Penny Mawdsley makes some Short Sorties into Silence.
For a hearing test recently, I experienced being in a dark anechoic chamber. The silence between the staggered bursts of sound were eerie and I was glad to get out! Physicists maintain that pure silence is non-existent. The lowest sound level to be observed in the natural world is apparently that of Brownian Motion i.e., that of particles moving through gas or liquid, but humans without auditory problems who listen acutely to apparent silence can pick up a faint thud from the blood pumping in the ear or a quiet hiss from the auditory neurons transmitting sound to the brain.
Religions down the ages have made much of silence and many examples come to mind, but there isn’t space to discuss them here. I’m suddenly reminded however of lines from W.B. Yeats’s Last Poems: ‘Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence’ – lines which inspired Don Cupitt’s The Long-Legged Fly (1987). Cupitt writes:
I take the pond skater as an image of religious thought in an age of thorough going reductionism. It is light, resourceful, fast-moving and well able to survive…Like the pond skater’s world our theology will have to be perfectly horizontal.
In Christianity, silence has been sought and valued, often in the most inhospitable venues, for practising deep spiritual contemplation or the apophatic prayer that is beyond words, thoughts and images. There are of course many similar practices to be found in eastern religions, and meditation unconnected with a higher power is popularly practised in the West today to still and relax body and mind from the pace and stress of modern living.
From the beginning Quakers latched on to silence as an important part of their worship. William Penn said, ‘True silence is the rest of the mind and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.’ Friends have told me how beneficial they find an hour’s corporate silence in a Meeting but that it is something to work at. Unfortunately, I haven’t the patience or a particular inclination to persevere with this practice for more than a few minutes. Here I’ll add that in my view deafness is possibly more of a handicap than blindness for its social invisibility and the risk of lonely isolation – of being out of things. I was surprised to discover that before Harry G. Lang’s 1994 book Silence of the Spheres: The Deaf Experience in the History of Science came out there was a complete absence of literature on the valuable contribution made by deaf men and women to science.
Simon and Garfunkel brought attention to the plight of politically voiceless social outcasts. The lyrics to The Sound of Silence include:
And the sign said, ‘The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence’.
In Walter de la Mare’s poem The Listeners he speaks of the human failure to surmount the mysteries of the universe, and from the Catholic tradition G.M. Hopkins expresses the intensity of deep spiritual silence in the opening lines of The Habit of Perfection. Apparently, for a time he denied himself all sensual delights and even vowed at the time to write no more poetry.
There are myriad ways we use silence productively, from disciplined listening in a counselling situation or in a medical context; when we listen attentively to music; when awed by spectacular scenery, skyscape or viewing the exceptional beauty of a person or artwork; in the contented silence of absorbed activity and the companionable silence of being with another where speech is unnecessary – to name but a few. Silence is then truly ‘golden’!
Silence can be used compassionately to protect a friend from trouble, but unfortunately silence can be used manipulatively too, as when one party in a quarrel seeks (usually unsuccessfully) to use silence to attract attention and prolong the argument, and it’s used often to avoid the likely consequences of supporting a controversial cause. Kahil Gibran points out in The Prophet that ‘There are those amongst you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.’ Fair enough! But sharing the same fear, or just feeling uncomfortable in taciturn company, gives the garrulous bore, insensitive to his or her audience, the perfect excuse for not shutting up!