For most cultures, though, the magic works – and since we worked the magic we feel pretty clever (with, it must be said, some considerable justification). We have won. The sun rises; the spring comes, the ice melts, the rivers flood the fertile plains. And eventually we feel smart enough and secure enough to invent ‘science’, in the sense of non-theological, non-magical rules, to explain why the sun has not been swallowed up and – equally important – why it is not going to be swallowed up tomorrow. This is not only comforting; it is also an immense saving of energy, time and expense. It is a massive victory – it really is. Our rules – our own laws, not the gods’, not the light’s, ours – enshrined in language. Our language – not the animals’ – keeps the sun (the light, life, food, future, the species, the world) alive.
Now what happens? What always happens when we try to suppress real fears without acknowledging them. The Terror appears somewhere different; it shifts, in language, as language always does, from the material to the abstract; from the present actual to the symbolic. Now the Terror turns up elsewhere.
(Of course, it is possible that the psychoanalytic story is true, and all this is repressed Oedipal stuff really – will daddy’s laws swallow up mummy’s love? Will mummy’s chaos gobble down daddy’s order? But, frankly, I doubt it.)
Now the abstract terror is that silence will gobble up (down) the words – will overwhelm the meaning, reinsert the void and the light will go out and we will all be dead; and the dead are very silent. By now we’ve given up magic so we can’t use ritual to force language into better health, as we once did with the sun. We need some new strategy. Needless to say we think of rather a crafty one: we deny the reality of silence, we reduce it to a lack or absence and make it powerless. We say that silence ‘needs’ – and therefore is waiting – to be broken: like a horse that must be ‘broken in’. But we are still frightened. And the impending ecological disaster deepens our fear that one day the science will not work, the language will break down and the light will go out. We are terrified of silence, so we encounter it as seldom as possible, even if this means losing experiences we know to be good ones, like children wandering alone or unsupervised in the countryside. We say that silence is a lack of something, a negative state. We deny the power and meaning of silence. We are terrified of silence and so we banish it from our lives.
Before I went to Weardale I did not notice the noise in public places, but as soon as I was experiencing periods of silence I also became increasingly overstimulated by noise. Before I had fully realised this I went one day to the Metro Centre in Gateshead to buy a waste-paper basket; something I needed, though not urgently, something that was not very important and which I could comfortably afford to buy – so it was not the shopping itself that led to the subsequent distress. Shopping malls are more or less designed to be noise boxes – they tend to have a great number of smooth hard surfaces, off which sound waves bounce energetically; they have roofs through which the sound waves cannot pass and are projected back like echoes; many of the shops play background music, which spills out into the passageways; electronic announcements blare out over the continual hubbub and there are a great number of people often in small groups. I very quickly found it extremely stressful – it caused me actual physical discomfort, an escalating feeling of panic and exhaustion. I was entirely unable to purchase anything at all and after less than an hour had to leave in tears.
It took me a little while to work out what was happening. I have never suffered from either agoraphobia or claustrophobia, to which on investigation the symptoms seemed quite close, and subsequently do not seem to have developed either. I am convinced that it was aural overstimulation – and it has not got better. Now I know what it is I can manage it well enough, but going to cities, to large parties, or to any place where there are a significant number of loud, overlapping but different sounds remains stressful and tiring at best. I had lived in London for years and had never noticed let alone been distressed by the noise, but now I do find it nearly intolerable; when I go to towns I sleep badly, I drink too much alcohol and I feel physically depleted very quickly. Literally millions of people live in a constantly noisy environment the whole time: it must be unhealthy, and to me at least provides part of an explanation of the tension and violence and the grim, closed-down faces that you see on the streets. The extensive use of personal stereos to deliver more freely chosen sounds directly into ears while cutting off the noise of the environment makes sense in this context, although of course what it actually delivers is more sound – noisy earplugs.
This is not merely subjective. There is good evidence now that exposure to excessive noise has damaging physiological and psychological effects, including hypertension, aggression, insomnia, high stress levels, tinnitus and hearing loss; and these in themselves can lead to other health problems, like cardiovascular diseases. The origins of the word ‘noise’ are uncertain but two of the suggested derivations are from nausea (the Latin for sickness) and noxious (the Latin for harmful).11 I have come to believe that we are at risk of underestimating the danger: lower levels of sound, particularly when it is sustained and out of our control, seem to have unnoticed but nasty effects. Noise may be damaging even when we are not experiencing it as excessive.
