Sorbet Period

As a sorbet cleans the pallet from the impressions of intense taste, so the initial period of this Phd brought – nothing. No ideas emerged. And so his work is silence. It is a silence that suggests absence, yet meaning as it meanders underground, following unseen streams and silently creating connections. Whilst there are no flowers yet, the inner rhizome is active dropping old connections and growing new ones. A silence to be accepted as activity, by which it gains a name, my sorbet^⁠ period. It is short, but sweet.

During this time a great deal of reading and discussion took place, and at a much later date I returned to this period, asking how its potential might be expressed. I will return to this at the very end of this PhD, as one last piece connecting beginning and end. For now, this potential is reflected in the numbering of this piece, zero, which, according to Sadie Plant ‘Zero may mean nothing to the Western world, but this has nothing to do with the way it works’ (1997, p.56). On the contrary, it denotes not absence, but possibility and change.