A Book of Silence (20 page)
Authors: Sara Maitland
But, I began to think, there is something missing from these stories, with some version of which we were all brought up. Who is this ‘we’? It is a very Western ‘we’. This ‘we’, and I am part of it, lives within a primal myth about creative activity. Creation happens when silence is broken; when someone speaks, when the formless and meaningless void is pushed back by sound or word. This particular mythological
structure
in all its diverse forms has proved so successful in terms of colonisation, scientific description and prediction, political stability and military power that it is difficult to notice what a very unusual and odd myth it actually is. The Children of the Book, as Islam describes us – that is the heirs of the three world religions whose roots lie in the cultural drama of the Middle East – are unique. The invasive military and cultural success of both Christianity and Islam should not feel surprising. According to the foundation story of both religions, you have rights and powers over everything you name. By naming it you make it and what you make is yours. It is not by chance that the words ‘author’ and ‘authority’ are connected.
Indeed, the biblical version of this story, which I started above, immediately moves on to God giving Adam the right to name the beasts, ‘and whatever the man called them, that was their name’. Thus, we are told quite precisely, Adam established his ‘dominion’ over them, by speaking, by naming, by breaking the silence of the wild. Having created Adam in his own image, God immediately gives him some of God’s own particular creative power.
The idea of gift is important here. This is not a Prometheus story, a Loki story or a Babel story.
Prometheus, in Greek mythology, stole fire from Olympus to give to human beings. It is for this presumption that he is pinned for ever to a rock while birds of prey pluck out his liver, unless you believe with Shelley
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that he was finally released from the gods’ bondage by scientific rationalism.
Loki, in Norse mythology, is a strange figure, a god who is both childlike and wicked. He frequently stole treasures, material and spiritual, from other gods and let humans get hold of them. It is his constant mischief that puts the gods, and the virtuous heroes who will fight with them, at real risk of defeat at the final battle of Ragnarok.
In Genesis 11, the collapse of the Tower of Babel, and consequent ‘confusion of tongues’ (the division of human speech into mutually incomprehensible languages) was a punishment for overweening pride.
In this Genesis story, however, people do not steal the power of naming and making from God. God gives it to them freely, without cost. Language, and with it the power to name and dominate, exists before the Fall, not evil but good. Part of the initial Grand Plan. All the three religions concerned – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – are highly verbal narrative faiths, their adherents
speak
directly with their God, and their God speaks to them through texts as well as face to face. All three religions see the creative capacity of language as ‘innocent’ rather than arrogant; as divine rather than demonic.
Naturally a culture that sees power in speaking is likely to develop a creation-by-fiat story. And such a culture will obviously
see silence as lack, silence as absence, not merely as negative, but as blank. Paul Davis, the cosmological physicist and writer, has argued that the question ‘what happened before the Big Bang’ is a non-question; it is the equivalent of asking, ‘What is north of the North Pole?’ There is nothing north of the North Pole; the whole point about the North Pole is that there is nothing north of it. The whole point about the biblical story and the Big Bang story is that there is no ‘before’. There is nothing. In such a poetic-religious context it is not at all ‘unreasonable’ to argue that all silence
is
waiting to be broken. Once it is broken, the myth suggests, the human situation improves radically. Matter, order, intricacy, socialisation, language, representation, identity, the individual, ME can emerge and evolve. From here it follows, all too easily, that silence – since ‘I’ am the purpose, centre and goal of the whole project – was waiting to be broken, longs and desires to be broken and should, ought to, be broken. The word desires to break the silence; that is the word’s job.
However, there is a problem. Although this myth has proved extremely effective, especially for those who wish to conquer the world and banish the darkness, or at least bring it firmly under control, it is not actually necessary or inevitable. The global power that this myth has given its owners obscures the fact that it is a very unusual, indeed very peculiar, story. There are lots of other creation myths, all of which get the show up and running without this primal fracture. The world is littered with them. Gods, Prime Movers and their newer scientific substitutes, create the origin of matter by ingesting, by brooding, by birthing, by killing, by withdrawing, by defecating, vomiting and masturbating, by fucking, by desiring, by self-mutilation and even quite simply by mistake.
Here is a Maori creation story:
In the beginning was Te Kore – the Nothing, the silence. The beginning was made from the nothing and the nothing existed for a long, long time. Then there was Te Po – the Great Night and it
was dark and silent and it went on for a long, long time. In the silence and the dark there was nothing, and there were no eyes to see that there was nothing and no ears to hear that it was silent, not even the gods’.Then Papa Tu Anuku, the earth, the mother, and Rangi Nui, the sky, the father, embraced and lay with each other and loved each other. Locked together, they lay so close in their love that there was no light between them; and they did not speak because there was no space between them. And though their love was rich and fruitful their offspring were trapped between them, sealed in the darkness so they could not grow and take shape and live. It was like this for a long, long time:
from the first division of time unto the tenth, and unto the
hundredth, and unto the thousandth, all was darkness and silence.But at last the children of Papa and Rangi agreed that their parents must be separated so that they could live. Tane, who would be the father of the forests and whose strength was the strength of growth, lay down on his mother and he placed his feet against his father and, as slowly as a tree grows, he pushed and pushed until, with cries of pain and loss Papa and Rangi were separated. Light flowed into the space between them and their many offspring were uncovered and took shape and lived.
Later, Tane took some earth, red with the blood of his parents’ severed love, and made a woman Hine Ahu One, the Earth-formed maiden. And she gave birth to a lovely daughter, Hine Titama, the Dawn Maiden – and the children of Hine Titama and her father Tane became men and women in the world, and for a long, long time death had no power over them.
Here is a Norse myth:
In the beginning was Ginnungagap – the void, the chasm. Because there was nothing there it was cold and dark in Ginnungagap. It was so cold and dark there that layers of everlasting salt ice formed in that dark void. Then Authumla, the Great Cow, came to lick at the ice and with her rough warm tongue she licked out the giant
Ymir. When he came out of the ice she fed him with her rich warm milk until he was grown up. Then alone, using the material from his feet and his armpits, he created the giants. From the giants, the Aesir and the Vanir, the gods of the north, were all descended.After many generations Odin, Lord of the Aesir, and his brothers killed Ymir and used the pieces of his dismembered body to construct the worlds, with Yggdrasil, the world tree, at the centre. After the three worlds were built Odin went for a walk on the beach of Middle Earth with two of his colleagues – Lodur and Hoenir, the silent god. They found two trees on the shore – Askr and Embla – and they breathed humanity into them. Odin gave them life, Lodur gave them form and Hoenir the silent gave them understanding. That was the beginning of people and time and speech and song.
I love this story and find it hard not to push for some connection between Authumla and the idea of a ‘mother tongue’ – the first language we all learn. In honesty the connection is not there. Authumla is silent, animal, licking not speaking – she is before language. That is the point.
And here’s an Egyptian version:
In the beginning was a limitless expanse of dark water – inert and sullen. The
benben
, the primal mound rose out of the water, as the islands and sandbars and banks rise out of the water when the Nile floods recede. And Atum, lord to the limits of the sky, created himself out of nothing and stood on the
benben
. Atum was the sun, the totality, containing within himself all potential, all being, the life force of every deity and every animate and inanimate thing yet to come. Atum stood alone on the
benben
while light flooded into the world; then he masturbated every thing into existence.‘No sky existed, no earth existed … I created on my own every being … my fist became my spouse … I copulated with my hand … I sneezed out Shu, I spat out Tefnut … and later Shu and
Tefnut gave birth to Geb and Nut … and Geb and Nut gave birth to Osiris, Seth, Isis and Nephthys … and ultimately they produced the population of this land.’
Well, this is how they told it in Heliopolis. But Egyptian mythology is extremely complex – mainly because Upper and Lower Egypt were originally two different countries and cultures, each with its own mythological hierarchy, divinities and stories. It was essential to pharaonic authority to synthesise these into a single narrative. The seams still show. In Hermopolis in the distant south they thought Atum a Johnny-come-lately. In the beginning, they said, there was the dark water, the primeval matter. Within it there was power: there were eight gods who appeared to be like frogs and snakes, and who contained in themselves the four deep energies of water, flood, darkness and dynamism. After a long time these forces broke through the inertia of the water, and the energy of their collision threw up the
benben
, not in the Delta but at Khemnu in the south. Thoth, the ibis god, flew down bearing the cosmic egg, which was laid on the
benben
. Atum was born from that egg and the rest is history.
I have picked these stories more or less at random from an enormous selection: I could just as easily have told the story of Vishnu’s lotus, or Pangu and the Yellow Emperor, or Crow’s flight, or Uranus’s castration. I have told them in my own words and to my own ends as the old stories are always and necessarily told, though I hope I have told them with respect. However, I am going to tell one more here, because it comes from a mindset so utterly unlike my own.
There are numerous examples of myths that express the sense that there
was no beginning.
For the Cherokee, for example, the land was always there. However, it was flat until the Great Eagle flew over it, and each downbeat of his wings pushed in the valleys, and each upbeat pulled up the mountains. But in the following Australian aboriginal myth, humans are themselves active in the creation, which is continuous, ongoing and is a creation not by word, but by
acts. The
songlines
, the ancient sung poems of the Australian people, record the creation of meaning for the land, but they do not create it. It is the ancestors travelling, and the people replicating those journeys, that are the creative moments.
In the beginning is the land and the land has no beginning – it is before the beginning and it is for ever, everlasting. But in the beginning the land was flat, dark and featureless. It had neither shape nor meaning. It had no places in it or on it, until the ancestors went travelling the paths of it. The ancestors did not create the land, but they created its meaning and shape. As they travelled they were creating the mountains and the hills and the rocks and the animals, people, places. They did not do it once and for all, they do it still – they do it in the walking and the dancing and the singing and the dreaming. The paths must be walked. The creation work must be done. The ancestors start the process, but the land is for ever and the creating of it is for ever. The ancestors are not gods – they die and go to be stars, or to be animals or to be mountains, but they are still walking the paths and creating the land. In the beginning, still, always, without beginning. The dreaming, singing, dancing, walking goes on and on, for ever.
It is hard to see what most of these stories have in common, except for the things they do not have in common with the verbally creative, highly intellectual, monotheist God of the Children of the Book. They represent a different way of seeing, a different way of telling about what can only be imagined. For example, the current story, the one we call the Big Bang, could equally well have been named the Tiny Egg, but it was not. And that is not accidental.
In all these stories, instead of having an abrupt singularity, a sharp-edged instant marking the beginning, a sound breaking the silence, the whole process is much more gradual. Time and silence come together in a slow, even piecemeal, creative drama. In one of the classical Greek versions the first god is actually called Kronos – Time.
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Language here really is the ‘foster-child of Silence and slow
Time’.
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It comes into play late in the story, usually after emotions, divisions and growth. Silence is not broken by the word, not outwith the beginning, but an integral, if separate, part of the creation.