A Book of Silence (30 page)

When I moved to Weardale I did not fully realise this – I thought it was a new beginning that would go on for the rest of my life, but in fact it turned out to be more of a pause. Even as silence is undermined in so many ways in the contemporary world, there remain tiny puddles of it in most people’s lives, pauses in the stream of sound, which they value though do not usually call silence. A common example is a hot bath at the end of the working day, whether or not accompanied by a drink. ‘Unwinding’ is a popular term for these little silences, suggesting that one does get wound up by the noise of daily life, and just under the level of consciousness one knows that incessant social activity can deplete as well as nourish the self. I have come to see Weardale as just such a pause.

A pause is a rather nebulous little whatsit, somehow, and hard to get a grip on. But certainly in a pause there is anticipation. Musical notation has proven better than spoken language at encoding small silences: here a silence is called a ‘rest’ if it is a precisely measured stoppage (half-beat; a beat, a bar) but a ‘pause’ if it goes on for an imprecise amount of time: they’re written differently on the staves. Language has lots of vocabulary for different small silences, but no way of showing how they fit into the hubbub of words around them: pause, stop, rest, end, caesura, hesitation, lacuna, delay. In defining ‘pause’ the OED rather favours ‘hesitate’ in the examples it gives, but ‘hesitation’ suggests a kind of fumbling whereas to me at least ‘pause’ does not; it is difficult to imagine a ‘serene hesitation’.

The one most obvious thing about a pause is that it doesn’t go on for ever. To
be
a pause it must sooner or later, and probably sooner, be broken; whereas with a ‘stop’ or an ‘end’ there is closure. It isn’t just that a pause doesn’t go on for ever – it is that we know it isn’t going to. It is building up to something. Presumably this is how comic ‘timing’, the famous pause-before-the-punchline, functions. The comedian creates a little silence to give the audience time to
want to know what the punchline will be, time to intensify their desire. But they do have to know there will
be
a punchline – they have to be ‘trained’ in the genre codes of stand-up comedy or it isn’t going to work. If the pause goes on too long the anticipation evaporates, into anxiety or boredom or over-anticipation.

In
Le Plaisir du Texte
Roland Barthes, the French literary theorist, argues that contemporary literary forms require ‘closure’; but that the satisfaction of closure (full-stop endings) deprives readers of the ‘bliss’ of the opening-out ending. Presumably he wanted works of literature to
end
with a pause. And T. S. Eliot described poetry as ‘writing with a lot of silence on the page’. Did he mean writing with a lot of
pauses
on the page, since the poet is going to start a new line at any moment?

The only use of pause to mean a
permanent
ending that I can think of is ‘menopause’. While I was considering this odd euphemism, I noticed with ironic amusement that the American word for a full stop is a period.

In this pause I learned a lot of things, external and internal, many of which were entirely unexpected. The biggest surprise was the realisation that there were so many different sorts of silence. My assumption had been that silence was going to be monotone; that all silence would be somehow the same and however one came by it, the end product, as it were, would be very pure, very beautiful but somehow flat, undifferentiated. Skye and the flotation tank had begun to teach me better, and now I was finding more and more complexity. The more silences I looked at, the more silent places I went to, the more I became aware that there were dense, interwoven strands of different silences.

Even at the physical level there is a huge variety. The BBC’s radio sound archive has tapes of a remarkable range of different silences – ‘night silence in an urban street’; ‘morning silence – dawn, the South Downs’; ‘Morning silence – winter moor’; ‘Silence, sitting room’ – ‘garage’ – ‘large hall’ – ‘cement bunker’ – ‘beach’; and so on; and even so most radio producers prefer to go out and record their own version of silence for their specific programmes.
This is partly because in fact it is practically
never
truly and completely silent, at least within the earth’s atmosphere, but it is also because these different silences have different emotional connotations.

Beyond the purely auditory experience there is an even greater range; there are emotionally different silences and intellectually different silences too. I have come to believe that while sound may be predominantly a brain phenomenon, silence is a mind event. The experience of silence is more tightly bound up with culture, cultural expectation and, oddly enough, with language than the experience of sound is. Chosen silence can be creative and generate self-knowledge, integration and profound joy; being silenced (a silence chosen by someone else and forced upon one) can drive people mad. It is possible to experience external silence without any sense of interior silence and in a few cases the reverse. Catherine of Siena, the Italian mystic, was famously able to maintain a conscious awareness of her own interior silence while pursuing an eloquent and complex ambassadorial role about the politics of the papacy. Silence is multifaceted, a densely woven fabric of many different strands and threads.

