A Book of Silence (19 page)
Authors: Sara Maitland
It was in many ways a long winter: a journey through the glories and
jouissance
on Skye, the fears that being snowed in had thrown up for me, and the ‘slough of despond’ thereafter. I found the necessary monitoring of myself tiring and at times irritating; I was often amazed at the gap between my desires and my actions. But underneath all that I knew I was learning and growing in silence, and I was excited.
1
Liddel and Scott,
Greek–English Lexicon
(1843).
2
Moitessier,
The Long Way
.
3
Byrd,
Alone
.
4
Web advertisement.
5
www.wikipedia.org.
6
www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/07.
7
Stuart Grassian,
Journal of Law & Policy
, vol. 22:325, 1986.
8
There is a certain confusion in this story. While all the old narrators (including Ovid) agree that there were two sisters – Procne and Philomel – there is no agreement about which was the wife and which the rape victim. Because Philomel is a name for a nightingale that can sing and Procne for a swallow that was classically held to be silent (although actually it is not) I prefer to give the name Procne to the tongueless victim, and Philomel to the sad but vocal wife.
9
Genesis 16–21.
10
Captain John Phillips, clause 4, ship’s articles,
Revenge
(1724).
11
Marguerite of Navarre,
Heptameron
, Tale LXVII (posthumous pub., 1588). Marguerite of Navarre bowdlerised the story she had learned from Alfonce, to minimise de la Rocque’s ‘immorality’ and possibly to exonerate Roberval.
12
Sara Maitland, ‘The Tale of the Valiant Demoiselle’ in
Far North and
Other Dark Tales
(Maia Press, 2008). Other fictions based on this adventure include a narrative poem of 1916 by Isabel Ecclestone Mckay, and novels by Elizabeth Boyer (1977), Charles Goulet (2000) and Joan Elizabeth Goodman (2006).
13
Richard Steele in
The Englishman
(periodical), issue of 1.12.1713.
14
Ibid.
15
Joe Simpson,
Touching the Void
(Cape, 1988).
16
Ibid., p. 206.
17
Ibid., pp. 141 and 147.
18
Ibid., p. 195.
19
Krakauer,
Into the Wild
.
20
Nichols,
A Voyage for Madmen
, p. 273.
21
Waddell,
Desert Fathers
, p. 228. The Gray referred to here is Thomas Gray, the poet who wrote the famous ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ and who lived most of his life at Pembroke College Cambridge, where he was first a student and subsequently a fellow. He seems to have suffered most of his life with some sort of depression or accidie.
22
Cassian of Marseilles,
De Coenobirum Institutis
, in ibid., pp. 229–31.
23
Anthony Grey,
Hostage in Peking
(M. Joseph 1970). This is from the new and expanded edition (Tagman Press, 2003), p. 110.
24
Ritter,
Woman in the Polar Night
.
25
Psalm 91: 5–6. Modern translations give us ‘scourge’ or ‘destruction’ rather than ‘demon’ – but the eremitical tradition used ‘demon’ consistently.
26
Richard Burton,
The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds,
Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine
Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically,
Historically, Opened and Cut up
(complete modern edition by New York Review Books, 2001).
27
Cassian, in Waddell,
Desert Fathers
, p. 232.
28
Ibid.
29
Adam Nicolson,
Sea Room
(HarperCollins, 2001), p. 156.
*
Interestingly, though, such phenomena are fairly common in reports of mystical experience – although there they are interpreted positively.
*
Cartier probably should not be too much blamed for this. The expedition was already in chaos. He had sailed the year before Roberval, as an independent captain; Roberval was meant to follow him almost immediately, but owing to his financial crisis he did not in fact leave until the following spring. Cartier meanwhile established a camp and endured the most appalling winter on the St Lawrence, where – without the equipment that Roberval was supposed to be bringing – his crew suffered badly. In the spring, believing that Roberval had got lost, he left the camp and planned to limp back to France. By chance he and Roberval met up in Newfoundland, where it transpired that Roberval had got himself appointed as Cartier’s admiral. Cartier’s insistence that the plan was not viable fell on deaf ears – and he finally sailed east under cover of night. The point here is that the members of the expedition must have known full well that Cartier did not think the plans possible and was prepared to risk criminal charges and death rather than return up the St Lawrence. At the time of Marguerite’s marooning there must have been a great deal of tension and unhappiness on board.
