To put it at its simplest I was now being proved wrong.
Luckily I had already become aware that there are lots of sorts of silence. This gave me an idea that there might be something profoundly different between the silence of the hermits and the silence of creative artists. I started to read more attentively the attempts of both groups to describe what they thought their silence was for. What I began to see was that the two projects are, in a number of ways, inherently contradictory. Here are two quotations from famous silence practitioners. Both quotes are from personal letters, rather than published text, and I do not think that this is mere chance.
You said once that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means reveal ing oneself to excess, that utmost of self-revelation and surrender … that is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.1
And:
We must cross the desert and spend some time in it to receive the grace of God as we should. It is there that one empties oneself, that one drives away from oneself everything that is not God and that one empties completely the small house of one’s soul so as to leave all the room free for God alone. … It is indispensable: the soul needs the silence of it, the inward retirement, this oblivion of all created things.2
The first is by Franz Kafka in a letter to his fiancée (perhaps not altogether surprisingly they were never married). Kafka was a Czech-born Austrian of German-Jewish parents, much influenced by the pre-existentialist theology of Kierkegaard, who saw social life as a continuous assault on the individual by a pointless and irrational society. He was hypersensitive and deeply introspective. Here he clearly sees silence as a means to strengthen his ego, by protecting it from social pressure, with a view to establishing an authentic self or ‘voice’ in which to write, and as a way of developing and experiencing personal fulfilment.
The second quote is from Charles de Foucault to a friend. De Foucault came from a prosperous military family, minor members of the French nobility. He served in the army until he experienced a profound spiritual awakening. He first joined the Trappists, but found the fairly extreme asceticism of the order inadequate to his personal creed of self-immolation. Eventually he was dispensed from the order and became a hermit in the Sahara Desert, where he was murdered, in 1916, by Tuareg nomads. It is evident that he saw silence not as a means to shore up or strengthen the boundaries of the ego, but to dismantle them – for an extreme act of ‘self-emptying’, or cosmic merging. The concept of ‘fulfilment’ would have been repugnant to de Foucault, filled-fullness and self-emptying being rather precisely opposites. His entire purpose seems to have been the destruction of his ego through radical self-denial.
It is interesting how much these two have in common in one sense. They both saw silence as integral to their life’s work. They both come from a similar historical period. They are both using the same genre, the personal letter, to discuss the same issue. They both use surprisingly similar imagery. Of course, rather than comparing them in this way, I could equally contrast them by other sets of identities – by race, class and, indeed, by emotional history: Kafka constantly dreading being overwhelmed by his father; de Foucault fatherless from a very young age. I have quoted them because of their unusual clarity about their intentions, which exposes the radical distinction between them. It is quite difficult to find many quotations as direct as this from those whose sense of self is simultaneously constructed and buried in silence.
However, I am certain that neither Kafka nor de Foucault is unique. I could similarly compare and contrast Virginia Woolf ’s Room of One’s Own with Catherine of Siena’s ‘little secret room’ or ‘hermitage of the heart’. The vocabulary and imagery are markedly similar; the projects are radically opposed. Woolf seeks solitary space in order to escape from the social pressures on women and establish a secure identity and voice; Catherine seeks the same space in order to empty herself of ego and merge her identity with, lose her sense of self in, her God.
So a new and, I have to say, painful question developed for me, coiled within the pleasure and excitement of my growing silent life. Is it possible to have both – to be the person who prays, who seeks union with the divine and to be the person who writes, and in particular writes prose narratives? I was very much aware that I have always believed that silence, and particularly silence in ‘nature’, was supposed to stimulate both artistic creativity and religious spirituality. That was not what I was experiencing.
Increasingly, I felt that there were, or seemed to be, two different sorts of silence, which required very different techniques. In prayer one is trying to empty oneself of ego; pour oneself out, become permeable, translucent, empty, open to the transcendent; whereas in the act of making art one needs the silence to focus all one’s capacity, to shore up or strengthen the ego. I began to understand more seriously what George Steiner had meant when he described artists as ‘rival creators’. I had always thought that this was rubbish – and that God wanted us, rather, to be co-creators. I was learning, with different degrees of acceptance, frustration, willingness and resistance, that I could not be silent and at the same time be creating new words and new worlds. Silence has no narrative. Silence intensifies sensation, but blurs the sense of time.
I began to feel that this meant, or might mean, that I had to make radical choices about who I chose to be. Could I be happy to give up writing? Could I be contented with a more active and businesslike kind of religious practice? The answer to both questions, most of the time, was ‘no’.
I had a problem.
So I decided to try to dig down to the roots of these two very different silences and try to understand them better. Because I had found the atmosphere of specific places so helpful in my earlier searches I decided I would make two more journeys: one to the desert, which the Christian hermits of the third to sixth centuries had used to explore radical silence as a means of getting closer to their God; the other to the mountains, which had proved so important to the writers of the Romantic Movement whose ideas have so deeply informed contemporary understanding about what it means to be a creative artist.
