A Book of Silence

by Sara Maitland

  There are the great cosmic forces, on which we depend, although they are silent and indeed invisible: light, organic growth, gravity, electricity, tides, rotation, the movement of the tectonic plates. Air, earth, fire and water.

  There is the silence of death.

  All these silences have some quite specific things in common: for example, a sense of ‘givenness’ – that this experience comes from ‘outside’ the normal self and cannot be commanded or controlled, though it can be evaded or avoided. At the same time they are experienced as integrative; the whole self is engaged and known to itself, in a new way. Even more common and profound is the lack of boundary – people feel they are outside watching themselves, ‘from a great height’, but without any sense of separation or split. A grasp of the difference between Self and Other, between I and Thou becomes unclear – except that there is no loss of integrity. It is usually the reassertion of the ego, of self-consciousness, that brings this state to an end.

  Perhaps more relevantly here, there is a very strong sense of ineffability – the experience is not only very hard to speak about, it is actually very hard to recall, remember, to reconstruct emotionally. It can even be somehow ‘content-free’ or meaningless – ‘outwith language’.

  I am labouring the point. Put simply, it does seem to me that to describe all these experiences of silence in terms of ‘lack’ or ‘absence’ is inadequate, if not stupid. Concepts of ‘excess’ seem rather more appropriate, if undeveloped in Western psychology. Whether we see silence as the way to access these states – that is, whether we see it as a liminal state or a doorway – or whether we see silence as the autonomous space within which these experiences are happening, we cannot just say this is void or negative; that all silence is waiting – or wanting, needing, yearning – to be broken. Or that it ought to be broken.

  Silence does not seem to be a loss or lack of language; it does not even seem to be the opposite of language. I have found it to be a whole world in and of itself, alongside of, woven within language and culture, but independent of it. It comes from a different place altogether.

  Silence apparently happens in a different part of the human brain from speaking or hearing or even thinking in a rational and orderly manner; a part of the brain separate from where language happens. Neurologically this has in fact been demonstrated, through a fascinating series of experiments scanning individuals while they are practising meditation, or other forms of self-consciously chosen silence. It isn’t that the brain blanks out or closes down if a person is silent, but that the electrical activity takes place elsewhere – somewhere different.

  The experiences of silence are somewhat resistant to the usual brain-activity-measuring devices of modern medical science. I am very aware of the dangers of bad science and I do not want to get trapped within the mind/brain debate, but it does seem to me that neurological research is providing a remarkably good metaphor to look at what might be happening. Within current brain descriptions there is a broad agreement that language is controlled from a part of the brain within the cerebral cortex – predominantly the left persylvian region. This is a language zone, not a speaking/hearing zone (language for signers is also located here, not within the visual zone, nor within the right cortex’s spatial organisation areas. Signers, for instance, lose their language capacity after left-brain lesions or strokes exactly as speakers do). However, all non-linguistic vocalisations – laughing, sobbing, moaning, shouting in pain (and bizarrely enough a range of swear words, as is famously recognised in people with Tourette’s syndrome) – are controlled not by the cerebral cortex but by a phylogenetically older set of neural structures in the brain stem and limbic systems, usually described as the ‘subcortical areas’. Suppose one imagines (at least) that it is by silencing the cerebral cortex that we can access this subcortical zone and its powerful emotional content. It is quite literally a different level of consciousness – a silent level.

  I wonder if all ‘the inarticulate sighs and groans’ of Protestant seventeenth-and eighteenth-century prayer; the ecstatic swoons and howls of pentecostalist deliverance ministries; glossolalia (speaking in tongues); the superficially psychotic disturbances of mysticism and its related spiritual phenomena; and the euphoric ecstasy of certain meditation practices are all instances of subcortical expression, emerging – as they so frequently do – from silence, by freeing up space in the brain more commonly suppressed by language and linear thought.

  Perhaps this is why silence is so often presented as though it were a subcortical brain function: animal, semiotic and emotionally chaotic. This does mirror (perhaps in a rather distorted way) the actual experiences of silence, inasmuch as we can access them. Almost universally, silence practitioners comment on the difficulty of recalling, remembering, focusing on, reporting with any satisfactory accuracy, let alone articulating what it is or was that they felt or experienced. The effort of transferring the content from one part of the brain to another seems to burn away the content – rather like a space ship re-entering the atmosphere. The ineffability of the event is an essential part of the event; as though silence itself were the ‘whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must keep silent’.10

  Julia Kristeva, the French psycholinguist, suggests that although language – complex grammared language, which can articulate the self into being and which she calls the symbolic – is only accessible through cutting a deal whereby individuals give up certain sorts of freedoms in exchange for what she calls the ‘phallic’ law, there is nonetheless a ‘pre-phallic’ pool of articulation which, while not fully linguistic, is nonetheless capable of emotional expression, which she names the semiotic.

