A Book of Silence (9 page)
Authors: Sara Maitland
In the tradition set by Abba Anthony male Christian hermits do seem to suffer an almost bizarre degree of sexual torment. (Female Christian hermits seem more prone to attacks of masochistic self-harm; Buddhist hermits seem more vulnerable to rage.) Some of this must be related to their earnest pursuit of a rather rigorous kind of chastity since what is most forbidden is most likely to rear up and threaten in any such situation. But I am convinced that a great deal of it is more related to this intensification in silence: feelings about sex, or food, or warmth, or comfort take on a vivid, even hectic,
vibrancy. When those are the very things one is hoping to escape from
through
silence, it is not at all surprising that one starts to see one’s longings as ‘works of the devil’ and this sense of the demonic is itself intensified by the silence.
In one form or another a great many individuals report this intensification effect. Richard Byrd, a highly practical man and normally prosaic writer, describes the polar evening:
The day is not abruptly walled off; the night does not suddenly drop. Rather the effect is a gradual accumulation, like that of an infinitely prolonged tide … the on-looker is not conscious of haste. On the contrary he is sensible of something of incalculable importance being accomplished with timeless patience … These are the best times; the times when the neglected senses expand to an exquisite sensitivity. You stand on the barrier and simply look and listen and feel … the afternoon may be so clear that you dare not make a sound, lest it fall in pieces.
12
Christiane Ritter, one of the few women to write about extreme terrain, describes the midwinter, twenty-four-hour night in the Arctic Circle in a similar hyperbolic passage:
There is no longer even a glimmer of day, not even at noon. Around the whole horizon only deep starry night. Day and night, throughout its circular course the moon is in the sky … It is as though we were dissolving in moonlight, as though the moonlight were eating us up … the light seems to follow me everywhere. One’s entire consciousness is penetrated by the brightness; it is as though we were being drawn into the moon itself. We cannot escape the brightness.
13
Jacques Balmat, who was the first person to climb Mont Blanc, described an earlier long solo climb and the intensity of his hearing. (It is probably worth mentioning, since Balmat’s degree of terror may sound a little strained, that he was bivouacking alone at a height which in 1786 was believed to be fatal; he had made the long
climb partly in order to disprove this supposition, and made it alone because no one else wanted to risk it.)
During the short intervals between the crash of avalanches I heard distinctly the barking of a dog at though it was more than a league and a half to that village from the spot where I was lying. The noise served to distract my thoughts, for it was the only earthly sound that reached me. At about mid-night the barking ceased and nothing remained but the deadly silence of the grave.
14
Jon Krakauer, an American journalist who specialises in stories about ‘the wilderness’ and who is a climber himself, refers directly to this sort intensification in an account of the first major solo climb he performed, which involved a substantial period of solitary travel to reach his chosen mountain.
Because I was alone even the mundane seemed charged with meaning. The ice looked colder and more mysterious, the sky a cleaner shade of blue. The unnamed peaks towering over the glacier were bigger and comelier and infinitely more menacing than they would if I were in the company of another person. And my emotions were similarly amplified: the highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker.
15
The ‘because’ that begins this quotation reads to me as if he not only found this ‘charged’ state normal, but assumed that his readers would too.
A second different experience, which I became aware of in my own silence and find in other people’s accounts too, is a sort of disinhibition.
One of the ‘harshest’ modern silences I know of was the six winter months that Augustine Courtauld spent in a small tent in the Arctic in the 1930s. For over three months of this he was snowed in and unable to leave his tent at all; and for the last six weeks he was
in total darkness. His silence was moreover particularly complete – he was confined in a very small space; he had no source of music and no method of communicating even if he had wanted to. I had a telephone, Byrd had a pedal-operated Morse radio, Knox-Johnston had a gramophone.
Although his expedition was given the nominal scientific justification of weather observation, Courtauld had no particular qualifications for this and did not in fact do much of it. Less than halfway through he managed to leave his spade outside his tent and was therefore unable to dig himself out to take the meteorological measurements. He came out of the English gentleman school of adventurers and never said or wrote much about his personal experience. Indeed, his only explanation of his own motives and intentions was expressed as a wish to do something that was not ‘mere’. However, Jung commented on a photograph of Courtauld, taken quite soon after the experience, that here was the face of a man ‘stripped of his
persona
, his public self stolen, leaving his true self naked before the world’.
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This is what I mean by ‘disinhibited’. Jung is saying something beyond the simple fact that if you are on your own you can do what you want. This is certainly true: I was quite shocked to find how quickly and easily I abandoned many of the daily activities I’d assumed were ‘natural’ or necessary, like washing, or brushing my hair, for example: in the journal after barely a fortnight I noted that,
I managed a hot bath with care, loved the clean underwear. But I realise that all the people who have accused me of being an innate slut are right. I can delight in a hot bath and clean knickers with the simple knowledge that I probably won’t bother again this week! I think – without guilt or worry – that I could easily go feral.
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Either abandoning customary levels of personal hygiene or creating overriding and strict rules in order to preserve it seems to happen to most people; even among those who are sharing the space of their
silence. In some religious disciplines washing, shaving and even dressing are seen as ‘worldly’ vanities (it is said that Jerome never bathed on the grounds that those who had been baptised needed no further cleaning)
*
but most silent religious communities adopt rigorous rules to govern personal cleanliness, diet and behaviour, which suggests that regulation is necessary and therefore it is silence, rather than solitude, that disinhibits. Funnily enough for me this has been one of the longer-term changes that Skye made in my life: I still have to put in a great deal of conscious effort to stay vaguely in line with an acceptable level of cleanliness and ‘grooming’. There is a freedom in being silent that allows one to challenge a good number of assumptions with less self-consciousness. It was curious to discover on Skye how far I had internalised prohibitions on things like shouting, laughing, singing, farting, taking all your clothes off, picking your nose while eating and so on. These inhibitions fall away at various rates.
But I think Jung was picking up on something more profound. I felt as though the silence
itself
unskinned me, and seems to have done the same thing to Courtauld. As though, to put it crudely, the superego was overwhelmed by the silence. Perhaps this is not surprising. If the contemporary French psycholinguists are right, it is through language, through words, that we enter into the Law of the Fathers – the social controls that allow ‘public’ life to be endurable for individuals. It is as though language and all its benefits were a ‘pay-off ’ for leaving the pre-lingual, warm, self-absorbed, messy and demanding state of infancy. Language is both the route to freedom and the route to ‘good behaviour’. If we abandon language – move back into the silent places we were evacuated from as babies – we might reasonably expect to shed some of the social rules that both govern and empower us. All that self-control I spent so much time learning and mastering; all those infantile joys I gave up – then I stepped outside that social place, back into infancy, out into the wild, ‘beyond the pale’.
*
It seems not at all shocking, really, that I found myself, for example, overwhelmed by seriously bizarre sexual fantasies and vengeful rages of kinds that I had never ‘dared’ admit.
This sense of disinhibition is almost universal in accounts of silence. There are a very large number of individuals reporting their own loss of concern about social norms, or other people, often critical, taking note of the social peculiarities of ‘loners’. At the southern end of Skye Tom Leppard, ‘The Leopard Man’, an ex-soldier, has been living in a sort of ruin without any modern amenities for twenty years. He is a Catholic who prays for three hours a day and reads extensively. He was also, until recently, in
The
Guinness Book of Records
as the world’s most tattooed man – his body is covered in leopard spots, even his eyelids tattooed with cat’s eyes, and he roams his very isolated peninsula, a two-hour walk or a boat ride away from anyone else, naked and unashamed. In 2002 he explained himself briefly. After he left the army, he said:
I found it difficult to settle into life as a civilian. And having worked in jobs with terrible conditions and bad pay I needed to do something different. I have everything I need here. I am lonely in the city. I am never lonely here, and I am never bored. This is my Paradise.
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There is a timelessness in his response to the rules and restrictions of ‘normal’ social life – it seems to have been repeated over and over again, at least since John the Baptist went into the wilderness and dressed in camel hair and adopted an unusual diet. (He ate locust fruit – from the carob tree – rather than the insects of the same name.)
This disinhibition may be as good an explanation as any of Bernard Moitessier’s superficially strange abandonment of the first Golden Globe race. Moitessier was the most experienced single-handed yachtsman of the entries and
Joshua
was potentially the fastest and best-designed boat in the race. It is clear that singlehanded sailing suited Moitessier in a more profound way than some of the other contestants. His mystical bent – and his yoga meditation practice – made the solitary and silent aspects of the race attractive rather than challenging to him.
Peter Nichols, in
Voyage for Madmen
, an account of the race, described Moitessier at sea:
[His] unceasing close communion with the three constant physical elements of his world – his boat, the sea and the weather around him – filled him with joy … a sailing holy man … Not since Captain Nemo has a man felt so comfortable and self-sufficient at sea. He had entered into a kind of seagoing stasis … deep in the vast middle he was untroubled by anything but the daily concerns of sailing; the rhythm of the sea, the endless passing of waves, the daily surging progress of
Joshua
… and his own highly attenuated skills and sensations all blended into a harmonious chord that pealed loud and clear inside and gave him peace.
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Moitessier competed fiercely throughout the earlier stages of the race. By the time he was in the eastern Pacific he was very strongly placed to win the ‘fastest time’ prize and possibly even be first home. (Knox-Johnston, always more concerned with the single-handed record itself than with the speed, had set out two months before Moitessier and was in the lead, but Moitessier was closing up on him in the faster
Joshua
.) Moitessier knew these facts. Nonetheless, somewhere south of Tahiti he simply ‘lost interest’ in the race. He rounded the Horn and instead of turning north up the Atlantic, he just sailed on, round the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa for the second time, back across the Indian Ocean, into the Pacific and finally landed in Tahiti. His ‘explanations’ of this fairly extraordinary decision do not immediately add up.
I have set course for the Pacific again … I felt really sick at the thought of getting back to Europe, back to the snake pit. Sure there
were good and sensible reasons. But does it make sense to head for a place knowing you will have to leave your peace behind? St Helena yes … but I wouldn’t have stopped. I would have pushed on in the Trade winds telling myself, ‘Don’t be a fool, you may as well just put in a little effort, try to pick up the
Sunday Times
prize.’ I know how it goes. Trying to reach Tahiti non-stop is risky, I know. But the risk would be much greater to the north … I feel a great strength in me. I am free, free as never before. Joined to all nonetheless, yet alone with my destiny.
20
To me it feels so like the disinhibition that arose in my own silence and in many other accounts. Normal social obligations and commitments to self and others give way, not to selfishness in the normally understood sense of that word, but to buried desires and needs, which have emerged through the silence and overwhelmed the superego, the patriarchal control, so that Moitessier, like Courtauld, was ‘stripped of his
persona
, his public self stolen, leaving his true self naked’. (I can hear my own defensiveness here; the number of people – including some who have never met me – who feel free to tell me that my pursuit of silence is ‘selfish’ still amazes me.)