Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear,
Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair, Fuzzy
Wuzzy wasn’t Fuzzy was’e?
The brain inserts the gap where it needs to in order to make sense of the continuous stream of sound (vibrations) that the ear sends it via the cochlea nerves.
Particularly in ‘adventurous’ silences we see people with all their physical and emotional senses intensified, and their normal rational processes disinhibited, who are bombarded with complex sound, where they anticipate and are geared up for silence. The brain is constantly busy at its job of decoding the stream of aural input. There is no actual language to ‘test’ the sounds against. The brain interprets the sounds as language.
Charles Lindbergh, not someone generally thought of as particularly schizotypic, heard voices while flying the Spirit of St Louis. He was alone, ‘silent’ in one sense but surrounded by the engine noise to which he was obliged for safety’s sake to listen continually. He was not under the sort of desperate stress that Simpson was, nor does his description match Simpson’s in any useful way. It seems easiest to understand these voices as interpretations of sound.
First one and then another presses forward to my shoulder to speak above the engine’s voice … [or they] come out of the air itself, clear yet far away, travelling through distances that can’t be measured by the scale of human miles … conversing and advising me on my flight, discussing problems of my navigation, reassuring me, giving me messages of importance unattainable in ordinary life.23
I spent a good deal of time hovering between two sorts of knowledge. The knowledge that my ears were giving me – that there was, for example, a choir singing in Latin in the bedroom – and the knowledge that my informed intelligence was giving me – that this was a normal effect of high, irregular winds and a long period of solitude.
One of the things that strengthens this theory for me is that these sorts of voices are particularly common among sailors. Sailing ships are exceptionally noisy places and their noises are of precisely the kind that the brain ‘likes’ to work on – irregular and not immediately easy to identify (unlike, say, a dog barking or a motor car). Peter Nichols describes Knox-Johnston’s ship in a storm:
The singular noise of high wind in a boat’s rigging during a gale at sea has no counterpart in the land-bound world, where overhead electrical cable and telephone wires are long and run without great tension. Wind howling through these is low in tone and without multiple a-tonal chords. Suhaili was cobwebbed with 30 or more separate lengths of wire and rope, running up its mast, tightened or winched to considerable tension.24
It is hardly surprising that Knox-Johnston complained that the ‘malevolent eldritch shrieking’ of Suhaili was ‘hard to endure’ and it ‘ate at his nerves’.
Even without gales, single-handed sailors anticipate that they will ‘hear voices’, especially those of their yachts. Bill Howell wrote in his log during a single-handed race in 1972: ‘Usual voices in the rigging calling “Bill, Bill” rather high pitched.’25
Ann Davison, who was sailing her ship home alone after the death of her husband, noted, ‘Reliance spoke in a multitude of tiny voices from behind bulkheads, under floorboards, everywhere all around, chattering, gossiping, gabbling incessantly and shrieking with gnomish laughter.’26
I do not think that understanding the voices that people hear in silence as effects of a specific function of the brain is a reductionist ‘explanation’, because of course the content, the meaning, of what such voices actually say is going to depend entirely on the individual and their moods of the time. What I want to do is clear away some of the negative associations of silence with insanity and make it possible to listen to these interpretations, the meanings of the heart and the ‘silent mind’. It seems to me that it ought to be perfectly obvious that the sorts of interpretation the brain will come up with under the pressures of great fear, or loneliness, are rather likely to be more malevolent than an interpretation made in peace, joy or a sense of union with the universe.
A fourth sensation very commonly reported by people who have enjoyed the silence they chose (not everyone does) is that they have experiences of great joy, which feel as though they came from ‘outside’ themselves; a strong sense of ‘givenness’.
Several times, especially later on in the six weeks on Skye, my journal recorded moments of intense happiness, followed by a powerful conviction that the moment was somehow a pure gift – that I had done nothing to deserve it and could do nothing to sustain it or repeat it. My only option was to enjoy it.
On one unusually radiant day, with a sort of golden brightness and lovely complex cloud formations, I took a walk up the burn above the house. It was sharply cold but there was less wind than usual. At the top of the valley is the watershed between Glenbrittle and Sligachan. I always found this a strangely haunting place; the water from the hill above collected in two tiny lochs, then flowed out at both ends, north and south. Over the years, walkers have piled up a large cairn here, a sort of mute witness to everyone who has enjoyed this silent space; and far below the river ran down towards the sea in a series of theatrical silver loops. Instead of following the path on down towards Glenbrittle, I climbed on up into the steep-sided corrie. It was sheltered there and magnificent – almost vertical mountains on both sides – a mixture of shining rock and loose scree, and below, tiny stands of water that looked like handfuls of shiny coins tossed casually down. I sat on a rock and ate cheese sandwiches – and thought I was perfectly happy. It was so huge. And so wild and so empty and so free.
