A Book of Silence (44 page)

The reality is that it is impossible to live in complete silence for very long in the developed world in the twenty-first century without various and extensive negotiations, in part with oneself.
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And particularly if you need to earn a living.

I used to worry about this, or even feel that when people asked me how I manage that I was being accused somehow of cheating. I kept telling myself that if only I were better organised, more disciplined, stronger willed, I would have to speak less but, reading and thinking about silence, I came to realise just how much talk there was inside even the great famous silences. Everything we know about the early Christian hermits, many of whom could not read or write and most of whom chose not to, we know from the conversations they had: the contemporary records of their lives and spiritual adventures are called
The
Sayings
of the Desert Fathers
. Almost all the solitaries – even the anchorites like Julian of Norwich – had servants or disciples who negotiated the outside world for them. Thomas Merton tells us about the deep silence of Gethsemane and then – in a casual aside – mentions that he was ‘helping the abbot with translating for foreign visitors’. And where there is pure silence, it is always serviced by someone else who is not silent. Even Tenzin Palmo, in her three years of complete silence high in Himalayas, had someone who, although he did not speak or break her retreat, nonetheless brought her, by pre-arrangement, necessary survival supplies. I have come to the decision, for both economic and ideological reasons, that I will be my own servant, service my own silence and accept the technical breaches of silence that this entails.

So the questions have really become about how much silence I can create, and how much of the intensity and beauty of Skye I can bring into dailiness, into a continuing life that is both rich and sustainable.

I have inevitably given a good deal of attention to the practical problems of living in silence. The whole business of how I actually manage my life is something that interests people very much. In my experience silent housekeeping requires a high level of commitment and a hefty dose of good administration; the latter is not something that comes very easily to me.

At a very basic level, for example, it is important to eat properly and this requires shopping. However, I live nearly fifteen miles from
any proper food shops. I do go to church every Sunday, but on Sundays the only shop that is open is the supermarket. How should I balance the ecological and neighbourly imperatives to use local shops and local produce against the carbon damage of taking the car out during the week and the loss of silence and stillness that this entails? Now I try to do a big shop once every four weeks – and do without whatever I fail to remember to buy. On Sundays after Mass I buy milk and sometimes fruit and vegetables and I collect free-range eggs from a farm on the way home. I try to think about it – to pay precisely enough attention to eating and house-cleaning and the rest of the administration of my home and life so that it takes up the least possible time. Mostly I do not succeed.

At the moment I am aiming for 80 per cent silence on the grounds that it is good to have a target. Two days a week I unplug the phone and with it the Internet and email; I would really like a third day and am working on that, but it takes a good deal of efficient time management and forethought. I try to limit all social activities to a maximum of six days a month, but it can be tricky, because unexpected things happen and people other than I have needs and desires too. I comfort myself with one of my favourite stories from the desert hermits:

I pray for about three hours a day; for much of this time, when I can, I try to hold that apophatic imageless silence, that complete emptiness, but often I need to ground myself in biblical meditation, in other sorts of imagery and in the discipline of the psalms or other texts. I do it for myself, in truth, but I also pray for others and pray that my silence may be useful somehow in the noisy world.

I earn my keep, I walk, I read, I do my sewing. I think about silence. I am extremely happy in my little house. But although I am happy and hopeful, or perhaps
because
I am happy and hopeful, I still find silence deeply mysterious.

Over and over again, for nearly ten years now, I go back to Janet Batsleer’s letter and wrestle with it: ‘Silence is the place of death, of nothingness … All silence is waiting to be broken.’

Silence is a lack, an absence, a void – silence is the negation of speech, and therefore of meaning and freedom. In the beginning was the word. I go on being certain that this is wrong, but I cannot pin down quite why it is wrong. I have been collecting and experiencing so many strongly positive instances of silence, moments in human experience where there is no speech, no noise, but clearly no sense of loss or deficiency. I don’t mean just my own ‘happy moments’ of silence, but more widely acknowledged cultural moments.

There is the exquisite intimacy between mother and infant at the end of the night feed, when the baby is contented, on the edge of sleep, and you are there with it and with yourself.

There are those awed responses to certain demonstrations of the ‘natural’ world, in which words, and even normal emotional reactions, fail or rather step back from the experience. Some natural phenomena, even though silent in themselves, tend to bring on sensations of peace or contentment, rather than awe and ineffability. For the full effect of the sublime to work there has to be an element of
power
and of something essentially inhumane. Different phenomena do it for different individuals: mountain ranges, meteor showers, large waterfalls and long views from high cliffs are examples of the kind of silencing events I am thinking of here.

There is the positive psychoanalytic silence that seems to allow a new kind of self-knowing and recreation of the wholeness and integrity of an individual.

There is the aftermath of seriously good sex, when you are with the other person without demand or need. In fact, there is a silence around sex, which is quite other than the silence of shame. There is
something about sexual passion that language cannot comprehend or represent and at its best there is no reason to try.

There is the silence of mystical experience, in which the silence becomes the content as well as the context and which is felt to be ineffable, somehow impossible to pull into language.

There is the silent, even ecstatic, euphoria which so frequently precedes psychotic, and indeed epileptic, episodes. I feel that perhaps this is the same silence as mystical silence, but contemporary culture has rigorously separated them.

There is the particular silence in some sorts of reading where a balanced communication is created and the generous-hearted writer opens the silent space for the attentive reader and the two of them work (or perhaps play) at meaning-making together.

