A Book of Silence (21 page)

There are good reasons for taking note of these stories. The first is obvious – they give a positive and active role to silence itself, not a negation or lack or castration or something to be ‘broken’, but a creative, generative power. The Gnostics – who tended to think that the creation of matter was a shocking error, unimaginable to the true God who is pure spirit – narrated long genealogical creation myths. These start with a Primal Being as the beginning of all things, who gave rise to other beings (often called aeons or demiurges) by a process of emanation. These in their turn emanate further beings, and so on, each generation slightly further removed from pure spirit, until one of them, usually by mistake but sometimes through wilful error, creates matter and thence the world as we experience it. Valentinus, one of the most important of the Christian Gnostics of the second century, names silence as one of the active demi-urges who (tragically from the point of view of Gnostic philosophy) made the material world. Silence is a god, or at least a divine force, herself (and not the feckless one who finally created the world – that was Nous – intelligence). It is rare for silence to be personified in this way; even the medieval Christian Church, which loved to make physical representations of most abstract qualities, virtues and vices (Justice with her blindfold and scales, for example), does not seem to have given silence a human face.
⁹

In a real sense, these sorts of creation stories better correspond to our contemporary knowledge of evolution and the scientific account of the ‘creation’ of the universe, and particularly of our species, than the God (or other force) who creates
ex nihilo
by suddenly breaking the silence. We know, now, of evolution’s slow, inexorable, chancy, silent movement through vast fields of time. We see both intricacy and accident in our own making and in the making of the world around us. If, in our imaginations, we could
really accept the information from evolution and from astrophysics, we might find that the most complex genealogies of the gods and their creative methods were actually less alien than the notion of humanity popping up, on a single verbal command, sophisticated in all matters except fashion sense.

Perhaps even more important, since it is myth – the poetry of the soul – that I was looking at here, these complex, convoluted stories of division and change and mixed motives and chance feel closer to our experience of our own ‘creation’ as individuals. Despite our potent ideas about our unalienable human rights, inherent from birth, we tend to
experience
ourselves as individuals in the process of becoming, rather than as finished and fixed, all complete when our parents picked out our names. The moment of our emerging, becoming, the moment of our creation as fully rounded autonomous selves remains blurred and gradual: a journey from infancy towards self-hood.

Moreover, at least since the romantic revival of the eighteenth century, we have accepted that
human
creative activity requires time and effort, and a withdrawing from the social bustle. Creative individuals – in both arts and sciences – are supposed to be detached, to withdraw into a silent introspection and self-examination, which is not simply about practice and experiment, but somehow a brooding process, which gives birth to new ideas or creative works. All myths are complex and cannot be interpreted too literally, but it seems curious to me that the three monotheistic religions want to claim
both
that we are ‘made in the image of God’ and that God creates in a radically different way from the way we create. George Steiner has suggested that all artists set themselves up as ‘rival gods’ – they are in creative competition with God.
¹⁰
Certainly we assign a rival
method
to them. God creates by breaking the silence in a single abrupt instant – God
speaks
. But when we mythologise ourselves as creators we seem to accept that silence plays an indispensable part in the process.

So when we think of silence as a lack, something that needs to be broken in order to let in life and meaning, we must not forget that
this is a singular, though powerful, viewpoint. It is not ‘natural’, obvious or inevitable. There are indeed many creation stories that do not see a violent breaking of silence by the voice of God or any other force as either necessary or desirable. And there are some that see silence itself as a creative agent, an active power, a vital ingredient.

There is, of course, a huge, probably unanswerable question about
why
different cultures come up with different sorts of creation stories. But the God who creates everything from nothing by speaking is a desert God. The silence of the desert has a horror to it, as well as, born of the horror, a deep and joyful beauty. The desert is vast, cruel and very silent. Perhaps there is an inevitable attraction to a God who speaks – to creation through sound.

