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Thomas Moore, former Catholic monk, reflecting on silence in an article called “The Silence of Sounds”, originally published on Resurgence

Excerpt:

The room in my house where I work tends to be cluttered. Books and papers arrive in great number every day, and though I try occasionally to keep up with the torrent, I rarely manage a clean desk and a well-ordered bookshelf. But, in those rare moments when the devastation has been conquered, I sense the silence in the place. I feel inspired, and for a few minutes, before the post arrives, I know what it’s like to be spatially quiet.

People speak of noise pollution, but in society at large I see no indication that it is a real concern. Yet noise contributes to the anxiety of our age. If the quiet sounds of a dancing brook and the soothing music of the sea calm and quiet a person, imagine what the roar of jets and the constant drum of traffic do. Sounds are as much a part of the environment as beautiful parks and unsettling trash. They colour the spaces in which we live, and they have an impact on us, even if we are unaware of their presence.

The subtle power of sound is like that of aromatherapy. If slight tinctures can so powerfully affect your mood and thoughts, what do the ordinary smells of car exhaust and refineries do to us? If Mozart and Bach can raise the spirits, what do the noises of factories and traffic congestion do? A study in Sweden suggests that people living near an airport have more problems with high blood pressure than other citizens in the city. Where do you work? What is the level and shape of sound there?

I play the piano for silence. The sounds coming out of my finger action scatter the activities and concerns that are the ‘noise’ of daily life. Sometimes I find more silence at the piano than in a quiet room reading or studying. The absence of sound doesn’t always create silence because, like everything else, silence is not a literal thing. The most quieting sound I know is the tumble of water over the stones of a mountain stream. One day I took my recorder to a nearby stream and now, when I crave some silence, I listen to that brook and get away from the noisy thoughts of my soundless work of writing.

I don’t want to moralise and romanticise in my rant against noise. Silence is important, but so are loud signs of vitality and music that wake your innards. But we seem well skilled at making noise and unconscious about the beauty of silence. It seems that we assume that there is nothing to do about sounds; that there is no art of silence and no practical purpose for it anyway.

But silence is a taste of the eternal, which is a natural part of us. If we are noisy and active all the time, we will never know the invisible world that is interior to us and to everything. It’s no accident that a church or temple might be a place where you can discover the forceful strength and healing power of quiet and stillness. The place is full of spirits, which move invisibly and make their soundless noises, which are sometimes captured in chant and polyphony and in the motionless drone of a harmonium and the otherworldly twang of a sitar.

Silence is a way of listening to the subtle sounds that keep the world on course. Pythagoras said he could hear the music of the planets making their rounds. Some adepts know well the cosmic sound of Om. I feel that different kinds of music take me to various places in the geography of the soul and spirit. Individually we may need to cultivate the active art of silence. Culturally, too, we might rediscover our interiority and the subtle qualities of the world through quiet. We might calm ourselves sufficiently to stop reacting so quickly and thoughtlessly to events. International politics might take a giant step forward if the politicians stopped talking for a while and listened to all the information and wisdom floating in the quiet air.

Silence is precious, not because it is literally empty but because it is a kind of fullness. In silence we hear our thoughts and take in the world. We become receivers rather than just doers. We are less active but more alive. When we speak from silence, our voices contain the whispers of a muse, a passing spirit, and an angel. Our words resonate. They are worth listening to, because in them the otherwise silent world finds its voice.

I have a gnawing, irrational fear that things will simply begin to disappear all around me.  That one by one, the rituals of my daily life will cease to exist, leaving me with nothing but myself for entertainment.  Living with this feeling is not easy.  I look in the mirror each morning, repeating to myself, “You are fun.  You are fun.  You are fun.” But I am not convinced it will be enough.  Not enough to drive away the fear.  Not enough to overpower the thought of yet another thing’s disappearance.

Don’t say “The End” unless you mean it, I think.  Don’t say one thing and mean another.  Don’t slip off into a mist when things could clear at any moment.  Everything breaks through.  It has to be.  Even I can make out the shape of my own head in the mirror’s fog.  I don’t have to wipe it away to know it is me; only to know if the room all around me is still there.

from Zellar

I cannot even hope to wrest enough time from the darkness to read all of these books, to read even a fraction of them, try as I might. I’ve been made frantic and terminally confused by this crowd of mute and hectoring companions. Books are no longer my friends. They are clients, salesmen of every stripe, lobbyists, all waiting in my outer office for a moment of my time.

The world produces too many books, spits too many words into the void, and I am now too fragile and harried to tolerate such an onslaught, and am losing all desire to make any further contribution to that confusion.

Obscure science, natural history, impossible philosophy, forgotten novels, biographies of dreadfully boring or wretched dead people, giant photography monographs, field guides, tortured memoirs, fat slabs of incomprehensible history, treatises on the diseases of horses and cattle, swine breeding manuals, bunk explorations of the paranormal, a half dozen books on dowsing, lurid accounts of criminal behavior, an instructional for romance writers, volumes of poetry in languages I cannot read, a Fleetwood Mac hagiography --I will never so much as open a single one of these books.

