Authors: Sara Maitland
But the most important thing that happened to me in Warkton was that I got interested in silence itself. At first I was both perplexed and self-critical about this new ‘hobby’. We have reached a point in
contemporary Western culture where we believe that too much silence is either ‘mad’ (depressive, escapist, weird) or ‘bad’ (selfish, antisocial) and I found I had internalised quite a lot of this way of thinking. Nor were the initial responses from many of my friends very encouraging. One of the problems with contemporary ideas about the complexity of our very identities is that if you say you are feeling neither mad nor bad, but on the contrary happy and well, this need make no real impression on one’s concerned interrogator – everyone knows that you may be ‘in denial’ or ‘repressing your real emotions’, or suffering from ‘false consciousness’. I found my efforts to explain what I was doing frustrating and, inevitably, a breach in the dam of the silence I was trying to build.
In these initial efforts I learned quickly that it is extremely difficult to talk about silence. At one level this is so obvious as to be funny – even writing a book about silence has a certain kind of inbuilt irony. But there are some other difficulties that can be swallowed up in this obviousness and I began to encounter a few of them.
The first problem is that the very word ‘silence’ lacks a clear definition. Everyone thinks they know what it means, but on examination it turns out that there is an enormous range of understanding. Even the dictionary definition is ambiguous. According to the OED, ‘silence’ means
both
an absence of all noises
and
an absence of speech. To fuzz the issue further, my anecdotal research has led me to believe that most people have a personal use of the word that is somewhere in between these two. ‘I was silent all evening’ can mean I was at a noisy party but did not myself speak much; it can mean ‘I stayed at home on my own and watched TV’; or it can mean that ‘it was so calm and peaceful where I was that I did not even hear the wind’. For some people, waves crashing on a seashore are ‘silent’ but the distant humming of a petrol engine is not. These, usually unexamined, differences matter quite a lot when one is trying to build ‘silence’ into one’s own life. For me personally the exact meaning of silence has grown and shifted as I practise it more, but it remains fairly literal: it is words and speech particularly that break up silence. In addition I find human noises less silent than
natural phenomena like wind and water. However, as time passes I increasingly realise there is an interior dimension to silence, a sort of stillness of heart and mind which is not a void but a rich space. What became obvious to me as I thought about this is that for me there is a chasm of difference between qualities like quietness or peace and silence itself. (Although, of course, it is sometimes possible, and lovely when it happens, to have them all at once.) In my personal vocabulary the difference is similar to the one between happiness and joy.
Additionally many people like John Cage, the radical composer, believe there is no such thing as real physical silence:
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot … Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
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(I do think that Cage has been misunderstood. He was not really interested in silence, because he did not believe it existed. He was interested in forcing situations, removing ‘conventional’ sounds – like music – so that people would listen properly and become aware that there was no silence.)
A different sort of ambiguity lies in what, using the radio as an analogy, I have come to call the transmitter/receptor problem. The result – silence – is identical whether you turn off the radio in your house or the broadcasting company stops transmitting. Even if both transmitter and receptor are working, static (foul-ups en route between the two) can render the communication meaningless: the speaker has been in effect silenced. If I don’t speak, there is nothing for you to hear; but if you are deaf then I can speak (orally) as loud as I want and you still won’t hear. We use the same word ‘silence’ to describe all three of these forms of interference. If I cut your tongue out you are silenced (at the transmission point); if I throw you into a dungeon you may shout and yell, but you are still silenced (no one
hears you, the reception is not available); if I make your speaking worthless, ‘inaudible’, meaningless, if I create static or interference, as it were, around your speech, you are also silenced. (This is very effective and useful for your average oppressor: calling someone ‘mad’, for example, means they can say what they like but no one will hear – this was the sort of silencing that the Soviet Union went in for.) In terms of shaping a silent life this image raises some interesting questions – is the silence in the hearing or the speaking? If I keep a journal, say, with no intention of ‘transmitting’ its content to anyone ever, is that a more silent activity than writing this book in the hope that you will read it and hear what I have to say? Is writing, or even reading, which use language but not noise, ‘silent’ in any case?
But most curious of all, my attempts to describe my experiences of silence, even to people who wanted to hear because they love me, forced me to feel that silence itself resists all attempts to talk about it, to try to theorise, explain or even describe it. This is not, I think, because silence is ‘without meaning’. It is ‘outwith language’. ‘Outwith’ is a wonderful Scottish word for which standard English appears to have no exact equivalent – outwith means ‘outside of’, ‘not within the circumference of something else’. ‘Without’ is necessarily negative and suggests that something is lacking.
*
I began to sense that all our contemporary thinking about silence sees it as an absence or a lack of speech or sound – a totally negative condition. But I was not experiencing it like that. In the growth of my garden, in my appreciation of time and the natural world, in the way I was praying, in my new sense of well-being and simple joy – all of which grew clearer the more silent I was – I did not see lack or absence, but a positive presence. Silence may be outside, or beyond the limits of, descriptive or narrative language but that does not necessarily mean that silence is
lacking
anything. Perhaps it is a real, separate, actual thing, an ontological category of its own: not a
lack
of language but other than, different from, language; not an
absence
of sound but the presence of something which is not sound.
