A Book of Silence (38 page)

To be honest, I find it hard to suppress a certain sense of relief when I find George Eliot bringing her caustic scepticism to bear on all this:

On my Galloway walks I took not
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
but Wordsworth’s
Prelude
.

Wordsworth wrote
The Prelude
in 1805, although he continued revising it and it was not published until after his death in 1850. Its title makes clear that it was intended to be an introduction to
The Recluse
– the great philosophical epic containing his views on ‘Man, Nature and Society’ that he never completed. He published the second of its three intended parts as
The Excursion
in 1814; and in the preface to that, he described his overall intention. The editor of the 1850 posthumous publication of
The
Prelude
used that preface to
The Excursion
in his own introductory remarks.

What Wordsworth does in the first and second books of
The
Prelude
is describe and celebrate his rural childhood. This is no innocent autobiography, it is a treatise on the making of a genius, and in particular it lays out the relationship between the poet and the landscape – that is to say, the natural world imbued with long associations.

In the opening passages of
The Prelude
the poet has first to gain his freedom, ‘dear Liberty’, by escaping from the city into the country:

Once away from the pressures of society he can start to think again and have access to his own true feelings and ideas, which will manifest themselves as
poetry
:

This moment of peace and quiet
naturally
turns his attention back to his childhood and the sublime beauties of the Lakes, which had given him:

I chose
The Prelude
because it was written explicitly to explore how solitude in nature influences creativity by strengthening the individual against the ‘
mean and vulgar works of man
’. Wordsworth is of course particularly concerned here about how childhood experiences of silence can develop these creative capacities, and also how language, specifically poetry, can represent them.

Wordsworth, and the Romantic Movement more widely, put a new emphasis on the experiences of childhood and its effect in later life. It was Wordsworth who coined the phrase, ‘the child is father to the man’, in his 1802 poem, ‘The Rainbow’.
*
Since he believed that children were uncontaminated by society, and therefore spontaneously both wise and creative, returning to the scenes of his childhood, alone and in silence, allowed him to access this primal innocence and with it his own poetic voice.

One afternoon, sitting in thin sunshine under the shelter of a drystone wall and looking down on the forestry plantations around the Clatteringshaws reservoir, I suddenly and vividly remembered something that I had forgotten for years. For her fourth-birthday treat my youngest sister had decided she wanted to climb the Merrick – it is a big walk for such a small child, but she did it. She was jollied but not carried. What I experienced was a whole, rounded memory – the kind that is entirely visualised but has nothing outside its own frame. I don’t remember why we decided to do this, but remembered vividly the doing of it, the breaking out of the pine trees into the huge upper air, her determined sturdy walking in little red wellington boots, the enormous sense of victory that we all had at the top – and the huge view from the ridge.

This made me notice something interesting: this silent walking seemed to improve my memory. Increasingly, throughout the week, I had a very sharp recall of episodes, events, even emotions. Not just of ‘significant moments’ but of small things like walking up the Merrick for Maggie’s birthday. Things from far back in childhood. They felt at least like ‘true’ memories and were quite detailed, and usually came as whole, nicely shaped stories. At first I thought this was about coming back to the terrain of my childhood. But soon I realised that it was not just memories of childhood but of later events, which had nothing at all to do with south-west Scotland. One of the things I gained during this week, in this specific silence, was a much stronger narrative of my own life. It was not until after I went home that I became aware of how much – how many anecdotes – I had added to my conscious memory bank. The effort to eliminate ego and silence the mind, heart and imagination destroys a clear sense of time and therefore of narrative, but the attempt to use silence deliberately to stimulate internal states of imagination has exactly the opposite effect. I’m guessing, of course, that this is related to silence – it could just be chance, or menopause or something, but I really do not think so.

One reason that I do not think so is because it seems to have been the experience of more individuals than just me. You go out into the wild and you ‘discover who you are’, you ‘establish your individual voice’, or ‘your authentic identity’. One of the definitions
of identity or selfhood being explored at present in both philosophy and psychiatry is the idea that the ability to construct a coherent narrative of one’s own life circumscribes identity – to be an individual is to own a narrative self. Choosing to be alone, solitary, particularly in a place that is ‘sublime’, is one way of establishing contact with such a narrative, unmediated by other people’s interpretation. I came to feel that it really is about going down (or in/up/through/over) a level internally – and there are memory gobbets just lying about down there. Silence firstly puts one in that ‘other’ place and secondly gives one an opportunity, without interruptions or comments, to retrieve and shape those memories. This gives a poignant sensitivity to Storr’s observation, ‘I regret that the average mental hospital can make little provision for those patients who want to be alone and would benefit from it.’
¹³

This confirmed for me a validity in the romantic claims for silence as a deep well of creativity, provided, of course, that you accept the underlying premises – that our ‘inner’ self is more ‘true’ and more ‘real’ than the socially constructed
persona
(mask) that we put on in social circumstances, and that great art is the exploration and exposure of that hidden self.

This time in the hills made me happy. My body liked being fit and tired. The walks themselves created a shape and narrative for each day. It was all extremely simple and pure. And one night I had an adventure that encapsulated and expanded the whole experience. I had decided there were two walks I wanted to take in the most northerly part of the region; to save time I decided I would sleep in my car up in the hills rather than go back down to the coast.

The first of the two days was lovely, bright and clear, but the walking was strenuous and I got back to the car weary. I snuggled down into my sleeping bag and was asleep before it was fully dark. At about 3 a.m. the stars woke me. I did not immediately know that. I woke up quite gently and lay there, half awake. Then I blinked my eyes open – and STARS. I have never seen stars like that night, not even in Sinai. There were so many that they lit up the sky; ‘starlight’
took on a specific meaning like sunlight and moonlight. I was hurtled from my bed by them – driven or called, or both, to pull on my jacket and shoes and be outside. It was completely calm and silent. The sky was perfectly clear across the zenith, although there were low, darker bands of clouds north and east. The hills bulked up, clear blacker outlines below the black sky, but high above me was a fabulously dense Milky Way – ‘The White Lady’s pathway’ and ‘the Goddess’s milk’ as it has also been called. There were so many stars it was impossible for me to pick out the constellations that I did know. It was not ‘flat’. I had a real sense of the three-dimensionality of the sky. Did the ancients really see it as a flat ‘dome’ or single layer? I was breathless with awe and excitement. Eventually I found the Pleiades and with the help of binoculars I could distinctly see each of the Seven Sisters, including the fainter Merope, and a dusting of tinier stars within the cluster, like icing sugar on a cake. I had never before really managed to see their different colours – blue, yellow and a brilliantly pure white. As I grew used to the panoply I identified Orion, and picked out the stars of Ursa Major from among the hundreds that seemed to obscure the pattern. There was no moon but there were shooting stars, random, sporadic, but frequent, and some with long flaming tails like the great dragon of the apocalypse.

I didn’t know it at the time that it was the peak night for the Orionids – one of the regular meteor showers. So the dragon metaphor was better than I meant; meteor showers are caused by the discarded dust fragments of comets’ tails burning up as they encounter our atmosphere. And the whole sky was twinkling, dancing, singing silently. It was gratuitous, that extraordinary sense that it was somehow alive, not flat and dead and distant, but immensely present and vital. Eventually some clouds drifted up or I got tired and the intensity faded. Half exalted, half exhausted, I climbed back into my sleeping bag and drew breath.

Two breaths.

The first breath was for the enormity of the silence.

The silence of the stars is unthinkable. They burn and burn at
unimaginably high temperatures for unaccountably long aeons. They blaze and blast and spark, and they do it all in silence. The explosions of their births and deaths go unheard throughout the whole cosmos. Sound waves, unlike light waves and radio waves, cannot carry through a vacuum; space itself is silent. Out there, beyond the atmospheric blanket, is an immeasurable vast and everlasting silence, ‘the vast vacuity’ through which Milton’s Satan fell. No wonder the devil likes noise.

The scale of it all is outrageous. There are about the same number of stars in the Milky Way, our own galaxy, as there are cells in my body and there are at least 125 million other galaxies. The numbers themselves lose meaning; there have not been a million earth days since the birth of Christ, but when I try to talk about astronomy I start treating ‘millions’ casually because there is no other way to speak. Between each of the stars is an enormous distance – our nearest star,
alpha proxima
, is about five light years away from the sun.
*
Between each star is silence. According to the Yale Bright Star Catalog there are 9,110 stars with a magnitude of 6.5 or brighter, that is to say visible to the naked eye (assuming ideal conditions and good eyesight). Because space stretches out in every direction you will never be able to see this many at once – only half of them could possibly be visible in each of the hemispheres; nor will you see that many at any one time because the earth spins them into view throughout the night. Nonetheless 4,500 stars is generous enough.