A Book of Silence

by Sara Maitland

  Now look at the eight particular experiences I have described here: an intensification of both physiological and psychological sensation; disinhibition; a sense of ‘givenness’ or connection; auditory hallucinations – voice hearing of a rather particular kind; boundary confusions; an exhilarating consciousness of being at risk, in peril; ineffability and bliss.

  I would not want to suggest that this was a definitive list. But even as it stands, it does seem to me that to describe these experiences in terms of ‘lack’ or ‘absence’ is simply stupid.

  Frank Mulville, yet another single-handed sailor, in an article entitled ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Sailor’, wrote about an experience that seems to hold together all the elements of silence that I have been so busy separating out. Mulville got ‘blissed out’ (his term) sailing single-handed in the Caribbean, in love with his ship and with the long silences. He wanted to see her and himself from the outside, and so one calm day, although the boat was under sail, he attached himself to a long rope, let himself down into the water and floated away.

  It made me feel quite dizzy to look at her. She seemed the most lovely thing dipping in and out of sight as she mounted the long Atlantic swell and then slipped into the hollows. This, it struck me was the supreme moment of my life; I had never achieved anything to equal it and I was never likely to again. This was the ultimate experience … it was my dream and I had it. Why not let go of the rope? To melt into the sea at this apex of experience, was the only thing left. Nothing that could happen in the future could better this. Why not trump the ace and walk out?

  I stayed at the end of the rope for a while and then I began to get frightened – not so much at what might happen to me but at what I might do to myself … I glanced deeply into the womb of the sea watched the shafts of sunlight as they spent their energy uselessly in its density … I slipped the bowline off my shoulders and hung for an instant on the very end of the rope – my fingers grasping the bare end of life itself – then I hauled myself back hand over hand. When I stood on the firm familiar deck I swore I would never do this thing again. I was running with sweat and shaking all over.40

  This does not feel like loss or absence to me. Driving south from Skye I knew that it was not possible for me to sustain that sort of silence for very much longer than the six weeks I had; but I also knew that it was one of the most significant things I have ever done. It was interesting, demanding, exciting, good fun and deeply joyful. It has informed my choices and my life ever since. I have been engaged trying to build those experiences into a daily and sustainable lifestyle. Skye is both a benchmark and a launch pad for much of my present life.

  Notes – 2 Forty Days and Forty Nights

  1 I am rashly assuming that readers can remember Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ stories. I owe this accurate and evocative description to Ford Hickson.

  2 Byrd, Alone, chapter 1.

  3 There is a fine selection of photos of the cottage and the locality at www.drynoch.demon. co. uk.

  4 Revelation 14:2.

  5 There is a biography of Tenzin Palmo: Vicky Mackenzie, A Cave in the Snow (Bloomsbury, 1998).

  6 John Hunt, Ascent of Everest (Hodder & Stoughton, 1953).

  7 Quoted in Fergus Fleming, Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps (Granta, 2001).

  8 He later explained this nausea by saying that he ‘had made a pact with the gods’ in reparation for what he saw as a bad and dishonest previous book, and felt strongly that circumnavigating for a possible cash prize would sully the whole enterprise.

  9Robin Knox-Johnston, A World of My Own (reissued Adlard Coles Nautical, 2004).

  10 Byrd, Alone, foreword to UK edition, p. 6.

  11 Many of the Desert Fathers paid for their few necessities by weaving baskets from rushes and selling them in the local villages. Given how many hermits there were at some points, and how few villages, I have this pleasing image of infuriated but affectionate villagers reluctantly buying yet more redundant baskets because of their concern for the well-being of the monks, their small houses or tents crammed with useless baskets, much the way twenty-first-century parents go on sticking their children’s nursery artwork on to the fridge.

  12 Byrd, Alone, p. 83.

  13 Christiane Ritter, Woman in the Polar Night, trans. Jane Degras (Allen & Unwin, 1956).

  14 Quoted in Fleming, Killing Dragons.

  15 Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (Villard, 1996), p. 138.

