Of course, there are silences in every book. There would have to be the finished line: the end of a word, the pen lifting from the page; the finger releasing—or the breath expired. But silence is really that period between hearing and listening. This morning, I sat facing east and softly dazed into meditation like my friend Mo. I wondered if I would appreciate the coordinating ensemble of birds’ songs if I knew each creator by name, age—and their ancestral history of flight.
“Hear you—” I write to a Nigerian creative I’ve never met but who will have put words in the air—like flight but fighting (and like both, redemptive)—for our listening during their visit to Bookstock, within a short drive from here.
Silence as a notion intrigued John Cage’s lectures, which became the book by the same name (Silence) published by Wesleyan University Press. The lectures themselves were part of a series championed by the American art enigma Robert Motherwell. We might know Motherwell’s inky blots from elegies that continue to be important, in a way more modern than Picasso’s “Guernica.” In one of John Cage’s lectures, he writes “I am here/,/and there is nothing to say/.” I write it to you this way so as not to disturb the poetics in the original. Paradoxically, the only way to feel the original is to be “here”—which is there, inside the open book.
We can quickly close the book the way we now swiftly swipe and close our smarter phones. Silence is not nothing. Notice: the silences say more, now, than all the past’s worshiping words. “We need not fear these/ silences, — ” Cage, continuing, writes. I like this, that we can use the present tense to insist that the intention continues: Cage…writes, even long after he wrote.
Tillie Olsen’s Silences and Adrienne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets, and Silence are two other resources I go to in times like these when I observe in silence more than celebrate in chorus. Olsen’s dedication is, in part, “For our silenced people, century after century their beings consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human life. Their art, which still they made—as their other contributions—anonymous; refused respect, recognition; lost.” The writing itself—particularly during fraught times, Olsen points out, quoting poet Louise Bogan—“is exhausting achievement.” That, a dozen eggs, and the price of butter will get you familiar stares in the parking lot. Not all silences are keen on the past.
“The need to love and be loved” is greater than any fears that are assailable, Olsen emphasizes. Maybe silence compels the listening? Shakespeare, in Sonnet 23, puts it this way: “O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:…. ” James Baldwin in “Ballad (for Yoran)": “The hardest thing of all [silence]…brings relief.”
In Silences, we hear directly again from Virginia Woolf: “Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground.” In this arrangement, the economy has no bearing other than to be ultimately equitable. Adrienne Rich speaks to what is “common cause” between two people. Rich also quotes from Virginia Woolf and asserts that paralysis by guilt “can become a convenient means for remaining passive and instrumental.” And instrumental. By what act/non-act do we sound out or not? To what sounds before and after daybreak will we ascribe to flight—or fight? Baldwin writes, as if concrete and metaphor: it's "form...between connecting rooms."
Maybe the only “real” cage is the cage within. Cuban writer Wendy Guerra, author of a book of poems called A Cage Within, visited several locations in my locale: Dartmouth College’s Baker Library, the indie “radical shopping” boutique called Revolution, among them. In the poem “Toy Cage” Guerra writes, “I fell as low as the deep sound of my orchestra/ that’s where I’m going” (translated by Elizabeth Polli). To me, this sounds close to a moan, which may become a single note drone—until it creates rhythm and makes melody. Perhaps our moan is before and after our silence.
Back to John Cage, his engagement with the page—in conversation, in airing vice or virtue—is also an act of creation. Cage’s 276 page Silence doesn’t just end so much as it goes on, to other subjects, ephemera, the personal, collective, to infinity. This, so much as we can do it may as well be our chance to culturally reset. In other words, I’ll say it here: the ink is important; so is the lift of the pen.
Postscript: Just a note about “silence,” as I travel through Ireland, particularly because silence, per se and writ large, can and would seem counter productive. Of course, artists (poets among them) work in the realm of silence—and yet it’s also a misnomer. Nobody knows true silence, perhaps, which is why it’s a subject of art. For reference sake, I became familiar with the film Into Great Silence—following Carthusian monks—perhaps as I was completing my essay above. I was glad to have found their “silence” (and the filmmaker’s) because it only emphasizes what I mean to encourage. If we’re not hearing silence, we’re not living.
So, go out and make some noise, but honor the silence that offered the chance for that decision.
Peter Money is a poet, playwright, and author of the novel Oh When the Saints (Dublin). His writing has appeared in The Irish Times, The Sun, American Poetry Review, on The Writer’s Almanac and RTE Radio 1 Ireland (“Loves: Silence [see?] and the Music of JS Bach”). Peter plays in the bard band Los Lorcas. His mentor was Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg.