Journey at the Edge of the Night

Why should the pleasure of the night not be equal to the pleasure of the day?

“My friend Milan Kundera said that loving one another isn’t enough. We must also know how to share the night. I and the nightingale, we share it fairly.”

Evgen Bavčar has a special ritual. For over forty years, he has been recording the nightingale singing on May nights in his hometown Lokavec near Ajdovščina. The nightingale tells dr. Bavčar he isn’t alone in the dark. Yet this is not only a story of their coexistence. Under the nocturnal cloak, in duet and in tandem with the nightingale, the story spreads its wings from Lokavec to Capri Island, opening reflections on blindness and blinding, existential closeness and distance, the situation of the blind across time and the question: why should the pleasure of night not be equal to the pleasure of day?

“When I was recording the nightingale for many years, here and in other places, a friend pointed me to the book Villa San Michele by Axel Munthe. I was taken by the text, I started to listen to nightingales in a completely different way; though I already knew that in some places birds are blinded, either nightingales or other species, to make them think it is always night,” says Evgen Bavčar in our radio documentary.

The documentary innovatively utilizes sound not only as a stimulus for perception of individuals for whom it is the sole source of information about the visual world, but also for narrating time, duration, space, the essence of the moment, and human coexistence. Furthermore, the sound conjures various emotions of the protagonist and expands the listeners’ perception of temporal-spatial coordinates of life. The night journey to the break of day raises profound questions about human existence, differences, exploitation, the struggle for justice, the environment, freedom and the intimate desire for duality, the sun and a new spring.

The radio documentary is a joint project between First Program, the Ars, and Val 202 and was recorded in the spring of 2023 in Lokavec near Ajdovščina, on the island of Capri, and in Naples.

Concept by Mojca Delač and Luka Hvalc, screenplay by Mojca Delač, Saška Rakef and Luka Hvalc in cooperation with dr. Evgen Bavčar, director Saška Rakef, dramaturgy Saška Rakef, Mojca Delač and Luka Hvalc, sound designer Urban Gruden.

“When I say the two of us, I also become responsible for another tiny existence warming its next generation nestled in the bush. It reminds me that the sun shone the day before, that the sun once shone for me, too, and that the nightingale, in its melody, transmits to me the light or energy of that sun I had known as a child,” adds Evgen Bavčar.

“Sound was our key guiding principle and the cue for this story. I think it’s clear that for Evgen Bavčar, it is much more than just an auditory stimulus. It is the world, colours, people, images. It is orientation in space, time, and relationships. And him? A personified inspiration! Our story was born spontaneously during research and first conversations in Ajdovščina. Quietly, it pecked so hard at the creative shell that it broke free and took flight. We’ve been on a truly incredible journey which, I dare say, has spoken to all the creators deeply and intimately. I hope it will also reach the listeners this way!” said Mojca Delač from Radio Slovenia’s First Program about making the radio documentary.

Polymath Evgen Bavčar holds two PhDs. He is a philosopher, artist, essayist, writer and an advocate for the rights of the blind. He lost his sight at the tender age of eleven, and so his world of light and visual perception remains encapsulated in the memory of his homeland, and his native Lokavec. For many years, dr. Evgen Bavčar has been writing his story around the world, especially in Paris where his studies and research took him in the 1970s already. For Evgen Bavčar, sound is the companion drawing the contours of his surroundings, the world, people, events and sensations.

The public presentation of the radio documentary took place on Tuesday, 3 October 2023 at 19.00 in the Švicarija venue in Ljubljana. The same day, at 20.00 hours, the documentary had its premiere on the airwaves of the First Program, and later in October also on the Ars Program and the Val 202. After airing it is available on the podcasts of Radio Slovenia, and here:

Journey at the Edge of the Night

21. 12. 2023

Journey at the Edge of the Night - Libretto - English translation

Journey at the Edge of the Night - Libretto - Italian translation

Journey at the Edge of the Night was also part of the Avdiofestival event organized by Radio Slovenia, taking place on Monday, 9 October 2023 at the Cukrarna venue in Ljubljana. There, we were exploring the sound lights of the night, thinking the role of contemporary radio for those who cannot see, and the creativity of the blind and visually impaired. More information is available at the website of the event.