  16 Nicholas Wollaston: The Man on the Ice Cap: The Life of Augustine Courtauld (Constable, 1980).

  17 Journal, Day 15.

  18 Observer, 10.2.2002, p. 9.

  19 Peter Nichols, A Voyage for Madmen (Profile Books, 2001), p. 214.

  20 Bernard Moitessier, The Long Way, (Doubleday, 1971), p. 164.

  21 Journal, Day 9.

  22 Journal, Day 27.

  23 Charles Lindbergh, Spirit of St Louis (Scribner’s, 1953), p. 109.

  24 Nichols, Voyage for Madmen.

  25 William Howell, White Cliffs to Coral Reef, (Odhams, 1957).

  26 Ann Davison, Last Voyage, Heinemann, 1951.

  27 William Wordsworth, ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, Lyrical Ballads (1800), line 7–8.

  28 Byrd, Alone, p. 85.

  29 Song of the Siren – The World About Us, BBC television, 1971.

  30 Moitessier, The Long Way, pp. 101–4.

  31 Ritter, Woman in the Polar Night.

  32 Geoffrey Williams, Sir Thomas Lipton Wins (P. Davis, 1969), p. 115.

  33 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), quoted in Fleming, Killing Dragons, (2002), p. 90.

  34 Jacques Yves Cousteau, The Silent World (Hamish Hamilton, 1953).

  35 Goutran de Procius, Kablina, quoted in Max Picard, The World of Silence, trans. Stanley Godman (London, 1948).

  36 The hideous consequences of this effect are detailed in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air (Random House, 1997), his account of a disastrous twenty-four hours on Everest in which nine people were killed, almost entirely through ‘disinhibited behaviour’ of one sort or another.

  37 John Dennis, letter, 1688, quoted in Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (Granta, 2003), p. 73.

  38 Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind.

  39 Exodus 3:1–6.

  40 Frank Mulville, ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Sailor’, Yachting Monthly, no. 132, May 1972, pp. 686–8.

  * It is usually ‘him’ – the sort of adventures we learn about have, until very recently, been undertaken most frequently by men. This makes the few accounts by women particularly interesting.

  * This is a bit more complicated than it looks, because of the social and communal aspects, including nudity, with which bathing was associated in Roman society. It is possible that Jerome just stopped ‘going to the baths’ rather than that he never washed.

  * The ‘pale’ in this well-known phrase was the ‘fence’ (actual or notional) that marked the limits of English jurisdiction – particularly in Ireland. Within the pale there was law and order; beyond, it was barbaric, lawless, unlicensed.

  The Dark Side

  There appears to be something missing in this account of my sojourn in Skye. It is all very positive and glorious, yet we live in a society that knows that silence is dangerous. When I talked about my plans both before I went and since returning, the most common responses have been foreboding concern – ‘Are you sure you will be all right? Don’t you think that is rather foolhardy? Sara, do be careful.’ As a society we will do anything we can to avoid silence at every level. Silence is terrifying, unnatural and drives people mad. Silence is supposed to be very dark, very heavy.

  To be honest, after I returned to Weardale I felt I had missed something – that I had not encountered fully the promised ‘dark side’ of silence. I had indeed had some depressed, angry and destabilised moments and even days, but in a sense they were not different in quality or intensity from the same sorts of days and moments that I experience any
way. In fact, they were probably fewer and milder than normal, because I did not have to deal with other people and their frustrating or inconvenient demands. These sensations, unlike the positive ones, did not feel specific to silence.

  I only had one seriously frightening experience that I would interpret as directly related to silence while I was in Skye. One morning I decided that I would take a walk from Luib to Loch Slapin – from sea to sea along a well-marked track between the mountains. From one of the tourist pamphlets in the house I had learned that quite recently some Bronze Age remains had been discovered here, evidence of the oldest inhabitation of the island, and that piqued my curiosity. It was a strange day, very still with no wind. I left the car and walked up the path, and after a couple of hundred yards it turned round a knoll and I walked into nowhere. It was a tight, steep-sided glen that I could not see out of. Nowhere. No one. Nothing. ‘Desolate’ suggests something sad – but at that point I had nothing to be sad about and I wasn’t, although the path was really wet and boggy and hard work. It was terribly still and beautiful – but somehow eerie. Soon I came to a little loch with reeds standing in the perfectly clear water, which reflected the hills rising sharply either side – and at first I was enchanted. I could hear, though never see, some small singing birds and I sat beside the water and listened to the silence – and then abruptly, suddenly I was ‘spooked’.

  It is so hard to describe – the silence, the fact that there was low cloud, or mist, solid on my side of the glen so I could not see how high above me the steep hill actually went. And on the opposite side there were wisps of cloud – at one point apparently emerging from a deep crevasse, like the smoke of dragon’s breath from within its lair. I found myself becoming increasingly uneasy, nervous. Gradually I became convinced I was being watched. There were two black shapes on the hill above me. I thought, or rather I felt, that they were alive. They were two dwarf fairy cows, with huge eyes. Before the Highland Clearances brought the sheep to Skye, the crofters farmed the old ‘black cattle’. Each year they swam them across the narrow water, from Kylerhea, tied nose-to-tail, to market them on the mainland: perhaps, I thought, these were ghost cattle. They stood perfectly still and watched me. I decided, firmly and rationally, that they were in fact rocks, but I never entirely convinced myself.

  The silent staring of the ghost cows or the silence itself overwhelmed me. I felt that the silence was stripping me down, desiccating, denuding me. I could hear the silence itself screaming. Augustine Courtauld in his polar tent recorded strange and inexplicable screaming noises and he said, afterwards, it was the only thing that really frightened him. Commentators have speculated since that it was ice breaking, or grinding, but since that day I have wondered. If I could hear the silence screaming after only three weeks of reasonably active and physically secure and agreeable silence, perhaps it is not surprising that six months immured in a tiny tent might have a similar effect.

  What it was for me, and I fully expect for other people in silent situations, was panic. I do not mean those experiences of extreme anxiety which we call ‘panic attacks’, but something far more primal. Suddenly I understood the full and proper sense of the word, here defined by H. G. Liddell and R. Scott in their Greek–English Lexicon: ‘Sounds heard by night on mountains or valleys were attributed to Pan and hence he was reputed to be the cause of any sudden or groundless fear.’1

  Pan is not just the sweet little faun or goat-footed pixie piping away in the springtime, but a powerful and primitive god, representing the whole force of the wild and the inexorable weight of its silence. His name is derived from the Greek word for ‘all’ or ‘everything’ – so that, for example, ‘pandemonium’ means the noise that all the demons together would make. Panic causes senseless and self-destructive responses to imaginary situations, and in groups has an infectious quality, leading to stampedes, irrational aggression and crazed behaviour.

  Panic partakes of true horror, physical rather than emotional. It had no meaningful content: I was not ‘frightened of ’ or ‘scared by’… this was something from much lower down and further in, something really visceral. I fled, literally. I ran and stumbled out of the valley, as though there were something dark in pursuit. Back at the car I found I was soaked to the skin and covered in mud although I had no memory of falling. I felt completely and neatly split in half – a sane me who said ‘this is silly’ and another bit that was entirely at the mercy of the sensation. This is something I had never felt before – or not since I was a child. It was somehow deeply connected to the silence, but also to the harsh desolation of the landscape.

