One afternoon I needed to break out and I took a walk up the undriveable road, despite the fact that there were flurries of ‘snail’ (a mixture of snow and hail) which, driven by a harsh wind, cut into my face. Then, about half a mile from the house, I started to hear the most agonised wailing noises – the wailing, it seemed to me then, of the damned. I was completely terrified. I would be on this hill in this wind forever howling and desolate. I would never see another human being again. I would freeze in hell. It turned out that this strange and deeply disturbing noise was in fact no manifestation of my inner torment, but caused by a strange and fascinating phenomenon. The unfenced roads in that part of the north-east have snow poles – tall posts, marked in black and white foot-wide stripes that show you both where the road is and how deep the snow is. Older snow poles are made of iron and, to make it harder for them to be blown over, they have holes drilled in them for the wind to pass through. Essentially they were Aeolian harps or organ pipes and they were responding to the wind with these extraordinary sounds. But I know I was lucky that I identified the source of the noise fairly quickly, because otherwise it would have driven me insane. I can only too easily understand how this sort of silence can drive one beyond panic and into true madness.
After the Foot and Mouth epidemic was over I had a letter from the Cumbrian poet Robert Drake in which he noted:
Time and time again those on culled farms referred to the nature of the silence after the slaughter, either straight away or particularly the next morning. This was something they had never experienced before. The interesting thing is that there must have been sounds – birdsong, distant traffic, wind, trees, etc., but these were ignored, and the silence attained a density and solidity of its own. In a recent poem of mine the final stanza goes:
At dusk he came back through a silence
So hard it ached inside his ear,
Abandoned boots and coat in the porch,
And found her on all fours, bellowing
Over a floor that just would not dry.
Now I can only recall with great effort the extraordinarily powerful feelings of abandonment, desolation, fury and madness that swept over me at times. It did not last very long. My negative experiences have been little ones, but they have been enough to give me some small understanding of how overwhelming and destructive silence can be, and how closely the terrors seem to follow the same paths and patterns as the joys. It has seemed to me important, as I have hunted my own joyful silence, to remember the silencing that other people have endured, suffered and, in some cases, survived.
At first I was baffled about what was going on. Why had six whole weeks far from home and in almost equally unfavourable weather filled me with delight, even ecstasy, and been rich in joyful, expansive thoughts and emotions, while barely ten days in my own home with my own things around me reduced me to semi-hysteria?
Then something superficially minor happened that gave some insight into all this: a friend gave me, as a present, a double session in a ‘flotation tank’. This gift was not really meant as a bit of pampering, but as an experiment in a specific sort of silence. A flotation tank is a piece of therapeutic equipment offered by various health spas: it consists of a pod, a large bath with a closing lid. This pod is filled with water heated to body temperature (37 degrees Centigrade – 98.6 Fahrenheit) and highly salinated, so that you float effortlessly with your face above the water level, like the Dead Sea. The pod is completely dark and sound-free (although the one I used did offer customers the option of ‘calming music’) and you feel neither temperature nor gravity. I was generously given a double session, because my friend felt that I was more used to silence than most people and a single hour would not be enough for me to get the full benefits.
Actually, I did not care too much for the experience. This was partly because the very idea of a health spa, with its odd mixture of ‘healthy’ and ‘luxurious’, brought out in me my most dour residue of Presbyterian puritanism. (I have such mistrust of beauty treatments that I have not been to a hairdresser for a quarter of a century.) I was also a bit dubious about provoking so easily the immensely strong emotions I had experienced in silence – it seemed a short cut to a state of being that somehow ought to be the result of a long, delicate and disciplined process, rather like using hallucinogenics to ‘find one’s soul’. The ambience of the health spa, offering bikini-line waxing, false nails and ‘natural’ therapies and ‘enhanced spirituality and creativity’ in a single package, brought all this home to me, a little too strongly for comfort. I was also very tired when I went to the spa; every time I became immersed in the silence I would doze off, then roll or tip over in the supporting water and get my mouth full of vile-tasting liquid. So I may not have been in the right mood for this particular form of silence.
According to advertisers (and, in fairness, users), floating
promotes total calm, peaceful relaxation, eliminates fatigue and jet lag; improves sleep; alleviates stress – mental and physical; energises, rejuvenates and revitalises. Stimulates left/right brain synchronisation; shifts brain waves from Beta to lower frequency Alpha, Theta and even Delta; creates mental clarity, alertness; increases creativity, problem solving; heightens visualisation; deepens meditation; expands awareness, intensifies acuteness of all the senses, accelerates learning. Enhances hypnotherapy and self-hypnosis; increases motivation, diminishes depression, anxiety and fear; facilitates freedom from habits, phobias and addictions. Improves athletic performance. Quickens rehabilitation and recovery; relieves pain – arthritis, migraines, injuries etc.; boosts immune function. Improves circulation and distribution of oxygen and nutrients; reduces blood pressure, pulse, heart rate and oxygen consumption.4
(I am only surprised that it does not promise multiple orgasms, world peace and enhanced biodiversity into the bargain.)
As I lay there, trying to stay face up, a hideous thought struck me. ‘Flotation’ is quite simply ‘sensory deprivation’. Indeed, I later learned that when flotation tanks were first introduced as therapy they were even called ‘Sensory Deprivation Tanks’, until some wily operator realised that this was not likely to go down well with consumers. The connotations are not comfortable. Wikipedia defines ‘sensory deprivation’ as:
The deliberate reduction or removal of stimuli from one or more of the senses. Simple devices such as hoods and earmuffs can cut off sight and hearing respectively, while more complex devices can also cut off the sense of smell, touch, taste, thermoception (heat-sense), and ‘gravity’.5
Sensory deprivation is a technique used for interrogation. Although in 1998 the European Court ruled that it ‘did not occasion suffering of the particular intensity and cruelty implied by the word torture’ nonetheless it ‘amounted to a practice of inhuman and degrading treatment’.
Many experts would go further than the Court:
Sensory deprivation, as CIA research and other agency interrogation materials demonstrate, is a remarkably simple concept. It can be inflicted by immobilizing individuals in small, soundproof rooms and fitting them with blacked-out goggles and earmuffs. The first thing that happens is extraordinary hallucinations akin to mescaline … I mean extreme hallucinations of sight and sound. It is followed, in some cases within just two days, by a breakdown akin to psychosis. A practice that may sound innocuous to some [has been] sharpened by the agency over the years into a horrifying torture technique … it is an obvious choice for interrogators newly constrained by law [my italics].6
Exactly the same technique can produce ‘total calm, peaceful relaxation, mental clarity, creativity, expanded awareness, and pain relief ’ and ‘breakdown akin to psychosis’. Or to put it another way, the same silence, the same breaking down of his own boundaries in the enormous solitude of the ocean, that moved Moitessier to ecstasy, drove Donald Crowhurst to psychosis and suicide. The only variable in the experience is the individual experiencing it.
We do, sadly, know too much about milder types of sensory deprivation, becaus
e solitary confinement as a form of punishment (or more politely of ‘prison management’) has been practised far too extensively, especially within the US and the Soviet Union. It is now known that keeping people in isolation produces such consistent responses that Dr Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist with extensive experience in evaluating the psychiatric effects of stringent conditions of confinement, defines them as a diagnosable ‘syndrome’ – akin to but with noteworthy differences from other psychotic or stress disorders; it has, he argues, the characteristics of an acute organic brain syndrome or a delirium. He notes the following cluster of symptoms: hyperresponsivity; difficulties with thinking, concentration and memory; intrusive obsessional thoughts; overt paranoia; panic attacks; problems with impulse control; and perceptual distortions, illusions and hallucinations (his definitions).
Grassian gives examples and details of all these mental states, often with quotations from the sufferers and concludes that:
Some of [these symptoms] are found in virtually no other psychiatric illness: for example, loss of perceptual constancy (objects becoming larger and smaller, seeming to ‘melt’ or change form, sounds becoming louder and softer, etc.) is very rare with primary psychiatric illness.* In addition, functional psychiatric illness very rarely presents with such severe and florid perceptual distortions, illusions, and hallucinations simultaneously affecting multiple perceptual modalities – auditory, visual, olfactory, tactile, kinaesthetic. In fact, in the more common psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia and psychotic depression, auditory hallucinations are by far the most common type, visual hallucinations come a distant second, and hallucinations in all other modalities are actually very uncommon; moreover, combined modality hallucinations – other than the combination of auditory with visual – are exceedingly rare.7
Grassian is saying here that these prisoners are not in any normal sense ‘mad’, but their reaction to silence and solitude is very closely akin to psychotic madness. But what really intrigued me about my own brief experience in the flotation tank and about Grassian’s work with sensory deprivation is that his whole list of symptoms is extraordinarily close to the list of positive effects of silence that I drew up in Skye, with the not altogether surprising absence of bliss. Even though we each give them different names and they clearly have different emotional meanings, as experiences they are more or less identical.
What I call ‘intensification of both physiological and psychological sensation’ he calls ‘hyperresponsivity to external stimuli’, but without question both of them describe (one positively and the other negatively) a very similar condition. So I ‘was suddenly overwhelmed by the wonderful, delicious delightfulness of porridge’, and one of Grassian’s prisoners reports that he got ‘sensitive to noise – the plumbing system. Someone in the tier above me pushes the button on the faucet. It’s too loud. I can’t stand it.’
Similarly, what I call a sense of ‘givenness’ – the feeling that the sensation comes from outside one’s own will or power, he calls ‘intrusive obsessional thoughts’ and his prisoners report a terrifying sense that their individuality is disintegrating; a feeling that they are lost in the universe. What I experience as a thrilling sense of risk or peril he diagnoses as ‘overt paranoia’. An experience of ‘disinhibition’ can be a profound freedom or a ‘problem with impulse control’. ‘Auditory hallucinations’ can just be there in an interesting and thought-provoking way, or they can be experienced as ‘perceptual distortions’ suggesting an unusual psychotic state. Ineffability can carry all the glories of the divine, but it can also make the experiences inaccessible and overwhelming. Boundary confusions in their darker guises are perhaps the most alarming; one of Grassian’s subjects stated, ‘You feel like you are losing something that you may not get back.’ If the world beyond the limits of yourself is inflicting a series of painful experiences and confusions upon you, and then your ability to know for certain what is ‘you’ and what is outside yourself (physically or psychically) becomes blurred, that confusion is not going to feel like a joyful freedom but is likely to induce great guilt to be carried along with the burden of these incomprehensible sensations.
