Each constellation is a story too: Orion, the hunter, with his sword belt, is visible in the sky of the northern hemisphere only during the hunting season. As Orion disappears to the west in March, Scorpius is rising in the east: Orion was killed by a scorpion, a punishment for boasting there was no living creature who could conquer him, and the scorpion still chases him across the night sky. I find it hard to remember that these patterns are arbitrary and that the stars in each constellation have no necessary scientific relationship to each other. Chinese astronomy imposed completely different patterns on the same stars: it was not that they had different names for the same constellations but that they saw different patterns, different stories. For example, Chinese constellations were smaller than Western ones and did not depict myths but facets of Chinese court and social life, such as Dizuo, the seat of the emperor; and Tianshi, the celestial market.
(I have subsequently used a Creative Writing exercise with people who have no knowledge of the stars. I hand out star maps with no names or constellations marked on them, and ask people to find and name their own patterns, then write a story to explain why that figure is in the skies. Almost everyone can do this with an ease that often surprises them; and, unless they have some elementary knowledge of astronomy, no two people ever see the same patterns.)
Like everyone else I love stories; I hear, use and tell stories. My right, earned for me by the Romantic Movement, to tell my own stories about myself and hear other people’s has been precious to me and has also been how I have earned my living. But that night, in the frail but magical starlight, it seemed an intolerable arrogance and even weakness. It came between me and the true silence of the moment – that rush to narrative seemed little more than chitter-chatter.
It would appear, too, that there was something accurate in the idea that silence inspires creative, particularly literary, activity. If I had had someone else with me, we would have dissipated the energy of that search for stories verbally – rather than piling it up inside and generating written words. We would probably have competed to identify or at least have discussed the location of further constellations. We would probably have had slightly different versions of the names, ‘The Great Bear’, ‘Ursa Major’, ‘The Frying Pan’, and of the stories that went with them. Someone would have known more and had more authority. The author is the person with the authority to tell the stories.
Romantic silence, as I experienced it in Galloway, sharpened my memory and generated stories. Whether this demonstrates that there is an inner hidden self that is somehow truer, more real, than the ‘socially constructed self ’ and that exposure to that self, through isolation and silence, will strengthen an individual is more dubious. But it is deeply embedded in the Western cultural psyche. Wordsworth felt he needed to encounter and fortify his true self in solitude, so that he could speak that self truly in his poetry. This is the basis of the idea that solitude nourishes creativity and all artists need it.
It’s not very difficult to see a rather close connection between the idea of an ‘authentic’ inner self obscured and weakened by excessive social demands and classical Christian dualism, with the ‘true’ soul trapped within a ‘corrupt’ body, and a corrupt material world. One would expect a philosophy like romanticism, opposed to classical dualism, also to reject the idea of a pure inner nugget of true being, but this is not what has actually happened. The belief in the true inner self has been promulgated as a new and radical posture by all sorts of movements throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This idea was fundamental to Radical Feminism: there was a ‘pure’*woman-self, which had been obscured and repressed by layers of social conditioning. The emergent feminist had only to strip away these layers of ‘false consciousness’ (it was always and necessarily false) and find her ‘real’ or true inner self and become liberated. By seeing ‘woman’ as a category that has been excluded from culture and therefore not responsible for society, feminists did not need to withdraw from it into solitude or silence. This liberating work could best be done in the company of other women. Our medium of liberation became the group, the naming and sharing of experience through language, even though the need to do so was fundamentally based on the idea that men owned language and women did not.
There is something wrong here. It seems nonsensical to suggest that talking in groups can do exactly the same thing as silence and solitude are held to do: shore up the individual’s boundaries against social construction. If the romantics realised that they needed silence and solitude to find their authentic voice, then how can the same authentic voice be found through speaking in groups?
I think what may have happened is that two different ‘liberation’ movements bumped into each other in the second half of the nineteenth century. Romantic individualism, with its ideas about personal freedom, encountered and was engaged by political freedom movements: nationalism and anti-imperialism were important to some of the romantics, who had many of their philosophical and political roots in the aspirations of the French Revolution: organised labour, anti-slavery, early women’s rights and other emancipation movements all claimed the attention of romantic artists. Byron died defending the freedom of Greece.
By the end of the nineteenth century the conviction that the artist was entitled – indeed, was morally obliged – to abandon social obligation, to strengthen his ego through solitude, had become almost a cliché. But, more important, this idea began to extend itself (like the franchise) further and further into the general population. Everyone had the right to individual expression, everyone was entitled to shake off the shackles of social obligation and aspire to self-actualisation. Everyone had a true inner self and was entitled to assert it over any social conventions or obligations. This applied especially and particularly to groups who had been oppressed or marginalised by society. However, the overall experience of the oppressed was that they had been silenced, rather than freely choosing silence. It was not that their truths were being corrupted by too much social chatter, but that they were not free to speak at all – or at least not audibly. Many radical thinkers found themselves engaged on two fronts: they were active in political reform movements and at the same time advocates of individualism and therefore set against any social order. The political freedom movements saw the right to speak, and to be heard, as absolutely crucial. For many of them this overrode the belief that the solution to the problem of the self lay in escape from the conventional restraints of society and in a retreat into solitude or ‘nature’.