And there, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, I slipped a gear, or something like that. There was not me and the landscape, but a kind of oneness: a connection as though my skin had been blown off. More than that – as though the molecules and atoms I am made of had reunited themselves with the molecules and atoms that the rest of the world is made of. I felt absolutely connected to everything. It was very brief, but it was a total moment. I cannot remember feeling that extraordinary sense of connectedness since I was a small child.
This feeling of being connected to the universe, and particularly to natural phenomena within it, was central to the sensibility of the Romantic Movement, and appears over and over again in the poetry of the period, nearly always linked to places or experience of silence in the natural world. A well-known example is from the famous English romantic poet William Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’:
Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.27
This ‘gift’ is experienced both as integrative – the whole self is engaged and known to itself, to the subject, in quite a new way – and as connecting that self to something larger. This would, of course, be an expected feeling from anyone who had a strong religious belief – of almost any kind – and in particular for those for whom silence was part of a search for precisely that gift. This is a clear example of where it is useful to look beyond religious descriptions of silence. But more or less the same set of feelings appears in many accounts of silence by people who have no particular religious agenda and leads me to suggest that this is a response to silence as much as to religious ecstasy, although the latter provides a rich interpretation. Richard Byrd, contemplating the onset of the polar night (not simply ‘evening’ in the usual sense) described in almost mystical terms this experience of everything being connected:
The day was dying the night was being born – but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos harmonious and soundless. That was what came out of the silence, harmony, a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres perhaps. It was enough to catch that rhythm momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man’s oneness with the universe … the universe was cosmos not chaos; and man was as rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the night and day.28
Moitessier speaks at length, especially in his film Song of the Siren, about
this unitive experience that he often had at sea:
There was no longer man and boat, but a man-boat, a boat-man … What you would call isolation, but I call communion. The things that mattered at the start didn’t matter any more … I want to go further because there is something more to see.29
More specifically, while sailing along the southern coast of Australia, Moitessier records an extraordinary contact with a large shoal of over a hundred porpoises. They were not behaving as porpoises normally do, but were ‘nervous’ and agitated. In what seemed to him an almost military way a group of them kept rushing off, always to the right, always returning and repeating the same manoeuvre. He watched them, entranced and baffled, until he happened to glance at his compass and saw that Joshua had changed course on a changing wind and was heading directly towards Stewart Island, a rocky outcrop on which his yacht might well have foundered. As soon as he changed back to his correct course, the porpoises seemed to ‘celebrate’ and then disappear. He wrote:
This is the first time I feel such peace, a peace that has become a certainty, something that cannot be explained, like faith. I know I will succeed and it strikes me as perfectly normal: that is the marvellous thing, that absolute certainty where there is neither pride nor fear nor surprise. The entire sea is simply singing in a way I had never known before, and it fills me with what is both question and answer … I will round the Horn thanks to porpoises and fairy tales, which helped me rediscover the Time of the Very Beginnings, where each thing is simple … Free on the right, free on the left, free everywhere.30
Christiane Ritter writes of her polar experiences:
I lie down in my little room where the moonlight filters green through the small snowed-up window. Neither the walls of the hut nor the roof can dispel my fancy that I am myself moonlight, gliding along the spires and ridges of the mountains, through the white valleys.31
Although a distinctly more prosaic writer, Geoffrey Williams, another single-handed yachtsman, reports an experience extremely similar to these:
I was no longer Lipton’s helmsman. I became part of her. I was a limb of Lipton, another sail, another tiller; the ship and I were one. But Lipton was part of the scene, so I became part of the scene, no longer outside looking in, but inside looking out. I was part of the chorus, neither conductor nor spectator, but singing as part of the environment.32
This sense of vast connectedness, of oneness with everything is so central to the core of mystical prayer that it can be distinctly disconcerting to read the matter-of-fact ease with which so many of these adventurers report a parallel experience. Often they sound mildly surprised or even offhand – although it is more usual for them to sense that this is a deeply precious and important moment, born out of an odd mixture of courage and silence.
If you are experiencing a profound level of oneness with the cosmos, you are very likely to experience boundary confusion as well. This was a fifth sensation that I became aware of. If an individual is one with and a part of everything, then it is not going to be clear where the self begins and ends.
In La Nouvelle Héloïse, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the influential French philosopher and autobiographer, describes what I mean here very effectively:
There is something magical and supernatural in hill landscape, which entrances the mind and the senses. One forgets everything, one forgets one’s own being, one ceases to know where one stands.33
I In a sense this is nothing more than an extension of the connectedness or sense of givenness in silence that I have just looked at, except that is usually less ecstatic and more conscious. As the six weeks went by my sense of difference from everything around me began to dissolve and with it accurate perceptions of all those external factors that shore up our sense of boundaries.
