I’ve always been the sort of person who comes up with the good line hours later — brushing my teeth, walking to class, mulling over things just before bed…the original conversation long gone, yet the words still buzzing like a mosquito against the cracked window of my mind. Maybe you’ve felt some form of this also?
Montaigne, who invented the essay as essai — attempt, trial, wandering — kept asking “Que sais-je?” What do I know? His motto was less a confession of ignorance than an orientation: circling the question gracefully instead of stabbing at an answer.
Clarice Lispector1 writes: “I write to you because I don’t understand myself.” This stands in stark contrast to how so many of us dive headlong into writing anything — with this impulsive need to pontificate or change other people’s understandings.
And then there’s John Cage, who composed an entire piece of silence, 4’33, about which Michael Nyman2 writes:
4’33 is a demonstration of the non-existence of silence, of the permanent presence of sounds around us, of the fact they are worthy of attention ... 4’33” is not a negation of music, but an affirmation of its omnipresence.
Likewise, Wittgenstein ended the only book3 of philosophy he ever wrote with the line: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Meaning: there are realms where language collapses, where precision gives way to mystery, and the most honest act is to, well, shut up.
But how often do we see that play out today, really — wherein we are comfortable letting comments or quips slide, okay with not pitching in with our hot takes or momentary flights of half-formed thought?
Or how about what Leonard Cohen’s expressing here — something even harder to find in the wild:
I find my own opinions extremely tiresome. And most of my views, you know—in a conversation, I will come up with them, I will present them if I have to. But I find that most of my opinions on things are so far behind where I am or what I feel.
Do we not zealously hold onto our opinions in the here and now as if they are the holy grail? Are we not guilty of thinking whatever our mind presents as the perfect way to perceive a thing? Well, I know I am.
Another lover of language I admire, Thomas Wolfe, speaks of loneliness as the “central and inevitable fact of human existence” and that:
When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people — not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul…we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing.
Maybe this is part of the reason why we choose the odd comfort of noise over the oblivion that silence can conjure?
Look. I’m also not saying that I want to stop speaking altogether4. But I do want to taking words for granted and using language as though it’s anything but a gift. (And yes, this goes for speaking as much as it does writing).
Sometimes the most honest thing we can offer is time — in the form of a pause, a breath…a refusal to rush. Not knowing what to say may be the beginning of listening. And listening, I suspect, is where love begins.
Água Viva. Translated by Stefan Tobler, New Directions, 2012.
Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2001.
Though my hero, beloved Mr. Cohen, did become a monk for 6 years and his initiated monk name was Jikan, “the silent one”
What excited me to take up poetry as an adult was the hope to write closer to the borders of perception. It might not be the realm of silence but it might be closer to that. At the edge of language, new meanings and new perceptions may wait. Admittedly, this is likely why my poems don’t have a wider audience. But it’s where I feel the inspirations I can’t quite pronounce. And that feels exciting the way life feels best. As John Cage said, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and this is poetry."
This reminds me of the 16 questions about which the Buddha maintained a noble silence - not because they were unanswerable necessarily, but because they were irrelevant to the Work.