Grassian is a psychiatrist and here he is trying, probably for perfectly good reasons like reducing the amount of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation inflicted on his patients, to define a new form of mental illness. He wants to prove that it is silence itself, not some inherent madness in them before their confinement. Naturally he will pathologise these symptoms and argue that the deprivations are the cause of the illness. But I think, when I look at my own experience, and the experience of all the other silence seekers I have been writing about who have experienced similar effects with joy and delight, that it would make as much or more sense to say that these were not symptoms of madness or any other illness, but the effects of silence itself, occurring within a dangerous context.
It was not, I realised, that I had missed out on some aspect or nuance of silence; I had had the same experiences Grassian lists, but I had enjoyed them and they were therefore different experiences. The lines between them are almost entirely subjective. Obviously hearing a choir sing in Latin is a very different thing from hearing demons taunting you; and having an intense sensation of delicious porridge is different from having an intense experience of pain. Being disinhibited so that you do not care about singing loudly out of tune is not the same as being so disinhibited so that you cut your own skin without knowing why, as some of his subjects did. There is a parallel in the effects of some drugs – the physiological effects of alcohol have been carefully measured, but I have seen no studies on what sort of person in what sort of circumstances gets happier or more miserable or more violent when drunk. There is no doubt that the effect is caused by alcohol intoxication, but the emotional experience is quite different.
I started to brood on what factors might tip the balance towards positive or negative experiences of extreme silence. I looked at my own silence and again at those of other people who have chosen to write about it. I now believe that the strongest determining factor in whether a silence ends up feeling positive or negative is whether or not it was freely chosen. Quite apart from research like Grassian’s on contemporary prisoners placed in solitary confinement, we have a surprising number of accounts of incarceration, isolation, marooning and banishment. It seems such a strange thing to do to another human being – to exile someone not just from his or her own place or family, but also from human society itself. Yet from many cultures and over a long stretch of time there have been tales, legends and myths about exile, exclusion and silencing.
In Greek mythology there are a number of stories of people being immured or exiled in order to prevent them from speaking. One of the most brutal and complex of these tales is the story of Procne:8 Procne’s sister, Philomel, was married to the King of Thrace, who went to fetch Procne for a visit. However, on the way back to Thrace he raped her. He was then so ashamed by his own action that, in order to prevent it becoming known, he cut out Procne’s tongue and imprisoned her in a hut in a forest. He went home and told his wife that her sister had died of a fever. Unable to speak and unable to escape, Procne embroidered a tapestry telling the whole story. After various vicissitudes this message came into Philomel’s hands; she rescued her sister and the two of them enacted an extreme revenge on the King: they killed his eight-year-old son – who was also Philomel’s son – and served him up to his father as a stew, which he ate with great relish before realising what he had done. Like many Greek myths, one of the issues here is about what might be an appropriate revenge. Here all three characters are equally punished, they are turned into birds, suggesting perhaps that at least in Greek culture the physical silencing of someone, even when it did not serve its intended ends, was seen as a very serious offence indeed, since it is equated with infanticide and cannibalism.
The Hebrew Scriptures told the story of Hagar, Abraham’s lover and mother of his (at that point) only child, who was driven out into th
e desert with her small son. Sarah, Abraham’s infertile wife, had used her slave Hagar as a surrogate mother and Hagar had a son, Ishmael, with Abraham. However, after the child was born, Sarah became jealous and persuaded Abraham to expel Hagar from the camp. Abraham gave Hagar bread and water and her child – who was also his child – and forced her to leave, to her certain death. Out in the desert, her child dying in her arms, Hagar clearly encountered the full terror of unchosen silence. She ‘cast her child down’ under some scrubby bushes and then went and sat a little way away from him, because she could not bear to watch him die. Then the God who had apparently authorised her banishment became present to her; she heard his voice and in an ineffable immediacy not described in any detail she became one of the very few people in the Hebrew Scriptures to ‘see God and live’.9
Her story has a happy ending; God shows Hagar a well, and she and the child both survive. Inevitably, most such stories have a happy ending, because the likely outcome of driving someone out of the protection of society into the wilderness is death, and then there is no one to tell what happened and therefore no story. In legend and myth, children exiled from their communities, for whatever reason, flourish. Romulus and Remus, raised by wolves, grow up to found the city of Rome. In Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan, the first European philosophical novel by Ibn Tufail, a twelfth-century Iberian Arab thinker and writer, which became a major ‘best-seller’, the eponymous hero is brought up on an uninhabited island by gazelles and achieves religious truth by direct reasoning. Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli, best known in the Jungle Book (1894) and its sequels, show Mowgli, who was also raised by wolves, acquiring almost magical powers through his ability to be at home both in human culture and in the wild with animals.
A Book of Silence Page 11