Whenever I get the infrequent opportunity to walk the wild deserted Cape Cod outer Atlantic beach in the early morning, I exult in the sea’s silent roar. It extinguishes the cacophonous dreck that fills the air of everyday life in a society whose depravity accelerates faster than shore birds can fly.
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This morning, because there was a little rain and rough surf the beach was deserted except for the usual assortment of birds. So we sauntered the long strand for an hour until we finally encountered a person as the sun flashed from behind the clouds. Inside the cocoon of the crashing waves and the whistling of the wind, with the clouds blowing fast, the seals just voiceless heads bobbing in the shallow water, and the birds hushed by the waves’ wild roar, a strange silence settled over me. I felt cloistered in a place of peace, similar to William Butler Yeats’ sentiment in his poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning . . . .”
Silence. Without it, we are bereft of meaningful words and end up talking repetitive gibberish, small talk. There are many people who can’t shut up; their jabbering is a disease. Tranquilized with trivia, they lose their ability to communicate.
Silence is a word gravid with multiple meanings: for many a threat; for others a nostalgic evocation of a time rendered obsolete by technology; for others still a sentence to boredom; and for some, devotees of the ancient arts of reading, writing, and contemplation, a word of profound, even sacred importance. As the ancient Greeks knew so well, musing is the music of the artist’s heart.
Writing is at first, like an imaginary friend, a silent companion. Conceived by its author in silence, it asks to be received in the same spirit. And silence – contrary to the popular notion that it, like nothing, is nothing, a void, a lack of something – is the receptive spirit that encompasses all the meanings words can give. That silence is golden is an aphorism we have all heard but rarely heed. Nevertheless, it is out of that great unknown that words are born; great writing is the child of silence.
So too reading should be a venture into that unknown, an adventure upon which one embarks with eyes and ears wide open and the constant chatter of one’s private “thoughts” silenced.
But silence, like so much else in today’s world, including human beings, is on the endangered-species list . Another rare bird of flamboyant plumage and very like a black swan – “Rara avis in terris nigroque similima cyno” in Juvenal’s words – is slowly disappearing from our midst. The poison of noise is killing it.
And out of this lack of silence comes the silence of lack, the inability to use words to communicate meaningfully. As sung so wonderfully by Simon and Garfunkel in The Sounds of Silence:
And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
Ironically, as books have become more plentiful, silence has become scarcer. Most books now arrive with the clatter and bombast of the same advertising hype used to sell laxatives and pain-killing drugs. And they are received in the same spirit, often producing similar results. These loud arrivals often make the so-called best seller lists (as if number seven on that list could be the “best” seller along with number one), a curious place where quality is measured by quantity and the noise of publicity pays off handsomely. Many of these books are what D. H. Lawrence called “printed toys,” loud little devices that spin and spin and always seem to end up where they started – nowhere.
When I speak of noise I am not primarily speaking of the din we associate with city life: cars, trucks, sirens, etc. Such noise, alas, is heard even in small towns where birdsong often disappears behind the grinding of gears. That kind of noise is hard to completely avoid and it is in any case the least disruptive of the silence I have in mind. There is another kind of noise that is self-imposed, and whose purpose, consciously or not, is to make sure one is not “caught” by silence. That, as those who flee from silence know, can be dangerous to one’s reigning assumptions about self and the world. They prefer the comfort of noise because it silences the imagination, and imagination, as William Blake has told us, is the world of eternity, and to the eyes of the person of imagination, nature is imagination itself. It is only through the eyes of imagination that one can slip away and hope to break loose from the mind-forg’d manacles of convention and propaganda that society places on us all from birth.
Just this morning, very early, I read an essay that brought this home to me once again. In “Psychic Treason,” Curtis White begins by telling us that he is living in a world that no longer exists, a sentiment that should ring true for most people in this chaos of everything world. He tells us how his world changed:
I once lived in a vital world whose only limit was no-limit, ‘free frame of reference,’ as the Haight Street Diggers thought. It was a world of beatniks, Buddhists, hippies, free-jazz poets, pacifists, wandering guitar soloists, postmodern fabulists, soulful anarchists, and collaborative maunderers. It was also a world of close readers, deconstructors, and afficionados of the beautiful, all performing in the heady atmosphere of refusal, a general strike of the Imagination.
