can feel the vibrations of the Saz, and she feels rocked by its soothing sound, its mysterious harmonies, making her body and soul resonate. … Missak striking the strings of the loom, the weft… she can feel the strings resounding in time. She can hear their voices, their songs and their dances, which left eternal traces in the wind. And this wind traveled to her ears.

Meanwhile, our nomadic poets continue their voyage, manes in the air, their bright horses galloping amongst hills, lakes and valleys. On their path, they cross the ways of other nomads. When the auroral sunlight projects its multicoloured beams on the mountains, they share a dance with strangers. For Naïri and Missak, sharing music is a human gesture of gratitude. They sing with Greeks, Georgians, Alevis, Qizilbash, Kurds, Azeris, Turks, Persians, Assyrians, Armenians and Yezidis. Each time, the song takes on a different color and becomes multilingual. Together, strangers dance to the same rhythm, attuning to the beat of the loom. And the loom records each language. They weave miscellaneous encounters into the main structure of the song. At each encounter, Missak adds a new colorful thread and the weaving becomes bigger and stronger, reflecting the love shared by human beings.

Ani thinks “The weavings that I collected are made of these links, the links created through encounters, through the emotions and love shared in musical moments. If civilisations could be weaved, they wouldn’t be torn apart”.