For me the clear, if artificial, demarcations of passing time were among the first to break down under the ‘pressure’ of silence. As I went further and further into my silent time, I found it harder and harder to maintain a sense of time passing. I ceased to have a ‘normal’ sense of how long I had been doing something or why I might continue or stop. This did not feel like absent-mindedness and was probably exaggerated because of the amount of the day that was dark, but it did make me realise just how clock-obsessed we have all become, marking our days ritually and shaken by anxiety, like Alice’s White Rabbit, if we ‘lose’ time. It is salutary to recall just how modern a concept this is: until the railway network spread out across Britain, with its need for timetables, there was no ‘accurate national time’ – the hours were fixed by the daylight and Oxford time, for example, was five minutes behind London time. Once I recognised what was happening, I found it very liberating; it gave me a sense of freedom coupled with a sort of almost childlike naughtiness or irresponsibility. Initially I had removed the clock from the room I spent my days in because its rather loud ticking seemed to break into the silence. For the first couple of weeks I was constantly popping next door to find out what time it was, but gradually it ceased to matter.
Of all the sensations I have been discussing, this loss of time is one from which sailors seem to be more exempt than others – I suspect that this is because navigation, particularly before GPS (the global satellite positioning system that can locate a small boat with pinpoint accuracy, from the boat and from a distance), requires a constant awareness of time and place. Donald Crowhurst, in his final days, more or less abandoned navigation and immediately, judging from his notebooks, became obsessed by the feeling that time was getting away from him. In Rousseau’s words, he rather literally ceased to know where he stood.
This sort of confusion is clearly something that a lot of people in silence and solitude find difficult to cope with. Over and over again I found accounts of people going to remarkable efforts to keep time in its place – ordering their days with extreme rigour, appointing precise moments for various activities and finding ways to replace clocks and diaries – marking each day as it passes with a notch on a stick or a stone on a cairn, inventing or at least contriving ‘tasks’. However, I particularly enjoyed this sensation. I think there were two reasons why I found it not just interesting but also immensely pleasurable. In the first place I was extremely safe. I knew exactly how long I was going to be there for and had every reason to expect someone to come and let me know if I had completely lost the plot and failed to emerge after the six weeks were over. I had a telephone too if I had needed to use it – and indeed I had a clock, and my car also had a clock. The other reason is more complex: if you believe in a God who is eternal, that is to say outside time, there is a sense of being nearer to, being more permeated by, God as time recedes in both importance and sensation. Almost all the examples of people who have enjoyed this experience of time collapsing have been religious. For us a loss of time is a positive and recognised ‘sign’ of mystical experience, often described as ‘trance’.
Another form that boundary confusions took for me was a very strange inability to distinguish between my own words and other people’s. I have a retentive memory, especially for poetry, but in my ordinary life I expect to be able to tell whether something is newly mine or dug up from my memory bank; this is a crucial skill for someone whose own fiction involves so much rewriting of older material as mine does, and confusion here would create serious problems of plagiarism and a radical loss of confidence. Nonetheless, as I moved further into this silent time, my journal increasingly contains phrases, expressions and even quite extended passages that are accurate quotations but with no sign on the page that I was aware of this – not just no quotation marks or other punctuation but with three or four lines of poetry written into my own sentences in continuous (not line-broken) prose. It feels retrospectively as though the boundary between ‘creative’ writing and memory had weakened.
Later, I had a series of very strange experiences when I stopped being able to distinguish easily between what was happening in my mind and what was happening ‘outside’. During the fourth week my journal records a number of su
ch episodes, of which this is one of the clearest:
I heard a car come up the track and a white van crossed the window. Then nothing happened. I was furious at the interruption. But nothing happening was strange – no knock on the door, no sound outside. Then there was a series of piercing whistles. I was hiding from any intrusion in the bed-room and looking out the window I saw a sheep dog – except that it was not really a sheep dog, more some sort of small terrier, but a sheep dog in action – on the far bank of the burn. I pulled on my jacket and went out – the wind was howling and the rain lashing down. I stood at the door. The sheep dog had four sheep huddled on the far side of the burn – and on my side was a shepherd. Not at all a romantic shepherd – neither biblical nor ‘gnarled highlander’, but a scruffy bloke in a blue woolly hat. When he saw me he called the dog, who let the sheep go and came splashing back across the burn, struggling to make headway. The shepherd smiled at me and said, ‘I was looking for a stray.’ Then I went back into the house and he – and the dog I imagine – got back into the white van (which had a large dent in the driver-side door) and drove away. I never said anything.
A Book of Silence Page 8