A Book of Silence

by Sara Maitland

  The scary bit is that within a couple of minutes and still I am not at all sure whether this actually did happen, or whether I hallucinated or imagined it. His actions were so senseless. Later in the day, I was increasingly perplexed and disturbed by this, so I attempted a little ‘reality check’: my jacket was bone dry (but then I had not left the shelter of the doorway, and I didn’t think of feeling the jacket for several hours). If it was a hallucination it was both bizarrely mundane and ridiculously detailed. But although I remember the dent in the van and the blue woolly hat I cannot remember any other details – local accent/other clothes/attitude or even where he was standing. And if he was ‘real’ then what the hell was he doing? Why would anyone chase a stray in this weather – or having decided to do so, abandon the project so quickly. I honestly am not sure.

  Perhaps more interesting, though, is how little it actually alarmed me. Reading the journal as a whole, I realise with what insouciance, even pleasure, I seem to have regarded episodes like this, which in my pre-silence life would have terrified me as signs of incipient lunacy.

  I remain curious, however, about how often this feeling of losing the clear sense of one’s own boundaries is experienced physically. In almost all extreme situations there is an associated physical phenomenon, where a normal awareness of self-protection ceases to function properly: desert lassitude, the rapture of the deep, mountain madness. In each case there is a sound physiological explanation (dehydration, pressure, oxygen deprivation) but nonetheless they seem somehow to share emotional symptoms. My journal records, several times, things like this:

  Each day it becomes easier to be silent, drowning down into it, but harder to get on the move. As soon as I am walking I feel wonderful – energetic, alive, sane, physically good, ‘fresh’ – but there is a weighting against it which for the last couple of days I’ve put down to the weather, but it can’t have been that today, as it was, weatherwise, about the best day I’ve had. I sit and time passes and it does not matter. I feel slightly drunk, elated but uncoordinated; or just dreamy, entranced, and completely uncaring. The Rapture of the Deep. That’s the way I feel today.

  Jacques Cousteau made the first ever aqualung dive and also invented the term ‘rapture of the deep’ (l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs) to describe Depth Narcosis – the more scientific name for a not dissimilar experience, which attacks deep-water divers.

  The first stage is a mild anaesthesia, after which the diver becomes a god. If a passing fish seems to require air, the crazed diver may tear out his air pipe or mouth grip as a sublime gift … I am personally quite receptive to the rapture. I like it and fear it like doom. It destroys the instinct of life.34

  This ‘rapture’ is caused by a perfectly explicable biological process, but the emotional content of the experience is so close to what I was feeling that it is hard not to suspect that the silence itself is involved here.

  In his book The World of Silence, Max Picard, the German existentialist who was to have such an influence on Thomas Merton, quotes a certain Goutran de Procius:

  Here in the land of the Eskimos there is no wind in the trees, for there are no leaves. No birds sing. There is no noise of flowing water. No frightened animals flee away in the dark. There is no stone to become loose under human feet and fall down a riverbank, for all these stones are walled in by the frost and buried under the snow. And yet this world is far from dead: it is only that the beings, which dwell in this solitude, are noiseless and invisible.

  This stillness, which has been so solitary, which has calmed me and done good to my worn-out nerves, gradually began to weigh on me like a lead weight. The flame of life within us withdrew further and further into a secret hiding place, and our heartbeats became ever slower. The day would come when we should have to shake ourselves to keep our heartbeats going. We had sunk deep into this silence; we were paralysed by it; we were on the bottom of a well from which we could pull ourselves out only with inconceivable difficulty.35

  At high altitude climbers lose judgement, cease to take proper care of themselves, act ‘as though drunk’ or fail to follow even the most rudimentary and ingrained safety codes. In intense cold the mind becomes disorientated; the desire to ‘snuggle down and sleep’, and to become pleasurably fixated on delusional ideas, is very common – in addition to the more obviously physiological effects of oxygen deprivation.36

  I am suggesting that alongside these physical responses runs some sort of mental or psychological response to silence. There are so many reports of experiences of confusion about time and/or spatial location – heavy/light and up/down distinctions are commonly lost; falling and flying, for instance, can become synonymous – but even more common and profound is way the self/other (or the I/thou) boundary becomes unclear. It is usually the reassertion of the ego that brings this state to an end and with its closure there is an enormous sense of loss, almost a kind of mourning. This is, of course, a central and classic aspect of mystical experience and can be pursued through the writings of that tradition in both East and West. One of the clearer articulators of what it feels like is the sixteenth-century mystic Teresa of Avila who, over a lifetime of writing about mystical prayer drawing directly on her own personal experience, described a whole series of such confusions including levitation, trancelike loss of chronological time, flying (in the claws of an eagle) and related changes in body weight, limbs dissolving, her body fragmenting, shrinking, enlarging or distorting, and most famously (because of the Bernini statue of the event, Teresa in Ecstasy) being pierced by an angel’s lance.