Lokavec ponoči foto Evgen Bavčar obrezana

Media coverage

Pre-selected for Prix Marulić 2024 Prix Marulić - HRT

Potovanje na robu noči: skupni projekt Prvega, Programa Ars in Vala 202 potuje na Prix Marulić - RTV SLO

Public listening and post-show discussion at Švicarija, Ljubljana

Potovanje na robu noči - RTV SLO

Testimonials

Us blind people are in a kind of complicity with the radio broadcasters

ddr. Evgen Bavčar on working with the crew of RTV Slovenia

Working with the crew of RTV Slovenia on the relationship between the visual and invisible reality allowed me to relive some of the notions of sightless existence. In terms of the cognition of reality, us blind people are in a kind of complicity with the radio broadcasters, whose creativity addresses an invisible ear that is also, metaphorically speaking, blind. Radio is a medium for the transmission of the word, which makes content visible to its unseen audience. This passing from one reality to another shows us how the modern world is oculocentric, meaning that the reality of our perception is more an image than a word, be it spoken or heard.

The radio medium is a unique universe, a treasury of words, a continuation of a narrative culture that was essential when most people were still illiterate. Even some famous figures of human history, such as Homer or Milton, were spoken orators and yet they communicated to us the deepest truths of their existence, their cultural milieu.

The trip to Capri offered proof that the world we inhabit also contains sound images, phonetic fragments, unlike the much more familiar and recognised visual reality. For the crew, night became a domain of a different sight, a realm of otherness that validates the nightingale's singing as a symbol of the natural troubadour. It strives to overcome the deserted monotony of the night, to fill the silence and make sense of it with its presence. Journey at the Edge of the Night is involved in the desire to give words, sounds, noises, cries a new meaning, an as yet unknown value in competition with the purely visual perception of the world. The blinding of the birds in their refuge on Capri, as depicted by Axel Munthe, therefore recalls the life context of the blind throughout history, who by natural necessity made sense of the word – because they embodied the word that, as such, is blind. Despite this characteristic, it allows us to see beyond the usual avenues of visual perception, beyond the realm of vision and the input of the right brain hemisphere. Several scientists have stressed the difference between the left and right halves of our best, most universal organ. Modern society favours the right hemisphere at the expense of denying the spoken word as an expression of the blind, either realistically or as a metaphor of duration in time.

The difference between the two types of perception is vast by its very nature. Sound is defined by a speed of 300 metres per second, light by 300 thousand kilometres per second.

Night thus symbolises duration, and day the moment of simultaneity of an image formalised by photography, film, video. Images rush, words become. We realise this differentiation of specificity when listening to the nightingale in the duration of the night, while accepting the otherness of the word of the blind man, which carries vision within it. Let me point out that in German universities, until the invention of photography, many pictorial works in painting were described. Describing visual reality is one of the still under-exploited possibilities of the radio medium, which I myself have tried out a lot on the French radio network France Culture, for example in the series Painting with Eyes Closed. Blind and sighted listeners are on equal footing when listening to descriptions from a radio receiver. The deep complexity of creating the content of Journey at the Edge of the Night is thus an important step into the still under-exploited possibilities of the radio medium. This collaboration, in a very specific and deeply egalitarian democratic way, ordains the word as a kind of creature of the modern gospel, which says that in the beginning was the word, and therefore also the radio word. I am pleased to have shared this precious new word with sincere interlocutors and collaborators who were able to move into a universe of different perceptions.

Our friendly cooperation proved that man should not be held hostage to the visual, but that we can access the night equally as well as the bright side of the day. The Slovenian writer Karel Širok wrote about the blind nightingale in 1922 already. With Mojca Delač's team I felt like one of those blind birds, not only in listening to the world but also in calling out to the world in the name of my own words, my own experience of reality. As I shared the silence of a May night with the friendly RTV crew, I remembered Lorca's verse about the cricket, which he describes as the sounding star, the estrella sonida. Something like that was the tiny bird that sang faithfully to us through the dark night, adorned and enlivened by our words in a quiet sonic reciprocity.

Evgen Bavčar