A Book of Silence (15 page)

(I am only surprised that it does not promise multiple orgasms, world peace and enhanced biodiversity into the bargain.)

As I lay there, trying to stay face up, a hideous thought struck me. ‘Flotation’ is quite simply ‘sensory deprivation’. Indeed, I later learned that when flotation tanks were first introduced as therapy they were even called ‘Sensory Deprivation Tanks’, until some wily operator realised that this was not likely to go down well with consumers. The connotations are not comfortable. Wikipedia defines ‘sensory deprivation’ as:

Sensory deprivation is a technique used for interrogation. Although in 1998 the European Court ruled that it ‘did not occasion suffering of the particular intensity and cruelty implied by the word torture’ nonetheless it ‘amounted to a practice of inhuman and degrading treatment’.

Many experts would go further than the Court:

Exactly the same technique can produce ‘total calm, peaceful relaxation, mental clarity, creativity, expanded awareness, and pain relief ’
and
‘breakdown akin to psychosis’. Or to put it another way, the same silence, the same breaking down of his own boundaries in the enormous solitude of the ocean, that moved Moitessier to ecstasy, drove Donald Crowhurst to psychosis and suicide. The only variable in the experience is the individual experiencing it.

We do, sadly, know too much about milder types of sensory deprivation, because solitary confinement as a form of punishment (or more politely of ‘prison management’) has been practised far too extensively, especially within the US and the Soviet Union. It is now known that keeping people in isolation produces such consistent responses that Dr Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist with extensive experience in evaluating the psychiatric effects of stringent conditions of confinement, defines them as a diagnosable ‘syndrome’ – akin to but with noteworthy differences from other psychotic or stress disorders; it has, he argues, the characteristics of an acute organic brain syndrome or a delirium. He notes the following cluster of symptoms: hyperresponsivity; difficulties with thinking, concentration and memory; intrusive obsessional thoughts; overt paranoia; panic attacks; problems with impulse control; and perceptual distortions, illusions and hallucinations (his definitions).

Grassian gives examples and details of all these mental states, often with quotations from the sufferers and concludes that:

Grassian is saying here that these prisoners are not in any normal sense ‘mad’, but their reaction to silence and solitude is very closely akin to psychotic madness. But what really intrigued me about my own brief experience in the flotation tank and about Grassian’s work with sensory deprivation is that his whole list of symptoms is extraordinarily close to the list of positive effects of silence that I drew up in Skye, with the not altogether surprising absence of bliss. Even though we each give them different names and they clearly have different emotional meanings, as experiences they are more or less identical.

What I call ‘intensification of both physiological and psychological sensation’ he calls ‘hyperresponsivity to external stimuli’, but without question both of them describe (one positively and the other negatively) a very similar condition. So I ‘was suddenly overwhelmed by the wonderful, delicious delightfulness of porridge’, and one of Grassian’s prisoners reports that he got ‘sensitive to noise – the plumbing system. Someone in the tier above me pushes the button on the faucet. It’s too loud. I can’t stand it.’

Similarly, what I call a sense of ‘givenness’ – the feeling that the sensation comes from outside one’s own will or power, he calls ‘intrusive obsessional thoughts’ and his prisoners report a terrifying sense that their individuality is disintegrating; a feeling that they are lost in the universe. What I experience as a thrilling sense of risk or peril he diagnoses as ‘overt paranoia’. An experience of ‘disinhibition’ can be a profound freedom or a ‘problem with impulse control’. ‘Auditory hallucinations’ can just be there in an interesting and thought-provoking way, or they can be experienced as ‘perceptual distortions’ suggesting an unusual psychotic state. Ineffability can carry all the glories of the divine, but it can also make the experiences inaccessible and overwhelming. Boundary confusions in their darker guises are perhaps the most alarming; one of Grassian’s subjects stated, ‘You feel like you are losing something that you may not get back.’ If the world beyond the limits of yourself is inflicting a series of painful experiences and confusions upon you, and then your ability to know for certain what is ‘you’ and what is outside yourself (physically or psychically) becomes blurred, that confusion is not going to feel like a joyful freedom but is likely to induce great guilt to be carried along with the burden of these incomprehensible sensations.

Grassian is a psychiatrist and here he is trying, probably for perfectly good reasons like reducing the amount of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation inflicted on his patients, to define a new form of mental illness. He wants to prove that it is silence itself, not some inherent madness in them before their confinement. Naturally he will pathologise these symptoms and argue that the deprivations are the cause of the illness. But I think, when I look at my own experience, and the experience of all the other silence seekers I have been writing about who have experienced similar effects with joy and delight, that it would make as much or more sense to say that these were not symptoms of madness or any other illness, but the effects of silence itself, occurring within a dangerous context.

It was not, I realised, that I had missed out on some aspect or
nuance of silence; I had had the same experiences Grassian lists, but I had enjoyed them and they were
therefore
different experiences. The lines between them are almost entirely subjective. Obviously hearing a choir sing in Latin is a very different thing from hearing demons taunting you; and having an intense sensation of delicious porridge is different from having an intense experience of pain. Being disinhibited so that you do not care about singing loudly out of tune is not the same as being so disinhibited so that you cut your own skin without knowing why, as some of his subjects did. There is a parallel in the effects of some drugs – the physiological effects of alcohol have been carefully measured, but I have seen no studies on what sort of person in what sort of circumstances gets happier or more miserable or more violent when drunk. There is no doubt that the effect is caused by alcohol intoxication, but the emotional experience is quite different.

I started to brood on what factors might tip the balance towards positive or negative experiences of extreme silence. I looked at my own silence and again at those of other people who have chosen to write about it. I now believe that the strongest determining factor in whether a silence ends up feeling positive or negative is whether or not it was freely chosen. Quite apart from research like Grassian’s on contemporary prisoners placed in solitary confinement, we have a surprising number of accounts of incarceration, isolation, marooning and banishment. It seems such a strange thing to do to another human being – to exile someone not just from his or her own place or family, but also from human society itself. Yet from many cultures and over a long stretch of time there have been tales, legends and myths about exile, exclusion and silencing.

In Greek mythology there are a number of stories of people being immured or exiled in order to prevent them from speaking. One of the most brutal and complex of these tales is the story of Procne:
⁸
Procne’s sister, Philomel, was married to the King of Thrace, who went to fetch Procne for a visit. However, on the way back to Thrace he raped her. He was then so ashamed by his own action that, in order to prevent it becoming known, he cut out
Procne’s tongue and imprisoned her in a hut in a forest. He went home and told his wife that her sister had died of a fever. Unable to speak and unable to escape, Procne embroidered a tapestry telling the whole story. After various vicissitudes this message came into Philomel’s hands; she rescued her sister and the two of them enacted an extreme revenge on the King: they killed his eight-year-old son – who was also Philomel’s son – and served him up to his father as a stew, which he ate with great relish before realising what he had done. Like many Greek myths, one of the issues here is about what might be an appropriate revenge. Here all three characters are equally punished, they are turned into birds, suggesting perhaps that at least in Greek culture the physical silencing of someone, even when it did not serve its intended ends, was seen as a very serious offence indeed, since it is equated with infanticide and cannibalism.

The Hebrew Scriptures told the story of Hagar, Abraham’s lover and mother of his (at that point) only child, who was driven out into the desert with her small son. Sarah, Abraham’s infertile wife, had used her slave Hagar as a surrogate mother and Hagar had a son, Ishmael, with Abraham. However, after the child was born, Sarah became jealous and persuaded Abraham to expel Hagar from the camp. Abraham gave Hagar bread and water and her child – who was also his child – and forced her to leave, to her certain death. Out in the desert, her child dying in her arms, Hagar clearly encountered the full terror of unchosen silence. She ‘cast her child down’ under some scrubby bushes and then went and sat a little way away from him, because she could not bear to watch him die. Then the God who had apparently authorised her banishment became present to her; she heard his voice and in an ineffable immediacy not described in any detail she became one of the very few people in the Hebrew Scriptures to ‘see God and live’.
⁹

Her story has a happy ending; God shows Hagar a well, and she and the child both survive. Inevitably, most such stories have a happy ending, because the likely outcome of driving someone out
of the protection of society into the wilderness is death, and then there is no one to tell what happened and therefore no story. In legend and myth, children exiled from their communities, for whatever reason, flourish. Romulus and Remus, raised by wolves, grow up to found the city of Rome.
In Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan
, the first European philosophical novel by Ibn Tufail, a twelfth-century Iberian Arab thinker and writer, which became a major ‘best-seller’, the eponymous hero is brought up on an uninhabited island by gazelles and achieves religious truth by direct reasoning. Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli, best known in the
Jungle Book
(1894) and its sequels, show Mowgli, who was also raised by wolves, acquiring almost magical powers through his ability to be at home both in human culture and in the wild with animals.

The reality of early abandonment, however, is not so optimistic. There have been approximately a hundred recorded cases of ‘feral children’, although most of them are hotly contested: how accurate are the records? How long and from how early had the child lived with its adopting animals? Was the child abandoned precisely because it was already brain damaged in the first place? But overall this particular experience of involuntary silence has grim consequences. Children raised outside human society have the greatest difficulty in re-entering; they seldom acquire language or learn to relate to other human beings, and they usually die young. With the subterranean truth of ancient stories this is to some extent acknowledged in the earliest legends. Genesis recounts that although Ishmael survived, he grew up to be ‘a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man’, to ‘dwell over against all his kinsmen. He will live in the wilderness,’ while Romulus murdered his brother and organised the mass rape of the Sabine women in order to populate his new city.