  Psychoanalysis offers to help people find material that, because of assorted traumas, got ‘stuck’ in the semiotic, and bring it into the conscious and articulate sphere of the symbolic. But for me personally what I experience is not a struggle to emerge from the semiotic into the fully symbolic, but the reverse: I find it difficult to move down and access that range of expression, to be more permeable, available to whatever there is ‘down’ or ‘out’ there. It seems to me that silence offers those people who want it a return journey into the semiotic, the seedbed of the self. And some of what we find there is both rich and exciting.

  In my search for silence I have become increasingly interested in destabilising my own autonomous independent self, losing ego rather than establishing it in logical linear language. This is not a very ‘modern’ project; modernity has made enormous sacrifices for rational order and for individual logical self-expression. But I am certain that our cultural repudiation of silence and our determination to define it as nothing more than a lack or absence is a sacrifice too far.

  But … but here I am, sitting on my doorstep in the sunshine, looking out at my huge nothing, delighted by a passing hen harrier, smug about my Completion Certificate and full of hope. Thoreau wrote (in Walden) about how I am feeling:

  If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.11

  People talk about ‘sinking’ into the ‘depths’ of silence. It is a good metaphor in lots of ways; there is profundity in silence. Silence absorbs me and the further in I go the more I am pressurised by it. In silence, as in deep waters, you are free from gravity. In his book The Silent World Jacques Cousteau describes the almost ecstatic freedom of the very first aqualung dive:

  I swam across the rocks and compared myself favourably with the sars [bream]. To swim fishlike, horizontally, was the logical method … To halt and hang attached to nothing, no lines or air pipe to the surface, was a dream. At night I had often had visions of flying by extending my arms as wings. Now I flew without wings. Since that first aqualung flight, I have never had another dream of flying. From this day forward we would swim across miles of country no man had known, free and level
with our flesh feeling what the fish scales know. I experimented with all possible manoeuvres – loops, somersaults and barrel rolls. I stood upside down on one finger and burst out laughing … Delivered from gravity and buoyancy I flew around in space.12

  And, like the deep water, you can drown in silence. The peril is always there.

  It is a good image, but at present I favour a different one altogether. Cousteau also describes later in his book one way of coming up from the depths of the seabed: you strip off all your equipment, leaving your heavy weights and breathing equipment at the bottom and the ascent is:

  an enjoyable rite. As you soar with [your] original lungful, the air expands progressively in the journey through the lessening pressures, issuing a continuous stream of bubbles from puckered lips.13

  Silence is soaring into a new lighter atmosphere, weightless and free, and when it works a stream of bubbles, bubbles of joy, float up around you and rise ahead of you towards some bright surface you cannot yet see clearly.

  I am beginning to flourish in this new atmosphere. This summer I saw something new – something I did not even know happened so I was not looking for it; in fact, it took me a little while to work out what I was seeing. The house martins came back all the way from Africa to their old nests. For generations they have nested in their elegant closed mud nests stuck on the old cracked stone walls under the broken eaves. But while they were away last winter I had restored the roof, straightened the walls and destroyed their homes. I am not sure where, or even if, they did nest instead. But all summer they came, swooping on the wind, graceful, skilful, skimming up and under the new wide eves, one by one. Each in turn, they were placing tiny specks of mud and spittle on to the new roughcast wall. By the end of the summer they had cemented a small shelf into place for next year’s nests. Sometimes there were thirty of them busy at this work. I watched them for hours, yet I never saw them so much as graze wings with each other. I feel very close to them. I deeply hope they will be back next summer and raising their broods here.

  I think, at this present, it is the silence I want most. I want silence to be actual and real and structured into my daily life: I do not want to lose a crudely real, embodied definition of ‘silence’. I don’t want to turn it into a philosophical or spiritual abstract or ‘state of mind’ – and that tends to happen very easily. Indeed, it tends to happen as soon as you start writing about it! Max Picard, for example, writes with a lyrical beauty about silence.

  Still like some old forgotten animal from the beginning of time, silence towers above all the puny world of noise; but as a living animal not an extinct species, it lies in wait and we can still see its broad back sinking ever deeper among the briers and bushes of the world of noise. It is as though this prehistoric creature were gradually sinking into the depths of its own silence. And yet sometimes all the noise of the world today seems like the mere buzzing of insects on the broad back of silence.14

  But although it is lovely, it does not actually mean very much. It is more or less impossible to imagine getting up in the morning and doing Picard’s silence: it lacks the tough reality of either Kafka at his desk, or de Foucault in his desert.

  I know now that when I started this adventure I underestimated the power of silence itself. If, and I think it is true, silence really does produce the effects I was investigating in Skye and have been working with ever since, especially the collapse of time and space – those boundary confusions – that is not going to be too good for prose fiction, which utterly depends on specific times and place. Plot (the idea that things happen in an orderly pulse of cause and effect) just doesn’t work any more. Narrative doesn’t drive anything forward in the silent vacuum. Perhaps, although silence has no narrative, it does have a rhythm. That would be an interesting idea because it would align silence with music.

  Since music is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable with the gods and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man.15

  How nearly could I say the same thing about silence? In all my researches into silence I have never encountered a silent heaven, even from those mystics who used silence most directly as a way of achieving heaven. Apart from the horrified ‘little hour’ of silence and the occasional casting down of golden crowns, what the heavenly hosts do in a Christian heaven is sing. They sing; they make music. Perhaps a writer’s job is finally co-operative, creating the words for that eternal choir, so that the endless song of ‘Holy, holy, holy’ never becomes boring.

  So yes, I want to work on that. I want to work on seeing if it might be possible to give ‘ineffability’ a good shaking up and invite it to reveal its secrets. I want to encode silence, so that out there in all that noise, people can access and love it. I am not sure that this is possible, but it seems worth a try.

  But actually I just want to do it. I want to sit in the sunshine on my doorstep and listen to the silence. In the morning I want to stare at the sheep – I am getting fonder and fonder of the sheep around here. They seem rather more professional than the fat complacent lowland sheep. I watch them and note various things about them. They like to walk neatly along the paths. The ewes around the cottage seem busy and gossipy, and go about in little gangs. Today a small group of five or six came almost trotting past the house while I was sitting there. They all had ridiculous punk hairstyles: a splendid tuft of neon turquoise above their foreheads. (This is in fact a very simple way of marking the sheep you have treated in some way and distinguishing them from the ones you haven’t yet dosed or wormed or whatever you have done to them.) They had surprisingly neat white coats and charming black faces with neat curled horns. But what really struck me were their elegant legs – some were all black and some had black and white stripes like Pippy Longstocking’s leggings. Hard businesslike legs and sharp elegant little feet, like old ladies who have gone plump in their bodies but still have smart legs and ankles for which high-heeled court shoes seem designed. I want time to notice sheep’s feet.

  I want to say my prayers and write some new sorts of stories and make a garden and read some books and walk up the hill behind the house so that I can see the sea when the weather is clear. And just sit. Yesterday evening I saw my owl, though who can say ‘mine’ to a barn owl who happens to live in a ruin you happen to own? This spring when the local ‘owl man’ came to ring the fledgling owlets, four of them, so white and fluffy and sweet, he said they were the ‘most forward brood in the county’ this year, and I surprised myself with a surge of maternal pride.

  In fact, there are a pair of barn owls, who live in an owl box in the old bier just up the hill from the house, but I tend to think of them in the singular because I have never seen more than one at a time, either suddenly, a white, fast-moving shape in the car headlights, or as a darker shadow across the dark night sky. So I do not really see my owl very often and then usually fleetingly: the ideal silent neighbour. Barn owls are genuinely more silent than tawny owls, who make the traditional ‘twit-twoo’ sound. However, my bird book says that barn owls are not only nocturnal but also ‘crepuscular’ – a fabulous new word for me, another gift from my owl; it means, ‘of, or associated with, the twilight’ – and sometimes they hunt at dusk, and so it was yesterday.

  The wind tends to drop at sundown and the colour fades out of the rough grass, and there is often a moment of almost perfect stillness. Yesterday, just then I came round the corner of the walled garden and there she was, perched on the dyke. She has feathered legs, like snug plus-fours; her heart-shaped face and wide black eyes really did look wise. She took off at once, of course, immensely strong and smooth, with her deep owl wing beats, stiffer than the flop of other owls, and her talons hanging down beneath her with the claws bunched neatly; powerful, silent, smooth across the hillside, then she floated behind the broken gable of the bier and was gone. I want to get to know her comings and goings.

  I want to watch for young fox
es, for the occasional deer, for the first swallow, for the moment when the grass turns from green to gold. I want to sit out at night and count all the 4,500 visible stars.

  I want to have a long long time to do all this, so that the silence has a chance to work on me and in me. And then I do not really know what will happen next.

  Sometimes I think that silence is like a Black Hole: in a Black Hole the gravitational force is so great that nothing, not even light, can escape outwards. Anything that comes within the range of that force is irreversibly attracted, sucked in, compressed, squeezed, compacted until it collapses under the concentration of its own mass. Time itself slows down. As if in slow motion, once the process has begun, any object – even a human ego – will be stretched, warped, twisted and contracted as it is drawn towards the centre, the singularity, and thence – the physicists are not quite sure what happens next either – perhaps into an alternative universe beyond the laws of physics and psyche, into a new universe, into God.

  This is death, of course; but it can also be birth, depending on the position of the observer. Whatever there is the other side of the singularity may be watching with excitement the slow transformation, understanding the breakdown of all the rules, waiting with a fierce joy to welcome the hermit into the infinite. I want to find out, and I know that for me silence is the only way to do it.