A Book of Silence (45 page)

Psychoanalysis offers to help people find material that, because of assorted traumas, got ‘stuck’ in the semiotic, and bring it into the conscious and articulate sphere of the symbolic. But for me personally what I experience is not a struggle to emerge from the semiotic into the fully symbolic, but the reverse: I find it difficult to move down and access that range of expression, to be more permeable, available to whatever there is ‘down’ or ‘out’ there. It seems to me that silence offers those people who want it a return journey into the semiotic, the seedbed of the self. And some of what we find there is both rich and exciting.

In my search for silence I have become increasingly interested in destabilising my own autonomous independent self, losing ego rather than establishing it in logical linear language. This is not a very ‘modern’ project; modernity has made enormous sacrifices for
rational order and for individual logical self-expression. But I am certain that our cultural repudiation of silence and our determination to define it as nothing more than a lack or absence is a sacrifice too far.

But … but here I am, sitting on my doorstep in the sunshine, looking out at my huge nothing, delighted by a passing hen harrier, smug about my Completion Certificate and full of hope. Thoreau wrote (in
Walden
) about how I am feeling:

People talk about ‘sinking’ into the ‘depths’ of silence. It is a good metaphor in lots of ways; there is profundity in silence. Silence absorbs me and the further in I go the more I am pressurised by it. In silence, as in deep waters, you are free from gravity. In his book
The Silent World
Jacques Cousteau describes the almost ecstatic freedom of the very first aqualung dive:

And, like the deep water, you can drown in silence. The peril is always there.

It is a good image, but at present I favour a different one altogether. Cousteau also describes later in his book one way of coming up from the depths of the seabed: you strip off all your equipment, leaving your heavy weights and breathing equipment at the bottom and the ascent is:

Silence is soaring into a new lighter atmosphere, weightless and free, and when it works a stream of bubbles, bubbles of joy, float up around you and rise ahead of you towards some bright surface you cannot yet see clearly.

I am beginning to flourish in this new atmosphere. This summer I saw something new – something I did not even know happened so I was not looking for it; in fact, it took me a little while to work out what I was seeing. The house martins came back all the way from Africa to their old nests. For generations they have nested in their elegant closed mud nests stuck on the old cracked stone walls under the broken eaves. But while they were away last winter I had restored the roof, straightened the walls and destroyed their homes. I am not sure where, or even if, they did nest instead. But all summer they came, swooping on the wind, graceful, skilful, skimming up and under the new wide eves, one by one. Each in turn, they were placing tiny specks of mud and spittle on to the new roughcast wall. By the end of the summer they had cemented a small shelf into place for next year’s nests. Sometimes there were thirty of them busy at this work. I watched them for hours, yet I never saw them so much as graze wings with each other. I feel very close to them. I deeply hope they will be back next summer and raising their broods here.

I think, at this present, it is the silence I want most. I want silence to be actual and real and structured into my daily life: I do not want to
lose a crudely real, embodied definition of ‘silence’. I don’t want to turn it into a philosophical or spiritual abstract or ‘state of mind’ – and that tends to happen very easily. Indeed, it tends to happen as soon as you start writing about it! Max Picard, for example, writes with a lyrical beauty about silence.

But although it is lovely, it does not actually mean very much. It is more or less impossible to imagine getting up in the morning and
doing
Picard’s silence: it lacks the tough reality of either Kafka at his desk, or de Foucault in his desert.

I know now that when I started this adventure I underestimated the power of silence itself. If, and I think it is true, silence really does produce the effects I was investigating in Skye and have been working with ever since, especially the collapse of time and space – those boundary confusions – that is not going to be too good for prose fiction, which utterly depends on specific times and place. Plot (the idea that things happen in an orderly pulse of cause and effect) just doesn’t work any more. Narrative doesn’t drive anything forward in the silent vacuum. Perhaps, although silence has no narrative, it does have a rhythm. That would be an interesting idea because it would align silence with
music
.

How nearly could I say the same thing about silence? In all my researches into silence I have never encountered a silent heaven, even from those mystics who used silence most directly as a way of achieving heaven. Apart from the horrified ‘little hour’ of silence and the occasional casting down of golden crowns, what the heavenly hosts do in a Christian heaven is sing. They sing; they make music. Perhaps a writer’s job is finally co-operative, creating the words for that eternal choir, so that the endless song of ‘Holy, holy, holy’ never becomes boring.

So yes, I want to work on that. I want to work on seeing if it might be possible to give ‘ineffability’ a good shaking up and invite it to reveal its secrets. I want to encode silence, so that out there in all that noise, people can access and love it. I am not sure that this is possible, but it seems worth a try.

