Noise / Silence
Since modern times were machine times, they were noisy times filled with sounds human beings had not heard before. Internal combustion engines proliferated and the noises that engines and mechanisms made—cars starting, trains barreling down the track, washing machines swishing clothes, furnaces turning on, police sirens yowling, jet airplanes lifting off. I could fill up the page with those sounds. They were unlovely, yet to anyone who was used to the machine—the hellacious whine of a chainsaw, for instance—the sound could be agreeable. The saw, after all, was doing its work. Any properly operating machine emitted its own tune. “Runnin’ rough. Hurts my ears,” an automotive aficionado I once knew would say about a car that hadn’t been looked after. “Modern man is besieged by mechanics,” as Albert Einstein put it.
The chief offending noise of modern times came not, however, from machines, which, after all, could be turned off, but the human mouth. Modern times saw the rise of a degree of sheer talkiness that threatened to fill every crease of life with words. The age was not one of great oratory, far from it, but, rather, an age of loquaciousness, a belief in the efficacy and importance of talk, be it commentary, advertising, interviews, mundane babble, or propaganda. Radio and television amplified the human capacity for talk. Whereas words were once emitted from a mouth in front of a person, they became disembodied and arrived from all directions.
What was particularly unsettling about modern talk was that the listener could not talk back. The listener was a perpetual audience. Words poured in—political views, television shows, sports casts, news, jingles touting products—and the listener took them in. Where they went was uncertain. Much money has been spent by corporations to track the effect of an advertisement but after a person heard hundreds if not thousands of them a serious diminution of retention seems likely. The words start to form a vast plain in which all manner of human announcements—a nation considering whether it should go to war, someone selling pickup trucks, and a comic making light of his mother-in-law—exist together. As in a Saul Steinberg drawing, there is only a horizontal dimension, a landscape of concerted blather.
Since the right use of language is one key way that people may aspire to be authentic, the notion of words as noise is not an appetizing prospect. In most cases, the people speaking do not consider their words to be anything like noise; they have every right to feel that way. The commentators on public radio are highly articulate. Yet the overall effect is a chorus that easily drowns the listener. To have the radio or television on all day is to invite an amnesiac experience into one’s life. What did I just hear, to say nothing of what is it to me? These questions lead to another: “What does it matter?” That question, however, doesn’t matter. What matters is the volume of words being poured out. Each of us may live with a garrulous companion who never shuts up. In its inexhaustible way, the experience, for some, is comforting. In the beginning was the Word and the word, though lower case, has continued. We may rest assured in the surfeit of language.
In such a world, silence may seem both threatening and perverse. How dare you be silent when so many are speaking? How dare you make others uneasy? How dare you make reference to something so primal, so indifferent to social conceit, and, for many, almost inhuman? As with so many phenomena in modern times, the external, the baying spectacle of words, took precedence over the internal, the silence from which words issue and to which all life returns. Silence is spiritual in the simplest sense—there is more to be felt about the mystery of life than there is to be said about it. Speech that does not refer somehow or other to mystery (as, for instance, a superstitious knock on wood or “God forbid” refers to the uncertainty of human affairs), easily becomes lost in an excess of confidence or simple willfulness. The terrible lack of humility in so many of the figures who drove the ideological and material engines of modern times, whether V. I. Lenin or Henry Ford, was almost a given. They were intent on seizing life rather than listening to it. For such men (and they were very much men) silence was a sham.
Without the margin of silence, the chances of speaking profoundly about our being here are slim to none. Words exist in relation to the amount of silence that surrounds them (in the same way that mystery surrounds being). Silence is the well from which eloquence issues. It frames the impenetrability, vastness, and otherness of life, the awareness that life is both dear and cheap, near at hand and infinite. The meditative traditions have honored silence accordingly. If a human being cannot go to the place of silence and stay there, clear words are unlikely to come. The words may be forceful, passionate, and persuasive, even what the age (and many a book blurb) calls “brilliant,” but the clarity that stems from silence has a particular resonance. Poetry is the blossom of silence.
The enormity that accompanies silence is no reason to denigrate daily conversation. We try to focus on whatever is more or less in our heads or before our faces. What hurts is the relentless acceleration of information so that it seems to shadow every moment like the televisions in some airports that play day and night. Tired travelers (or pilgrims, as another age might have put it) might want to simply gather their thoughts about where they are headed and what they have left behind. Instead, such travelers are besieged by captioned voices telling them more things. Who asked for these broadcast words? Are we that desperate to convince ourselves that we exist? Must we be up-to-date each moment?
“The strong are saying nothing until they see,” Robert Frost wrote about the “little or much [that may be] beyond the grave.” For not wishing to anoint their days with words that have become noise, the strong may be thought to be weak. There is, however, more oblivion in such talky noise than in silence. The noise hardens us; the silence alerts us.
Noise / Silence
I love, love, love this line: "Silence is the well from which eloquence issues. It frames the impenetrability, vastness, and otherness of life, the awareness that life is both dear and cheap, near at hand and infinite." I want to carve it into the subway walls and tenement halls. -Sami
Such an exact description of our "...landscape of concerted blather". The news alone is exhausting. I wonder how we come to any true thought at all sometimes. I write in my journal some days just to try and hear myself above the "noise". "Poetry is the blossom of silence." indeed. In Scorsese's wonderful film Kundun, the Dalai Lama says (of the occupation of Tibet), "They have stolen our silence." I think of that line often. It seems here we have an occupation of our own making. Thank you for sharing this.