In Pursuit of Silence

by George Prochnik

  In one of the earliest of such gardens, the fourteenth-century Moss Temple outside Kyoto, the Zen monk Musō Soseki gathered fifty large stones from an ancient necropolis to fashion a three-tiered dry waterfall. Although the only motion in this garden came from the shifting fall of sunlight through the trees, visitors who contemplated the rockfall described its almost total silence being interrupted periodically by the thunder of an imagined waterfall. These nearly plantless gardens, with their raked gravel swirls and irregularly positioned stones, are almost entirely creations of the viewer’s mind. In reference to another such garden in Kyoto, the philosopher Eliot Deutsch describes how the garden creates a “multiplicity of perspectives in potentia.” It stimulates meditation, but the meditation it occasions is not on the garden but on the deep stillness of being as such. This is a manifestation of yūgen, a notion akin to silence that Zeami, a fourteenth-century master of Japanese Noh theater, placed at the pinnacle of all human endeavors. The silence of yūgen connects to the aspiration for complete expression of being—pure presence.

  From the Zen garden, we walked to a covered portico at the bottom of a winding path that led up to the teahouse. “This,” Harmon said, “is the first point in the staging ground of the tea ceremony—a ceremony that could sometimes last for eight hours.” She led me to a bench that gave a view uphill toward the teahouse. Sen Rikyu, Japan’s preeminent tea master, who lived in the sixteenth century, went further than anyone in marrying the tea ceremony with ideas taken from Zen Buddhism, Harmon observed. He outlined an ideal for the architecture of teahouses based on rustic simplicity, restraint, and silence. “In Rikyu’s era,” Harmon said, “the Shogun finally lost control. People got more rights. Rikyu tried to show that you could find peace in a bowl of tea. The Samurai listened, and put away their swords for the chrysanthemum and the pen.”

  I liked the sound of it, but why had they listened?

  “You are in the window seat,” she went on. “This seat is for the guest who will excuse himself next to make the passage to the teahouse. It shows who is first, not who is higher in rank. Guests waiting on this bench would be silent, except to apologize at the moment of departure for going before the others.”

  We left the teahouse and started up the trail of broken stones, the “dewy path,” to a spot where Harmon pointed out a low building to one side of the teahouse. “That’s the changing arbor. The Samurai put aside their long swords in the arbor because they couldn’t fit through the narrow crawl space of the teahouse entrance. This was intentional on Rikyu’s part. Not a single blade of grass or iris leaf was allowed inside either because their shapes were reminiscent of the sword. Inside the teahouse, there was no differentiation among guests in gender or rank. No rich or poor. The only thing we carry into the tea ceremony is the fan, which represents peace, meaning: ‘I’ve willingly set aside war and all my worries outside the teahouse.’”

  We continued our ascent. The uneven pattern of the stones, Harmon said, forced guests to think about their passage from the crowded external world to a state of pastoral seclusion. The second guest would wait to leave the portico until the first guest was visible moving from the changing arbor to the teahouse. With each step, there was a peeling away of the outside world, an emptying and a clarifying. “I studied in Japan for six years,” Harmon said, “and when I walked on the stepping-stones to the teahouse my teacher kept saying, ‘There is something not right in how you walk!’ He finally called his wife who trussed me up so tightly in a kimono that I could barely move—and then I understood the placement of the stones.”

  I asked her how she’d become involved with Japanese gardens. It was a long, winding path of its own, beginning in her childhood on her grandmother’s Texas ranch that bordered the property of a family of Japanese farmers. At the age of seventeen, Harmon moved to New York City and became friends with a Japanese woman who introduced her to the world of Japanese language and thought. In the midst of many other pursuits, Harmon managed to complete a medical degree and become head of an endoscopy unit at St. Joseph Hospital in Houston. “And then one day,” Harmon told me, “I just said to myself, ‘I’ve done my last colonoscopy! I have to do something new.’”

  As we entered the teahouse, Harmon remarked that once inside, every aspect of the experience was designed to harmonize with every other aspect. “Rikyu’s idea,” she said, “was that if we have harmony, respect, and purity, then tranquillity will surely follow.”

  She pointed out the different elements that made up the plain structure of the house—the long “sleeve gate” echoing the sleeves of a kimono, the tatami-mat seating area looking over the garden where the tea ceremony is performed. “Throughout the tea,” she said, “there is no conversation. There might be moments of apology, but the well-trained guest knows when to perform the different actions without the host having to say anything. Everyone is seated on the floor. They are breathing in synchrony, so that even breath is not really heard. There’s the whisper of the silk kimono on the mats as you move forward and back with the bowl of tea. And there are other small sounds. First, when the pot is on the coals, the hiss of the water. Then, as the kettle cools, the hiss stops, the guest takes a bamboo ladle for the water, making a clacking sound intentionally to accentuate the silence, to signal the depth of the solitude. There’s the sound of the pouring water, and of sipping from the lip of the bowl.”

