Grèves perlées

Script I blinked (<span class="blinkvalue"></span>) times, apparently. That’s much more than the average, which is 12 to 15 times a minute. If you apply that number to an hour, that’s about 1,200 blinks, and no fewer than 28,800 blinks of an eye per day. So, we spend 10 percent of our waking time with our eyes closed. If an eye dries out for having looked too much, it is recommended to lower the eyelid and open it again quickly. This can help spread the moisture of a tear over the surface of the eye. This function, also known as nictation, builds up a protective moisture barrier against any type of pollution and dazzling. However, it was for another reason that a team of Japanese scientists also became interested in this act. Their study revealed that the cerebral areas involved in attention seemed to become inactive with each blink of an eye. Similarly, the regions that are usually activated when we sleep wake up. Blinking would emulate a form of sleep. I blinked (<span class="blinkvalue"></span>) times. If the systems for preventing drowsiness behind the wheel can find an indicator of my own tiredness in this figure, I wonder whether the algorithm of an autonomous car would let me drive. It’s true that I am tired right now. Or is it a despondency facing a certain tempo that appears to be constantly accelerating, a certain pressure for us to align with the permanent live flow that’s increasingly tense. I am now counting (<span class="blinkvalue"></span>) blinks. It’s still more than average. Perhaps this rapid up and down movement of the eyelid is the eyesight breathing, its rhythmic breath. I didn’t write that sentence. Walter Murch did. And I didn’t find it. Peter Szendy did. Could we detect in this infra-gesture, programmed in advance, a certain signature? Going with the flow of our blinks that have never stopped giving their own rhythm in silence? When he was a war prisoner, soldier Jeremiah Denton was forced to take part in a video interview serving Vietnamese propaganda. I grew interested in soldier Denton’s blinking not because it served to preserve his eyes from the powerful light spots, as he told the soldiers watching him, but rather because it had something to say. Soldier Denton blinked as many times as necessary and according to a specific rhythm allowing him to spell out the letters of the word t.o.r.t.u.r.e. off-screen, which he hoped would save him. As such, in his blinking, there are small fragments of war inserted in daily life. As many grains of sand slipped into the cracks, the holes, the gaps to disturb, itch, bother. So many barriers to slow down what can be in the blink of an eye; barricades to stand up to the net and incomprehensible flows. Could it be possible to make imaginary strikes emerge on this scale? The series of our blinking creates non-programmable phrases that evade calculation. A way of fluctuating, not on a fixed rhythm that’s regular and predictable but according to an improvised form, sensitive to irregularities. Temporal elasticities that protect us from conforming. As breaks, rests, retreats, respite have never been so difficult to access, it seems that something is going on in the antechamber of our waking activities—without having to name it—in the time during which my eyelids are stuck to one another, in the time they touch. A time apart that we can fill like the rear base of our armed struggles, a “temporary autonomous zone,” that also needs to be defended. Inhabiting this blind spot without renouncing all forms of contact by abandoning …