This was helpful to my conviction that silence was not simply a deficit or lack, an absence of sound (or speech or noise). It seemed to me that if silence were simply a negative event, a blurred absence of a great reality called sound, then it could not have specific qualities of its own, no pitch, volume or tone and no reverberations. But increasingly all my experience suggested that silence does indeed have these qualities, or at least qualities close to and comparable with these. ‘A scary silence’ and ‘a holy silence’ are crude examples; but I learned to tell when it had been snowing in the night by the quality of the silence, even more than the light, when I woke up – snow silence is different from wet silence or sunny silence. Silence can be calm or frightening; lonely or joyful; deep or thin. Certainly silence seems to have reverberation – the silence in the sensory deprivation pod and the silence at Throstlehole
felt
very different.

I found it quite daunting to discover that silence was so complex and asked such difficult questions of me. But I also found it fascinating and deeply engaging. There was, and there remains for me, something deeply mysterious about the fact that there are different kinds of silence. I find comfort in Georg Cantor’s elegant mathematical proof that infinity comes in different sizes. Both philosophically and mathematically this was deeply shocking (it made Wittgenstein extremely cross) – but nonetheless it is now generally accepted. If there can be different sizes of infinity, of course there can be different volumes of silence; and indeed, I now hope there may be whole symphonies of silence.

D
uring these years in Weardale I grew deeply contented. I lived in a place of extraordinary wild beauty. I was fit and well. I had all these fascinating things to think and learn about. I was never lonely and never bored. I had enough satisfying work to do. I felt my prayer life and my theological understanding were developing, and moving forward in ways that seemed both natural and exciting. I felt I was creating a way of living, freely and silently, that might be useful to a noisy world as well as to me personally. Above all, I enjoyed the sense of exploration, and possibility.

Then I noticed something shocking. I had come to Weardale for four conscious reasons: to study and think about silence, to find out if it was delightful to me, to deepen my prayer life and to write better. I was indeed doing and enjoying all the first three, but I was not, in fact, writing. Or, to be more precise, I was not writing any fiction and certainly not of the kind I wanted to write. When I had come north it had been with a sense that the stories were not
enough
– I wanted to dig deeper into them, to pull more out of them. It had not occurred to me that I would abandon them, nor they me. The desire to write, to tell stories that pull my thoughts and emotions together, has been something that I have lived with and found integral to my sense of well-being, even of identity, for as long as I can remember. Now quite simply
stories
did not spring to mind; my imagination did not take a narrative form. I had in a peculiarly literal way ‘lost the plot’. I found this disturbing.

More to the point, I could not understand what was happening. When I set out on my journey into silence, I had a very well-embedded assumption. I was a writer and a pray-er; through a disciplined practice of silence I would get better at both.

It is a commonplace, almost a cliché, that silence and solitude are good for the creative artist and particularly for writers: ‘the world is too much with us’, we need privacy and peace, and a minimum of interruption because ‘solitude is the school for genius’. Equally, it is very generally held, in almost all religious traditions, that silence (in larger or smaller doses) is necessary to the aspiring soul. This belief is not confined to monotheistic faiths and even the most communitarian traditions, like Judaism and Islam, have a silent tradition and core narratives about withdrawal into solitude and silence as a precursor to hearing ‘the voice of God’ and being enabled to take radical action.

So it had seemed perfectly reasonable to me that I could go and lurk up on a high moor, put in the disciplined practice of concentration and meditation, and thus become
both
a better, more prolific imaginative writer
and
more safely and intensely engaged in the life of prayer.

To put it at its simplest I was now being proved wrong.

Luckily I had already become aware that there are lots of sorts of silence. This gave me an idea that there might be something profoundly different between the silence of the hermits and the silence of creative artists. I started to read more attentively the attempts of both groups to describe what they thought their silence was
for
. What I began to see was that the two projects are, in a number of ways, inherently contradictory. Here are two quotations from famous silence practitioners. Both quotes are from personal letters, rather than published text, and I do not think that this is mere chance.