  Nonetheless, although I did genuinely find this scary and troubling, overall I did not find that the silence in Skye reflected in any way my full expectations of sublime horror. The difficult or dark experiences never took on the quality of intensity that the ‘highs’ did. Where was that madness and desolation that I had been culturally led to expect? Before I went to Skye I know it had worried my friends; some mornings I even woke up glancing over my mental shoulder to see if it was preparing to pounce. No one who goes silence hunting can expect it to be simple or straightforward: it is necessarily complicated and by all accounts can lead to insanity. Even the most positive of the silence seekers whose stories I read were conscious of the threat. The exultant Moitessier wrote, ‘Wrapped in total silence, sucked down by a huge inner emptiness I sank into the abyss … I felt madness burrowing into my guts like some hideous beast.’2 And the calmer Byrd recorded: ‘Cold and darkness deplete a body gradually; the mind turns sluggish; the nervous system slows up … Try as I may I cannot take my loneliness casually. It is too big. But I must not dwell on it. Otherwise I am undone.3

  Perhaps I have just been lucky, although, actually, I do not believe it is just ‘luck’ – I am, I think, reasonably careful about my own self-protection. And there is also an advantage in setting out on this sort of journey when one is older, weighted towards the social and with strong commitments beyond, or outside of the silence. Most of the things that go horrendously wrong happen to younger adventurers. Naturally one part of me was delighted and reassured – obviously silence suited me and I could enjoy it. At another level, though, I felt somehow slightly ‘cheated’. I wanted to experience the whole of silence. I wanted to understand Donald Crowhurst as well as Bernard Moitessier – the dark disintegration, the howling emptiness, the demons of the desert hermits.

  Then, that winter I got snowed in.

  This was not the usual sort of getting snowed in. Early in 2001 there was a major outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease. It was horrible. The horror was exacerbated by a feeling that the government was being totally incompetent – the rules and regulations made no sense; the contiguous cull was probably illegal and widely held to be useless; and the disposal of the slaughtered livestock was both unsanitary and insensitive. In many rural areas people felt frightened and powerless, and in isolated places like the Durham moors, social life was completely disrupted. The markets were closed, people did not want to visit other farms or have people on theirs. More immediate to my personal comfort, the moors, like the rest of the countryside, were closed to walkers, so that I could not take my usual exercise and had a sense of being ‘cabin’d, cribbed, confined’.

  In late March there was a period of severe snow and blizzards. The rural roads of County Durham are normally snowploughed by subcontracted local farmers using their own tractors – but they were confined to their farms by the outbreak, so the road to and from my house was unploughed and soon became unpassable as the snow drifted across it. Without any choice, and without much preparation, I was alone and locked into an involuntary period of silence. Since the telephone lines were down, I had no source of information as to what was going on in the ‘real world’. I knew, for example, that my brother’s farm was under Special Measures – a legally binding series of restrictions on movement in and out of the farm – and that he was anticipating the slaughter of his stock, but I did not know if this had or had not happ
ened (his sheep were eventually culled but his dairy herd was not, which was in itself rather frustrating and confusing), or how the epidemic was progressing throughout the country, including my own moor, so it was not a comfortable time or place to be confined. Part of me regressed – I built a splendid snowlady in the garden, daily expanding the magnificence of her bosom and the glamour of her costumes, but another part of me became increasingly scared. Some of the anxiety was ‘realistic’ – would I eventually run out of food (or in my case more seriously, of cigarettes)? What would happen if the weather did not improve? Was my family all right? But more of it was emotional – despite the fact that I was supposedly longing for quiet. I increasingly felt invaded. The silence was hollowing me out and leaving me empty and naked.

  The cold intensified that sense of being exposed, and sometimes when the weather was particularly wild just getting the coal in from the coal shed was exhausting and even frightening. When the weather was calmer, however, I realised that snow produces a peculiar acoustic effect: it mutes nearby noises (presumably because the softer ground surface absorbs them) but causes distant sounds to carry further and with a startling clarity. In addition the snow itself flattens everything visually. These effects disorientated me and made me increasingly nervy and jumpy. One day walking to my gate, the collar of my jacket blew up against the back of my head and I screamed aloud, viscerally convinced I had been attacked from behind.