  Rikyu’s era has been described by the historian Yuriko Saito as the flowering of an aesthetic of imperfection. Everything from the worn stepping-stones to the irregular water basins and tea utensils (Rikyu left detailed instructions as to how a host should handle a badly cracked tea bowl) was meant to emphasize usage and contingency. They tell stories without speaking. Part of what’s being celebrated is the notion of transience itself. Yoshida Kenkō, a fourteenth-century Buddhist monk who inspired much of the aesthetic in which Rikyu’s tea ceremony is grounded, wrote: “If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” The chipped, worn implements of Rikyu’s tea ceremony nurture, in Saito’s words, the submission of one’s ego to the natural process of change and mortality. Similarly, we might say that the intent quiet of the tea ceremony serves to spotlight individual sounds that arise from silence, then dissolve back into it.

  At the end of the ceremony, Harmon said, the guests make a last bow to the single chrysanthemum blossom that gave its beauty for this one day. “They leave one by one, and will never speak of their experience with each other or anyone else. And if they are ever invited back to this teahouse, they will never be invited with the same group. Throughout the hours of the ceremony, the guests have watched the movement of sunlight and shadows through the screen. When we come out, the changed light shows us a different garden.”

  Rikyu seduced the Samurai to cast aside their swords for an experience of silence. The Samurai knew that they would get out of the tea ceremony exactly as much sensory revelation as they could make room for by quieting themselves. As Deutsch wrote, though one might initially be overpowered by a beautiful Zen garden, particularly when the experience of it takes the form of “a mere stepping away from the humdrum chaos of one’s ordinary being and routine,” one must learn to “become as the art-work itself is—in truth of being.” Master Bash?, a seventeenth-century poet, described the practice of listening to the world as a way of coming to identify with it: “when we observe calmly we discover that all things have their fulfillment,” he wrote. Thus, we are enjoined to “learn from a pine things about a pine, and from a bamboo things about a bamboo.” In so doing, we allow a spontaneous, natural harmony to emerge—the same as the one evoked between guests at a tea ceremony.

  In an essay written in 1929, a Western scholar of Oriental studies named A. L. Sadler characterized Chanoyu, the way of tea, as “an institution that made simplicity and restraint fashiona
ble and at the same time kept itself accessible to all classes, providing a ground on which all could meet on terms of equality, thus combining the advantages of a Mohammadean Mosque and a cricket field, and, some may feel inclined to add, also those of a Freemasons’ Lodge and a Quaker Meeting-House.”

  As we left, we came upon Harmon’s friend in a small building at the back of the garden eating quietly from an enormous bowl of trail mix. Harmon smiled at me. And then it was time to leave the garden.

  A WORLD OF SILENCE

  I came back to New York in a buoyant mood—filled with admiration for the way that Rikyu had managed to carve out a space in which to quiet all visitors, even the Samurai. Yet I knew that my experience in the garden amounted to the study of a historical era that had passed. That didn’t make it irrelevant. We ought to build more Zen gardens. But these enchanted oases won’t recapture the devout attention they attracted in Japan some four hundred years ago. Harmon herself made the point to me that the only real way to appreciate a Japanese garden is in solitude. But the mandate of the Portland Japanese Garden is to be a public garden first, and only then a Japanese garden. Even in Japan, she added, there are almost no gardens left that limit the number of people who are admitted at any one time.

  But what, then, can we do now? This much I felt I had learned from the Zen garden: if we want more silence—not just in our individual hearts but also in the public sphere—we have to build spaces that harbor silence just as we create structures to facilitate other pursuits. However otherworldly some of its associations might be, silence needs a home in the here and now. One might even say that our lack of silence today reflects a failure in architecture. The great American architect Louis Kahn believed that buildings could foster empathy, and the creation of spaces enfolding silence was at the center of his thinking. I wondered how one might begin to fashion such a space today. And then I had the fortune to meet Hansel Bauman.

  DEAF SPACE

  “I’ve resigned myself to the fact that this is going to be an adventure, and nobody knows what’s going to happen.” Hansel Bauman flicked open his cell phone to check the time. “We’re running late—of course.” He glanced up at the high-pitched Gothic Revival structure of Chapel Hall. “Boy, those Victorians knew what they were doing. Look at the way light passes through those long windows from one side of the building to the other. That transparency … inclusiveness to the whole campus—panes of glass on the south side half the size of those on the north—all the subtle connections they make to where the structure is relative to the sun … They really listened—heard the silence.” He flicked open his cell phone again. “I hope the community members will be sympathetic.”

  Bauman and I were standing in a parking lot at Gallaudet University, the foremost college for the Deaf in the world, awaiting the arrival of a group of his students for a daylong collaborative project with various groups from Washington, D.C.’s, troubled Fifth Ward. This event was one of the first to bring Gallaudet’s students together with residents of the surrounding neighborhood. It was an icebreaker for a larger, more ambitious under taking whereby the campus renovation that Bauman is spear heading will include the creation of a pedestrian thoroughfare (dubbed the “Sixth Street Corridor”) linking the two communities. This is not just a typical campus upgrade linked to a vague gesture of community outreach. The redesign is being conceived as the launchpad for Deaf Architecture, which combines the perceptual experience of the Deaf with design. The Sixth Street Corridor plan is intended to show that the Deaf understanding of physical space has something vital to offer the larger world. What happens to your visual understanding of space if you look at it while receiving little or no auditory information? How might architecture designed to facilitate silent communication enlarge our relationship to the world whether or not we can hear? What would a building created for silence—a dynamic, sociable silence—look like?

