To write about silence—what a paradox. “When I pronounce the word Silence / I destroy it,” wrote Wisława Szymborska in The Three Oddest Words (translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh).
What could be said about silence except that there is less and less of it, just as there is less and less darkness (excessive nighttime lighting due to numerous sources of artificial light is the cause of the light pollution hindering astronomical observation of the sky, but it also interferes with the well-being of animals and plants adapted to living in darkness during the night)? In the civilized world, it is almost never completely dark—and never completely quiet. Like everything that is natural and rare, silence becomes an exclusive commodity—we leave the city to find ourselves away from its clamour, to wind down and rest. Silence is a luxury, being “out of reach” (with no access to the internet or a phone)—an extravagance few of us can afford, while there are fewer and fewer places where it is possible to really ‘cut oneself off’ from the world.
My situation as I begin to write this piece: early morning, summertime, the Mazovian countryside. It is warm and pleasant at this hour, but later it will be hot and sticky. I have opened the windows, birds’ voices can be heard (sparse now that spring is long gone), as well as the silent, almost soothing sound of cars passing in the distance. The mood of the moment makes me think of Nathaniel Hawthorne meditating in the nineteenth-century New England woods, for whom the sudden whistle of a distant locomotive intensified the sense of being removed from civilization. The unobtrusive hum of engines constitutes a kind of frame for my relatively wild surroundings; for the calmness of this morning. I can say to myself: here I am, away from it all, life is good.
But suddenly the idyll gets interrupted by the loud whirr of a lawnmower. A moment later it is joined by another and yet another, until all space around me is momentarily filled with noise. One needn’t be a wacko to become irritated (to put it mildly!), especially taking into consideration that the obstinately mowed stretch of land already looks like a desert rather than a lawn. My morning calm has gone to hell. I close the windows and go back to writing, but my enthusiasm is gone. To write about silence with the accompaniment of three lawnmowers—what does that say about the world?
It’s not just about my interrupted idyll; not about the mere fact that noise has ruined a person’s peace and concentration. Too much noise is simply harmful to humans and other beings, causing, among other things, stress; disrupting blood circulation, heart rate and sleep; interfering with navigation (in some animals); causing damage to hearing; lowering the effectiveness of learning (in human children). Anthropogenic noise is a form of pollution, both on land and in the sea. It is caused primarily by machines and cars, but also by household equipment or loud music. As demonstrated by the Canadian composer and environmentalist Raymond Murray Schafer, noise can also be a manifestation of power, for instance when people modify their cars to be insanely loud. Making noise can constitute a form of aggression towards other people as well as animals. The soundscape then becomes a battlefield—let us remember this the next time we want to play loud music on a beach or rent a quad bike to ride in the woods.
But perhaps we don’t really like silence? Maybe we are just annoyed by sounds emitted by others because we would rather keep our place center stage? “Modern man has lost the option of silence,” claimed William S. Burroughs, one of the most brilliant, if also eccentric American writers of the second half of the twentieth century, whose paranoid tirades about the word virus sound uncannily adequate today. In The Ticket That Exploded, he wrote:
“Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.”
It seems like Burroughs understood this quite literally: the word is a virus from outer space, attacking our bodies and feeding on our lives. “Modern man,” according to the author of Naked Lunch, is completely enslaved, manipulated and programmed by the word. The word turns us into automatons—automatons for speaking. When we read this as a metaphor, it turns out to be frightfully accurate: try to achieve ten seconds of inner silence. What happens?
The “word” would then be a “virus” implanted in our bodies by a techno-civilization, forcing our bodies to make noise. I started from noises projected outwards and received by others as loud sounds, while the quote from Burroughs is about inner noise—the overproduction of meanings. But perhaps the two are related to each other as symptoms of the same deeper inclination? The inclination to generate excess—be it an excess of goods or content—and, as a result, waste. The fundamental difference between civilized humans and other animals is that we are the only ones who produce garbage that can’t be processed by nature. Noise is waste; as such, it is a problem for our ecosystem. But the same applies to every automatically reproduced word (sentence, opinion)—multiplied in our own mind, on Facebook, on the wall of a building, or the first page of a daily paper.
To become a source of silence—for oneself and other beings, even as the lawnmower is running outside—might that be possible?
On the Beauty of Silence
When I pronounce the word silence, I think about several things simultaneously.
First of all, I simply imagine a quiet place; some space where no noises can reach me, especially no civilized noises. A quiet room with a view. A house with a garden. A cabin in the woods. But it is not only sounds, or a lack thereof, that I think of when I think about silence. I also think about being free from politics and advertising, from messages that demand a reaction, controversies that must urgently be solved, current affairs on which one should form an opinion—immediately, if possible. From the desire, awakened by the sighting of a pair of perfect red stilettos, to have them, now.
When I think about silence, I think about freedom.
It is easy to imagine all the things that deprive me of my freedom. Easy to believe that all would be different, if I could only find the right place to be. Isn’t that the essence of the pastoral fantasy, as old as our Western civilization? “Ditch it all and head for the woods”—how is that desire different from wanting new stilettos? Actually, the ones with animal print are okay too . . . (“When I pronounce the word Silence / I destroy it.”)
Let’s assume I have found the quiet place (a room with a view, a house with a garden, a cabin in the woods), then what? All external noises cease, which of course is not without consequences for physical and mental health, but what about inside my mind (wherever that is)—does it automatically quieten too? Anyone who has ever tried meditation knows that the opposite is true. Charlotte Joko Beck, an outstanding teacher of meditation, whose talks were collected in several books (including Nothing Special: Living Zen) compares this first moment to what happens to the passengers of a speeding bus when the driver suddenly brakes. Only then, as they lose balance and fall, do the passengers realize how fast they had been travelling. The mind works in the same way: only when it stops for a moment is it possible to see and hear what is going on inside. Not many people enjoy what they encounter at such times.
Is every noise opposed to silence? Is every thought and emotion – every word – a disruption of stillness? Here is Jane Hirschfield’s take on this question:
Everything has two endings-
a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.Before a life, air.
And after.As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
John Cage—the poet, composer, experimenter—emphasized on a number of occasions that absolute silence does not exist. There is a well-known anecdote about what Cage heard in an anechoic chamber—it was the sound of his own blood circulating and the higher sound of his nervous system operating. Cage placed silence on the spectrum of sound. In one interview, he put it this way: “The sound experience which I prefer to all others is the experience of silence. The silence experience almost everywhere in the world now is traffic.”
In the summer, I had the pleasure of conducting a workshop in “not speaking” as part of a Festival of Abstract Thought in Jazdów, Warsaw. The venue was not a cabin in the woods but something a bit like it—a wooden Finnish house surrounded by a beautiful autumn parkland; an urban version of pastoralism. It was very warm—yes, the climate is changing —so we opened the windows. The noises of a busy thoroughfare were heard; the sound of our modern silence.
I was tempted to copy Cage’s idea from his famous composition 4’3” and subject the participants of the workshop to a full ninety minutes of not speaking. But refraining from speaking is hard for human beings so we talked a little, trying to use words as scaffolding for silence. And when we didn’t talk, we sat quietly, listening to the traffic and whatever each of us had inside his or her mind. Not talking is hard, but once we overcome resistance, it becomes a wonderful means to be with other people in ways not often practiced in our culture.
Contemporary capitalism deprives us of silence and of freedom: there is no questioning of that basic fact. In place of a whole rich spectrum of human existential possibilities, it offers a choice between this or that product, service or lifestyle. It commodifies absolutely everything, including wild nature and rebellion. But this would not be possible if it wasn’t for our strong inclination to become enslaved. Recognizing that inclination (and resisting it)—isn’t that one of the most beautiful tasks of human life?
When I think about freedom I think about silence.
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