A Book of Silence (32 page)

It was this experience that inspired
4'33"
, his 1952 composition in which a pianist sits at a piano and does not play it for just over four and a half minutes. Cage’s point was that anyone listening properly would have heard sound in the concert hall. It is these sounds, unpredictable and unintentional, that constitute the music of this piece.
*
Cage appears to have accepted his ‘engineer’s’ explanation without any questions. He writes several times about this key experience and in later repetitions drops all reference to the engineer’s opinion and presents the explanation as though it were an accredited scientific fact, but other people hear it differently and are less certain that it is in fact physical sound at all. In his book about deserts,
Grains of Sand
, Martin Buckley writes:

I have discussed this very peculiar and distinct sound with a good number of people who have spent time in silence. Almost everyone agrees that it is
there
– very low volume, continuous, and (usually) two or more toned, exactly as Cage describes it. You can only experience it at very intense moments of physical silence. I don’t know what it is. No one seems to know what it is. It is the voice of God. It is minute particles caught in the inner ear. It is the consequence of there now being so many people in the world making so much noise that there is nowhere to escape the last dying reverberations of human sounds. It is the spinning of the universe, or the slow crawl of the tectonic plates deep underground, moving at about the speed that fingernails grow. Although I first encountered it in the Sinai Desert this strange effect can happen anywhere that there is profound enough silence, still air and someone paying attention. I still find something thrilling about it too.

Up in my desert eyrie I had another potentially more dangerous experience. As the day wore on just as silently and ever hotter, I would find myself slipping into a kind of lassitude that made the effort to do very simple things, like drinking, feel immense. It was a strange, dreamlike state, in which nothing seemed important or worthwhile, without it feeling particularly horrid or alarming. I understood with gratitude why Matt, our excellent desert guide, had gone on and on –
ad tedium
– about how important it was to keep drinking and nagged about quantity: because he had done enough to override my lassitude, in that respect at least. But at one point, as the sun moved round, my legs weren’t in shade any more. I sunburn easily and badly, but even though I knew they would burn, possibly dangerously, and before long the rest of me as well, I still looked at my legs in the sun dreamily, thinking, ‘I must move,’
but not quite finding the energy to do so. When I described this to Matt, he said, ‘desert lassitude’ – that it was very common and dangerous. He felt it was a response to solitude and heat that is similar to snow sickness.

That day in Sinai I was protected from any serious consequences by the fact that I had to report back to the camp for supper – and, to the great inconvenience and annoyance of others, would have had to be found and fetched back if I had failed to appear. This realisation did make me wonder if one element in the gradual adoption, in the West, of community (cenobitic) models of the monastic life in preference to solitary hermits was precisely to protect the individuals, not from ravening beasts or the incursions of barbarians, but from this interior movement of the self as it becomes emptier, less precious, less well boundaried and less adjusted to survival. Disinhibition and loss of clear boundaries would be more likely to be fatal in the desert than almost anywhere else.

I spent a great deal of each day, from the breathtaking rose-coloured dawns right through the long hot silence of midday, sitting up there and trying to think about silence and prayer.

There is a tendency today to assume that prayer is primarily a private and interior activity, as opposed to ‘organised religious ritual’, or ‘rote prayers’. But all the anthropological evidence suggests that first of all prayer was communal and ritualised, and the development of silent meditation or private prayer comes much later in all cultures. The earliest account of silent prayer that I have found rather makes this point. It occurs in the Hebrew Scriptures:

This is a very ancient story – probably originally eleventh century
BCE
, but it is worth noting that it continued to be curious enough for the later editor, who put the Books of Samuel into their present form after the fall of Jerusalem in 586
BCE
, to keep it in – obviously silent prayer did not take off with quite the speed one might now expect.

It is a story set in a culture that values the word and the community so highly that silence has very little positive role in classical Judaism. When I talked to Christopher Rowland, Professor of Biblical Studies at Oxford University, about silence in the Hebrew Scriptures, he felt that for that community silence was a negative thing, a lack or absence, indeed, and so of little or no cultural interest.
⁸
In this culture to be alive is to be speaking – the dead in Sheol are silent. The faithful speak to God and God speaks to them directly, or through messengers (‘angels’) and through the prophets. It is not that Judaism lacks mystical or visionary insight, or denigrates intense personal union with God; it is more that the accepted form and expression of this inner authority was prophecy and poetry, rather than silent contemplation.

One might expect a society that formed its spirituality in the silent desert, and which forbids itself visual representations, to need and value language especially highly. In such a context words take on an additional weight and significance, and silence poses a particular
danger. Perhaps it is not surprising that in the Hebrew Scriptures ‘silence’ signifies more than simply our modern quietness and comes to mean total ruin or destruction, subjection, death and the grave. The direct Word of God, and the authorised record of it in the law and in history, is essential to the life of the community. In such a culture the great terror is that God will fall silent:

Yet at the heart of Judaism is the Great Silence. The name of God is not spoken. Even God does not break this silence: when asked for a name, God only said, ‘I am who I am.’ Once a year, in awe and solemnity, the High Priest in the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem spoke the name of God. Even that has been silenced: the name was written down in consonants alone, but obviously a word cannot be pronounced unless its vowels are also known. After the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70
CE
there was no place in which the name could be spoken and – somehow – the way to speak it got lost, silenced in a new way.

This is one silence that was not broken. It is a taboo so deep that it was not even inscribed in the law. But there is an ancient tale about speaking the name of God. When God first created the world, he created human beings ‘in his own image; male and female he created them’ (Genesis 1:27). Later, after many things and for many reasons, the Lord God said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone,’ so He took one of Adam’s ribs and made Eve from it, to be ‘bone of Adam’s bone and flesh of his flesh’ (Genesis 2:18–23). There is a myth, however, to fill the obvious gap. The first woman, the one made directly in the image of God and equal of Adam in every way, was called Lilith. She refused to be subservient to him – some versions tell that she refused to lie underneath him when they
had sex, while he felt his status required the missionary position – and the couple fought. Outraged, she named the unnameable name and it gave her power. She flew out of Eden and down to the Red Sea coast where (untouched by the Fall and therefore immortal) she lives for ever, sustained on the flesh of her own children, which she conceives alone, giving birth every morning and consuming them before nightfall. She is the screech owl and newborn babies must be protected from her rapacity and enmity with amulets and charms lest, not satisfied with her own offspring, she tries to consume and destroy yours. Power and peril, male and female seem well balanced in this story. But the central silence is protected by threats as well as by promises.

This unnamed God is known not through silence but in the ongoing story of the community and through his own direct spoken word. When asked for his name, God first said, ‘I am who I am,’ but then added, ‘The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob … this is my name for ever and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations’ (Exodus 3:14, 15).

Very early Christianity did not break with this tradition. Although the Gospels record Jesus’s forty-day fast, presumably in silence, and his temptations in the desert, and although they describe him on occasion going off to the hills to pray alone, when his disciples asked him to teach them to pray, he did not instruct them in meditation techniques nor urge interiority and silence; instead, he immediately gave them a formalised set of words, clearly designed to be said out loud and communally. (The Lord’s Prayer is in the first person
plural
: ‘our’, ‘us’ and ‘we’.) Nor in his epistles, which instruct the new Churches around the Mediterranean in great detail about the life in Christ, does Paul seem give any attention at all to what we would now call ‘spirituality’, the silent and interior practice of personal prayer. The attitude that insists that the practice of Christianity is centrally the disciplined worship of the community and works of charity and justice has continued ever since. ‘And whose feet will you wash?’ asked Basil the Great testily as yet another member of his
community headed off into the desert to become a hermit. It was a major plank of the Reformation, but also of the Counter-Reformation, and is still embedded in a great deal of contemporary theology.

So it is not entirely clear
why
, from the middle of the third century, Christians began to go into the desert, initially around Egypt and east of Jerusalem, and develop an intense spirituality based on rigorous asceticism and particularly on silence. Nonetheless, for the next several centuries they did so in surprising numbers. The extremity of the desert and eremitical life is as far as one can possibly go – so they went.

The simplest explanation is that the end of active persecution by the Roman state provided a challenge to a Church that had seen martyrdom as the noblest expression of faith, not just because dying for a cause is always effective, but also because being martyred was imitating the life of Jesus. The extremes of the ascetic life were a response: create something as difficult and disagreeable as dying and you too can be as heroic as the martyrs were. While this is generally viable, it does not explain why
silence
became such a central form of asceticism. There are lots of other more spectacular disciplines, as the early Church set out to demonstrate. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has suggested that early Christian spirituality was highly experimental: sit on a pillar, nest in a tree, live in a desert, dance, study, fast, don’t speak and so on –
and see what that
does for your interior life and your relationship with God
. In the light of the actual physical and psychological effects of silence it seems reasonable to suppose that silence emerged as an effective instrument for inducing profound experiences, and for lowering the barriers between the self and the Other – the resurrected Christ.

Peter Brown, in
The Body and Society
, has suggested that some of the impetus towards Christian chastity and virginity (now interpreted mainly as body hatred and dualism) in fact arose partly from a radical refusal to participate in or support the Roman Empire. For women virginity meant childlessness and refusing to have babies was a clear way of expressing contempt for the system, especially as the
Empire had a worrying population shortfall. If this is correct, it might be worth remembering that public speaking (rhetoric) was another key citizens’ duty and the central focus of a Roman education: silence, like virginity, was a critical stance.