A Book of Silence (46 page)
Authors: Sara Maitland
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High tide occurs approximately every twelve and a half hours (with some variations); so on most days there are two high tides. In the Solway where I was living the height of the tide varied through the year from 5.7 metres to 9.4 metres – and was further affected by the amount of water coming down the river into the estuary.
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In one sense this is not true. People with aphasia do not speak. People using sign languages do not speak. Karin Paish, the conceptual artist, went for six months without speaking at all, even to her partner, while carrying on her normal daily life. However, instead of speaking she wrote. It is interesting to me that she saw this as an ‘exercise in communication’ rather than an exercise in silence.
T
his book has been a long time in the writing, which means there are a lot of people to thank.
Apart from Janet Batsleer and John Russell I have discussed the ideas in the book with a wide range of individuals and I thank them all.
I especially want to thank Joe Cassidy, my spiritual director.
Very early in the process Elaine Graham and Frankie Ward invited me to give a paper at the Manchester Contextual Theology Seminar, which was inspirational and immensely helpful to me; Emma Loveridge and everyone at Wind, Sand and Stars made my trip to Sinai possible; Deirdre Peppe owns Allt Dearg, the cottage on Skye, and did everything imaginable to support my long stay there; Christopher Rowland is an inspired and inspiring biblical guide.
Sine qua non
.
As a writer I owe an enormous debt to my wonderful agent Jenny Brown; and to Sara Holloway and Lindsay Paterson at Granta, Claire Malcolm at New Writing North, Graham Mort at Lancaster University and to the Society of Authors and the Scottish Arts Council who both gave me grants.
Ronnie and Sheila Lambton, in Weardale, taught me in practical terms how to live in wild places – and did so with constant kindness and good humour. John Freeburn, master builder, and his gang, built my house for me.
My neighbours in Glenwhilly – all the Donnans, Jasmine and John Thorpe, Marie and Billy Furguson, Alex McColm – have made me welcome here.
Alan Wilkinson, Tessa West, Adam, Fred, Jock and Thomas Maitland all worked on Dirniemow with me; Will Anderson was both an inspiration and an unfailing support.
Mildred and Adam Lee, Ros Hunt, Stella and Phillip Thomas,
Alan Green, Sabine Butzlaff, Ford Hickson and Will Anderson, Sebastian Sandys, Jane Havell, Peter Daly, Sue Dowell, Peter Magee, Harriett Gilbert and Trevor Richardson RIP are all owed thanks of various kinds.
And finally I thank Frippy Fyfe, Jamie Maitland, Robert Maitland and Maggie Lawrence (my brothers and sisters) for an act of generosity far beyond the requirements of justice.
1 Angela Carter in
Gender and Writing
, ed. Michelene Wandor (Pandora, 1985).
2 Psalm 131:2 (interestingly, most modern translation omit the word ‘weaned’, returning us to the more sentimental/pious suckling image, but my experts assure me that
weaned
is the intended meaning – a child who is intimately with the mother, but without
needing
her for anything).
3 Helene Deutsch,
The Psychology of Women
(Grune & Stratton, 1944), p. 477.
4 Sara Maitland,
On Becoming a Fairy Godmother
(Maia Press, 2003). I had the greatest difficulty getting this collection published – and even wonderful Maia Press drew the line at the original subtitle, ‘Role models for the menopausal woman’!
5 One of the stories in
On Becoming a Fairy Godmother
, ‘Bird Woman Learns to Fly’, explores this lovely natural phenomenon in more detail.
6 Dylan Thomas, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’,
18 Poems
(Fortune Press, 1934).
7 Sara Maitland and Peter Matthews,
Gardens of Illusion
(Cassells, 2000). (We wanted to call the book ‘A Cunning Plot’ but the marketing people wouldn’t let us!)
8 John Cage,
Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage
(Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 8.
9 Janet Batsleer, personal communication.
10 George Mallory became obsessed with climbing Mount Everest and in the end he died there, last seen ‘going strongly for the summit’. Legend claims that when asked why he wanted to climb it he replied, ‘Because it’s there.’ In fact, he never said this – the phrase, as an explanation of apparently senseless ambitions, appeared in a
1923 article about Mallory and other climbers, and was not even ascribed to him. However, it has become inextricably attached to Mallory.
