There is a beauty but also violence to silence. Is this the unrest that produced Emily Dickinson
’s turbulent poetry? Do people listen to music in order to calm the violence that emerges from solitude? There are stages of silence, just like there is a process of dying that culminates in the death rattle. Georgia O’Keeffe knew about silence, and John Cage wrote a famous piece of music, 4’33”, which can never be truly performed (though it’s been presented), employing silence as its music. Silence is a commodity that is increasingly hard to come by; not because the world is a noisier place, but because of the density of information that surrounds us. Offices, for example, are quieter since computers replaced typewriters and phones were replaced by instant and text messaging. True silence proposes a certain vacancy, an emptying out. Is that what meditation seeks to do? Our silence is threatened because our solitude is fractured. Whether we have anything to do with actual people or not, we live with the illusion of community. Arrivistes used to be part of a social landscape described by words like nouveau riche. But today, the new aspiration is informational, and while we might loathe our crowded screens, we lie in perpetual terror of being left behind. True silence used to be a bare motel room in a plains state with a Gideon Bible in the drawer of the nightstand. But today such a condition can only be found in “the hole,” the solitary confinement section of a maximum-security prison. And what is silence when it is not chosen? Self imposed confinement, of the kind practiced by monks, leads to silence, which can in turn lead to transcendence of the petty desires that constitute our suffering. Yet, isolation can also produce insanity. We become haunted by voices when we can no longer tolerate being alone. The terror of Bergman’s Silence
derives from the absence of god.
’s turbulent poetry? Do people listen to music in order to calm the violence that emerges from solitude? There are stages of silence, just like there is a process of dying that culminates in the death rattle. Georgia O’Keeffe knew about silence, and John Cage wrote a famous piece of music, 4’33”, which can never be truly performed (though it’s been presented), employing silence as its music. Silence is a commodity that is increasingly hard to come by; not because the world is a noisier place, but because of the density of information that surrounds us. Offices, for example, are quieter since computers replaced typewriters and phones were replaced by instant and text messaging. True silence proposes a certain vacancy, an emptying out. Is that what meditation seeks to do? Our silence is threatened because our solitude is fractured. Whether we have anything to do with actual people or not, we live with the illusion of community. Arrivistes used to be part of a social landscape described by words like nouveau riche. But today, the new aspiration is informational, and while we might loathe our crowded screens, we lie in perpetual terror of being left behind. True silence used to be a bare motel room in a plains state with a Gideon Bible in the drawer of the nightstand. But today such a condition can only be found in “the hole,” the solitary confinement section of a maximum-security prison. And what is silence when it is not chosen? Self imposed confinement, of the kind practiced by monks, leads to silence, which can in turn lead to transcendence of the petty desires that constitute our suffering. Yet, isolation can also produce insanity. We become haunted by voices when we can no longer tolerate being alone. The terror of Bergman’s Silence derives from the absence of god.