  We live in a culture that closely associates silence with madness, so the exhilarating sense of peril that is associated with silence may be nothing more than a culturally induced fear of insanity – it is nonetheless a very persistent emotional response and one that I identified as a sixth positive effect of silence. It is not the same as fear or terror. Many people, including me, find it a very positive and exciting experience. Several times my journal describes with delight the knowledge that what I was up to was risky, that I was deliberately exposing myself to peril. The risk felt twofold – one is the danger that disinhibition might allow me to do something very stupid; the other is of so losing or confusing one’s boundaries that one evaporates into true madness. But despite that reality it remains, for me as for others, a powerfully positive aspect of silence.

  Most of us learned in childhood that risk, under particular circumstances, can be very strangely and affirmatively exciting. In the late seventeenth century this frisson of thrilling fear became newly fashionable and was seen as part of the aesthetic of the Sublime: ‘a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy’.37 This in itself can be addictive, and is probably one of the reasons why silence has traditionally been hedged around with disciplines and structures.

  In his excellent book about the emotional and imaginative history of mountain climbing, Mountains of the Mind,38 Robert Macfarlane devotes a chapter to what he calls ‘the pursuit of fear’. He has little time for sublime peril; his central tenet is that mountains kill people and if we were not still engaged with concepts of heroism and delusions of grandeur we would avoid such sentimentality. Indeed, he is extremely funny at the expense of many of the heroes of romanticism and their wilful production of this emotion. But, because he is focused so specifically on the history of mountain climbing, I think that Macfarlane misses something here. This ‘delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy’ is far more ancient than he suggests. It was, in fact, the normative reaction to an encounter with the divine. Moses was out in the wilderness (the desert) shepherding his father-in-law’s herd when he saw a bush ‘burning, but it was not consumed’. Moses, quite naturally, was intrigued by this and ‘turns aside’ to see what is going on. But when the bush revealed that it is ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and God of Jacob’, Moses immediately hid his face, because he was ‘afraid to look on God’.39 When the angel ‘came in’ to Mary in the New Testament, she was ‘sore afraid’. The physical risks of high mounta
ins and cliff faces are perhaps as much a substitute for the thrill of ‘holy fear’ as they are a reflex of romanticism. Any extreme situation, particularly one encountered in silence, is capable of putting one’s sense of identity, one’s self-possession, at risk.

  It is the frequency of this thrilling peril itself that suggests to me that silence is the place, the focus, of the radical encounter with the divine, what the theologian Martin Buber described as an (or even the) I/Thou encounter. If this is so, the sense of peril is well founded; there is good reason for it. There is always a risk that our identities may be overwhelmed by something greater, but that need not necessarily mean that there is not equally good reason for the ‘terrible Joy’. The desire to break the silence with constant human noise is, I believe, precisely an avoidance of the sacred terror of that divine encounter. On Skye I came to think that silence may be the only ‘place’ in which the boundaries of the autonomous self can dissolve, can be penetrated without breaking, safely (well, safely-ish). Whether this is a good thing or not is an entirely different and separate question.

  Earlier in this chapter I spoke about ineffability and the way that silence itself seems to have a quality of being indescribable, literally unsayable. There is obviously not much I can say about this! The difficulty seems to have caught almost every silence seeker by the neck. ‘I can’t explain or describe it’ is probably the most usual comment – whether the speaker goes on to try to do so or thus evades the effort. Ineffability is the seventh sensation that I noted in my own silence and found again in other people’s.

  The experience of those intense moments of silence – when the external and the interior silence come together and the subject becomes conscious of that, without thereby breaking it up – is not just difficult to talk about; it is actually very hard to recall, remember, to reconstruct emotionally. It can even be somehow contentless or meaningless – outwith language.

  This sense of being ‘silenced’, rendered mysteriously dumb, both internally and externally, by an intense experience of silence is explicable within many religious traditions, because God is – of God’s nature – unknowable and unspeakable. While all things come into being through God’s speaking, God is in no way contained or restricted by that speaking. It is harder to understand what might be happening when the silence is not grounded in any willed encounter with whatever there might be ‘beyond’ language.

  And finally almost everyone who describes a positive experience of prolonged silence speaks about a state of bliss – a fierce joy, far beyond ‘happiness’ or ‘pleasure’.

  I have come to prefer the French word jouissance, with its associations of both playfulness (jouer – to play) and joy. There are other terms, like ‘glory,’, and ‘beatitude’. In his book Le Plaisir du Texte Roland Barthes, the French critic and theorist, contrasts the pleasures of ‘closure’, of a satisfying resolution, with jouissance, which he defines as an infinite opening out to delight and beyond delight. He is speaking of literary texts here, but such inflation or expansion is not confined to literature. For some individuals, indeed, this jouissance is the purpose and the goal of silence.

  Most small children experience this sensation of profound joy randomly and apparently frequently. Wordsworth mourned its passing in his ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807):

  There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,

  The earth, and every common sight

  To me did seem

  Apparelled in celestial light,

  The glory and the freshness of a dream.

  It is not now as it has been of yore; –

  Turn wheresoe’er I may, By night or day,

  The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

  The rainbow comes and goes,

  And lovely is the rose,

  The Moon doth with delight

  Look round her when the heavens are bare;

  Waters on a starry night

  Are beautiful and fair;

  The sunshine is a glorious birth;

  But yet I know, where’er I go,

  That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

  This lost glory is not, indeed, particular to silence, but given Wordsworth’s frequent association of bliss with storm, wind and wildness, it is intriguing that all the images from nature he uses here are silent ones. Certainly, for me personally, jouissance is closely, intimately connected to silence.

  Many of the days in Skye were punctuated by these joyful moments. Sometimes they were very gentle and sweet. One magically wind-free day I drove down the Strathaird peninsula beyond Elgol, a tiny coastal village. At one point the road rose along a cliff edge. I got out of the car and it was warm in the sun and at first seemed utterly and completely silent; then, when my ears had absorbed the silence, there was far below me the occasional very quiet boom noise of a wave hitting the cliff, although from above the water looked absolutely still, flat, smooth. There was no wind. All around there were sea and mountains, at every distance: the islands, then Knoydart and Torridons, the Cuillin and the tiny white houses on the Sleat coast.

  Then I saw a whale, or porpoise – no, a sea-monster – turning in the water, rolling. A silkie perhaps, a seal woman, lovely and perilous. It was, in fact, a rock with the water rolling over it – but the water seemed to be still while the black shape rolled through it. I leaned against the car and rejoiced. It was not an anguish of loveliness but a complete, huge, calm, silent joy of loveliness. I did not even want to hold or keep it. I did think once, ‘If I could look at this view day after day, surely I would grow to be good.’ But I immediately knew that was not true and laughed at myself.

  I was entirely happy inside the stillness, the beauty. The many islands floated, danced on the sea, and the surface of the water was silky smooth and the snowcaps on the furthest mountains seemed to pour a particular bright light into the air. The soft sound of the sea was a sound of silence.

  But on other occasions it was a far wilder joy. The last few days of my stay were quite difficult. Part of me had already moved on from Allt Dearg, and another part of me wanted never to leave. The weather became appalling so that I could not go out for a final walk or round off the time with any satisfying sense of closure. I had to clean the house and then drive a very long way. I had felt quite depressed and lethargic for about forty-eight hours and then, the very final evening, I suddenly was seized with an overwhelming moment of jouissance. I wrote:

  They say it is not all over till the fat lady sings. Well, she is singing now. She is singing in a wild fierce wind – and I am in here, just. Now I am full of joy and thankfulness and a sort of solemn and bubbling hilarity. And gratitude. Exultant – that is what I feel – and excited, and that now, here, right at the very edge of the end I have been given back my joy.

  For several hours I enjoyed an extraordinary rhythmical sequence of emotions – great waves of delight, gratitude and peace; a realisation of how much I had done in the last six weeks, how far I had travelled; a powerful surge of hope and possibility for myself and my future; and above all a sense of privilege. But also a nakedness or openness that needed to be honoured somehow.

  I experienced a fierce joyful … joyful what? … neither pride nor triumph felt like the right word. Near the end of Ursula le Guin’s The Farthest Shore (the third part of the Earthsea Trilogy) Arren, the young prince-hero, who has with an intrepid courage born of love rescued the magician Sparrowhawk, and by implication the whole of society, from destruction, wakes alone on the western shore of the island of Selidor. ‘He smiled then, a smile both sombre and joyous, knowing for the first time in his life, and alone, and unpraised and at the end of the world, victory.’ That was what I felt like, alone on An t-Eilean Sgitheanach, The Winged Isle. I felt an enormous victorious YES to the world and to myself. For a short while I was absorbed in joy. I was dancing my joy, dancing, and flowing with energy. At one point I grabbed my jacket, plunged out into the wind and the storm. It was p
hysically impossible to stay out for more than about a minute because the wind and rain were so strong and I came back in soaked from even that brief moment; but I came in energised and laughing and exulting as well. I was both excited and contented. This is a rare and precious pairing. I knew, and wrote in my journal, that this would not last, but it did not matter. It was NOW. At the moment that now, and the enormous wind, felt like enough. Felt like more than enough.

  And once again I am not alone. Repeatedly, in every historical period, from every imaginable terrain, in innumerable different languages and forms, people who go freely into silence come out with slightly garbled messages of intense jouissance, of some kind of encounter with nature, their self, their God, or some indescribable source of power.