But there has to be a story to explain why we came up with this sort of mythology and particularly why we hold to it so tightly that even the most rational scientific minds of the secular twentieth century reverted to it apparently subconsciously and very illogically when they wanted a name for a radically new narrative of creation – the Big Bang. This looks like fear to me and I sense that the fear of silence is very deeply embedded in the Western psyche. I began to get extremely curious about why we are frightened, where the fear comes from. I think there is a plausible story that goes something like this:

Once upon a time, almost at the very beginning, there was the Great Chthonic Terror.
*
No one, back in these earliest human societies, has time to worry about abstractions; at this point there is a far more pressing question. Actually, there are
two
pressing questions that are quite closely linked. One of them (the other of them) is ‘Are we sure? How can we be sure that we aren’t animals?’ And one of the mythological ways we can answer this is by speaking – language is what humans have, and what by definition animals do not have. But the first pressing question is simple, ‘How do we stay alive?’

The Great Chthonic Terror is that the dark may swallow the light, may gobble it up, terminate or destroy it. That the night will conquer the day; that the sun will not rise, that the fires will go out, that the cold will triumph; and we will all be dead. Light is life; dark is death. This is not symbolic at all; this is actual and biological.

Everything we can do to allay the Terror, to assist, persuade, seduce, propitiate, cajole, reward or bully the sun, which, for all its power, seems oddly fragile and recalcitrant, we must do and we will do. Anthropologically ‘sun encouragement’ rituals are as nearly universal as anything is, from the Aztecs to Beltane. They are gruesome, expensive and ruthless. They are creative, beautiful and symbol-rich.

What is more, they
work
. Every morning the sun rises; and further north, where it matters more, every spring the sun returns.

Though, interestingly, the doubt remains and the colder the terrain the deeper the doubt. The Vikings were never entirely confident: Norse mythology is the only theistic theology I know of where the issue remains in serious peril. The gods will go out to fight at Ragnarok. They will do their best, for themselves, for humans and for the light; but Baldur the Beautiful is dead and we do not know if they or the forces of the dark will triumph. Even if the gods do win, it will be at great loss and with a tragic diminishment (like the Hobbits at the end of
The Lord of the Rings
). The Terror is fobbed off but never defeated; the issue remains in the balance. I think this may be why Viking culture is the only one I have so far encountered that has never valorised, desired, or found any positive cultural space for silence. Valhalla is also the
noisiest
heaven I have ever come across, no everlasting rest and sweet music for the heroic Norsemen; their dream is of drunken rioting and a great deal of crashing and banging.

For most cultures, though, the magic works – and since we worked the magic we feel pretty clever (with, it must be said, some considerable justification). We have won. The sun rises; the spring comes, the ice melts, the rivers flood the fertile plains. And eventually we feel smart enough and secure enough to invent ‘science’, in the sense of non-theological, non-magical rules, to explain why the sun has not been swallowed up and – equally important – why it is
not going to be
swallowed up tomorrow. This is not only comforting; it is also an immense saving of energy, time and expense. It is a massive victory – it really is.
Our
rules – our
own
laws, not the gods’, not the light’s, ours – enshrined in
language
. Our language – not the animals’ – keeps the sun (the light, life, food, future, the species, the world) alive.

Now what happens? What always happens when we try to suppress real fears without acknowledging them. The Terror appears somewhere different; it shifts, in language, as language always does, from the material to the abstract; from the present actual to the symbolic. Now the Terror turns up elsewhere.

(Of course, it is possible that the psychoanalytic story is true, and all this is repressed Oedipal stuff really – will daddy’s laws swallow up mummy’s love? Will mummy’s chaos gobble down daddy’s order? But, frankly, I doubt it.)

Now the abstract terror is that silence will gobble up (down) the words – will overwhelm the meaning, reinsert the void and the light will go out and we will all be dead; and the dead are very silent. By now we’ve given up magic so we can’t use ritual to force language into better health, as we once did with the sun. We need some new strategy. Needless to say we think of rather a crafty one: we deny the reality of silence, we reduce it to a lack or absence and make it powerless. We say that silence ‘needs’ – and therefore is waiting – to be broken: like a horse that must be ‘broken in’. But we are still frightened. And the impending ecological disaster deepens our fear that one day the science will not work, the language will break down and the light will go out. We are terrified of silence, so we encounter it as seldom as possible, even if this means
losing experiences we know to be good ones, like children wandering alone or unsupervised in the countryside. We say that silence is a lack of something, a negative state. We deny the power and meaning of silence. We are terrified of silence and so we banish it from our lives.

Before I went to Weardale I did not notice the noise in public places, but as soon as I was experiencing periods of silence I also became increasingly overstimulated by noise. Before I had fully realised this I went one day to the Metro Centre in Gateshead to buy a waste-paper basket; something I needed, though not urgently, something that was not very important and which I could comfortably afford to buy – so it was not the shopping itself that led to the subsequent distress. Shopping malls are more or less designed to be noise boxes – they tend to have a great number of smooth hard surfaces, off which sound waves bounce energetically; they have roofs through which the sound waves cannot pass and are projected back like echoes; many of the shops play background music, which spills out into the passageways; electronic announcements blare out over the continual hubbub and there are a great number of people often in small groups. I very quickly found it extremely stressful – it caused me actual physical discomfort, an escalating feeling of panic and exhaustion. I was entirely unable to purchase anything at all and after less than an hour had to leave in tears.

It took me a little while to work out what was happening. I have never suffered from either agoraphobia or claustrophobia, to which on investigation the symptoms seemed quite close, and subsequently do not seem to have developed either. I am convinced that it was aural overstimulation – and it has not got better. Now I know what it is I can manage it well enough, but going to cities, to large parties, or to any place where there are a significant number of loud, overlapping but different sounds remains stressful and tiring at best. I had lived in London for years and had never noticed let alone been distressed by the noise, but now I do find it nearly intolerable; when I go to towns I sleep badly, I drink too much alcohol and I
feel physically depleted very quickly. Literally millions of people live in a constantly noisy environment the whole time: it must be unhealthy, and to me at least provides part of an explanation of the tension and violence and the grim, closed-down faces that you see on the streets. The extensive use of personal stereos to deliver more freely chosen sounds directly into ears while cutting off the noise of the environment makes sense in this context, although of course what it actually delivers is more sound – noisy earplugs.

This is not merely subjective. There is good evidence now that exposure to excessive noise has damaging physiological and psychological effects, including hypertension, aggression, insomnia, high stress levels, tinnitus and hearing loss; and these in themselves can lead to other health problems, like cardiovascular diseases. The origins of the word ‘noise’ are uncertain but two of the suggested derivations are from
nausea
(the Latin for sickness) and
noxious
(the Latin for harmful).
¹¹
I have come to believe that we are at risk of underestimating the danger: lower levels of sound, particularly when it is sustained and out of our control, seem to have unnoticed but nasty effects. Noise may be damaging even when we are not experiencing it as excessive.

Like other forms of environmental pollution, this is a relatively recent problem. The more densely inhabited any given area is the more noisy it inevitably is; it is impossible for a human being to move without making some sound. The more human beings there are in any one place the more noise there will be. Over the last 200 years the population of Europe has increased enormously, but the rural population has declined radically and continues to do so: more people occupy less space and are therefore subject to more noise than would have been imaginable in the eighteenth century. This shift is continuing still: the population of the Scottish islands, for example, has fallen a further 3 per cent in the last decade.
¹²
Moreover, the more hard flat surfaces and the less horizontal space there is the more any noise will increase. One of the points that Henry Mayhew, the nineteenth-century journalist and sociologist, made in his most famous book,
London Labour and the London Poor
, is
how damaging intellectually and morally the dense population, and the constant hubbub that it inevitably generated, was to the urban poor; the effect was compounded because people who had worked alone or in small units outside in agricultural labour were now transferred to the immensely loud, steam-powered factories of the Industrial Revolution. For extremely long periods of the day more and more people worked in the enclosed spaces and hellish din of industrial units and mines.