  Bauman is bright-eyed and fine-boned with short-cropped white hair. When his retro black glasses are pushed back on his head he resembles a Nordic ski instructor. Bauman has been given a signed nickname by his students that involves pinching the thumb and forefinger together, then sliding them down the left side of the chest. It means, “He’s so cute you just want to put him in your pocket.”

  Deaf Architecture, which was first articulated in a series of workshops with Deaf faculty and students at Gallaudet, is in its infancy. Bauman, who is himself hearing, is gambling a great deal on the hope that the Gallaudet Deaf Space project can have lasting effects, but, as he told me in his gentle California twang, “Architecture is all I’ve ever known, and the unknown is a big part of that.” When he was a small child, Bauman’s mother deeded him their backyard. On Sundays, the two of them would go off to construction sites and steal scrap wood that he would then cobble into houses, which he would name after semi-mythical beasts and sell to his mother’s friends. His last project before coming to Gallaudet was a building at Oakridge to house a proton accelerator. The scientists, he said, “definitely have their own language,” and helped acclimate him to “working in cultures.” If one had to sum up his diverse efforts, he told me, it would be about trying to humanize environments built for populations who’ve never been heard when it comes to designing their space. “A lot of Gallaudet was built by people who were incapable of hearing the Deaf,” he told me.

  Throughout the months I spent thinking about silence, I’d been more and more drawn to spend time with the Deaf. (The word is capitalized in recognition of the standing of the Deaf community as a distinct cultural group with its own language, traditions, and values.) I felt that the Deaf experience spanned the antipodes of my subject. On the one hand deafness is among the most marked and tragic consequences of excessive noise exposure. On the other hand, the Deaf often possess a special understanding of silence.

  It’s a tricky equation: the idea of silence has been imputed to the Deaf experience in a pejorative sense for centuries—as in the assertion that the Deaf are “locked in silence.” Many Deaf people are also tormented by tinnitus, which can be maddeningly loud, and some suffer from other sounds produced within their own brains. “When the brain is cut off from sensory input, it hallucinates,” the writer Michael Chorost told me. Chorost had been hearing impaired his whole life, but became profoundly Deaf in the summer of 2001. He explained how at that time he became subject to round-the-clock auditory hallucinations. “In the morning,” he said, “it would be loud plane engines, chain saws—blasts of undetermined sounds. In the evenings, it was music—an endless jumble of melodies, with my brain ransacking its stores of auditory memory. The three months between when I lost the last of my hearing and when I got cochlear implants were the loudest three months of my life.” As many people at Gallaudet reminded me, there is also such a thing as visual noise. If you go into the main cafeteria at Gallaudet, you will enter a space filled with many hands swirling and streaking through the air. I had one Deaf student tell me that the exhaustion from all this visual stimulation was such that when she left the cafeteria for the campus green she had a feeling of relief she imagined to be akin to walking out of a rock concert.

  And yet, with all of these nuances to factor, the more conversations I had with members of the Deaf community, the more convinced I became that the Deaf have a great deal to teach the hearing about the meaning of silence. The Deaf generally have far less auditory overload from the outside world to contend with—and, commensurately, they have much more of what most people think of as quiet. Even today when many people at Gallaudet have cochlear implants—which bypass the ear’s damaged receivers and amplifiers to directly stimulate the auditory nerve—many students prefer to keep their implants off most of the time. Several students told me that in the course of an ordinary day the amount of time during which they enjoy or desire sound is minimal. Why should this be the case? Now that more silence has become the goal for so many of us, it makes sense to turn to the Deaf as authorities on the pursuit of silence.

  I know that I’v
e never felt so acutely listened to as I have with some of my Deaf interlocutors. The words of Pierre Desloges, a Deaf man who lived in the late eighteenth century and composed the first known public defense of sign language, ring true: “The privation of hearing makes us more attentive in general. Our ideas concentrated in ourselves, so to speak, necessarily incline us toward reflectiveness and meditation.” Louis-François-Joseph Alhoy, a Deaf educator who rose to become head teacher at the Institution Nationale, the most important facility for teaching the Deaf in the Napoleonic era, likened the hearing population to “children born to opulence”—numb to the wealth of sensory impressions lavished upon them. The singular vision that accompanies the silence of the Deaf has long been recognized. It’s not coincidental that the Institution Nationale produced one of the richest legacies of gifted painters and sculptors in nineteenth-century France. Sometimes their visual capacity was also put to more mundane uses. In the 1920s, a Deaf school in Cape Province became renowned as a place to recruit people who could find any lost object.

  UNHEARD OF

  What would it be like to lose your hearing completely? I mentioned earlier the surprising finding that people who go suddenly Deaf often find themselves asking not why it is that they can’t hear anything but where they are in space. My one experience of the state was when I took a float in a sensory deprivation tank. The tank was located in a small soundproof room.