There once was a man who hid all his words in a crawl space, and packed them like wood shavings around his heart. A man who wrote his words in invisible ink. Someone said they saw him step out from under a dark cloud and fall clear off the face of the planet. This account, according to local tribal legend, was not strictly accurate. The natives reported that the man was in fact falling for a very long time and a great distance, and the dark cloud, it was said, followed him all the way down. The cloud, the natives claimed, was the ghost of a dog, and it followed the man out of loyalty, after there was not another soul who would follow him down.

Imaginary Keith is flushed and out of breath when he walks in the door today.  I suspect the heat, at first, but then see that he is holding a book in his hands.  It doesn’t even look used - the corners are crisp and straight, the cover a very soothing blue. 

“You haven’t been working at all this morning, have you?”

“Yes I have.  I fixed a sprinkler.”

“Three hours to fix a sprinkler?  I’m going to have a hard time billing that one out.”

“Okay, I only worked a few minutes, maybe five.  We were out working at Brian’s this morning.  You know I always get talking whenever I go out there.”

“I see.”

“But the guys were working.  Things were getting done.”

Brian has been working on a book for some time now.  I don’t even know how long.  I know that Imaginary Keith brought home a rough draft of it at least a year ago, maybe longer, and we looked it over then.  Keeping track of time is so hard these days.

“So, is that Brian’s book?” I ask.

“It is.  He even signed it for me.

For Keith,

Both the Imaginary and, especially, the Real.

Good reading,
Brian

“Sounds to me like we’re suppose to share it.  As a matter of fact, it sounds to me like it’s mostly for me.”

“Nah.  That’s just the way Brian writes, all mysterious and elusive.  But you’re welcome to read it.”

“Well, at least tell me the name of it.”

“It’s called Return to the One.”

“Open it up.  Read me something.”

“Okay.  Here’s a chapter called Time Is Temporary.”

“That sounds about right.  Go on.” Imaginary Keith begins reading.

Here in our universe, material things (including thoughts produced by the physical brain) always are separated by time and space.  Since time continually brings about changes and only one thing can occupy a certain space at a particular time, there is a constant push and pull within materiality.

Imaginary Keith stops. “Do you think that means even things like you and me?  Even imaginary friends?”

“How would I know?  You’ve only read one paragraph.  But relationships, even those with ourselves exist within time and space, so I suppose so.  And I would certainly call ours one of “constant push and pull”.  Keep reading.”

Life on earth bears an unsettling resemblance to a crowded parking lot at a popular shopping mall the weekend before Christmas: there is incessant circling around and jockeying for position, some leaving and some arriving, people frantically striving to be somewhere other than where they are now.  Such is the way of this material world, says Plotinus, but not of the spiritual world.

“Wooo!  Now that’s easy on the ears!  Better then that stuff you were reading to me this morning.”

“I think so,” Imaginary Keith says.

“You get reading.  I’m going to get on the phone and see if we can’t get him over here for coffee or dinner or something.”

“Who, Brian?”

“Well, yea, I suppose he could come too.  But no, I was talking about Plotinus.  I’m going to see if he has time to stop by.”

“You mean squeeze the two of us into what I’m sure is his already hectic schedule?  It can’t be easy being a mystic philosopher.  The man has got to be busy.”

“Are you kidding?  Sitting around thinking all the time?  Why do you think philosophers spend so much time talking about time?  It’s because they have all of it in the world.”

“I think you’re over simplifying.  I think you’re just going to add to the push and pull of his life.”

“Those are Brian’s words, not Plotinus’.  Now, get reading.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a clue what Plotinus will be thinking about.  We need to get up to speed before he comes over.”

“True.”

“I don’t even know the simple things.  I mean, does he even like coffee?”

“I find it stimulates thought.”

“Well, that’s a start.  But we’ll need more then that to hold our own with a third century Greek philosopher.  This Plotinus could be a slippery fish.”

“Hey!  Look at this!  My name’s in the acknowledgments!”

“Let me see that.”

“See, right there.  Plain as day.”

“Hmmm.  Nope.  I don’t see you listed.  That’s my name you see, not yours.  Sorry.”

“What?!”

“It’s one of the perks of being real.  Seeing your name in print occasionally.”

“Well next time you can go over and fix the sprinkler then.  If you get the perks, then you can do the work.”

“You’re threatening me with five minutes of work?  You’re going to have to do better then that, especially when Plotinus gets here.  Now quit wasting time.  Get reading.”

Because sometimes it’s just easier to let someone else do the writing.

Compliments of In These Times.
Led to by Welcome to Mark Maynard’s World

Cold Turkey

By Kurt Vonnegut

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

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When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:

Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.

As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.

As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

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There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are!

I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does “A.D.” signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that.

Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?

No problem. That’s entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said.

During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again.

Mel Gibson’s next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will again be broken.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

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And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times.

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.

Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls’ basketball.

Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:

I often think it’s comical

How nature always does contrive

That every boy and every gal

That’s born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative.

Which one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut.

If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you.

If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal.

If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative.

What could be simpler?

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My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.”

How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.

So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.

That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay.

Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.

And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.