silence










Oh!










The shadow of the cry is silence. Nothing more silent than the moment before the cry or the moment after the cry. Or, maybe, it is during the cry that it is most silent. Hot emptiness—a pitch beyond what our ears are capable of hearing, it comes in like a gust that takes all other sounds away.

Silence is imagined as something that must be sustained, only existing in long drawn out passages. But, just as the cry can come in bouts, abrupt starts and stops, silence (as its shadow) must also be able to follow the same rhythms.

Life is a cry and everything else is silence. Or, maybe, it’s the other way around… Through a tear, the cry looks a lot like silence.

The interior of the cry is beyond reach. The path to its center is not a simple one. Some claim they’ve made the journey, but believing them is a matter of trust. The interior of the cry is silent.

Metaphysical silence happens inside words themselves. And its intentions are harder to define. Every translator knows the point where one language cannot be translated into another… But now what if, within this silence, you discover a deeper one—a word that does not intend to be translatable. A word that stops itself.1

The image of silence is silent. I see the vacuum and I see the mist. But that is just my fantasy—that is just the habit of my mind—that is just my attempt to puncture the silence.2

  • Forgive me.

Through a tear, silence is an impasse and a network. It is the bridge that connects me and you, across space and time. And it is the chasm of intranslatability between souls here, there, and elsewhere. Our love and anger and anxiety and humility and shame gathering, billowing, dispersing between, around, and within; and the absence of all that weather.3 Silence is the atmosphere of trust and distrust.

Silence is the mark of hysteria. The great hysterics have lost speech, they are aphonic, and at times have lost more than speech: they are pushed to the point of choking, nothings gets through. They are decapitated, their tongues are cut off and what talks isn’t heard because it’s the body that talks, and man doesn’t hear the body.4

The hysteric is silenced by those that control the weather. The hysteric is isolated and sealed away, the chasm is drawn around them, the mist is drawn away. There they are left, still within their own silence, their own weather, left to gather and brim and cycle without end, without release, or at least without ever hearing the warm silence of the other hysterics—the silence of the mist.

Our language reinforces those deliberate, programmed chasms. Moats and oceans and rectangles of glass. We speak most often of the silence of the vacuum, the silence of irony and alienation. Silence is taken to mean the absence of sound, the absence of life, the absence of feeling, enlightened nihilism. But that is one dimensional silence, the silence of singularity. That is the silence of not listening.5

  1. Anne Carson, On The Right to Remain Silent ↩︎

  2. “The pursuit of silence, likewise, is dissimilar from most other pursuits in that it generally begins with a surrender of the chase, the abandonment of efforts to impose our will and vision on the world.” —George Prochnik, In Pursuit of Silence ↩︎

  3. “The plants are very psychic but they can express it only by silence and beauty.” —Sri Aurobindo ↩︎

  4. Hélène Cixous, Castration or Decapitation**? ↩︎

  5. “Human activity has brought my kind to the brink of extinction, but I don’t blame them for it. They didn’t do it maliciously. The just weren’t paying attention.”  —Ted Chiang, The Great Silence / “Listening is an act of community, which takes space, time and, silence. Reading is a means of listening. Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media.”  —Ursula K. Le Guin, Operating Instructions ↩︎