A Book of Silence (39 page)

But wait. Pick up a reasonably good pair of binoculars, the same ones you use for birdwatching, and you multiply the number of cosmic bonfires you can see by about ten. So now, if you have a very clear night and a high place to view from, you can see 45,000 stars.

Get a telescope and … the present ‘best estimate’ of observable stars using available telescopes is seventy sextillion (seventy thousand million million million). That is more than all the grains of sand on all the beaches and in all the deserts on this planet, but it is not all the stars; it is only the number within the range of our technology.

Standing there in the cold night, I made an effort not to think about antimatter. Cosmologists are currently saying there is not enough matter, enough material objects, molecules or atoms, out there to allow the cosmos to function. There has to be some dark material, invisible, immeasurable, but somehow
there
. They do not know what it is or how to find it. I can be overwhelmed by the idea that antimatter is all the concentrated silence of space. Silence so dense and heavy that it takes on materiality.

The second breath was a sharper intake, more of a gasp. I realised that almost the first thing I had done, confronted with that enormous brightness, was look for patterns, for
stories
. I had instinctively and very swiftly groped about for something I knew a story for. The Pleiades, for example, are named after the immortal sisters, daughters of Atlas, who were placed in the heavens because of their beauty. One of the seven stars is fainter than the others and called Merope because she alone married a mortal while the other six took gods as lovers. The visible astronomical objects are not named randomly: Mercury was the messenger of the gods with winged heels, and the planet Mercury moves faster than any other, whizzing round the sun at high speed. Venus, named after the goddess of love, appears in the evening and the morning, serene and beautiful. Mars looks red in the night sky, red was the colour of war and Mars was the god of war, hence the term ‘martial arts’. Jupiter was the king of the gods and is the largest planet; it is surrounded by an exceptionally large number of moons, each named after one of his exceptionally large number of lovers.

Each constellation is a story too: Orion, the hunter, with his sword belt, is visible in the sky of the northern hemisphere only during the hunting season. As Orion disappears to the west in March, Scorpius is rising in the east: Orion was killed by a scorpion, a punishment for boasting there was no living creature who could conquer him, and the scorpion still chases him across the night sky. I find it hard to remember that these patterns are arbitrary and that
the stars in each constellation have no necessary scientific relationship to each other. Chinese astronomy imposed completely different patterns on the same stars: it was not that they had different names for the same constellations but that they saw different patterns, different stories. For example, Chinese constellations were smaller than Western ones and did not depict myths but facets of Chinese court and social life, such as
Dizuo
, the seat of the emperor; and
Tianshi
, the celestial market.

(I have subsequently used a Creative Writing exercise with people who have no knowledge of the stars. I hand out star maps with no names or constellations marked on them, and ask people to find and name their own patterns, then write a story to explain why that figure is in the skies. Almost everyone can do this with an ease that often surprises them; and, unless they have some elementary knowledge of astronomy, no two people ever see the same patterns.)

Like everyone else I love stories; I hear, use and tell stories. My right, earned for me by the Romantic Movement, to tell my own stories about myself and hear other people’s has been precious to me and has also been how I have earned my living. But that night, in the frail but magical starlight, it seemed an intolerable arrogance and even weakness. It came between me and the true silence of the moment – that rush to narrative seemed little more than chitter-chatter.

It would appear, too, that there was something accurate in the idea that silence inspires creative, particularly literary, activity. If I had had someone else with me, we would have dissipated the energy of that search for stories verbally – rather than piling it up inside and generating written words. We would probably have competed to identify or at least have discussed the location of further constellations. We would probably have had slightly different versions of the names, ‘The Great Bear’, ‘Ursa Major’, ