A Book of Silence (11 page)
Authors: Sara Maitland
The day was dying the night was being born – but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos harmonious and soundless. That was what came out of the silence, harmony, a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres perhaps. It was enough to catch that rhythm momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man’s oneness with the universe … the universe was cosmos not chaos; and man was as rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the night and day.
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Moitessier speaks at length, especially in his film
Song of the Siren
, about this unitive experience that he often had at sea:
There was no longer man and boat, but a man-boat, a boat-man … What you would call isolation, but I call communion. The things that mattered at the start didn’t matter any more … I want to go further because there is something more to see.
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More specifically, while sailing along the southern coast of Australia, Moitessier records an extraordinary contact with a large shoal of over a hundred porpoises. They were not behaving as porpoises normally do, but were ‘nervous’ and agitated. In what seemed to him an almost military way a group of them kept
rushing off, always to the right, always returning and repeating the same manoeuvre. He watched them, entranced and baffled, until he happened to glance at his compass and saw that
Joshua
had changed course on a changing wind and was heading directly towards Stewart Island, a rocky outcrop on which his yacht might well have foundered. As soon as he changed back to his correct course, the porpoises seemed to ‘celebrate’ and then disappear. He wrote:
This is the first time I feel such peace, a peace that has become a certainty, something that cannot be explained, like faith. I know I will succeed and it strikes me as perfectly normal: that is the marvellous thing, that absolute certainty where there is neither pride nor fear nor surprise. The entire sea is simply singing in a way I had never known before, and it fills me with what is both question and answer … I will round the Horn thanks to porpoises and fairy tales, which helped me rediscover the Time of the Very Beginnings, where each thing is simple … Free on the right, free on the left, free everywhere.
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Christiane Ritter writes of her polar experiences:
I lie down in my little room where the moonlight filters green through the small snowed-up window. Neither the walls of the hut nor the roof can dispel my fancy that I am myself moonlight, gliding along the spires and ridges of the mountains, through the white valleys.
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Although a distinctly more prosaic writer, Geoffrey Williams, another single-handed yachtsman, reports an experience extremely similar to these:
I was no longer
Lipton
’s helmsman. I became part of her. I was a limb of
Lipton
, another sail, another tiller; the ship and I were one. But
Lipton
was part of the scene, so I became part of the scene, no
longer outside looking in, but inside looking out. I was part of the chorus, neither conductor nor spectator, but singing as part of the environment.
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This sense of vast connectedness, of oneness with everything is so central to the core of mystical prayer that it can be distinctly disconcerting to read the matter-of-fact ease with which so many of these adventurers report a parallel experience. Often they sound mildly surprised or even offhand – although it is more usual for them to sense that this is a deeply precious and important moment, born out of an odd mixture of courage and silence.
If you are experiencing a profound level of oneness with the cosmos, you are very likely to experience boundary confusion as well. This was a fifth sensation that I became aware of. If an individual is one with and a part of
everything
, then it is not going to be clear where the self begins and ends.
In
La Nouvelle Héloïse
, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the influential French philosopher and autobiographer, describes what I mean here very effectively:
There is something magical and supernatural in hill landscape, which entrances the mind and the senses. One forgets everything, one forgets one’s own being,
one ceases to know where one stands.
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I In a sense this is nothing more than an extension of the connectedness or sense of givenness in silence that I have just looked at, except that is usually less ecstatic and more conscious. As the six weeks went by my sense of difference from everything around me began to dissolve and with it accurate perceptions of all those external factors that shore up our sense of boundaries.
For me the clear, if artificial, demarcations of passing time were among the first to break down under the ‘pressure’ of silence. As I went further and further into my silent time, I found it harder and harder to maintain a sense of time passing. I ceased to have a ‘normal’ sense of how long I had been doing something or why I
might continue or stop. This did not feel like absent-mindedness and was probably exaggerated because of the amount of the day that was dark, but it did make me realise just how clock-obsessed we have all become, marking our days ritually and shaken by anxiety, like Alice’s White Rabbit, if we ‘lose’ time. It is salutary to recall just how modern a concept this is: until the railway network spread out across Britain, with its need for timetables, there was no ‘accurate national time’ – the hours were fixed by the daylight and Oxford time, for example, was five minutes behind London time. Once I recognised what was happening, I found it very liberating; it gave me a sense of freedom coupled with a sort of almost childlike naughtiness or irresponsibility. Initially I had removed the clock from the room I spent my days in because its rather loud ticking seemed to break into the silence. For the first couple of weeks I was constantly popping next door to find out what time it was, but gradually it ceased to matter.
Of all the sensations I have been discussing, this loss of time is one from which sailors seem to be more exempt than others – I suspect that this is because navigation, particularly before GPS (the global satellite positioning system that can locate a small boat with pinpoint accuracy, from the boat and from a distance), requires a constant awareness of time and place. Donald Crowhurst, in his final days, more or less abandoned navigation and immediately, judging from his notebooks, became obsessed by the feeling that time was getting away from him. In Rousseau’s words, he rather literally ceased to know where he stood.
This sort of confusion is clearly something that a lot of people in silence and solitude find difficult to cope with. Over and over again I found accounts of people going to remarkable efforts to keep time in its place – ordering their days with extreme rigour, appointing precise moments for various activities and finding ways to replace clocks and diaries – marking each day as it passes with a notch on a stick or a stone on a cairn, inventing or at least contriving ‘tasks’. However, I particularly enjoyed this sensation. I think there were two reasons why I found it not just interesting but
also immensely pleasurable. In the first place I was extremely safe. I knew exactly how long I was going to be there for and had every reason to expect someone to come and let me know if I had completely lost the plot and failed to emerge after the six weeks were over. I had a telephone too if I had needed to use it – and indeed I had a clock, and my car also had a clock. The other reason is more complex: if you believe in a God who is eternal, that is to say outside time, there is a sense of being nearer to, being more permeated by, God as time recedes in both importance and sensation. Almost all the examples of people who have enjoyed this experience of time collapsing have been religious. For us a loss of time is a positive and recognised ‘sign’ of mystical experience, often described as ‘trance’.
Another form that boundary confusions took for me was a very strange inability to distinguish between my own words and other people’s. I have a retentive memory, especially for poetry, but in my ordinary life I expect to be able to tell whether something is newly mine or dug up from my memory bank; this is a crucial skill for someone whose own fiction involves so much rewriting of older material as mine does, and confusion here would create serious problems of plagiarism and a radical loss of confidence. Nonetheless, as I moved further into this silent time, my journal increasingly contains phrases, expressions and even quite extended passages that are accurate quotations but with no sign on the page that I was aware of this – not just no quotation marks or other punctuation but with three or four lines of poetry written into my own sentences in continuous (not line-broken) prose. It feels retrospectively as though the boundary between ‘creative’ writing and memory had weakened.
Later, I had a series of very strange experiences when I stopped being able to distinguish easily between what was happening in my mind and what was happening ‘outside’. During the fourth week my journal records a number of such episodes, of which this is one of the clearest:
I heard a car come up the track and a white van crossed the window. Then nothing happened. I was furious at the interruption. But nothing happening was strange – no knock on the door, no sound outside. Then there was a series of piercing whistles. I was hiding from any intrusion in the bed-room and looking out the window I saw a sheep dog – except that it was not really a sheep dog, more some sort of small terrier, but a sheep dog in action – on the far bank of the burn. I pulled on my jacket and went out – the wind was howling and the rain lashing down. I stood at the door. The sheep dog had four sheep huddled on the far side of the burn – and on my side was a shepherd. Not at all a romantic shepherd – neither biblical nor ‘gnarled highlander’, but a scruffy bloke in a blue woolly hat. When he saw me he called the dog, who let the sheep go and came splashing back across the burn, struggling to make headway. The shepherd smiled at me and said, ‘I was looking for a stray.’ Then I went back into the house and he – and the dog I imagine – got back into the white van (which had a large dent in the driver-side door) and drove away. I never said anything.
The scary bit is that within a couple of minutes
and still
I am not at all sure whether this actually did happen, or whether I hallucinated or imagined it. His actions were so senseless. Later in the day, I was increasingly perplexed and disturbed by this, so I attempted a little ‘reality check’: my jacket was bone dry (but then I had not left the shelter of the doorway, and I didn’t think of feeling the jacket for several hours). If it was a hallucination it was both bizarrely mundane and ridiculously detailed. But although I remember the dent in the van and the blue woolly hat I cannot remember any other details – local accent/other clothes/attitude or even where he was standing. And if he was ‘real’ then what the hell was he doing? Why would anyone chase a stray in this weather – or having decided to do so, abandon the project so quickly. I honestly am not sure.
Perhaps more interesting, though, is how little it actually alarmed me. Reading the journal as a whole, I realise with what insouciance,
even pleasure, I seem to have regarded episodes like this, which in my pre-silence life would have terrified me as signs of incipient lunacy.
I remain curious, however, about how often this feeling of losing the clear sense of one’s own boundaries is experienced
physically
. In almost all extreme situations there is an associated physical phenomenon, where a normal awareness of self-protection ceases to function properly: desert lassitude, the rapture of the deep, mountain madness. In each case there is a sound physiological explanation (dehydration, pressure, oxygen deprivation) but nonetheless they seem somehow to share emotional symptoms. My journal records, several times, things like this:
Each day it becomes easier to be silent, drowning down into it, but harder to get on the move. As soon as I am walking I feel wonderful – energetic, alive, sane, physically good, ‘fresh’ – but there is a weighting against it which for the last couple of days I’ve put down to the weather, but it can’t have been that today, as it was, weatherwise, about the best day I’ve had. I sit and time passes and it does not matter. I feel slightly drunk, elated but uncoordinated; or just dreamy, entranced, and completely uncaring. The Rapture of the Deep. That’s the way I feel today.
Jacques Cousteau made the first ever aqualung dive and also invented the term ‘rapture of the deep’ (
l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs
) to describe Depth Narcosis – the more scientific name for a not dissimilar experience, which attacks deep-water divers.
The first stage is a mild anaesthesia, after which the diver becomes a god. If a passing fish seems to require air, the crazed diver may tear out his air pipe or mouth grip as a sublime gift … I am personally quite receptive to the rapture. I like it and fear it like doom. It destroys the instinct of life.
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