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The event on stage is more than a spectacle. The intense spotlight beam isolates the silhouette,fixes it in space and annuls time. Blinded and dumbstruck for a moment, the illuminated singer nolonger discerns the limits of the room around him. An echo in the heart of the chance silencestrengthens the overwhelming impression of a subterranean quest. Echoes of grottoes and cold

cathedrals, echoes of the infinite cosmos.

Categories of anguish tend to merge together: the oppression of depths and the closed evoke dread of thevoid, the corridors of the kingdom of the dead resound in the far depths of ourselves like the idea of theinfinite.This spectacle is a ritual, one infinitely despairing of solitude.A shudder ... Those few seconds, free from vibrations, are an eternity. In them, they condense the depthsof interior reflections, funeral exploration of dark labyrinths, from which only the unique and irredeemableend is certain. Would the music be only punctuation and accentuation, the frame more or less hewn froman absolute silence, secretly sought after?

The blinding spotlight is a setting sun. The horizontal light of dusk, which strikes the eyes without the headhaving to look up. It is the hour of unmeasured shadows announcing the return of darkness. Intermediarytime zone and moment of mixed emotions. Exaltation and depression can be born from these fires andshadows - the mental ambiguity in echo with that of the privileged moment.

Every being anguished by its own existence experiences an irresistable attraction for those end of the daycontemplations. Can it itself foresee what its feeling will be? Weary of life and desiring the Night ... or onthe contrary sparking off internally at the sight of the last flarings? Two extreme examples, amongstothers, to show the nodal character of that moment when all subjective experiences are summed up,when all of each day's conflicts are replayed.

CLEMENS BRENTANO, the German romanticist, wrote this intuitive sentence: "... Impressively, the nightveils the immense porch of dusk, and every human heart knows who has won, who has lost".

The opposition of clarity to darkness as a reflection of the battle between reason and the delirious, butequally a point where the two empires cloud over reciprocally, as in a kind of reconciliation. Mad and

secret hope of the distressed being ... Hope that the symbolic ritual, cosmic and everyday, will induce byits exemplarity, the synthesis of that which, in its own mind, is separated. Perhaps if the Star at thatprecise moment suspended its fall. But coexistence never establishes itself, it is usually melancholy anddespondency which accompanies the setting. Destiny of those who desire the half-light, who refuse tochoose between analysis and delirium. Hesitant people from intermediary zones, from the uncertainty,from shadows and almost horizontal lights, from half-open doors and broken windows.

Others opt for the darkness. They will call up the abstract, will desire the rise of secret forces, of dream, ofphantasms and of the unconscious ... but with some restrictions, in truth even a certain intellectualdishonesty.

HEINREICH VON KLEIST, that other great Romanticist, states that "in the organic world, in so far as theconscious reflection becomes darker or weaker, grace advances more radiant and triumphant..."; it is no

less true of it that he hesitates to annihilate all conscience in himself. He seeks only in fact the awakeneddream, a kind of somnambulism where the observer, though in retreat, would remain vigilant. Theunconscious is here a super conscience, a reservoir of occult knowledge in which the awakened partdesires to drink deep. As MARCEL BRION notes in his work the Romantic Germany, the question is oneof "sleep and active dreams". One enters the night in order to explore it and the twilight is its threshold.Interior darkness, darkness of the terrestrial depths, the romantic symbolism passes with ease andintuition from one world to the other. The nocturnal sky blends with the subterranean world of hells. Thetexts of that time testify to that... Thus half magnificent letter from Caroline Von GUNDERODE to BeltinaBRENTANO (Clemens Brentano's sister): "You don't yet understand that these paths lead right lo thebottom of the spirit's mine; but the day will come when they appear to you as such, for man walks often

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through deserted ways; the more he has the desire to advance, the more solitude become terrifying, andthe more the desert spreads onwards. But when you realise how far you have descended into the well ofthought and when you find there below a new dawn, when you re-emerge joyous, when you speak fromyour subterranean world, then you will be consoled; for the world will never be with you".Most paradoxically, it is the light that she seeks in the blackness of the inner worlds, a new dawn (thattwilight of the morning) with an essential different quality - the revelation of herself.

O lamps of luminous firesIn your splendours the hollow grottoesOf blind and dark feelingThrough advantageous favoursGive both light and warmthTo the cherished object of their heartSt JEAN DE LA CROIX'The dark night of the soul'

Through those who are in misery ofseeing themselves without faith, onesees that God does not illuminate them;

but for others one sees that there isa God who blinds themPASCAL 'thoughts'

The light is like a meterialisation of the "ungraspable", the intersection of transcendence and the visual. Itis the very symbol of the Spiritual through antinomy to the Material. The light is truth, its domain of clarityis also that of transparence and the aerial. It is opposed to concealment and creeping. It is honesty anddeprivation. The light should therefore induce only knowledge, its symbolism should be that of analysis, ofdescription, and of the look ... but there again words mix, the illusions superimposed one on the other, theend achieved is in contradiction with the appearance conveyed by the invocation. Light and dazzle ofsunset. Rays of light similar to shafts, crossing the bodies and destroying them, beams of radiationsdisintegrating the flesh. The mystic aspires to be only "pure spirit", to free himself from the corporeal.

"The Ecstasy of St. Teresa" by Bernini (1598-1680): the light is sharp, made from golden metal. The saint,in an ecstatic state close to fainting, has half-closed eyes (the detail is important) ... It is like a voluptuousagony, the prolonging and the translation of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. The marble, ghastly pale,sets the body in a specific moment, between flesh and crystal, just before the tangible disappears and thesoul flies away. The illumination, in the literal and mystical sense of the term.

Extreme pallour of the death desired as the passage to immortality. Coldness of the renouncement of thepalpable, anticipation of the infinite, timeless, absolute and fixed. But what is it internally, what is the realitybehind the glazed image?

The sunset burns with its last flames. Light/warmth, star energy, echo in the internal fire of emotions, theecstasy is a fire devouring the being, and seeming to consume it literally. Interior and exterior loose allsignification, the body sublimating its substance, becoming all gradually transparent, is consumed in

harmony with the illumination. The Mystic touched by the light feels he himself becomes immaterialradiation; but that the subjective transmutation operates from the interior, at the source of illusions. It findsits origins in the depths of the being, it springs from the secret imperiousness of desires, of which it is onlythe symbolic resurgence.

It appeals then, that the aim of the mystic in his search for the light is not so much as to be dazzled. Thatdazzling blindness is the triumphal way, although diverted, of a descent to hell. (The eyes which closeindicate the withdrawal to the interior of oneself, introspection, self-spelaeology). The difference betweenthe blinding of the black nights and the white blindness of the illumination is minute ... The Mysticabandons the exterior look in order to see better within himself, to be no more than Vision. His call to the

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