Infinite Now is an experience, a state: in the midst of a morass, the presence of an imminent disaster. What is going on, how long, when will it end — all is unclear. It is an existential state of nakedness where the ordinary sense of control and reason are stripped away. This situation is somewhat familiar, we taste it to some degree throughout life, even if the extraordinary does not happen. As the rate of distribution of information grows and as the political situations around us seem more precarious and unpredictable we all get a slight taste of this feeling of naked helplessness. However when war happens or disaster hits something basic changes, as the last remnants of security and routine are taken away. It is an extreme situation, on an existential level. But it holds also an opportunity for an exceptional encounter with the world, bringing its own perspective and long term consequences, historical and personal. In a way, every such a morass is a blockade which stops the evolution of things and might then result in a sudden change. That change is felt in the air and its intuited presence is extremely forceful simultaneously frightening and hopeful.
The opera uses texts from two sources: a short story: Homecoming by the celebrated Chinese writer Can Xue, and the play FRONT (Luk Perceval) which is based on All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, and on letters of soldiers from the first world war, which were assembled and shaped into a theatre piece by Luk Perceval. Both texts enact a suspension; people are unable to get out of a static situation. In FRONT soldiers are in the trenches, locked in fighting which does not end: they move some kilometres forward only to return back to their former position in a desperate deadly cycle. In Homecoming, a woman thought to pass through a house and continue her journey but then she gradually realizes that it is impossible to leave the house, which is on a cliff above an abyss where a quiet old man serves as an illusionary guide and gives some solace with his presence.
Homecoming with its chaotic internal and external landscape and FRONT with the extended war situation and the various forms of suffering it causes are both testimonies to what I would like to call the wild uncontrolled breathing of the world as it moves closer towards a state of entropy, or towards change, an inevitable change. The deep meaning here is not only historical. The slow merging of two seemingly unconnected worlds gradually creates a kind of an amalgam. This amalgam suggests a state of mind of such difficulty and helplessness, that in order to survive, one must find the will to continue and to find hope in the simplest element of existence, the breathing. As per David Grossmann, “in pain there is breath.” In that sense, while the spoken and sung materials become strong and very visceral and present at the end, they also become further away more like islands in the midst of wind and breathing which slowly cover everything like sand in a sandstorm in the desert.
In this sense, the opera is about more than Homecoming or the first World war. It is about our existence now and here. How we survive, how are destined to survive and how even the smallest element of vitality commends survival and with it perhaps hope.
Chaya Czernowin