A Book of Silence (14 page)

It is so hard to describe – the silence, the fact that there was low cloud, or mist, solid on my side of the glen so I could not see how high above me the steep hill actually went. And on the opposite side there were wisps of cloud – at one point apparently emerging from a deep crevasse, like the smoke of dragon’s breath from within its lair. I found myself becoming increasingly uneasy, nervous. Gradually I became convinced I was being watched. There were two black shapes on the hill above me. I thought, or rather I felt, that they were alive. They were two dwarf fairy cows, with huge eyes. Before the Highland Clearances brought the sheep to Skye, the crofters farmed the old ‘black cattle’. Each year they swam them across the narrow water, from Kylerhea, tied nose-to-tail, to market them on the mainland: perhaps, I thought, these were ghost cattle. They stood perfectly still and watched me. I decided, firmly and rationally, that they were in fact rocks, but I never entirely convinced myself.

The silent staring of the ghost cows or the silence itself overwhelmed me. I felt that the silence was stripping me down, desiccating, denuding me. I could hear the silence itself screaming. Augustine Courtauld in his polar tent recorded strange and inexplicable screaming noises and he said, afterwards, it was the only
thing that really frightened him. Commentators have speculated since that it was ice breaking, or grinding, but since that day I have wondered. If I could hear the silence screaming after only three weeks of reasonably active and physically secure and agreeable silence, perhaps it is not surprising that six months immured in a tiny tent might have a similar effect.

What it was for me, and I fully expect for other people in silent situations, was panic. I do not mean those experiences of extreme anxiety which we call ‘panic attacks’, but something far more primal. Suddenly I understood the full and proper sense of the word, here defined by H. G. Liddell and R. Scott in their
Greek–English Lexicon
: ‘Sounds heard by night on mountains or valleys were attributed to Pan and hence he was reputed to be the cause of any sudden or groundless fear.’
¹

Pan is not just the sweet little faun or goat-footed pixie piping away in the springtime, but a powerful and primitive god, representing the whole force of the wild and the inexorable weight of its silence. His name is derived from the Greek word for ‘all’ or ‘everything’ – so that, for example, ‘pandemonium’ means the noise that all the demons together would make. Panic causes senseless and self-destructive responses to imaginary situations, and in groups has an infectious quality, leading to stampedes, irrational aggression and crazed behaviour.

Panic partakes of true horror, physical rather than emotional. It had no meaningful content: I was not ‘frightened of ’ or ‘scared by’… this was something from much lower down and further in, something really visceral. I fled, literally. I ran and stumbled out of the valley, as though there were something dark in pursuit. Back at the car I found I was soaked to the skin and covered in mud although I had no memory of falling. I felt completely and neatly split in half – a sane me who said ‘this is silly’ and another bit that was entirely at the mercy of the sensation. This is something I had never felt before – or not since I was a child. It was somehow deeply connected to the silence, but also to the harsh desolation of the landscape.

Nonetheless, although I did genuinely find this scary and troubling, overall I did not find that the silence in Skye reflected in any way my full expectations of sublime horror. The difficult or dark experiences never took on the quality of intensity that the ‘highs’ did. Where was that madness and desolation that I had been culturally led to expect? Before I went to Skye I know it had worried my friends; some mornings I even woke up glancing over my mental shoulder to see if it was preparing to pounce. No one who goes silence hunting can expect it to be simple or straightforward: it is necessarily complicated and by all accounts can lead to insanity. Even the most positive of the silence seekers whose stories I read were conscious of the threat. The exultant Moitessier wrote, ‘Wrapped in total silence, sucked down by a huge inner emptiness I sank into the abyss … I felt madness burrowing into my guts like some hideous beast.’
²
And the calmer Byrd recorded: ‘Cold and darkness deplete a body gradually; the mind turns sluggish; the nervous system slows up … Try as I may I cannot take my loneliness casually. It is too big. But I must not dwell on it. Otherwise I am undone.
³

Perhaps I have just been lucky, although, actually, I do not believe it is just ‘luck’ – I am, I think, reasonably careful about my own self-protection. And there is also an advantage in setting out on this sort of journey when one is older, weighted towards the social and with strong commitments beyond, or outside of the silence. Most of the things that go horrendously wrong happen to younger adventurers. Naturally one part of me was delighted and reassured – obviously silence suited me and I could enjoy it. At another level, though, I felt somehow slightly ‘cheated’. I wanted to experience the whole of silence. I wanted to understand Donald Crowhurst as well as Bernard Moitessier – the dark disintegration, the howling emptiness, the demons of the desert hermits.

Then, that winter I got snowed in.

This was not the usual sort of getting snowed in. Early in 2001 there was a major outbreak of Foot and Mouth Disease. It was horrible. The horror was exacerbated by a feeling that the government
was being totally incompetent – the rules and regulations made no sense; the contiguous cull was probably illegal and widely held to be useless; and the disposal of the slaughtered livestock was both unsanitary and insensitive. In many rural areas people felt frightened and powerless, and in isolated places like the Durham moors, social life was completely disrupted. The markets were closed, people did not want to visit other farms or have people on theirs. More immediate to my personal comfort, the moors, like the rest of the countryside, were closed to walkers, so that I could not take my usual exercise and had a sense of being ‘cabin’d, cribbed, confined’.