11 Henry Thoreau, Walden,
or Life in the Woods
(1854).
12 Richard Byrd,
Alone
(Putnam 1938), pp. 3–7.
13
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
, trans. Helen Waddell (Constable, 1936), p. 157.
14 Edward Gibbon,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, ed. Bury (London, 1898), vol V, p. 337.
15 John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820).
1 I am rashly assuming that readers can remember Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ stories. I owe this accurate and evocative description to Ford Hickson.
2 Byrd,
Alone
, chapter 1.
3 There is a fine selection of photos of the cottage and the locality at www.drynoch.demon. co. uk.
4 Revelation 14:2.
5 There is a biography of Tenzin Palmo: Vicky Mackenzie,
A Cave in the
Snow
(Bloomsbury, 1998).
6 John Hunt,
Ascent of Everest
(Hodder & Stoughton, 1953).
7 Quoted in Fergus Fleming,
Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps
(Granta, 2001).
8 He later explained this nausea by saying that he ‘had made a pact with the gods’ in reparation for what he saw as a bad and dishonest previous book, and felt strongly that circumnavigating for a possible cash prize would sully the whole enterprise.
9 Robin Knox-Johnston,
A World of My Own
(reissued Adlard Coles Nautical, 2004).
10 Byrd,
Alone
, foreword to UK edition, p. 6.
11 Many of the Desert Fathers paid for their few necessities by weaving baskets from rushes and selling them in the local villages. Given how many hermits there were at some points, and how few villages, I have this pleasing image of infuriated but affectionate villagers reluctantly buying yet more redundant baskets because of their concern for the well-being of the monks, their small houses or tents crammed
with useless baskets, much the way twenty-first-century parents go on sticking their children’s nursery artwork on to the fridge.
12 Byrd,
Alone
, p.83.
13 Christiane Ritter,
Woman in the Polar Night
, trans. Jane Degras (Allen & Unwin, 1956).
14 Quoted in Fleming,
Killing Dragons
.
15 Jon Krakauer,
Into the Wild
(Villard, 1996), p. 138.
16 Nicholas Wollaston:
The Man on the Ice Cap: The Life of Augustine Courtauld
(Constable, 1980).
17 Journal, Day 15.
18
Observer
, 10.2.2002, p. 9.
19 Peter Nichols,
A Voyage for Madmen
(Profile Books, 2001), p. 214.
20 Bernard Moitessier,
The Long Way
, (Doubleday, 1971), p. 164.
21 Journal, Day 9.
22 Journal, Day 27.
23 Charles Lindbergh,
Spirit of St Louis
(Scribner’s, 1953), p. 109.
24 Nichols,
Voyage for Madmen
.
25 William Howell,
White Cliffs to Coral Reef
, (Odhams, 1957).
26 Ann Davison,
Last Voyage
, Heinemann, 1951.
27 William Wordsworth, ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’,
Lyrical Ballads
(1800), line 7–8.
28 Byrd,
Alone
, p. 85.
29
Song of the Siren – The World About Us
, BBC television, 1971.
30 Moitessier,
The Long Way
, pp. 101–4.
31 Ritter,
Woman in the Polar Night
.
32 Geoffrey Williams,
Sir Thomas Lipton Wins
(P. Davis, 1969), p. 115.
33 Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
La Nouvelle Héloïse
(1761), quoted in Fleming,
Killing Dragons
, (2002), p. 90.
34 Jacques Yves Cousteau,
The Silent World
(Hamish Hamilton, 1953).
35 Goutran de Procius,
Kablina
, quoted in Max Picard,
The World of
Silence
, trans. Stanley Godman (London, 1948).
36 The hideous consequences of this effect are detailed in Jon Krakauer’s
Into Thin Air
(Random House, 1997), his account of a disastrous twenty-four hours on Everest in which nine people were killed, almost entirely through ‘disinhibited behaviour’ of one sort or another.
37 John Dennis, letter, 1688, quoted in Robert Macfarlane,
Mountains of
the Mind: A History of a Fascination
(Granta, 2003), p. 73.
38 Macfarlane,
Mountains of the Mind.
39 Exodus 3:1–6.
40 Frank Mulville, ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Sailor’,
Yachting
Monthly
, no. 132, May 1972, pp. 686–8.
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.