But actually I just want to do it. I want to sit in the sunshine on my doorstep and listen to the silence. In the morning I want to stare at the sheep – I am getting fonder and fonder of the sheep around here. They seem rather more professional than the fat complacent lowland sheep. I watch them and note various things about them. They like to walk neatly along the paths. The ewes around the cottage seem busy and gossipy, and go about in little gangs. Today a small group of five or six came almost trotting past the house while I was sitting there. They all had ridiculous punk hairstyles: a splendid tuft of neon turquoise above their foreheads. (This is in fact a very simple way of marking the sheep you have treated in some way and distinguishing them from the ones you haven’t yet dosed or wormed or whatever you have done to them.) They had surprisingly neat white coats and charming black faces with neat curled horns. But what really struck me were their elegant legs – some were all black and some had black and white stripes like Pippy Longstocking’s leggings. Hard businesslike legs and sharp elegant little feet, like old ladies who have gone plump in their bodies but still have smart legs and ankles for which high-heeled court shoes seem designed. I want time to notice sheep’s feet.

I want to say my prayers and write some new sorts of stories and
make a garden and read some books and walk up the hill behind the house so that I can see the sea when the weather is clear. And just sit. Yesterday evening I saw my owl, though who can say ‘mine’ to a barn owl who happens to live in a ruin you happen to own? This spring when the local ‘owl man’ came to ring the fledgling owlets, four of them, so white and fluffy and sweet, he said they were the ‘most forward brood in the county’ this year, and I surprised myself with a surge of maternal pride.

In fact, there are a pair of barn owls, who live in an owl box in the old bier just up the hill from the house, but I tend to think of them in the singular because I have never seen more than one at a time, either suddenly, a white, fast-moving shape in the car headlights, or as a darker shadow across the dark night sky. So I do not really see my owl very often and then usually fleetingly: the ideal silent neighbour. Barn owls are genuinely more silent than tawny owls, who make the traditional ‘twit-twoo’ sound. However, my bird book says that barn owls are not only nocturnal but also ‘crepuscular’ – a fabulous new word for me, another gift from my owl; it means, ‘of, or associated with, the twilight’ – and sometimes they hunt at dusk, and so it was yesterday.

The wind tends to drop at sundown and the colour fades out of the rough grass, and there is often a moment of almost perfect stillness. Yesterday, just then I came round the corner of the walled garden and there she was, perched on the dyke. She has feathered legs, like snug plus-fours; her heart-shaped face and wide black eyes really did look wise. She took off at once, of course, immensely strong and smooth, with her deep owl wing beats, stiffer than the flop of other owls, and her talons hanging down beneath her with the claws bunched neatly; powerful, silent, smooth across the hillside, then she floated behind the broken gable of the bier and was gone. I want to get to know her comings and goings.

I want to watch for young foxes, for the occasional deer, for the first swallow, for the moment when the grass turns from green to gold. I want to sit out at night and count all the 4,500 visible stars.

I want to have a long long time to do all this, so that the silence
has a chance to work on me and in me. And then I do not really know what will happen next.

Sometimes I think that silence is like a Black Hole: in a Black Hole the gravitational force is so great that nothing, not even light, can escape outwards. Anything that comes within the range of that force is irreversibly attracted, sucked in, compressed, squeezed, compacted until it collapses under the concentration of its own mass. Time itself slows down. As if in slow motion, once the process has begun, any object – even a human ego – will be stretched, warped, twisted and contracted as it is drawn towards the centre, the singularity, and thence – the physicists are not quite sure what happens next either – perhaps into an alternative universe beyond the laws of physics and psyche, into a new universe, into God.

This is death, of course; but it can also be birth, depending on the position of the observer. Whatever there is the other side of the singularity may be watching with excitement the slow transformation, understanding the breakdown of all the rules, waiting with a fierce joy to welcome the hermit into the infinite. I want to find out, and I know that for me silence is the only way to do it.

I am finding it hard to finish this book, because I don’t feel that I am at the end of anything. Back in Warkton, at the very beginning, I tried to design a garden that would open out into infinity; that would forgo the satisfaction of closure, in the hope of finding the
jouissance
of the unresolved, the open-ended. Now I am trying to design a whole life that will do that. For me silence is both the instrument and content of that life. I don’t feel worried about falling over the edge of a bottomless chasm, but rather I have a sense of moving up a level, into some finer cleaner air.

It is risky, I have always known it would be risky, and I was raised in a risk-averse culture. I hope I do not underestimate the risk. But I am willing to face it.

Terror and risk walk hand in hand with beauty. There is terror, there is beauty and there is nothing else.

And the rest, I hope, is silence.