A layered unfolding of silence
Tensions of building and destruction in stillness
Watch this space. Watch an expansion into silence and a tiptoeing away. Watch a fear of the other and of the innermost self collide and repeat, as a wave releasing upont the shore. Over a decade of time, silent time, witness an opening up, or unfolding, or undoing, or maybe all of those, but most of all a layered, reverse archaeological un-selfing…at least the beginnings of it. One that can only happen in silence and also in conflict with silence.
2015
A thick falling snow has the effect of quieting the world. Even the howls of wind outside are muffled. This is our fourth or fifth—actually I don’t remember how many at this point—blizzard of this winter. I am up early—well not actually. It is 7am now; I was up a little before 6am. That has been my normal waking time ever since my son started sleeping through the night. Up until he turned two, he awoke around 5am every day…and therefore so did I. Now he is sleeping a bit longer, usually closer to 6am. But today he is asleep, along with my mother, and the house spreads its quiet.
It must have been a long time since I have immersed myself in quiet. This uninterrupted, unbroken morning comes as such a relief, and yet a foreign one. This silent excavation of self. I am so distanced from my former self, the one who moved through the world but not of it, for days, weeks at a time. I remember quite vividly my sorrowful year at a prestigious, yet isolated college in the northern hinterlands of New England. Yes, full of sorrow, and the interiority of loss built an enclosed space around me. I walked around as if in a tomb, going for days without speaking a word or interacting with another human being. When you step apart from the world, mute, everything does become quiet. Yet sorrow for what? There was no particular reason, no precipitating event. There was one boy with whom I had been close who was struggling with his own depression; he had withdrawn from the world and, then finally last of all, from me. Was that enough to cause the extreme sort of removal that I too had initiated?
2018
I wrote the above two paragraphs two or three years ago when quiet was indeed a rarity. Now I sit, once again, worlds apart from a past me, under the weight of silence. My now 6-year old is spending his first weekend away from me with his father under a court order which came on abruptly and painfully. It is not truly silent—as usual, I hear cars pass on the state highway outside our house; the air conditioner buzzes on and off; the hum of heat rising into the day vibrates itself through the closed windows; robins and chickadees sing their morning rounds.
No, it is the silence of oblivion, of absence, of what is but is not. I no longer know this world without my son bumping around in his room when he wakes and then calls mellifluously down the stairs “Mommy?” It is the silence of you waking up and there you are, still alive, yet without all that you would call life.
I may seem melodramatic. Perhaps I am. The emotional anguish is the moment, though, building outward to fill the silence. I have twinges of what it might be like to lose a child. Their toys and papers from school and small pieces of string and tiny clothing all around, underfoot, within view…their voice never in earshot, the amplitude of their calls and laughter displacing none of your space. A silence that is imprisoning in its noisiness.
Silence can be a terror, but also a freedom, an abandonment even. In September of 1966, the composer Samuel Barber experienced a spectacular failure. Barber’s previous opera, Vanessa, had won him a Pulitzer Prize. But on that fall evening in ‘66 when the Metropolitan Opera first performed in its new home at Lincoln Center, Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra premiered and the incoming world stopped short. As described in a 1971 New York Times article:
On that memorable night, just about everything went wrong. The production—devised, directed, costumed and co‐authored by Franco Zeffirelli—heaved and creaked under the massive weight of mammoth stage sets, live horses and goats and what seemed a cast of thousands; light cues misfired with disastrous results…[even] the Met's new revolving stage, a vital factor in the short‐scene structure of the opera, failed to revolve.
The negative or worse, indifferent and dismissive, critical reviews only deepened the sense of disaster. It seemed like his life and work were wiped out completely in a single night.
As a composer, Barber’s life was immersed in music and therefore in sound. At age 7, he wrote his first musical piece and by 10, he was composing operas. If you have ever seen Platoon, you will recognize his hauntingly lyrical Adagio for Strings. After the Cleopatra drama, Barber exiled himself to South Tyrol—the blended Austrian/Italian region known as the Gateway to the Dolomites. Around 260 million years ago, this area was covered by a large tropical sea teaming with life. In a geologic parallel to Barber’s almost career-ending disaster, a series of volcanic explosions around 252 million years ago caused a worldwide mass extinction which almost wiped out life on earth completely. In the seas, algae and sponges slowly began their repopulation and in the active volcanic and later-to-be-Dolomite-region, the reef-building by invertebrate skeletons was recurrently interrupted by volcanic eruptions producing new ash, lava, and pumice. Thus began a cycling process which resulted in an ongoing layering—coral reef, volcanic material, coral reef, volcanic material. Beneath the quiet surface of the sea, the mountains grew until finally around 80 million years ago, the African tectonic plate collided with the European plate, forcing what was previously submarine up out of the ancient sea to take its first dramatic breath. The theatrical sculptural verticality and distinctive pale color of the Dolomites comes from their existence as mountains of coral, which form calcium carbonate platforms on which you can still perch, and from the unique hyper-saline environment which, when combined with the remains of algae and bacteria, cause the resultant rock to be a “whiter shade of pale.” Professor Nereo Preto, who was amongst the geologists to discover the secret of the Dolomite’s color, once called them, “the mountains of mucilaginous bacteria,” a back-handed compliment to these limestone beauties if there ever was one.
But this was not the place for Barber’s music to cease. Although it was thousands of miles away from New York and energies oft thought to encourage creativity, this quiet landscape spoke volumes—quite literally its mountains blushed enrosadira in the early evenings while speaking nakedly of their sometimes violent, sometimes crushing, sometimes life-giving, sometimes pelagic past. Indeed, moving through a personal concealment and a geologic exposure, the quiet opened up new avenues of creativity for Barber. Through what he described as “a circumference of silence” he found a way to be nurtured by nature and to translate that tending into music.
The space of silence to create. The silent mountain-building over millenia as a transformative space. The round shape of a silent circumference embraced him and opened him, circling around from end to beginning, like the earth or the solar system, like a lover’s arms or a mother’s smile. My silence is not a circumference unless it is a noose. The weight of silence already bursting with creation missing, with space like endless sky to atmospherically echo all I no longer have near. My silence, though equally layered, reveals an absence that was always there, just as the mountains reveal the strata of their past in a heaving, conspicuous, defenseless stillness.
I wrote some untranslatable notes from my previously unfinished post—the weight of future pain, that of being a spectator…something about the recognition of my struggle making me feel a sense of loss. Oh me me me. The old me could entirely fill the silence with my own pain. The current me can too, yet now the pain feels valid, feels equally external and connected as it does interiorized whereas the older ineffable sorrow feels Werther-like, manufactured to romanticize the space of sorrow itself. The child I grew inside my body is gone—it is easy to pinpoint the sorrow now.
I admit that, in early parenthood, I was jealous of others’ immersion in silence. I wrote years ago: “It is so quiet this morning that I can hear others—my bachelor friend painting all weekend in one of the previous blizzards, the scratch of the brushes on canvas, the struggle of his being to find its way to self-expression, the space of making and doing, the sound of me making silence in his presence. And now they begin to destroy the quiet: my son coughing, the water rushing through the pipes, the floor creaking with the weight of my mother’s footfalls upstairs.” Now, however, it is the silence that destroys. Like a slow erosion of presence, the wearing away of what I thought was solid stone. Friends have recommended I take its offerings, hold its hand again, let my own voice pulsate its thickened air. Can you find yourself amidst silence?
There is a room in Minneapolis which has taken the title of “the quietest place on earth.” Away from the notifications, the earbuds, the outside tainted by traffic, airplanes, and leaf blowers, the anechoic chamber allows for a space where noise is measured in negative decibel levels. Though some find the deactivation the room enables therapeutic, others become anxious or disoriented in less than an hour. If noise has been identified as a threat by the World Health Organization, why am I, and apparently others, so terrified of silence?
Steve Orfield who is the president of Orfield Laboratories explains: “Silence is the ability to step out of the world and to be passive.” When you take away all of the noise, all of the stimulus, what returns is the opportunity for one to clarify oneself. This stepping into myself is the silence I am afraid of, the silence that hurts. It is the me that is afraid of losing my son’s need for me. It is the me that is not yet sure what I am again without constantly being a mother. It is the me who is so used to giving and interrupting myself that I am unacquainted with who I have become. It is the me ready to continue pouring me into every open glass rather than submerge into my own bath, feel the cool of the water on my soul, and begin to swim again. “The highest order thing we can give ourselves, we already own,” Orfield tells us.
I am going to try to sit with the quiet in the silence, because it is the quiet of my own sorrow…once as again. It is the quiet of my fears and my deepest love. The gift of knowing myself is terrifying. I once sought it constantly and it was more terrifying then because I could never find it; I could never nail it down. I am ultimately unknowable even to myself, a shifting, raw movement within the silence. I am not my son. I am not only his mother. I am sorrow, I am silence, and I am the noise, the voice I can make and the one that might be able to encompass the seemingly opposite poles of gentle and powerful. As Jason Rosenthal writes in his piece, “My Wife Said You Want to Marry Me,” “loss is loss is loss” and when those of us prepare our loved ones for it in a way that invites new life, they can use that empty space to write a new story. As I prepare my son for a life where much of it will not include me—and attempt to prepare him with gentleness, support, and encouragement—my new story begins.
2024
When there is auditory silence, there is the absence of sound. As one’s sense of hearing is diminished, the attention that is always there is still there, but now without an object. What can be its object? Its object becomes the thing that then arises inside of you, which is in fact always arising, but which you can only access in the silence—this deeper form of consciousness, this ego-releasing awareness of existence.
The minute you are not dissatisfied, the minute you are not in conflict, the minute you stop putting yourself in contradistinction to anything else, the minute you turn inward to your attention searching for an object in the silence, your ego will inevitably dissolve. This is both terrifying and freeing. In silence, in attention turned toward what is still, there cannot be a you. The space is too vast and the contrast to anything thereby impossible.
And yet our urge to communicate is strong. The way you have an experience or just a hint of a feeling bubble up inside of you and a near simultaneous urgency to share it—the very human need for connecting my lived intimacy to yours. Its frightening urgency bumps up against the necessity of translation into the symbology of language, the leaden reductiveness of words, the always pained slippage of what cannot be said of a “thing” by the word “thing,” or of the way we must continually define the terms we utter merely for their utterance to travel, or of the way “birdsong” cannot wrap its hollow representationality around the we-ooo-we-ooo-we-ooo whistly call that drifts down to you as you walk beneath a tall oak and also lifts you up out of your embodied being into the branches where a Carolina wren speaks something inconceivable to its mate. If only I could hear you. If only I could sink into your vibrations without trying to translate and find a familiarity there. I live in my silence no matter how many words I spew out.
We always live in the silence of our own experience and we are always trying to find our way out. Some more than others. Makalya is a non-verbal autistic young woman who was introduced to a letterboard by her family. [Note: I recognize that facilitated communication is controversial and not recommended therapeutically by multiple pediatric and psychological associations. I neither advocate for it, nor dismiss it. While the film represents one reported individual experience, I invite you to do your own research and come to your own conclusions.] With the letter board and with the additional aid of a voice over artist that she chose to represent herself, she is able to speak of her experiences and of her enforced silence. A recent short documentary film starts with her telling us “The most beautiful sound I have ever heard is the empty way that air flows between the trees.” Oh yes, she is indeed a gifted poet. She continues: “The sound goes unnoticed to most, but to me it sings. It creates melodies that resemble my own silence.” And so silence can have a melody. For Makayla, silence is multifaceted and both rotten and ripe: “Silence is my cage, but it is my gift to the world to sing my silence out loud.”
In a world of constant noise, we seek silence. But sometimes we need to break through silence to hear voices that see that very world in a way we never will, such as Makayla’s: “I see how the autistic mind mirrors the soul in a cosmic way. It sees the colors in sound, music in the wind. My soul sees what others cannot: truth, honesty, and love are colors surrounding the heart. I literally see that. It is music, silent like me. Roxy, I wish I could show you, it is so beautiful, like the nebula you showed me.”
Language reattached to thought. What about when we are enabling the detaching? Our development of AI has invited a world where language has been disengaged from thought and from human intention. Its silent non-experience generates quick and voluminous linguistic output. Its silence is indeed a voice. But unlike Makayla, whose silence contains multitudes of sensory experience—colors in sound, music in the wind—AI's silence of non-experience is hidden within patterns and probabilities, masked by derivative storylines and quick-witted responses that feel human but ultimately lack its true texture. Where she breaks through silence to reveal authentic experience, AI's language masks an experiential void. What do we hear when we read something written by AI? It may be clever, it may be poetic, it may even be virtuoso, but there is a silence embodied in its linguistic production. Is it the silence of non-human, non-experiential disembodiment?
We focus so much on whether what AI produces will be as good as what humans produce, on whether we can call it creative, on the threat it poses to our seemingly unique intelligence that we miss seeing what is lost for humans. AI allows for our own silencing. In an episode of The Gray Area, author of God, Human, Animal, Machine, Meghan O’Gieblyn recalls her grandfather’s habit of writing uncomplicated poems for people on special occasions. With their simple rhyming structure and a basic prompt about who you want to write for, an LLM could easily produce such an output. Indeed, I imagine people are already using it for such quotidian purposes—think of the suggested text responses you may tap out of ease when they are close enough to what you want to say. And while the adjacency of AI to genuine human communication is indeed problematic, there is also something lost on our side of the equation. What of those small efforts we may not make anymore: the putting aside of the struggle with the behemoth of language in its immense size and vast reach and the difficulty we have to make it touch the infinitesimally tiny, or the struggle with its awkward application of the cerebral to the emotional or the phenomenological. It is not whether your graduation speech will be better when written by AI. Maybe it will. Maybe it will be funnier and more inspiring and even more prescient. What it won’t do is reflect the authentic experience you had while in high school. And worse, without the struggle of trying to put that into words, you will never discover in a clarified manner what that experience meant to you except to sink your senses into a vague, amorphous soup of memory and emotion.
Sometimes I think poets get closest to the texture of human experience through their bending of this anchor of a thing called language, through their ability to somehow make pliant an unwieldy sword. Where they weave meaning around the stilted words, using them as the spokes of a loom with which to reflect and to create the billowing folds of a shared fabric, they knit an enveloping cloth that is the human experience as equally as it speaks to it. Yet this carefully woven meaning remains as delicate as a spider's silk, as tentative as a city suspended in air. In a lecture given at the University of Toronto in 1999, Salman Rushdie used Octavia—Italo Calvino’s famous and fantastic city from Invisible Cities—as a metaphor for how newness enters the world. Calvino, Rushdie explains, describes Octavia as:
suspended between two mountains in something like a spider’s web. If influence is the spider’s web in which we hang our work, then the work is like Octavia itself, that glittering jewel of a dream city, hanging in the filaments of the web, for as long as they are able to bear its weight.
As such too is silence. It weighs us down and yet can barely hold our unbearable weight. Held insubstantially by these filaments, embraced by the very silence we reject, love and loss can combine to find meaning far beyond the words where, as Pablo Neruda enlightens us, even our souls can be wet when we wake up early, where our ever-aching beingness will experience sorrow and longing, where:
The moon turns its clockwork dream.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.
We exist in silence, in the filaments of life upon which we balance trying to bridge our isolated silences, and in this very human doing-ness of tight-rope walking, we may find the meaning our stillness and constant motion toil to create.
In voluminous silence,
Katie