This world and its open assumptions about possibility slowly dissipated over a thirty-year period. As the late Sly Stone put it, ‘The possibility of possibility was leaking out.’ It seemed quite dead by the millennium, our collective mind aspirated into glass pipettes by techno-oligarchs and assorted others who bore us no love. We were left with Data World, the Great American Smartphone Society. We have been priced out of cities, so there are no avenues to barricade, no ‘scenes’ where artists and musicians can hang out, and our universities are in ruin, occupied by ‘ indentured students,’ in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s telling phrase, studying only what the boss wants. And what the boss wants has nothing to do with poets. Even at Canterbury’s Christ Church University, the destination for Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, poetry is ‘no longer viable in the current climate.’
White’s world is not the world everyone once inhabited, as others can attest. Everyone’s world of yesterday is somewhat different, but each contains nostalgic images that not just draw us back but forward – an imaginative nostalgia for a future that sustains the heart, even when the past one remembers never existed in pure form. White writes:
Happily, it will always be possible to create stories that liberate us from the stories of our masters. This is what William Blake called for when he wrote in Jerusalem (1815), ‘I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.’
. . . . Blake’s quote is “heavy,” as hippies used to say, because it asks, as Tolstoy put it, “What is to be done?” The answer to that question might simply be “tell better stories.” Live through better stories. Live through stories that will be understood in an as yet unimagined world, just past the next bend in the river, where the Imagination lives in all its inherited riches. So, let us be Nietzschean, all too Nietzschean, without fear or giddiness, and seek liberation for ourselves and others.
We all know people who go from morning till night, day in and day out without ever pausing to enter the sounds of silence. One doesn’t have to look for them; technology has made them the rule. They move like techno-ghosts up and down the lanes and byways, seashells stuck in their ears (“And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind,” Ray Bradbury writes in Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953) or rectangular vibrators sticking out of their back pockets, proud symbols of the manacles that hold them captive to their minds’ bedlam. They drift through their lives in the cocoon of technological noise They are informed, with it, tuned in – to everything but the life of their own souls. The real world passes them by. Always ready to photograph something that they do not see, they ignore that rare bird of flamboyant plumage that sits on their heads, singing plaintively. They may even read books, those candy-colored non-book books filled with millions of meaningless words, distracting little noises that allow them to avoid the silence that might force then to confront self-knowledge that is the stuff of great books, true art.
For the art of writing implies the art of reading. The writer creates and the reader recreates; both demand silence, the cessation of all noise that serves to prevent true thought. The machines must be turned off. “Our inventions,” Thoreau noted, “are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.”
It is not hard to turn a switch or pull a plug; the hard part is wanting to. Harder still, but equally necessary, is the quieting of the mind, the silencing of the incessant internal chatterboxes that accompany us everywhere and prevent us from experiencing the world.
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For in the end one cannot hear or see the world or the penetrating truths of great writing unless, like the artists who create in silence, we turn off the noise of the social world and enter the silence. Only then, will one’s imaginary silent companion begin to sing.
In her bittersweet memoir A Freewheelin’ Time, Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s girlfriend in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, echoes Curtis White’s point about how the past is as much about the imagination and the future as the past. Her book is equally about the plight of young women in those days and the vibrancy of the Village’s creative community as about her relationship with Dylan. Writing in the early 2000s before her untimely death, she notes:
Greenwich Village bohemia exists no more. It was the public square of the twentieth century for the outsiders, the mad ones, and the misfits. Today all that remains are the posters, fliers, and signs preserved on the walls as a reminder of that bygone era when rents were cheap and New York replaced Paris as the destination for the creative crowd.
Those who feel they are not part of the mainstream are always somewhere, however. Greenwich Village is a calling. Though it is now priced out of its physical space, as a state of mind, it will never be out of bounds. . . . The creative spirit finds a way.
That way is found whenever and wherever one enters the cocoon of silence to hear the rare bird of flamboyant plumage sing. It is then we can live through better stories as we tell them.
Reprinted with the author’s permission.
