A Book of Silence (10 page)

Third, almost every account of prolonged silence I have ever read or heard about contain mentions of ‘hearing voices’, whether these come in the form of divine intervention or deeply frightening tongues of madness. As someone who has experienced these voices, I was a bit concerned that prolonged silence might be rather alarming. I know that when I set off to Skye this worried some of my friends as well. Had I known about the loss of inhibition I might have been too cautious to do it at all.

In the event I need not have worried. Although so many people do hear voices in silence, I do not think that this is evidence that freely chosen silence sends people mad. In fact, I now think that precisely because I am a voice hearer it may have been easier for me to distinguish between the various sorts of voices than it might be for others – and therefore infinitely
less
alarming and much easier to think about.

However we choose to interpret ‘pathological’ or ‘visionary’ voice
hearing (and I am not sure there is much difference except in the eyes of the diagnostician – psychiatrist or priest), there are two forms of voice hearing which seem to me to be slightly different from this and may well be related to silence. The first of these I would call ‘stress voices’, where a kind of self-splitting occurs under extreme and difficult circumstances. Most of the self is absorbed into the ‘difficulty’, which may involve great physical pain or vulnerability, but a part of the self continues to act ‘sensibly’, positively, life protectively. This part of the personality appears to withdraw from the body and instruct it from outside it as an external voice. This voice is often harsh and bullying, but effectively overwhelms the desires to give up, go to sleep, despair or do anything singularly foolish. In his book
Touching the Void
Joe Simpson, the mountaineer whose accident has been made famous by the film of that title, gives a very vivid account of such a voice-hearing episode.

This response to great stress is not uncommon and does not seem to be necessarily related to silence, except in the crude sense that in more social situations someone other than oneself would be around to provide the stimulus and direction that Simpson’s
voice
produced. It seems a useful survival mechanism.

But there is a second, more complicated sort of voice hearing, which I think is closely related to silence and can be a positive aspect of the experience.

In my journal I repeatedly recorded my sense that I could hear singing. For example:

Another evening I heard a male-voice choir singing Latin plainsong in the bedroom. Almost immediately I realised that this was
ridiculous; the acoustics were all wrong. The bedroom was tiny, but the sound was like the music at Quorr Abbey, a Benedictine monastery on the Isle of Wight, which concentrates particularly on the very beautiful singing of the daily prayers, or in a large cathedral, heard from a greater distance than between where I was sitting in the kitchen and the bedroom. But I could hear singing, in Latin, and I could pick up occasional words.

I have thought a lot about this phenomenon. It is possible that a great many people who spend a period of time in silence, suddenly and without any particular predisposition, have psychotic episodes, from which they immediately and permanently recover the instant they are back in society. But this does not seem entirely probable. I think there is a better explanation. In
The Language Instinct
Steven Pinker describes an experience which led him to believe, briefly, that he was going mad. He heard human voices emerging from what he knew to be a randomised synthesiser. This phenomenon is called ‘sine-wave speech’ and can be deliberately manipulated to represent human sentences. Simplifying wildly, some combinations of two or three ‘bands’ of sound waves create noises that can be heard as human or quasi-human voices. I wondered if the different wind sounds I described earlier could similarly combine and if this was a reason why I was hearing these distant, lovely choirs ‘singing’. I have to say that to me, this seems a complex but rather beautiful concept.
²²

To try to make some sense of this I went back to John Cage’s idea mentioned in the previous chapter that there is no such thing as ‘real’ silence. There is always some sound, even if it is only the sounds that the human body makes. Now the human brain is an immensely efficient
interpreter
of sound. Although our hearing is less acute than that of many animals, our capacity to make sense of what we hear, to give meaning to it, is phenomenal. We need this bizarrely sophisticated mental equipment because of language. It is difficult but important to grasp that much of the business of understanding spoken language is a task of interpretation, not of hearing in the physical sense. To take a simple example, in spoken language
there are
no aural breaks between words
, no silences that those little blank white spaces on a page purport to represent. This is why it is so hard to understand conversation in a language that one is not entirely fluent in: spoken face-to-face or read it may be possible to have good comprehension, but it is extremely hard for the brain to decide where to put the gaps between the words when they are spoken fast and without full ‘lip-sync’. In fact, there is
no
aural difference between ‘I scream’ and ‘ice cream’, ‘some mothers’ and ‘some others’, ‘The good can decay many ways’ and ‘The good candy came anyways’. Where the word is new to the hearer the ingenuity of the brain is particularly evident: ‘They played the Bohemian Rap City,’ wrote an American high-school student of a concert, for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. This is not, as we were too often told as children, ‘sloppy mumbling’. These pairings are called ‘oronyms’ and they seem particularly to delight small children. They are the basis of many playground jokes and rhymes, like:

The brain inserts the gap where it needs to in order to make sense of the continuous stream of sound (vibrations) that the ear sends it via the cochlea nerves.

Particularly in ‘adventurous’ silences we see people with all their physical and emotional senses intensified, and their normal rational processes disinhibited, who are bombarded with complex sound, where they anticipate and are geared up for silence. The brain is constantly busy at its job of decoding the stream of aural input. There is no actual language to ‘test’ the sounds against. The brain interprets the sounds as language.

Charles Lindbergh, not someone generally thought of as particularly schizotypic, heard voices while flying the
Spirit of St Louis
. He was alone, ‘silent’ in one sense but surrounded by the engine noise to which he was obliged for safety’s sake to listen continually. He was
not under the sort of desperate stress that Simpson was, nor does his description match Simpson’s in any useful way. It seems easiest to understand these voices as interpretations of sound.

I spent a good deal of time hovering between two sorts of knowledge. The knowledge that my ears were giving me – that there was, for example, a choir singing in Latin in the bedroom – and the knowledge that my informed intelligence was giving me – that this was a normal effect of high, irregular winds and a long period of solitude.

One of the things that strengthens this theory for me is that these sorts of voices are particularly common among sailors. Sailing ships are exceptionally noisy places and their noises are of precisely the kind that the brain ‘likes’ to work on – irregular and not immediately easy to identify (unlike, say, a dog barking or a motor car). Peter Nichols describes Knox-Johnston’s ship in a storm:

It is hardly surprising that Knox-Johnston complained that the ‘malevolent eldritch shrieking’ of
Suhaili
was ‘hard to endure’ and it ‘ate at his nerves’.

Even without gales, single-handed sailors anticipate that they will ‘hear voices’, especially those of their yachts. Bill Howell wrote in his log during a single-handed race in 1972: ‘
Usual
voices in the rigging calling “Bill, Bill” rather high pitched.’
²⁵

Ann Davison, who was sailing her ship home alone after the death of her husband, noted, ‘
Reliance
spoke in a multitude of tiny voices from behind bulkheads, under floorboards, everywhere all around, chattering, gossiping, gabbling incessantly and shrieking with gnomish laughter.’
²⁶

I do not think that understanding the voices that people hear in silence as effects of a specific function of the brain is a reductionist ‘explanation’, because of course the content,
the meaning
, of what such voices actually say is going to depend entirely on the individual and their moods of the time. What I want to do is clear away some of the negative associations of silence with insanity and make it possible to listen to these interpretations, the meanings of the heart and the ‘silent mind’. It seems to me that it ought to be perfectly obvious that the sorts of interpretation the brain will come up with under the pressures of great fear, or loneliness, are rather likely to be more malevolent than an interpretation made in peace, joy or a sense of union with the universe.

A fourth sensation very commonly reported by people who have
enjoyed
the silence they chose (not everyone does) is that they have experiences of great joy, which feel as though they came from ‘outside’ themselves; a strong sense of ‘givenness’.

Several times, especially later on in the six weeks on Skye, my journal recorded moments of intense happiness, followed by a powerful conviction that the moment was somehow a pure gift – that I had done nothing to deserve it and could do nothing to sustain it or repeat it. My only option was to enjoy it.

On one unusually radiant day, with a sort of golden brightness and lovely complex cloud formations, I took a walk up the burn above the house. It was sharply cold but there was less wind than usual. At the top of the valley is the watershed between Glenbrittle and Sligachan. I always found this a strangely haunting place; the
water from the hill above collected in two tiny lochs, then flowed out at both ends, north and south. Over the years, walkers have piled up a large cairn here, a sort of mute witness to everyone who has enjoyed this silent space; and far below the river ran down towards the sea in a series of theatrical silver loops. Instead of following the path on down towards Glenbrittle, I climbed on up into the steep-sided corrie. It was sheltered there and magnificent – almost vertical mountains on both sides – a mixture of shining rock and loose scree, and below, tiny stands of water that looked like handfuls of shiny coins tossed casually down. I sat on a rock and ate cheese sandwiches – and thought I was
perfectly
happy. It was so huge. And so wild and so empty and so free.

And there, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, I slipped a gear, or something like that. There was not me and the landscape, but a kind of oneness: a connection as though my skin had been blown off. More than that – as though the molecules and atoms I am made of had reunited themselves with the molecules and atoms that the rest of the world is made of. I felt absolutely connected to everything. It was very brief, but it was a total moment. I cannot remember feeling that extraordinary sense of connectedness since I was a small child.

This feeling of being connected to the universe, and particularly to natural phenomena within it, was central to the sensibility of the Romantic Movement, and appears over and over again in the poetry of the period, nearly always linked to places or experience of silence
in the natural world
. A well-known example is from the famous English romantic poet William Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’:

This ‘gift’ is experienced both as integrative – the whole self is engaged and
known
to itself, to the subject, in quite a new way –
and
as connecting that self to something larger. This would, of course, be
an expected feeling from anyone who had a strong religious belief – of almost any kind – and in particular for those for whom silence was part of a search for precisely that gift. This is a clear example of where it is useful to look beyond religious descriptions of silence. But more or less the same set of feelings appears in many accounts of silence by people who have no particular religious agenda and leads me to suggest that this is a response to silence as much as to religious ecstasy, although the latter provides a rich interpretation. Richard Byrd, contemplating the onset of the polar night (not simply ‘evening’ in the usual sense) described in almost mystical terms this experience of everything being connected: