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I have told no one I am working on this piece.
For the poet, the artist, the mystic and the survivor, silence has many facets, zones and shades. Silence has its own texture, its own spheres, its own archaeology. It has its own contradictions as well. The silence of the victim is one thing, that of the killer, another. And that of the spectator, still another. There is creative silence, there is murderous silence. To a perceptive human being the universe is never silent -- but there exists a universe of silence, and only perceptive human beings are aware of it.
Elie Wiesel
Somewhere A Master:
Further Hasidic Portraits And Legends
(1982)
p. 200 - 201
When I first heard this passage -- appropriately, I did not read it "silently" to myself, primarily with my eyes, but heard it enunciated (the voice Jewish, yes, Texan, and theatrical) -- I thought that surely Wiesel was not trying to catalog the many varieties of silence. Such a compendium would be infinite. I am no longer so certain. If you are at all familiar with Wiesel's fiction, you know that "The School OF Work", the chapter to which this text belongs, you understand that the author's aim is not simply to recount the story of Reb Itzikl, his son Reb Mendel, and spiritual meaning of the meekness they demanded of themselves. Wiesel wants his readers to see how the mystical and the pragmatic complement one another. Wiesel also wants to understand how, in our world, silence can so easily be not a sign of steadfastness but a symptom of passivity; how silence can shape our world so that, in it, human slaughter is not only possible, but countenanced.
In a world such as this, in which silence is the mark of the accomplice, perhaps we have a moral obligation to enumerate silences, and thus render them retrievable as well potentially computable. Silence is never equivalent to contentlessness. Our accounting should have modest beginnings... we could concentrate on silence as a component of human expressiveness. We can simply annex silences to the names of known emotions:
The problem as I see it is not that these silences are overwhelmingly Old Testament in affect. Rather, the difficulty is that these silences are not unique. The silence of one who listens, intently (to what he or she is listening is immaterial), the silence of the unanswered question, the silence of "if you don't have anything nice to say…", the queer silence of that which is never heard, the silence of "Hear that?" "Hear what?" "Shhhh… that!", the silence we associate with tranquility: those seem to me soundless states which deliver on the quasi-epistemological challenge to which Wiesel's concluding sentence makes its pledge.
Yes, why all that emphasis on human beings? For silence exists without us, doesn't it? Or does silence change its spots, materialize from the tip of its ringed tail to its inscrutable grin, as soon as it is sure there are no more predatory human beings around? Silence is one with its habitat, and that habitat is a pristine but fragile ecology which we often view as useless, as barren, seek to traverse as expeditiously as possible, but manage so poorly that rather than reclaim it we give it the resources it needs to make incursions into our settlements. Silence as uninvited. It is more comforting then to think of silence as the absence of human utterance. Thus even those silences that represent privation become domesticated, such as in the case of the voluntary surrender of speech that unites the residents of a monastery, each pursuing his personal salvation. Yet, by this definition of silence, a book -- or even a musical score -- is not exactly silent, despite the fact a book is incapable of producing sound unless it is manipulated in some way, i.e., its pages are rustled by browsing fingers, or the writing inside it is used to clear a reader's throat. OK, then. Is silence then that which is free of... free from... without vocal humanity? Is silence that which is without or beyond all sound, human or otherwise? I believe that the former often becomes confused with the latter. As long as there is atmosphere, literal air to be scattered and stirred, silence of the last sort is impossible. (John Cage being one of many but not the first Sensei to observe this.) Human beings have shown a reflex by which they crane their necks and contemplate the heavens with faith that there, in a vastness that no clamor however mighty could cause to reverberate, they will spy the Divine. Wiesel, setting the stage for what has been cited above: "We have so far failed to decipher or even to confront God's silence in a world empty of God -- or worse: filled with God."
There are many silences, but the only silence that matters is the silence that involves us. As a Catholic with a strong interest in Eastern spirituality, I acknowledge that silence as mystery does speak to the problem of humanity's place in the cosmos... if you're an atheist and uncomfortable with this notion, then just think of the SETI technicians at their consoles, listening, trying to discern intelligible patterns in the roiling quiet of interstellar space. (If you're a devout skeptic, then I'm not sure what helpful example I can give you. Perhaps this words from Joseph McElroy's essay "Socrates On The Beach: Thought And Thing", "Talking unchecked all night all day, philosophy in its need of questioning looks endless...") The anonymous Medieval author of The Cloud Of Unknowing views consciousness as both grace as pestilence and seeks to extinguish the feeble illumination of language and darken his mind so that he will not be distracted from the lightning bolt of divine visitation he is sure will strike. For him, inner quiet is rauisching in Middle English, ravishment, to be abducted or carried away, transported, impelled into ecstasy. Silence become climax. Silence sunders us from the quotidian and the corporeal. Corollary to these notions is that silence itself can be broken. Its breaking can represent a breakthrough, as when an autistic, thought drowned in a inner ocean of muteness, emerges from those depths and gulps the oxygen of speech. Or this breaking can be a breakdown, as when a confession is finally extracted from a suspect. Silence is dear, tightly held, secret. Silence can also break in: a radio signal crashes into some interfering structure, a hand is clamped over a mouth, a door or window is slammed shut and the music of the street can no longer disturb. The silence, then, of being sequestered, quarantined or otherwise drastically confined. In sum (how cabalistic), silence as exemplum of experiences, if not lonely, then at least inward in station and reach.
Wiesel says silence is one thing, then -- quick cut -- silence is that thing's opposite number. Wiesel is not a contrarian (I don't think) or a witness out to expose any particular silence as an imposture. But he does testify to the integrity of silence's obverse. He must take up this defense because silence must be scrutinized from the other end of the exchange (whether of argument or of action) that silence itself invariably does open, even if it seems just as suddenly to forswear dialogue. I see; Wiesel is not making an inventory. He is presenting us with the beginnings of a list. So I am back where I began, only not exactly. Realize, no list of silences could be ever be completed, and, in fact, the very initiative would seem to deny silence itself by depleting it. And as no list can the paradox -- without substance yet inexhaustible -- that is silence, no list can limit silence's mutability or fix it in a sequence of manifestations. All a litany such as this can convey is that silence is not some exactness other than these exactnesses. There are therefore innumerable noises that exist outside of the vacuum created by this litany of silences, some of them profound, but only insofar as they eclipse silences heretofore not encountered.
Implicit in every litany is the pause, and so the litany binds silence to discourse. Like certain kinds of music that lingers over low volume events (Lachenmann's „…zwei Gefühle…”, Musik mit Leonardo, Taku Unami's intransigent towards the detectives of capital), the list ensures that silence does not become extinct even as it prevents silence from growing over all our works in a flourishing devastation. Like a great jazz solo, even one as Aristotelian as, say, Ruby Braff's (trumpet) on a 1955 rendition of "Button Up Your Overcoat" with Mel Powell (piano) and Bobby Donaldson (drums), a list thrives on divergences as much as it does on concurrences. Like a collective improvisation or a late novella by Henry James, a list allows insertions. How I love litanies and they way they fool you. Litanies -- "on and on", tedious by most definitions -- do not preclude possibilities, but entertain them. How I want to proclaim after but not like Job that all narratives are litanies. Or, allowing myself a juggle, how narrative is all litany. It occurs to me how writing is all about the interruptions. That the best ideas come when I walk away for a moment from the notes, the desk with the ergonomic chair, the tap-tap of making marks and then wiping them out to tap-tap more worthy (I hope) marks in their place. Editing is impossible with interruption. Interrupt yourself with doubt, with straining for the exact word, with the exhortation that you aren't thinking hard enough through the theme. The act of listing is the process of moving to the next alternative, an alternative which is more interesting that its predecessor, or more general, or more specific, more or less ambiguous, or, perhaps, is an alternative that recaptures the essence of an alternative already chosen but for some reason forgotten. Like music or story, a litany takes time. Every list has its own interims, its own valences. Listing enacts the hope that one can simultaneously release and stem the heedless onrush of thought. Again, from The Cloud Of Unknowing: "Consciousness in itself is a faculty of such a kind that, so to speak, it has no proper activity of its own." So a list's progress is deceptive, for it is always being delayed and reordered, and it disguises the way it branches and involutes unless you understand that, like silence, a list is not one form, but, in its nodal construction, the potential coexistence of several forms. Both silence and the list, including the list that would be about silence, embrace the non-responsive. Silences and their negations: they presage and approach and spill over into one another.
When Wiesel says, "[t]o a perceptive human being the universe is never silent -- but there exists a universe of silence, and only perceptive human beings are aware of it," he is telling us that, more than it is fitting to inquire into the thunderous and through the dramatic, it is fair to ask about silence just as it is appropriate to ask of the litany: "When will it stop?"
~ Joe Milazzo
Posted by joe on January 23, 2005 12:27 PMdo you know George Steiner's book, "LANGUAGE and SILENCE?"
Posted by: Adam Hill at January 24, 2005 9:51 AMAdam -- I read Steiner's "introduction" to Heidegger several years ago, but as I don't call upon those thoughts on a daily basis, I've since forgotten a good bit why I read it, and hence a good bit of what I read. I recently picked up GRAMMARS OF CREATION but still have not found time do much more than crack the its spine.
Would be most interested to hear your take on this volume, which looks as if it contains some of his earlier (60's) work.
Thanks,
Joe
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at January 24, 2005 10:21 AMJoe,
It's been awhile for me, and I'm a lot less infatuated
with Steiner than I once was, but there is an essay in that volume that I remember having fascinated me, called "The Retreat from the Word." It's a broad essay, and defies summary, but I think I might look at it again, as well as look at your own essay here and give myself a bit more time to comprehend.
Interesting, yes.
Adam
Joe,
I got a chance to more closely read your essay here (a meditation, really, which I confess to not always following), and also reread the essay by Steiner I mentioned, and it bears very little relation to what I think you're trying to get at. His mostly concerns the increasing predominance of mathematical language, though he also manages to throughly dismiss modern art and modern music (which reminded me of why I stopped reading Steiner).
Anyway, Wittgenstein has much to say about the necessity of silence, and there is the poetry of Paul Celan that ultimately came to aspire to the conditions of silence, and I could go on an on (say Cezanne's radical use of white, etc).
Posted by: Adam Hill at January 24, 2005 9:17 PM"Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their
silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is
conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing;
but from their silence certainly never." (tr. from Kafka's 'Das Schweigen der Sirenen' [1917]).
> Anyway, Wittgenstein has much to say about the necessity of silence....
"Much"? I thought it was a pretty small handful of (quotable) sentences--"whereof one cannot speak", mostly.
Posted by: nd at January 25, 2005 12:07 AMyes, much, but you'd have go beyond reading a ''pretty small handful of (quotable) sentences" to see that (there's a little snark back for you, officer). Both his major works focus on the capacities of language and what is inexpressible.
Posted by: Adam Hill at January 25, 2005 6:11 AMWonderful, wonderful Kafka.
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at January 25, 2005 6:28 AMAnd thanks, Adam, for the abstract.
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at January 25, 2005 6:51 AMYes, I've read both the TP & PI, & my recollection is that there's not a lot specifically on "the necessity of silence". The other pertinent remark is the comment in the PI that "explanations must come to an end somewhere."
Never mind, carry on.
Posted by: N.D. at January 25, 2005 7:42 AMsomewhere between the pedant and dilettante is the biggest pain in the ass. who said that?
just kidding. :)
I try to combine the virtues of both.
Posted by: N.D. at January 25, 2005 8:52 AMthat's a good come-back. made me laugh.
joe,
is this a finished piece? is it the part of something larger? wanted to say I think it's nicely written and
engaging, though there are some areas where I
had hoped you would go into some ideas futher as they were intriguing.
"he also manages to throughly dismiss modern art and modern music (which reminded me of why I stopped reading Steiner)."
funny, I'd think that'd make him a role model for you. :)
more seriously, thinking about it now, the Steiner essay I read that dismissed all American contributions to the arts (glossing over jazz in two sentences, hilariously) was roughly along the lines of your OFN diatribes, I'm not surprised to hear you bring him up.
ah, jon, baiting me into a fight, in your typically
arrogant, uninformed, and hypocritical manner.
how about not souring this thread to Joe's thoughtful essay, or must you always bully people on-line every day of your prickly life?
you guys are hilarious. bagatellen saved my day again :)
Posted by: tomas at January 25, 2005 11:22 AMnot especially trying to start a fight, my man, just couldn't resist pointing out the similarities between Steiner's parchment-thick, hole-ridden, smug dismissals of huge chunks of the arts and your own, since you not only brought him up but also his tendency towards dismissiveness.
for someone who writes intentionally provocative essays, you sure don't take well to criticism coming back atcha.
(FYI, for anyone interested, the Steiner essay I'm referring to is titled "The Archives of Eden", written in the early eighties. he also fails to mention Cage in his fifty pages of declaring the US simply a caretaker for European artistic ideas, with no original ones of their own. nicely researched, big George.)
Posted by: jon abbey at January 25, 2005 11:58 AM"for someone who writes intentionally provocative essays, you sure don't take well to criticism coming back atcha."
right, there were only two rather long and involved threads here (and at JC) regarding both of my OFN pieces, and on both occasions I sought to address (and even accept) criticisms while fending off pointlessly ad hominem attacks from the likes of you.
read Joe's piece here and respond to it and kindly try resisting what you have asked me to resist.
Posted by: Adam Hill at January 25, 2005 12:08 PMbagatellen = one of the few online estuaries where a snipe hunt is sure to uncover a surplus of snipes.
Posted by: Narew Ramsh at January 25, 2005 12:12 PM> nicely researched, big George.)
"Squeeze us, we are olives"
(Joyce, as quoted by big George Steiner in his 1997 autobiography, 'Errata', in defense of "avant-garde composition").
Adam,
Your first OFN piece on EAI was really an ad hominem attack on anybody who likes that music, since we are all likened to yammering mutts who could be duped into digging ass-scratching, whirring refrigerators, and dog whistles. What a shock that someone might respond to that sort of attack in kind.
Posted by: crawjo at January 25, 2005 6:17 PM>"must you always...?" ("my man" to "ah, jon")
that time again -- the season of the tyranny of the Thin Mint, Do-di-dos, Tagalongs, Iced Berry Pinatas...?
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/01/25/BAG0DB00O51.DTL
Posted by: byles jr at January 25, 2005 6:51 PMum, that column ran about 10 months ago?
and, um, Joe's piece here has nothing whatsoever
to do with that.
and, um, are you eai boys gonna run me out of town?
Adam,
You do a great job of pissing people off and making enemies.
Maybe someday you might get to listening to music and writing something that resembles music critism instead of picking fights and wondering why people don't respect your opinion.
It might also be good to read a little jazz history too. Since you seem to be repeating the same kind of attacks leveled at music in the 60s.
Posted by: Jared/sonic1 at January 25, 2005 10:13 PMso when someone writes something you don't like
or agree with, they become an "enemy?"
all you Abbey acolytes are the same.
why not read the freaking article that begins this thread, and respond to that.....
I don't agree with a lot of critics, many who I think of as my friends. But they actually have something to say that means something, whether or not I agree.
You can't keep playing THAT card.
Posted by: Jared/sonic1 at January 26, 2005 8:01 AM"so when someone writes something you don't like
or agree with, they become an "enemy?" "
you're kidding, right? this from a guy who thinks he's in the OK Corral every time he types in a few lines, from a guy who told me he knew my street address and he'd be waiting outside my house one day?
"all you Abbey acolytes are the same."
again, well-played, because Jared and crawjo have so much in common besides their love for this music.
lastly, no one's trying to "run you out of town", just trying to hold you responsible for your intentionally controversial and public opinions. do you not believe what you wrote anymore?
and if you're really SO CONCERNED about this thread sticking to Joe's original post, stop answering already.
to Joe: sorry, but this isn't the first or the last thread to get far off track.
Posted by: jon abbey at January 26, 2005 9:26 AMQuote
"Lisa: Let's put it on the Internet!
Bart: No. We have to reach people whose opinions actually matter." -- Simpsons.
Unquote
"and if you're really SO CONCERNED about this thread sticking to Joe's original post, stop answering already."
ummmm . . . ? last word, last word, last word, enough already, jeez.
I often think about silence in non-audible terms, perhaps closer to the monk's notion of silencing the mind. I think about fequencies beyound human perception, but are perceptible by appliances, or other animals. You might be in a 'quiet' park environment, but actually microwaves and other noise are just flowing right through you.
As the piece noted, silence can involve the absence of human participation. I wonder if people with hearing disabilities, who primarily communicate through sign language, consider the a time when they are not communicating as 'silent'. Is a room full of signers 'noisy'?
Also I feel quite often, some sounds can produce a 'silence of the mind' better than sitting in actual silence itself.
I'm not so sure I'd be interested in the list, though. Like my view on god: you'll never know exactly so don't worry about it, just be nice to people. If you'll never come to true silence, don't worry about it either, just don't make too much noise! (Not saying you shouldn't have written the thing; it was interesting. Though I found somthing hilariously contradictive in the above mention of Wittgenstein having "much to say about the necessity of silence"!)
Michael
Posted by: michael rodgers at January 26, 2005 10:34 AMSince he was mentioned above, and since this may be of interest to readres here... the latest issue (Vol. 24, no. 1; 2005) of the CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW is dedicated to the work of Helmut Lachenmann. There's even a piece by Austin Clarkson on „…zwei Gefühle…”, Musik mit Leonardo
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at January 26, 2005 11:32 AMI think the arguments about silence are almost totally semantic. First we need to establish what definition of silence we are going with, then try to attack the problem.
But regarding deaf people: The receptors in the inner ear are very similar to those in the rest of the body, only they have some (for lack of a better term) amplifying organs to assist. Sound is vibration, sensed not just through ears but through the body.
Personally in the universe as at least I know it, there is no such thing as silence. I have never experienced it.
Tuning out is another story.
I think what MOST people consider as silence is an abeyance in the activity they are interested in paying attention to. So what you get into is the definition of what is worth the attention and what is not. Cage argued that we should pay attention to that which was outside the intention of the ego (or the composers and instrumentalists). Traditionalists like to stick to a more narrow definition of what is worth paying attention to. I myself in my promiscuity like to spend time in many different definitions since I can't make up my mind which is better.
I find it impossible for us, in this universe of the many, to be silent, since our very beings stand in a very loud contrast to one another.
Posted by: Jared/sonic1 at January 26, 2005 11:41 AM>"We have so far failed to decipher or even to confront God's silence in a world empty of God -- or worse: filled with God." ('Somewhere')
"When it comes right down to it I'd much rather have been a Basel Professor than God; but I didn't dare be selfish enough to forgo the creation of the world. You see, one must make sacrifices, no matter how and where one lives." (Nietzsche, Turin, January 6, 1889)
Posted by: michael at January 26, 2005 3:24 PM"the silence that descends on the battlefield once the hostilities cease"
not there yet by a long shot i'm afraid
"The silence of the victim is one thing, that of the killer, another. And that of the spectator, still another."
one thing or another. or another. or another
"very discouraging day" (the President, today)
Posted by: bush at January 26, 2005 7:55 PMBush actually remained silent about the 31 dead Americans at his news conference on Wednesday.
Posted by: Jo Hill at January 26, 2005 8:47 PMComment Submission Error
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I would never misunderestimate silence.
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at January 27, 2005 9:30 AMGeorgie Porgie's silence speaks volumes.
Posted by: Reverend Pearly Whites at January 27, 2005 10:02 AMMy wife and I were speaking this evening of my retreat into silence with the advent of my hearing loss, and my attempting to define its place in my music. The silence is now a daily occurence for me, and it is rather beautiful and not as stark as I imagined. It reminds me of the music I wrote for Hymn for the Perfect Heart of a Pearl...long "silent" chords moving at slow speeds.
Posted by: Dennis Gonzalez at February 4, 2005 8:01 PMMr. T. I know I'm easy to mock. But I don't understand why you bother with such an easy target.
Posted by: Joe Milazzo at March 1, 2005 8:25 AM"Mr. T. I know I'm easy to mock. But I don't understand why you bother with such an easy target."
sorry, Joe, for the misunderstanding. no mockery of you intended at all.
since i felt like being tooted into submission by mr. wiesel (7 mentions of silence/silent in 5 1/2 lines), i was simply trying to post an ounce of silence (blank page), except when i clicked on the button i received this note from your site:
Comment Submission Error, etc etc
...
ms.t (misty)
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