In late March there was a period of severe snow and blizzards. The rural roads of County Durham are normally snowploughed by subcontracted local farmers using their own tractors – but they were confined to their farms by the outbreak, so the road to and from my house was unploughed and soon became unpassable as the snow drifted across it. Without any choice, and without much preparation, I was alone and locked into an involuntary period of silence. Since the telephone lines were down, I had no source of information as to what was going on in the ‘real world’. I knew, for example, that my brother’s farm was under Special Measures – a legally binding series of restrictions on movement in and out of the farm – and that he was anticipating the slaughter of his stock, but I did not know if this had or had not happened (his sheep were eventually culled but his dairy herd was not, which was in itself rather frustrating and confusing), or how the epidemic was progressing throughout the country, including my own moor, so it was not a comfortable time or place to be confined. Part of me regressed – I built a splendid snowlady in the garden, daily expanding the magnificence of her bosom and the glamour of her costumes, but another part of me became increasingly scared. Some of the anxiety was ‘realistic’ – would I eventually run out of food (or in my case more seriously, of cigarettes)? What would happen if the weather did not improve? Was my family all right? But more of it was emotional – despite the fact that I was supposedly longing for quiet. I increasingly felt
invaded. The silence was hollowing me out and leaving me empty and naked.

The cold intensified that sense of being exposed, and sometimes when the weather was particularly wild just getting the coal in from the coal shed was exhausting and even frightening. When the weather was calmer, however, I realised that snow produces a peculiar acoustic effect: it mutes nearby noises (presumably because the softer ground surface absorbs them) but causes distant sounds to carry further and with a startling clarity. In addition the snow itself flattens everything visually. These effects disorientated me and made me increasingly nervy and jumpy. One day walking to my gate, the collar of my jacket blew up against the back of my head and I screamed aloud, viscerally convinced I had been attacked from behind.

One afternoon I needed to break out and I took a walk up the undriveable road, despite the fact that there were flurries of ‘snail’ (a mixture of snow and hail) which, driven by a harsh wind, cut into my face. Then, about half a mile from the house, I started to hear the most agonised wailing noises – the wailing, it seemed to me then, of the damned. I was completely terrified. I would be on this hill in this wind forever howling and desolate. I would never see another human being again. I would freeze in hell. It turned out that this strange and deeply disturbing noise was in fact no manifestation of my inner torment, but caused by a strange and fascinating phenomenon. The unfenced roads in that part of the north-east have snow poles – tall posts, marked in black and white foot-wide stripes that show you both where the road is and how deep the snow is. Older snow poles are made of iron and, to make it harder for them to be blown over, they have holes drilled in them for the wind to pass through. Essentially they were Aeolian harps or organ pipes and they were responding to the wind with these extraordinary sounds. But I know I was lucky that I identified the source of the noise fairly quickly, because otherwise it would have driven me insane. I can only too easily understand how this sort of silence can drive one beyond panic and into true madness.

After the Foot and Mouth epidemic was over I had a letter from the Cumbrian poet Robert Drake in which he noted:

Now I can only recall with great effort the extraordinarily powerful feelings of abandonment, desolation, fury and madness that swept over me at times. It did not last very long. My negative experiences have been little ones, but they have been enough to give me some small understanding of how overwhelming and destructive silence can be, and how closely the terrors seem to follow the same paths and patterns as the joys. It has seemed to me important, as I have hunted my own joyful silence, to remember the silencing that other people have endured, suffered and, in some cases, survived.

At first I was baffled about what was going on. Why had six whole weeks far from home and in almost equally unfavourable weather filled me with delight, even ecstasy, and been rich in joyful, expansive thoughts and emotions, while barely ten days in my own home with my own things around me reduced me to semi-hysteria?

Then something superficially minor happened that gave some insight into all this: a friend gave me, as a present, a double session in a ‘flotation tank’. This gift was not really meant as a bit of pampering, but as an experiment in a specific sort of silence. A flotation
tank is a piece of therapeutic equipment offered by various health spas: it consists of a pod, a large bath with a closing lid. This pod is filled with water heated to body temperature (37 degrees Centigrade – 98.6 Fahrenheit) and highly salinated, so that you float effortlessly with your face above the water level, like the Dead Sea. The pod is completely dark and sound-free (although the one I used did offer customers the option of ‘calming music’) and you feel neither temperature nor gravity. I was generously given a double session, because my friend felt that I was more used to silence than most people and a single hour would not be enough for me to get the full benefits.

Actually, I did not care too much for the experience. This was partly because the very idea of a health spa, with its odd mixture of ‘healthy’ and ‘luxurious’, brought out in me my most dour residue of Presbyterian puritanism. (I have such mistrust of beauty treatments that I have not been to a hairdresser for a quarter of a century.) I was also a bit dubious about provoking so easily the immensely strong emotions I had experienced in silence – it seemed a short cut to a state of being that somehow ought to be the result of a long, delicate and disciplined process, rather like using hallucinogenics to ‘find one’s soul’. The ambience of the health spa, offering bikini-line waxing, false nails and ‘natural’ therapies and ‘enhanced spirituality and creativity’ in a single package, brought all this home to me, a little too strongly for comfort. I was also very tired when I went to the spa; every time I became immersed in the silence I would doze off, then roll or tip over in the supporting water and get my mouth full of vile-tasting liquid. So I may not have been in the right mood for this particular form of silence.

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