Squeezed between the belief that social intercourse corroded freedom and the belief that naming oneself and one’s oppression in solidarity with others was a fundamental pre-necessity of freedom, something had to give. This pressure produced an extremely interesting development: a brand-new kind of silence. The individual would speak out and be heard. The silence, which would allow and shape that free speech, would be located not in the oppressed individual, but in a separate person: a listener or hearer. After a long and complex journey through the nineteenth century these needs and desires found a form: the psychoanalyst.
This idea of a silent listener, one who can hold the silence so that others can speak their true selves into it, is an extraordinary development. The analyst’s capacity to hold the silence is quite different from anything in religious life; the function of confessors, spiritual directors, gurus, sheiks, teachers is explicitly directive, instructive, even judgemental. Of course these roles require good listening, but in the context of hearing enough to know what to say back, how to advise, direct and assist the speaker in the task of escaping from the ego and finding their own silence, so as to hear and incorporate the divine. Even those who teach through their own silence, like Meher Baba, the influential and popular twentieth-century guru who claimed to be the Avatar, the human form of God, are teaching.
From 1925 until his death in 1969, Meher Baba was silent. He communicated first by using an alphabet board, and later by hand gestures, which were interpreted and spoken by o
ne of his disciples. He insisted that his silence was not undertaken as a spiritual exercise, nor as a vow, but solely in connection with his universal work.
Man’s inability to live God’s words makes the Avatar’s teaching a mockery. Instead of practising the compassion He taught, man has waged wars in his name. Instead of living the humility, purity, and truth of his words, man has given way to hatred, greed, and violence. Because man has been deaf to the principles and precepts laid down by God in the past, in this present Avataric form, I observe silence.14
Psychoanalysts (and other therapists) in theory do not teach, direct, judge or instruct. They create and hold the free silence in which the subjects of the process may struggle to name themselves. They have become like God is to the contemplative.
During my brief brush with psychoanalysis in the 1980s I myself never encountered this liberating silence, and through it some place of truth and self-knowledge; I always felt every bit as much constructed by Freudian theory as I was by any other social circumstance. The psychoanalytical silence does depend on an article of faith: that naming, speaking oneself, is essential to freedom and integrity, and I was never sure enough that I believed this. Now I would question whether psychoanalysis is appropriate or even possible for anyone who is seriously given to contemplative prayer, partly because of Freud’s determination that all faith in God was necessarily neurotic, and partly because so much of the encounter with God in prayer is not merely silent but is ineffable. It cannot be spoken or described and yet it is experienced as completely real. Despite this caveat, the capacity to create such a listening silence is a strange and beautiful thing. So many people, when I have asked them about positive experiences of silence, have mentioned this psychoanalytic silence that I do not want to ignore it here.
Certainly the sort of speech, of self-knowing, drawn out by a good listener has a creative quality to it that often surprises the speaker, even in situations less consciously constructed to do so. In 2001 I wrote Other Voices, a drama for BBC radio. It was an attempt to present to a wider audience some of the contemporary and more radical ideas about hearing voices – a phenomenon that has been too simply treated as a psychotic symptom, usually associated with schizophrenia.15 One strand of the play was documentary – and, with extraordinary generosity and courage, several members of the Exeter Voice Hearing Group agreed to talk about their experiences. Sara Davies, a BBC producer, recorded over six hours of interviews with them. The tapes are beautiful, surprising, open-hearted and intensely personal. When I talked to some of the group they all said they were taken aback by how freely they had spoken – some of them saying they had heard themselves say things that they had never said or even known about themselves before. They all insisted that this was because Sara Davies was ‘such a good interviewer’. The fascinating thing about the tapes is that she says practically nothing. There are frequent pauses and silences, and even on the tapes this listening silence collaborates with the speakers. It generates the confidence that allows the spoken word proper space. For me these tapes have a redemptive quality. One of the biggest problems (after social stigmatisation) that many voice hearers experience is the difficulty of creating any silence internally. Too often there simply is no silence ever. Davies’s capacity to create that silence was a revelation.16
These were the issues I was trying to think about as I strode across the hills of my childhood. After Sinai I had begun to feel that all my own inclination and endeavours were towards the eremitical silence – the harsh wrestling with the strength and tenacity of the ego – rather than the romantic notion that the ego needs shoring up, but during those long, lovely, strenuous walks I learned that I underestimated how much my perception of nature and of religious experience, and indeed of my own self, is grounded in a romantic model.