Nonetheless the idea that silence is an absence or lack is the commonly held position in contemporary life and especially – this is why it was painful – among the radical intellectual milieu in which I had for so long lived and flourished.
Towards the end of the 1990s my friend Janet Batsleer, with whom I was discussing all this at great length, sent me a (deliberately) provocative letter:
Silence is the place of death, of nothingness. In fact there is no silence without speech. There is no silence without the act of silencing, some one having been shut up, put bang to rights, gagged, told to hold their tongue, had their tongue cut out, had the cat get their tongue, lost their voice. Silence is oppression and speech, language, spoken or written, is freedom.
Paolo Freire in his great founding text
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
– founding for so much work in the last forty years – wrote that silence was the great theme of a pedagogy of liberation. That is why literacy preoccupied him and why the paradoxical capacities of the talk of the powerful to silence the ‘coming to voice’ of the oppressed fascinated him. Call it silence on the one hand; call it false consciousness, too much chatter next. That silence comes before speech and literacy is a trivial point. After all the silence of the oppressed can only be recognised in and through a language of freedom.That silence is a place of non-being, a place of control, from which all our yearning is to escape. All the social movements of oppressed people in the second part of the twentieth century have claimed ‘coming to language’ and ‘coming to voice’ as necessary to their politics… In the beginning was the Word. … Silence is oppression. It is ‘the word’ that is the beginning of freedom.
All silence is waiting to be broken.
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Janet and I have argued theoretically for years; she has not only a shining intelligence, but also an enormously wide range of reference and an enduring, courageous commitment to justice and truth. On the whole, when we argue, I have the best jokes but she has the last laugh. She is nearly always right. But this time I was sure along my pulses that she was wrong, and I decided that I wanted to prove it.
People do not really change their whole lifestyle because their friends write them provocative letters. Janet’s letter clarified and gave a shape to something that had been already growing in me. I was in Warkton for nearly eight years writing my books, pottering about my garden and my prayers, finding in an increasing amount of silence both happiness and fascination. But I was coming to realise that I wanted
more
– not just a greater quantity of silence, but also a more intense and focused experience of it.
The year 2000 was pivotal for me. It was the millennium, of course, but it was also the year I turned fifty, and the year my son finished school and left home. I was free. I could do anything I wanted. What I had learned I wanted was to forge a life with silence at the very centre of it. With this knowledge it also became clear that for me this could not happen in a sweet little West Midlands village. Oddly enough village life, although peaceful and often tranquil, is one of the least silent ways of living. You can be alone in the wild and invisible in a city; in a village or small country town you are known and seen and involved. I never seriously considered the city version of silence, although I deeply admire those who can do it. My ideas about silence had a landscape as well as an interior dimension. This is probably merely an aesthetic choice, but I was free to make that choice, and what called to me was space, wide wild space, neither spectacular mountains nor sheltered woods and fields. For me the terrain of silence is what I have since come to call the Huge Nothing of the high moorlands.
I wanted to live there. I wanted to live there in silence.
People asked me
why
. People still ask me why. Why leave the south where you have been happy for so long, where your friends and your
children and your work all are, where your life is established? You are going too far; seemly ladylike retirement for rural peace and quiet, the absence of the din and bustle of the city, makes sense, but why go to such extremes? Sometimes I would just shrug my shoulders and joke, ‘It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it,’ or, ‘Can you go too far in the right direction?’ Or say – Like Mallory
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– ‘Because it’s there.’ But in honesty I was serious. I was not very interested in ‘peace and quiet’ or in the
absence
of anything. I was interested in silence; in response to Janet Batsleer’s letter, which had struck a deep chord in me, I wanted not absence or lack of sound, but to explore the positive power of silence; I wanted the fullness of the experience.
I was much encouraged by other individuals who had sought out extreme solitude. I found myself in profound sympathy, for instance, with Henry Thoreau, the Transcendentalist radical philosopher. He explained his motivation for going to live alone by Walden Pond thus:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
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A century later Richard Byrd, a US admiral and polar explorer, said something very similar about his decision to spend a winter alone in the Antarctic:
I wanted to go for experience sake: one man’s desire to know that kind of experience to the full, to be by himself for a while and to taste the peace and quiet and solitude long enough to find out how good they really are … Must you go off and bury yourself in the middle of polar cold and darkness just to be alone? A stranger walking down 5th Avenue can be just as lonely as a traveller wandering in the desert? All of which I grant, but with the contention that no man can hope to be completely free who lingers within reach of familiar habits and urgencies. I wanted something more than just privacy in the geographical sense. I should be able to live exactly as I chose, obedient to no necessities but those imposed by wind and night and cold, and to no man’s laws but my own.
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The idea that extreme lifestyles deliver extreme experiences, and that these are desirable, is very ancient. The Greek gods offered the hero Achilles the choice between a long and contented life and a short blaze of glory, and he chose the latter. The desert hermits of the fourth century
CE
told a number of stories about the gains of going too far: