The idea of trial by silence is very ancient: it emerges in folklore and religious ritual from almost every culture. The aboriginal boy must undergo an initiation of silence-in-the-wild to become a man, while on the other side of the world the squire and the novice must pass through a night of silent vigil, the tall columns and vaulted roof rising above them like trees, to achieve their high status as knight or monk.
Trials are the stuff of fairy stories. Quests, both outward into the unknown world and inward into the protagonist’s moral being, are basically trials. Only the worthy can prove they are worthy. Only the real princess can feel the pea through all those mattresses. Unlike myths, fairy stories are never about transcending nature, but about uncovering – discovering – an already existing identity. The function of trials is to uncover the truth: this is why trial by combat between two men was deemed capable of determining a woman’s sexual fidelity; why trial by water could prove whether someone was a witch; or indeed trial by jury can infallibly expose a criminal. Etymologically ‘trial’ derives from ‘try’, not in the sense of ‘attempt’, but in the sense of ‘test’ – to try out a new car, or try on a new frock.
Perhaps the best-known European fairy story dealing with ‘trial by silence’ is ‘The Six Swan Brothers’.14 Here the nameless heroine’s six brothers, betrayed by their stepmother, are turned into swans and she voluntarily undertakes a trial by silence to release them: she will be silent for seven years. She is bound neither by a forced oath nor by being struck dumb – she chooses to be silent freely and with love as her only motive. She also has to make them each a shirt out of starwort. This is deeply mysterious because starwort is a leggy wild flower with tiny petals and not particularly fibrous stalks; it does not seem possible to make thread out of starwort. The only clue I can find to the meaning of this strange task is that starwort, in some parts of the country, is called stitchwort – probably because, as an infusion, it was believed to heal ‘stitches’, the kind that stab you in the side if you run too far or fast. The pain, the endurance of pain and the difficulty of the task all come together here – although I don’t know if the twinning works in German whence the story originally comes.
She sits in a tree, like a bird, completely silent and sewing the shirts. A king finds her there, woos her, takes her to his palace and marries her, but still she does not speak. Her wicked mother-in-law steals her newborn babies, smears her mouth with goats’ blood and eventually persuades the husband that his silent wife is a witch and has eaten their children. She does not defend herself. She must be burned. She is led to the stake, the almost finished shirts carried neatly over her arm – and at the last moment the air is filled with swans, they swoop down, put on the shirts and are restored to human form. She is free to speak, she tells her story and all is well, save that one shirt was unfinished and the youngest brother must go through life lopsided, with a swan’s wing instead of his own left arm.
This is a very strange story. Surely a woman is not meant to love her brothers more than her husband or her children? In ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ the ‘heroine’ is let off her Faustian bargain simply because mother love is allowed to override justice; she is freed from a promise because she is a mother. This is a much more normal approach to mothers and their commitments. If fire tests courage and water tests purity, what does silence test? Not love certainly. The boundaries of the self, perhaps.
Integrity. Together with vigils and trials by silence go fasting and trials by hunger. The silent hermits are fiercely ascetic. Taboos about food and taboos about words are often closely related. Persephone must not eat while in hell; she must keep her mouth shut, or she will be claimed by death for ever. None of this is surprising: our mouths are one orifice over which we might seem to have control. To speak is to give not just secrets, but our selves, away. Not to speak, then, is to be self-contained, autonomous, adult and, by implication, chaste. Trial by silence tests integrity.
Going to the forest did not cure me of being scared of it, but it taught me that the terror of silence was complex and the struggle to engage with it and understand it was beautiful as well as dark. I came home from Inverness somewhat enchanted myself, and more aware than ever that the long shadow of the wild wood plays an essential role in our contemporary negative attitudes to silence.
Looking back at those three years in Weardale, I see them as a kind of novitiate. When a would-be nun (or monk of course) enters a religious order she is first a ‘postulant’, a person ‘postulating’ or proposing that she might want to join. A postulant takes no vows and makes no commitments. If this works out well on both sides, she then becomes a novice. A novice is a new nun in formal training; as well as participating in the life and practice of the order she is taught – about prayer, about the theories behind it, and about the history of monasticism and her own chosen version of it; in a sense a novice is an apprentice – she is learning the skill of her life work in both theory and practice. In Weardale I was a silence novice, studying the practice and history and theory of silence.
When I moved to Weardale I did not fully realise this – I thought it was a new beginning that would go on for the rest of my life, but in fact it turned out to be more of a pause. Even as silence is undermined in so many ways in the contemporary world, there remain tiny puddles of it in most people’s lives, pauses in the stream of sound, which they value though do not usually call silence. A common example is a hot bath at the end of the working day, whether or not accompanied by a drink. ‘Unwinding’ is a popular term for these little silences, suggesting that one does get wound up by the noise of daily life, and just under the level of consciousness one knows that incessant social activity can deplete as well as nourish the self. I have come to see Weardale as just such a pause.
A pause is a rather nebulous little whatsit, somehow, and hard to get a grip on. But certainly in a pause there is anticipation. Musical notation has proven better than spoken language at encoding small silences: here a silence is called a ‘rest’ if it is a precisely measured stoppage (half-beat; a beat, a bar) but a ‘pause’ if it goes on for an imprecise amount of time: they’re written differently on the staves. Language has lots of vocabulary for different small silences, but no way of showing how they fit into the hubbub of words around them: pause, stop, rest, end, caesura, hesitation, lacuna, delay. In defining ‘pause’ the OED rather favours ‘hesitate’ in the examples it gives, but ‘hesitation’ suggests a kind of fumbling whereas to me at least ‘pause’ does not; it is difficult to imagine a ‘serene hesitation’.
The one most obvious thing about a pause is that it doesn’t go on for ever. To be a pause it must sooner or later, and probably sooner, be broken; whereas with a ‘stop’ or an ‘end’ there is closure. It isn’t just that a pause doesn’t go on for ever – it is that we know it isn’t going to. It is building up to something. Presumably this is how comic ‘timing’, the famous pause-before-the-punchline, functions. The comedian creates a little silence to give the audience time to want to know what the punchline will be, time to intensify their desire. But they do have to know there will be a punchline – they have to be ‘trained’ in the genre codes of stand-up comedy or it isn’t going to work. If the pause goes on too long the anticipation evaporates, into anxiety or boredom or over-anticipation.
In Le Plaisir du Texte Roland Barthes, the French literary theorist, argues that contemporary literary forms require ‘closure’; but that the satisfaction of closure (full-stop endings) deprives readers of the ‘bliss’ of the opening-out ending. Presumably he wanted works of literature to end with a pause. And T. S. Eliot described poetry as ‘writing with a lot of silence on the page’. Did he mean writing with a lot of pauses on the page, since the poet is going to start a new line at any moment?
The only use of pause to mean a permanent ending that I can think of is ‘menopause’. While I was considering this odd euphemism, I noticed with ironic amusement that the American word for a full stop is a period.
In this pau
se I learned a lot of things, external and internal, many of which were entirely unexpected. The biggest surprise was the realisation that there were so many different sorts of silence. My assumption had been that silence was going to be monotone; that all silence would be somehow the same and however one came by it, the end product, as it were, would be very pure, very beautiful but somehow flat, undifferentiated. Skye and the flotation tank had begun to teach me better, and now I was finding more and more complexity. The more silences I looked at, the more silent places I went to, the more I became aware that there were dense, interwoven strands of different silences.
Even at the physical level there is a huge variety. The BBC’s radio sound archive has tapes of a remarkable range of different silences – ‘night silence in an urban street’; ‘morning silence – dawn, the South Downs’; ‘Morning silence – winter moor’; ‘Silence, sitting room’ – ‘garage’ – ‘large hall’ – ‘cement bunker’ – ‘beach’; and so on; and even so most radio producers prefer to go out and record their own version of silence for their specific programmes. This is partly because in fact it is practically never truly and completely silent, at least within the earth’s atmosphere, but it is also because these different silences have different emotional connotations.
Beyond the purely auditory experience there is an even greater range; there are emotionally different silences and intellectually different silences too. I have come to believe that while sound may be predominantly a brain phenomenon, silence is a mind event. The experience of silence is more tightly bound up with culture, cultural expectation and, oddly enough, with language than the experience of sound is. Chosen silence can be creative and generate self-knowledge, integration and profound joy; being silenced (a silence chosen by someone else and forced upon one) can drive people mad. It is possible to experience external silence without any sense of interior silence and in a few cases the reverse. Catherine of Siena, the Italian mystic, was famously able to maintain a conscious awareness of her own interior silence while pursuing an eloquent and complex ambassadorial role about the politics of the papacy. Silence is multifaceted, a densely woven fabric of many different strands and threads.
This was helpful to my conviction that silence was not simply a deficit or lack, an absence of sound (or speech or noise). It seemed to me that if silence were simply a negative event, a blurred absence of a great reality called sound, then it could not have specific qualities of its own, no pitch, volume or tone and no reverberations. But increasingly all my experience suggested that silence does indeed have these qualities, or at least qualities close to and comparable with these. ‘A scary silence’ and ‘a holy silence’ are crude examples; but I learned to tell when it had been snowing in the night by the quality of the silence, even more than the light, when I woke up – snow silence is different from wet silence or sunny silence. Silence can be calm or frightening; lonely or joyful; deep or thin. Certainly silence seems to have reverberation – the silence in the sensory deprivation pod and the silence at Throstlehole felt very different.
I found it quite daunting to discover that silence was so complex and asked such difficult questions of me. But I also found it fascinating and deeply engaging. There was, and there remains for me, something deeply mysterious about the fact that there are different kinds of silence. I find comfort in Georg Cantor’s elegant mathematical proof that infinity comes in different sizes. Both philosophically and mathematically this was deeply shocking (it made Wittgenstein extremely cross) – but nonetheless it is now generally accepted. If there can be different sizes of infinity, of course there can be different volumes of silence; and indeed, I now hope there may be whole symphonies of silence.
Notes – 5 Silent Places
1 Henry Thoreau, Journal, 7.1.1857.
2Thomas Merton, Journal, 27.2.1963.
3 These concerns are reflected in my fiction, especially in Three Times Table (1990) and Home Truths (1993), and in many of my short stories, but most particularly in ‘A Big Enough God’ (1995), an attempt at a theology of creation post-Einstein.
4 Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek (Cape, 1975), p. 165.
5 Anthony Gormley, interview, Guardian 14.6.2005.
6Psalm 124:7
7 Nicolson, Sea Room, p.29.
8 ‘St Columba’s Island Hermitage’, Irish, twelfth century, anon. From Celtic Miscellany, ed. Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson (Penguin Classics, 1971).
9 William Cowper, ‘The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk’, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, (Oxford, 1907) p. 114. Oddly enough, far from being a paeon to solitude and ownership, this is a very depressing poem about the pains of isolation and the pointlessness of ownership – the opening four lines are entirely ironic and quite bitter, but they have been removed from their original context and are frequently quoted as positive pleasure.
10 The Forestry Commission has recently taken on a great number of these concerns – both planting with more diversity and opening out the forests for recreational use. Far more than private landlords, they have taken on board not just the legal obligations of the new access laws but their spirit also.
11 Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908).
12 Bruno Bettelheim, Uses of Enchantment (Thames & Hudson, 1976). One of the places from which silence is conspicuously absent is the index to this fascinating book. Bettelheim, a psychologist, sees no value in silence and overrides it in his work.
13 Maitland Miscellany, vol. 2, part 1 (Edinburgh, 1840), pp. 187–91.
14 In some tellings there are seven or twelve brothers; and in some versions they are not swans but crows or ravens. I am not sure why they are always either pure white or pure black.
* Bettelheim’s clinical speciality was in autism. As was fashionable at the time, he endorsed the theory of the ‘refrigerator mother’ – autism was caused by withholding mothers. No wonder he found the Grimms’ wicked stepmothers and ice maidens so meaningful.
Desert Hermits
During these years in Weardale I grew deeply contented. I lived in a place of extraordinary wild beauty. I was fit and well. I had all these fascinating things to think and learn about. I was never lonely and never bored. I had enough satisfying work to do. I felt my prayer life and my theological understanding were developing, and moving forward in ways that seemed both natural and exciting. I felt I was creating a way of living, freely and silently, that might be useful to a noisy world as well as to me personally. Above all, I enjoyed the sense of exploration, and possibility.
Then I noticed something shocking. I had come to Weardale for four conscious reasons: to study and think about silence, to find out if it was delightful to me, to deepen my prayer life and to write better. I was indeed doing and enjoying all the first three, but I was not, in fact, writing. Or, to be more precise, I was not writing any fiction and certainly not of the kind I wanted to write. When I had come north it had been with a sense that the stories were not enough – I wanted to dig deeper into them, to pull more out of them. It had not occurred to me that I would abandon them, nor they me. The desire to write, to tell stories that pull my thoughts and emotions together, has been something that I have lived with and found integral to my sense of well-being, even of identity, for as long as I can remember. Now quite simply stories did not spring to mind; my imagination did not take a narrative form. I had in a peculiarly literal way ‘lost the plot’. I found this disturbing.
More to the point, I could not understand what was happening. When I set out on my journey into silence, I had a very well-embedded assumption. I was a writer and a pray-er; through a disciplined practice of silence I would get better at both.
It is a commonplace, almost a cliché, that silence and solitude are good for the creative artist and particularly for writers: ‘the world is too much with us’, we need privacy and peace, and a minimum of interruption because ‘solitude is the school for genius’. Equally, it is very generally held, in almost all religious traditions, that silence (in larger or smal
ler doses) is necessary to the aspiring soul. This belief is not confined to monotheistic faiths and even the most communitarian traditions, like Judaism and Islam, have a silent tradition and core narratives about withdrawal into solitude and silence as a precursor to hearing ‘the voice of God’ and being enabled to take radical action.
So it had seemed perfectly reasonable to me that I could go and lurk up on a high moor, put in the disciplined practice of concentration and meditation, and thus become both a better, more prolific imaginative writer and more safely and intensely engaged in the life of prayer.
A Book of Silence Page 22