There is the silence in listening to music – especially instrumental music (as opposed to the human voice). Music is complicated in this context. If music is an aural language ‘intelligible but not translatable’ as Anthony Storr has called it, or even more crudely a set of
sounds
, in what sense can it be called ‘silent’? This is why I have emphasised
listening
to music, rather than the music itself. A silencing of the heart and mind, and an inability to speak about its meaning, emotional or intellectual, while being very clear that it has an important meaning, is a common response to certain kinds of music, and it is one of the cultural experiences that people come up with frequently if you ask them about positive experiences of silence. Sometimes I think that music mediates between silence and language; sometimes I see it as a particular language of its own – like BSL (the most common hand/eye, as opposed to mouth/ear, language of the British deaf community) or mathematics.

There are the great cosmic forces, on which we depend, although they are silent and indeed invisible: light, organic growth, gravity, electricity, tides, rotation, the movement of the tectonic plates. Air, earth, fire and water.

There is the silence of death.

All these silences have some quite specific things in common: for example, a sense of ‘givenness’ – that this experience comes from
‘outside’ the normal self and cannot be commanded or controlled, though it can be evaded or avoided. At the same time they are experienced as integrative; the whole self is engaged and
known
to itself, in a new way. Even more common and profound is the lack of boundary – people feel they are outside watching themselves, ‘from a great height’, but without any sense of separation or split. A grasp of the difference between Self and Other, between I and Thou becomes unclear – except that there is no loss of integrity. It is usually the reassertion of the ego, of self-consciousness, that brings this state to an end.

Perhaps more relevantly here, there is a very strong sense of ineffability – the experience is not only very hard to speak about, it is actually very hard to recall, remember, to reconstruct emotionally. It can even be somehow ‘content-free’ or meaningless – ‘outwith language’.

I am labouring the point. Put simply, it does seem to me that to describe all these experiences of silence in terms of ‘lack’ or ‘absence’ is inadequate, if not stupid. Concepts of ‘excess’ seem rather more appropriate, if undeveloped in Western psychology. Whether we see silence as the way to access these states – that is, whether we see it as a liminal state or a doorway – or whether we see silence as the autonomous space within which these experiences are happening, we cannot just say this is void or negative; that all silence is waiting – or wanting, needing, yearning – to be broken. Or that it ought to be broken.

Silence does not seem to be a loss or lack of language; it does not even seem to be the opposite of language. I have found it to be a whole world in and of itself, alongside of, woven within language and culture, but independent of it. It comes from a different place altogether.

Silence apparently happens in a different part of the human brain from speaking or hearing or even
thinking
in a rational and orderly manner; a part of the brain separate from where language happens. Neurologically this has in fact been demonstrated, through a fascinating series of experiments scanning individuals while they
are practising meditation, or other forms of self-consciously chosen silence. It isn’t that the brain blanks out or closes down if a person is silent, but that the electrical activity takes place elsewhere – somewhere different.

The experiences of silence are somewhat resistant to the usual brain-activity-measuring devices of modern medical science. I am very aware of the dangers of bad science and I do not want to get trapped within the mind/brain debate, but it does seem to me that neurological research is providing a remarkably good metaphor to look at what might be happening. Within current brain descriptions there is a broad agreement that language is controlled from a part of the brain within the cerebral cortex – predominantly the left persylvian region. This is a language zone,
not
a speaking/hearing zone (language for signers is also located here, not within the visual zone, nor within the right cortex’s spatial organisation areas. Signers, for instance, lose their language capacity after left-brain lesions or strokes exactly as speakers do). However, all non-linguistic vocalisations – laughing, sobbing, moaning, shouting in pain (and bizarrely enough a range of swear words, as is famously recognised in people with Tourette’s syndrome) – are controlled not by the cerebral cortex but by a phylogenetically older set of neural structures in the brain stem and limbic systems, usually described as the ‘subcortical areas’. Suppose one imagines (at least) that it is by silencing the cerebral cortex that we can access this subcortical zone and its powerful emotional content. It is quite literally a different level of consciousness – a silent level.

I wonder if all ‘the inarticulate sighs and groans’ of Protestant seventeenth-and eighteenth-century prayer; the ecstatic swoons and howls of pentecostalist deliverance ministries; glossolalia (speaking in tongues); the superficially psychotic disturbances of mysticism and its related spiritual phenomena; and the euphoric ecstasy of certain meditation practices are all instances of subcortical expression, emerging – as they so frequently do – from silence, by freeing up space in the brain more commonly suppressed by language and linear thought.

Perhaps this is why silence is so often presented as though it were a subcortical brain function: animal, semiotic and emotionally chaotic. This does mirror (perhaps in a rather distorted way) the actual experiences of silence, inasmuch as we can access them. Almost universally, silence practitioners comment on the difficulty of recalling, remembering, focusing on, reporting with any satisfactory accuracy, let alone articulating what it is or was that they felt or experienced. The effort of transferring the content from one part of the brain to another seems to burn away the content – rather like a space ship re-entering the atmosphere. The ineffability of the event is an essential part of the event; as though silence itself were the ‘whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must keep silent’.
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Julia Kristeva, the French psycholinguist, suggests that although language – complex grammared language, which can articulate the self into being and which she calls the
symbolic
– is only accessible through cutting a deal whereby individuals give up certain sorts of freedoms in exchange for what she calls the ‘phallic’ law, there is nonetheless a ‘pre-phallic’ pool of articulation which, while not fully linguistic, is nonetheless capable of emotional expression, which she names the
semiotic
.