Silence

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
(Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.)

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
(Translated by C.K. Ogden)

In Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry, Paul Goodman wrote: “not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each.” He then enumerated nine kinds of silence:

— the dumb silence of slumber or apathy;
— the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face;
— the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts;
— the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”;
— the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity;
— the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear;
— the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud with subvocal speech but sullen to say it;
— baffled silence;
— the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.

Boston’s NPR News Station (WBUR) made a wonderful programme on sound, music, and listening. The first episode of the series opens with a reading of Goodman’s list:

In this collection of stories and reflections on silence, a lady called Amanda narrates her experience, as she regains her ability to hear. Her story reminds me of Gwen, in the short film This is Normal. In it, “Gwen risks her friends, culture, and identity to discover the answer to the question, ‘Is it worth giving up who you’ve been for the ‘maybe’ you could become?‘”.

Hearing—or being able to listen, to pay attention to someone or something—is precious. Thankfully, people are still able to communicate with their loved ones, in spite of the lockdowns. Though, being absorbed in a constant stream of voices can be overwhelming. The voices in the TV; on the phone, on Zoom, or Teams; the flux of voices on one’s timeline, imagined and actual; the voices in music… All these can easily amass into a perpetual clamour.

Occasional retreat into silence is important. This is not the same as doing or listening to nothing. The episode rounds off with the sagacious words and voice of Pico Iyer who reminds us that,

We have to earn silence, then, to work for it: to make it not an absence but a presence; not emptiness but repletion. Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think, and so sink below our selves into a place far deeper than mere thought allows. In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think.

Silence makes room, for us to become aware of—even familiar with—parts of ourselves, yet hidden to us. It makes room for the dear ones in our lives. “In love, we are speechless; in awe, we say, words fail us.”

In her journal, the poet Rita Dove wrote that what she loved about her writing cabin “is the absolute quiet”. Dove emphasises what sort of silence it is she wallows in whilst writing:

Oh, not the dead silence of a studio, a silence so physical that you begin to gasp for air; and it’s not the allegorical silence of an empty apartment, with its creaks and sniffles and traffic a dull roar below, and the neighbors’ muffled treading overhead. No, this is the silence of the world: birds shifting weight on branches, the branches squeaking against other twigs, the deer hooosching through the woods… It’s a silence where you can hear your blood in your chest, if you choose to listen.

If only we’d listen, and bear its weight. Because silence isn’t just some benign companion, one whom we can call up or turn to at a whim. It isn’t merely a subtraction. “Do not confuse it / with any kind of absence”, Adrienne Rich cautions, in Cartographies of Silence. Because silence “is a presence / it has a history [and] a form”. Iyer’s piece echoes this: to him, we ought “to make it not an absence but a presence; not emptiness but repletion.” Not only something we observe but something we do.

TBC.