I went to the Sinai Desert first, because that is the older of the two strands.
Geographically, Sinai is a part of the vast belt of desert that runs from the Atlantic across the top of Africa (the Sahara) into Saudi Arabia and, curling northwards, along the eastern side of Jordan into Syria and Iraq. The part of this chain of deserts that lies between the Nile and the Euphrates is the wellspring of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the monotheisms of the ‘Children of the Book’, which are sometimes called the ‘Abrahamic faiths’. In this shared story Abraham and Sarah came out of Ur of the Chaldees, an ancient city on the Euphrates about 150 miles south of modern Baghdad, trekked along the northern edge of the desert to Haran (in Syria), then south through what is now Israel, into the Negev in the north-west of the Sinai peninsula and down into Egypt, and finally back through northern Sinai to the land of the Canaanites, now Israel and Palestine. Somewhere in this vast, bleak journey the idea of a God who was almighty but nameless, who could not be bribed, who was not tied to any place or temple, who could be met directly and personally, who would speak to His people, began to take root.
Generations later, so the story runs, the young Moses, fleeing justice (perhaps the very first nationalist to begin as a terrorist and end as a patriarch) after murdering an Egyptian overseer, encountered God in a burning bush at the foot of Mount Sinai. Inspired by this vision, he led the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt and into this desert for forty years until they finally arrived in the ‘promised land’, which was also the land of their ancestors. In the desert the Hebrew migrants experienced a harsh purification, a total dependence on their God and above all a direct and abiding encounter with the divine. On the summit of Mount Sinai God gave Moses the tablets of the law. So crucial was this understa
nding of the desert as the place where God could be found that Jesus and Muhammad, seeking, centuries later, to move the religious tradition forward, both withdrew into the desert to prepare themselves for their missions.
Everyone who has written about the desert, from the hermits themselves right through to modern tourists, speaks about the density of desert silence. Gertrude Bell, the British traveller who was to become such an important figure in the political development of the Middle East after the 1914–18 war, wrote to her father during her first desert journey:
Shall I tell you my first impression – the silence. It is like the silence of mountain tops, but more intense, for there you know the sound of the wind and far away water and falling ice and stone; there is a sort of echo of sound there, you know it father, but here nothing … silence and solitude fall around you like an impenetrable veil.3
It was this silence that I wanted to taste. I joined a desert retreat organised by Wind, Sand and Stars, ‘which offers an opportunity to spend a week in one area, meditating in the space, silence and beauty of this ancient place’.4
Getting into the desert was an unusually fretful and noisy experience. I flew to Sharm el Sheik, the tourist resort on the south coast of the Sinai peninsula. All the irritation with flying that I had developed over the previous years was given appalling confirmation – an overfull plane of happy families en route to a beach holiday; the particularly stressful noise of human voices speaking at high volume in a language I could not understand; an intense cacophony of officious incompetence at the airport. The flight was late, too late for us to proceed to the proposed campsite for the first night. There was a din of meeting too many new people in the dark and not knowing quite who anyone was; a restless night, a hectic dawn reorganisation; a long drive in a crammed jeep over bumpy roads.
And then we were in the desert.
The jeep engine was turned off and we transferred to camels. Once I got used to it, I found the gait of my camel oddly soporific, slightly like being in a small boat on a calm sea, a steady rocking sensation. A camel does not need much steering or much attention at all, really, very different from a horse. It was hot and I rocked there under the bright sun. The sky was white, too dazzling to look at, and gradually the silence of the desert took hold and overwhelmed me. I sat on the camel swaying passively with it, losing any sense of time and distance.
Sinai is not a sand dune desert – it is a rocky, mountainous desert. I have never been anywhere so beautiful and so harsh. Our campsite was called the White Wadi: a flat semicircle of very white sand, sprinkled with smaller black stones and protected on three sides by sharp irregular escarpments. The cliff-like formations jutted out into the wadi, and down them flowed steep streams of sand that moved and flowed like water when I tried to walk up them; from a distance these falls of sand looked like glaciers.
A very long time ago the whole area was under the sea, a warm, shallow ocean. The rocks are sandstone laid down in narrow layers of sediment. The same slow inexorable movement of the earth’s tectonic plates which pushed up the Alps lifted the Sinai peninsula out of the water like a monster lumbering out of the depths, shaking the water off its rough coat. Once the sea had gone and the rocks dried out, the wind wrought the sandstone, eroded it into grotesque beautiful forms, stained in places with vivid iron drippings; in the camp it seemed sometimes as though we were surrounded by great dead beasts, the escarpments their ancient bones. The same wind ground it down into sand, the finest, whitest sand I have ever seen. There are other rocks too – baked basalt, far more resilient and left behind as black patches in the white.
This part of Sinai had a harsh, even cruel, beauty, ‘a dry weary land without water’. At first sight it seemed completely barren, even dead – but each morning in the smooth sand there would be tiny footprints running often right up to my sleeping bag: scorpion tracks; they were there though I never saw one. Here for a week I sat each day perched up on the escarpment, in a cleft in a rock, almost a cave, for protection from the sun, looking out over the desert camp, and thinking about silence and prayer. Below me was a long view of the flat desert floor, and the sharp cliffs of rock seemed to rise directly from the sand and ascend vertically. Above me was the blue sky. Once, late in the morning, I saw a single bedu, in long dark clothes and a black head covering, appear at the furthest limits of my view, probably over three miles away and walking steadily towards me across the sand. Eventually the cliff that dropped below me hid him. He had the quality of a dream and may indeed have been one. Once I saw some type of crow floating effortlessly over the camp, watching sharply; very occasionally there were tiny birds, swift and eager as swallows, which flew with sudden grace through the broken rocks. Apart from that there was nothing; a huge hot nothing. It was the deepest silence I have ever known. There was nothing to hear.
It was hot and it was silent. I began to experience for the first time that mysterious ‘song’ or ‘sound of silence’. There is a problem describing it, because it does feel like an aural experience, you do hear it, but I think it is in fact the absence of anything to hear. John Cage thought that it was a physical sound and it proved to him that silence did not exist:
For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.5
It was this experience that inspired 4'33", his 1952 composition in which a pianist sits at a piano and does not play it for just over four and a half minutes. Cage’s point was that anyone listening properly would have heard sound in the concert hall. It is these sounds, unpredictable and unintentional, that constitute the music of this piece.* Cage appears to have accepted his ‘engineer’s’ explanation without any questions. He writes several times about this key experience and in later repetitions drops all reference to the engineer’s opinion and presents the explanation as though it were an accredited scientific fact, but other people hear it differently and are less certain that it is in fact physical sound at all. In his book about deserts, Grains of Sand, Martin Buckley writes:
Short of a vacuum, true silence requires the absence of friction of air upon object – the emptiness and stillness found only in the desert. Hovering over the binaries of dust and sky, dun and blue, shade and sunlight, silence eventually becomes a sound itself: a sibilant blood rush in your ears.6
I have discussed this very peculiar and distinct sound with a good number of people who have spent time in silence. Almost everyone agrees that it is there – very low volume, continuous, and (usually) two or more toned, exactly as Cage describes it. You can only experience it at very intense moments of physical silence. I don’t know what it is. No one seems to know what it is. It is the voice of God. It is minute particles caught in the inner ear. It is the consequence of there now being so many people in the world making so much noise that there is nowhere to escape the last dying reverberations of human sounds. It is the spinning of the universe, or the slow crawl of the tectonic plates deep underground, moving at about the speed that fingernails grow. Although I first encountered it in the Sinai Desert this strange effect can happen anywhere that there is profound enough silence, still air and someone paying attention. I still find something thrilling about it too.
Up in my desert eyrie I had another potentially more dangerous experience. As the day wore on just as silently and ever hotter, I would find myself slipping into a kind of lassitude that made the effort to do very simple things, like drinking, feel immense. It was a strange, dreamlike state, in which nothing seemed important or worthwhile, without it feeling particularly horrid or alarming. I understood with gratitude why Matt, our excellent desert guide, had gone on and on – ad tedium – about how important it was to keep drinking
and nagged about quantity: because he had done enough to override my lassitude, in that respect at least. But at one point, as the sun moved round, my legs weren’t in shade any more. I sunburn easily and badly, but even though I knew they would burn, possibly dangerously, and before long the rest of me as well, I still looked at my legs in the sun dreamily, thinking, ‘I must move,’ but not quite finding the energy to do so. When I described this to Matt, he said, ‘desert lassitude’ – that it was very common and dangerous. He felt it was a response to solitude and heat that is similar to snow sickness.
That day in Sinai I was protected from any serious consequences by the fact that I had to report back to the camp for supper – and, to the great inconvenience and annoyance of others, would have had to be found and fetched back if I had failed to appear. This realisation did make me wonder if one element in the gradual adoption, in the West, of community (cenobitic) models of the monastic life in preference to solitary hermits was precisely to protect the individuals, not from ravening beasts or the incursions of barbarians, but from this interior movement of the self as it becomes emptier, less precious, less well boundaried and less adjusted to survival. Disinhibition and loss of clear boundaries would be more likely to be fatal in the desert than almost anywhere else.
I spent a great deal of each day, from the breathtaking rose-coloured dawns right through the long hot silence of midday, sitting up there and trying to think about silence and prayer.
There is a tendency today to assume that prayer is primarily a private and interior activity, as opposed to ‘organised religious ritual’, or ‘rote prayers’. But all the anthropological evidence suggests that first of all prayer was communal and ritualised, and the development of silent meditation or private prayer comes much later in all cultures. The earliest account of silent prayer that I have found rather makes this point. It occurs in the Hebrew Scriptures:
A Book of Silence Page 23