Like other forms of environmental pollution, this is a relatively recent problem. The more densely inhabited any given area is the more noisy it inevitably is; it is impossible for a human being to move without making some sound. The more human beings there are in any one place the more noise there will be. Over the last 200 years the population of Europe has increased enormously, but the rural population has declined radically and continues to do so: more people occupy less space and are therefore subject to more noise than would have been imaginable in the eighteenth century. This shift is continuing still: the population of the Scottish islands, for example, has fallen a further 3 per cent in the last decade.12 Moreover, the more hard flat surfaces and the less horizontal space there is the more any noise will increase. One of the points that Henry Mayhew, the nineteenth-century journalist and sociologist, made in his most famous book, London Labour and the London Poor, is how damaging intellectually and morally the dense population, and the constant hubbub that it inevitably generated, was to the urban poor; the effect was compounded because people who had worked alone or in small units outside in agricultural labour were now transferred to the immensely loud, steam-powered factories of the Industrial Revolution. For extremely long periods of the day more and more people worked in the enclosed spaces and hellish din of industrial units and mines.
If the volume of ambient sound increased in the nineteenth century because of urbanisation and industrialisation, in the twentieth century yet more noise arose as a side effect of technology, and indeed of increasing prosperity. Horses make more noise than feet; cars and trains make more noise than horses; and aeroplanes make more noise than any of these. Almost every labour-saving device – vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, liquidisers, central heating and air conditioning, computers, even hair dryers – makes more noise than the manual version of the task that it replaced. Radios, stereo sound systems and television – along with other recreational devices – also add volume. Our homes may be more private than they were but they are not quieter. Above all, communication technology has, in increasing human contact, decreased the amount of silence around us. The ubiquitous mobile phone (117 per cent of the population of the UK own one) is the latest form of instant communication.
In the Middle Ages Christian scholastics argued that the devil’s basic strategy was to bring human beings to a point where they are never alone with their God, nor ever attentively face to face with another human being. In the Christian tradition Satan has always been hampered by her inability to create anything new – she lacks both imagination and artistry. The mobile phone, then, seems to me to represent a major breakthrough for the powers of hell – it is a new thing, which allows the devil to take a significant step forward in her grand design
. With a mobile, a person is never alone and is never entirely attentive to someone else. What is entirely brilliant about it from the demonic perspective is that so many people have been persuaded that this is not something pleasurable (a free choice) but something necessary. Of course, I am fully aware that mobile phones have radically improved working conditions for some people – but oddly enough this is used in peculiar ways. Doctors, for example, have told me how much easier a mobile makes their house calls, without apparently noticing that at the very moment this ease was granted them they gave up making house calls at all.
In The Screwtape Letters C. S. Lewis, the Christian apologist now best known for his children’s books about Narnia, has his devil write:
Music and silence – how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since Our Father entered Hell … no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied with Noise – Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless and virile – Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end.13
This ambition seems very nearly to have been achieved. I believe it has psychological consequences. In 1985 Ernest Gellner, the philosopher and sociologist, commented, ‘Our environment is now made up basically of our relationships with others.’14 And in The School for Genius Anthony Storr developed this notion:
The burden of value with which we are at present loading interpersonal relationships is too heavy for those fragile craft to carry … love and friendship are, of course, an important part of what makes life worthwhile. But they are no t the only source of happiness.15
This idea, that we feel ourselves to be happy and fulfilled only when we are interacting with other people, creates a dissonance with the equally popular mythology that stresses individual autonomy and personal ‘rights’. If I need interpersonal relationships and I have a right to what I need, it is obviously very difficult to have relationships of genuine self-giving or even of equality. However, this problem is not addressed, is indeed concealed, within popular culture. The consequence of this, almost inevitably, is the creation of an increasing number of lightweight relationships – relationships that appear to connect people, but are not vulnerable to the requirements of love, and therefore tend to lack endurance and discipline. The overstimulation, of which noise is a major factor, of modern society has an addictive quality – the more stimulation and novelty you get, the more you feel you need.
Incessant noise covers up the thinness of relationships as well as making silence appear dangerous and threatening. The nervous chatter that is produced to cover over even brief periods of silence within a group is one manifestation of this. A more alarming one is the move away from honouring disaster by silence to celebrating the event with applause. What on earth is going on when groups of people gather to cheer and clap as a response to sudden or shocking deaths, as a crowd of strangers did outside Liverpool Cathedral at Rhys Jones’s funeral? It is a serious tragedy that an eleven-year-old should be shot dead on the street. What are we celebrating; why are we not silenced?