The romantic poets were so influential and important to me as an adolescent, especially in giving me a point of reference, a way of seeing myself as a writer, or potential writer. How much I got from them – even my name. I had an ‘h’ on the end of my name when it was given to me by my parents. When I was seventeen I was in love with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Both Coleridge’s wife and his mistress were called ‘Sarah’ and he had made them each drop their final ‘h’, describing it as a ‘singularly ugly aspirant’. I cancelled my ‘h’ immediately.
The romantics’ quasi-mystical approach to nature had given me a way of interpreting experiences which I could not, as a sceptical adolescent, have happily called holy and which, without some kind of romantic interpretation, might well have driven me mad. Instead, I think that heightened intuitive response to the world did nurture some sort of creativity. The lens of romantic ideology legitimated my feelings. Moreover, a romantic idea about madness – that it marked one as a ‘special’ person – is useful to all adolescents. The sense of being fragmented, worthless, ‘out-of-control’ can be balanced and made bearable by the idea that there is a meaning and truth that can only be discovered through experiencing extreme emotion – and valuing it. I am increasingly persuaded that both the worrying increase in mental health problems and the demonstrations of antisocial, even violent, behaviour in younger people in the West at present must be related to a lack of silence and a lack of training in how to use silence.
Towards the end of my walking, I did indeed encounter the storm I would not have dared to summon. A dark-green evening of increasing oppression and rumblings in the distance burst into one of those spectacular night thunderstorms where the lightning really does flash like strobe lights – illuminating everything in a weird, violent monochrome like an overexposed photograph. The wind got up and the rain pounded on the roof of the car. I was a little scared, but more exultant, excited and emotionally somewhat hyperactive. I realised that there are two distinct strands to this engagement with solitude and silence in nature. There is the moralistic strand that argues that a person will grow in freedom, integrity, authenticity and courage if nurtured by nature – the good mother – that her stern, even austere, though profoundly rich regime will make one a nobler, better person than the soft, smothering, but restrictive and conventional love of society. This is the tradition of Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau and Annie Dillard, at least in Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. Then there is the other tradition – the tradition of the wild, of Shelley, Emily Brontë, Poe and Kerouac – which is amoral at bottom. It claims that ‘nature’ and solitude will open up an individual to the wild and mad, which is lurking there, barely contained by civilisation.
What I ultimately learned from those walks is that I had been right: there is something profoundly different about this romantic understanding and the older religious view of silence. Religious or eremitic silence, not just in the Christian tradition but in Buddhism as well, is about inner emptiness – emptying the mind and the body of desires, being purged and therefore pure: a kind of blank, a tabula rasa, on which the divine can inscribe itself. It is a discipline of self-emptying, or, to use a theological term, of kenosis, self-outpouring. Whereas romanticism uses silence to exactly the opposite ends: to shore up and strengthen the boundaries of the self; to make a person less permeable to the Other; to assert the ego against the construction and expectations of society; to enable an individual to establish autonomous freedom and an authentic voice. Rather than self-emptying, it seeks full-fill-ment.
As the imagery and the practices of both these interpretations of silence are very closely related (as the use of ‘retreat’ in the Montaigne quotation at the beginning of the chapter suggests), in any specific modern life there is bound to be a good deal of confusion about precisely which sort of silence someone is enjoying at any particular moment. There seem always to be multiple layers or fragments of identity, rattling around within an individual. Nonetheless, there are some real differences in the self-understanding and indeed ‘well-being’ produced by each kind of silence; and for me they seemed to be in direct conflict. Some of the points of conflict could be simplified into binary oppositions: a person pursuing desert s
ilence seems more likely to have a sense of time as space, compared to the romantic notion of time as narrative; to delight in ineffability rather than struggle for self-expression; to value openness and humility over autonomy and self-esteem; and perhaps above all to desire jouissance, the infinite opening out into eternity rather than resolution or closure, represented by a finished work of art.
I have come, for my own convenience, to use the terms ‘permeable’ and ‘boundaried’ selves, or identities, to sum up the two positions; with desert silence seeking to make the self as open as possible and romantics trying to wall off the self from outside influences.
To put the matter somewhat simplistically, at this present cultural moment, certainly in the West, we tend to see ‘normal’, healthy people as firmly, though not excessively, boundaried. A person is, or should be, autonomous, integrated, whole, rational and independent. These socially approved boundaries are expressed, more or less, by the skin; the ‘self ’ starts, and stops, at the margins of the body. Such a self is fulfilled: filled full of self. It is neither a sucking vacuum of need nor an overflowing intrusion into other people’s space. This clear-edged person does not exist without a social framework, but there should not be very much confusion between inside and outside. The self is seen as a tiny nation state, with the rights and obligations of that sovereign entity. A nation state has the right to police its borders, repel invasion and form self-interested alliances with others. In the individual, as in the nation state (and of course these two concepts developed together), authenticity and authority depend on a smooth continuity and a firm narrative of the self. Most psychoanalysis is directed towards bolstering this sense of identity.
A Book of Silence Page 29