“And the vision that was planted in my brain still remains within the sound of silence.” ~ Paul Simon
There was a bird outside my window yesterday – wish I knew which one – with a ten-syllable song. Was it a black-eyed sparrow, a rose-breasted grosbeak, a chickadee? How precious that song. Because we are invited to write about music in this issue, and because of my iconoclastic tendencies, I have decided to write about silence, which I often find more musical than any song. That bird’s no-holds-barred call was one of the songs of silence for me yesterday. The river of traffic on nearby I-40 is another of the songs, one I’ve lived with since the early 80s when I moved onto Rolling Green Farm, our old Colonial stone mansion of a place on Route 202 in New Hope, Pennsylvania. I recall lying in bed there on Sunday mornings about 5, before folks would arrive for meditation at 5:30, touching the cool two-foot thick rock wall of the bedroom and waiting for the sound of the first truck or car. After it whizzed by, I would count the seconds until another one arrived, in a sort of meditation on traffic.
Judith Toy
Whatever the sounds, we rarely if ever experience true silence unless under water, and then you can hear the sound of your own breathing in the scuba or deep dive equipment, as if it were amplified by a microphone. I tried one of those isolation tanks that were popular in the late 70s and early 80s only once. It had a built-in drip which made the experience more like a torture chamber than a place for making spiritual headway. I paid something like $15 for that annoying hour-long drip!
So why ever did we think we could make spiritual coinage through total silence? Isn’t that the notion of a beginner? The men I correspond with who are lifers in prison write about how hard it is to meditate in a dorm with 40 guys, so they sit in a dry shower stall at 4 in the morning. Or they write about not being able to see the sky from solitary confinement. In one of the first talks I ever heard from Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, he spoke of Camus’ novel, The Stranger, in which a man imprisoned and about to die sees a small patch of blue sky from his prison cell. He sees that sky as if for the first time, and before his death experiences a kind of enlightenment, a time of peace.
Another of the sounds of silence happens when there is a pause in conversation. The Japanese have a specific phrase for a form of nonverbal, interpersonal communication that results from mutual understanding: ishin denshin. These silences are a feature of the Japanese culture, from whom the West would do well to take a lesson. Ishin denshin is not a withholding, but rather a tacit, heart-to-heart understanding that requires no words. So this particular silence refers to a passive form of shared understanding, traditionally noted by the Japanese to be sincere, silent communication via the heart or belly versus overt communication via the face and mouth, which is susceptible to insincerity. In Zen, this relates to the practice of direct wordless transmission between teacher and student.
Claude Debussy famously said music is the silence between the notes. There’s a story that Buddhist teacher Pema Chodren tells about a group of tourists in Tibet where the village dogs were barking up a storm all night, disallowing the visitors to sleep. The way she handled the barking was to listen to the silences between the barks, and sure enough, she fell asleep.
Famous orators know the value of pauses in speech. Both Martin Luther King’s famous statement, “I have a dream” and Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you” both ended with skillful pauses. The pregnant pause embeds the statement into the minds of the listeners. The most important part of a speech is when the speaker says nothing. Toastmasters know it takes a full two seconds – one thousand one, one thousand two – to get the audience reaction.
In primary school I was berated by my teacher for “visiting with her neighbors” too much. My grandmother wrote a song called “Chatterbox,” dedicating it to me: Chatterbox, you really should control yourself, chatterbox, you really owe it to yourself to keep a secret now and then, and that would be a good omen to tell you that I love you when you cease to be a little chatterbox. Never mind the implied conditional love in those lyrics; apparently I had a reputation. So now in my waning years, while I still have a reputation for telling all in my daily blog, I am experimenting with silences in conversation. As a species, it is difficult for us to listen to one another. We tend to be thinking of the next thing we want to say to add to the conversation. My current tact is to let my mind go blank and just hear the other person. And what happens? They talk a lot more and I get to relax and listen a lot more. Have you ever noticed that the same six letters that spell “silent” also spell “listen?”
Judith Toy will offer a peace puppet intensive in the tradition of Peter Schumann’s Bread & Puppet Theatre at the Black Mountain Center for the Arts in eight, three-hour sessions, Mondays and Thursdays 1 – 4 PM, July 6-30. Participants will learn giant puppet making using paper mache over clay molds, which they will sculpt, as well as script writing, chorus and percussion. The workshop will culminate in an interactive puppet show to be performed at BMCA. For information, call the Black Mountain Center for the Arts at 828-669-0930. Toy blogs daily at www.caringbridge.org/visit/philiptoylove.