T
he summer comes late and slowly on the high moors; it comes from two directions at once, out of the sky in the longer days and the shining brightness, and simultaneously creeping up from the valley, green and gold. In the spring there would be daffodils in full flower at the bottom of the dale while the same plants up at my house on the moor had hardly poked their first hard green spikes above the ground. Going up and down the road between my house and the village I could see the bright yellow clumps laboriously struggling up the hill, pulling the new green of the trees behind them. This gentle but inexorable movement of the seasons is yet another of the silent elemental forces that shape our lives and of which we remain mainly oblivious.
As slowly as the seasons, that summer after I had come back physically from Skye and mentally from the various difficulties of that winter, I began to settle down. I felt both determined and eager. What I had learned, for good and bad, about both silence and myself reassured me powerfully. This was what I wanted.
However, the first thing I had to absorb was that sadly but inevitably the intensity of that winter could not continue indefinitely. Over the next three years I joyfully explored how I might create a sustainable lifestyle that would contain as much silence as possible. One part of this was simply doing it – building up internally and externally a practice of silence, persuading my friends and family that this was really what I wanted, developing and maintaining a disciplined pattern of meditation and prayer,
unplugging the phone, taking life gently, walking, looking, listening to the silence.
Another part of it, though, was about learning more about silence; looking at the ways silence had been understood in the past and how it was used in the present. I was investigating silence – its history, its landscape and its culture. I wanted to understand
why
, in the face of my experiences in Skye, Western society increasingly sees silence as an absence, and a dangerous absence at that. This drew me back to Janet Batsleer’s letter, which I described in chapter 1.
In the beginning God
said
, God spoke.Silence is a place of non-being, from which all our yearning is to escape. All the social movements of oppressed people in the second part of the twentieth century have claimed ‘coming to language’ and ‘coming to voice’ as necessary to their politics … In the beginning was the Word. … Silence is oppression. It is ‘the word’ that is the beginning of freedom.
All silence is waiting to be broken.
1
My writerly imagination has always been deeply grounded in myths and ancient stories of various kinds. This retelling has been both a way of finding strong and enduring stories, and a way of looking at ideas that puzzle me. So high on the moor and revelling in that silent beauty, and especially the silent coming of the light, I started to look at and think about creation stories.
In the beginning… God
said
‘let there be light’ and there was light.
2In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.
3
In the beginning … In the beginning of the creation story that Christianity and Islam both learned from Judaism, there was nothing. There was chaos, emptiness, fall without direction, vacuum,
void, notness. There are no words for this nothing, because there were no words. And as there were no words, there was no silence either, because silence in this story is the absence of words. Language creates the possibility of silence through absence. In the beginning there was nothing, not even absence or silence. There was nothing, no thing. ‘The world was without form and void.’ God creates
ex nihilo
, from nothing, out of nothing, by speaking.
‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth … God
said
, “let there be light” and there was light.’ God speaking broke the void. The silence was broken and because there was light, there was dark. Because there was word, there was silence. Time began ‘and there was evening and morning, one day’.
4
After that it was pretty straightforward, although each phase of the creation took longer and longer sentences, more and more words, to accomplish. The final act – the making of human beings – was the most complicated; God had to communicate directly, establish an I and a You. Not just speaking but speaking to, being heard.
In the beginning God spoke.
In the beginning was the Word … all things were made through the
Word, and without the Word was not anything made that was made.
5
This story has proved itself a
very
powerful creation myth.
Now, here is another creation myth. It is rather shorter:
At the beginning
*
there was the Big Bang.
I am not using the word ‘myth’ here to suggest that the theory that the universe was created by the extraordinary explosion of a singularity – the energy of which triggered the whole process of the universe including time itself – is fictional; or that I don’t believe it.
I am using the word more technically. The Big Bang is an attempt to express the inexpressible, in terms of images and story. To break the silence, indeed. It is not ‘literally’ so; it is an image, a chosen not an inevitable image – a representation, a set of words. The Big Bang was not ‘big’, it was sub-nuclear; and it was not a bang, because there was nothing to make or hear any noise. It is not exactly sophisticated language either – BANG. In fact, I could argue that the Genesis writers did a better job, but under the circumstances it will do. It will have to do.
It is not by chance that the discoverers – or reporters perhaps – of this initial singularity event used this set of images rather than another. Silence is absence, is nothingness. For the world to come into being silence has to be broken, ended, replaced. Even in this most modern of myths, this creation by random accident, without intention or purpose, without a Grand Narrative or a divine directive, we still apparently need an articulation of sound; a noise, a very specific and precise moment in which the silence is broken.