This post continues my meditation on the phenomena that fuel both my scholarly and personal curiosity these days. As I settled on writing a blog, I knew that sound is important, but that silence too has its own profound meaning. It signifies more to us than just the absence of sound. This post is a “reminder to self” that I need to keep querying and exploring that significance.
Why Silence?
Silence comes in many flavors, each of which is heard differently by its audience. Musical, spiritual, and natural forms of silence have engaged my recent attention. I sometimes wonder if the same word is suited to cover all three areas, since they manifest so differently in my thinking.
Silence is the anticipation more often than the absence; it is the unexpected, leaping to our attention through the “pop” of negative pressure. Where we predicted sound, we have its inverse. That’s silence.
Silence is a mystic space, a centeredness outside of (or inside of) the active conversational chatter of the mind. It is interlinked with zen, with mystic contemplation, with communion with the soul, with imbeddedness in nature. It is the non-self of the self, unencumbered by the doubts and worries, pressures and overhyped-up coalescence of modern human existence.
It is stillness and quiet, respite from quotidian concerns.
As a practice fitted into a monastic day, silence serves as a recurring part of the spiritual cycle of devotions.
Vows of silence mark a path apart, a decision to cast of the ordinary in favor of an aspirational stance – a quest, a longing for difference, a departure from the mundane.
Silence can also be the standing apart, the non-crowd following, the identification of a disconnect in stance, attitude, or action.
Silence is the syncopation and dance of musical convention. It is where music starts and ends, but also the formidable marker of musical experience; not the cadence but the re-framing that follows the cadence; not the climax but its consummation. It is the breath, the phrase end, the agogic lift-and-pause, a momentary hiatus that ineluctably shapes our experience of the musical moment.
Silence is the cicadas when they stop.
Silence is leaving your phone in a different space, tether undone.
Silence is fractal; we chase silence across layers and levels as we listen ever more deeply.
Silence is found in the hush of the forest, the wind in its leaves, the thrum of the pulse in the ears, the almost inaudible swish of the blinking eye. It is the visible effort of a rabbit to be as still as a rock in the landscape. It is the peace and contentment of the sunny rock after a long climb. It is the space of feeling, not word.
Silence is not the absence of noise so much as the substitution of the world of nature over and above the human-generated whines and squeals of machinery and the coursing race of competing voices in a human-focal landscape.
Sound and silence, presence and absence, what is heard and what is felt in the quiet spaces in between: these drive my curiosity – and I hope yours as well.
If you choose, share a memory of a silent moment and what it meant to you.
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