Noisy applause replacing silence as a way of marking these sorts of events is, moreover, a break with a very ancient tradition and one that seems to occur in a wide range of cultures. The traditional response to awe, positive or negative, has been silence. In the Apocalypse the whole of heaven falls silent ‘for one little hour’ before the mystical Lamb can ‘break the seal’ which will bring on the judgement day.16 This idea seems to have been derived from the poetry of the psalms – ‘The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silent before him,’ or, ‘Be silent all flesh before the Lord; for he has roused himself from his holy dwelling’ – and from classical Greek custom. Philip Howard outlined the history:
Silence has been the ultimate human response to enormity. A Munch Scream may be the initial response to tragedy, but silence is the awe for something too deep for words. The Romans called the inspiration for such otherworldly feeling numen [hence ‘numinous’]. The priests of ancient Greece called on their citizens to keep silence in the presence of tragedy or disaster … the awesome ceremony has survived ever since.17
Awestruck and dumbstruck (struck dumb, and dumbfounded are similar terms) are almost synonymous.
Oddly, in the face of the increasing noise, the two-minute silence on Remembrance Sunday is one of the very few remaining acts of social ritual that commands wide support in Britain, and this annual ceremony seems to be increasingly observed, with about 75 per cent of the population participating.
The organised minutes of public silence in honour of the war dead and more recently of other groups has a complicated history, with various different countries and individuals claiming to have invented it. France was probably the first country to have a national annual period of silence after the First World War, although in 1912 large parts of the USA kept a ceremonial silence to mourn the sinking of the Titanic and the Maine, while the Portuguese Senate kept a ten-minute silence on the death of Rio Branco – the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Brazil. The British silence, originally on Armistice Day and subsequently on the Sunday nearest to 11 November, began in 1919 after a formal appeal by George V, through the pages of The Times. The foreign ministers of the EU asked for a three-minute silence following the destruction of the Twin Towers, a curious example of a war memorial occurring before a war. I cannot help but feel that such a silence is both more appropriate and more meaningful than inevitably artificial cheering.
Silence, even as an expression of awe, is becoming uncomfortable. We are asked to be silent less and less; churches and public libraries are no longer regarded as places where silence is appropriate, or even more simply polite. Even the acceptable length of silence in radio programmes is being reduced. Silence is not experienced as refreshing or as assisting concentration, but as threatening and disturbing.
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that in 1994 the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act undermined a very specific silence: the right of a person accused of a crime not to answer questions, nor to have prejudicial inference drawn from such a silence. Although this right was only codified in statute law in 1912, it is a very ancient Common Law provision – probably emerging from the seventeenth-century protests against the Star Chamber and High Commissions, which could compel (by torture) the accused to answer questions without telling them what they had been charged with. This right to silence is based on a number of legal principles. People were held to have a ‘natural duty’ of self-preservation and therefore could not be ‘bound to accuse themselves’. In law people must be treated as innocent until proven guilty; it is not their job, as it were, to demonstrate their innocence – it is the prosecution’s duty to prove their guilt. Such ideas must have been connected to, or at least have drawn force from, the fact that at his trial Jesus declined to answer questions: ‘he was silent and gave no answer’.18 The contemporary erosion of this right suggests to me that, consciously or unconsciously, silence is perceived as sinister, dishonest and contemptuous. It must not be permitted or encouraged.
Yet we know historically and emotionally that silence as resistance can have a bone-shaking power – as anyone who has had to deal with a sulking teenager does not need telling. Silent protest, the freedom not to speak, to challenge the supposedly rational speakers, to give no ground, to refuse to enter the arena, is not simply negative; it is an occupation of space with a symbolic and powerful meaning. The right to freedom of expression – the right to speak out and be heard – loses meaning if it separates itself too far from the parallel right to be silent.
Nonetheless, despite the rising tide of noise, there are some real pools of silence embedded even in the noisiest places and I began to search them out a
nd test them, starting with what was in easy reach of Weardale. One of the most obvious places to begin was with religiously inspired silences.
It was by lucky chance that there was a Zen monastery less than twenty miles from Weatherhill and by an even luckier chance that I discovered this. I will always think of Throstlehole with gratitude as well as affection; the monks were extraordinarily generous and hospitable, open to explaining their own faith tradition, while never probing into mine, just offering the resources of their evening meditation whenever I wanted to come and sit with them.
Zen is a form of Buddhism which emerged during the transmission of Buddhist teaching from India to China, although its principal development was in Japan and Korea. Part of Zen philosophy is that it is impossible to describe Zen; but individuals have tried. In the early twelfth century a seminal work, Ts’u-t’ing shih-yuan, attributed this description of Zen to the fifth-century master, Bodhidharma:
A special transmission outside the scriptures,
Not founded on words and letters;
By pointing directly to mind
It allows one to penetrate the nature of things
To attain the Buddha-nature.19
A Book of Silence Page 16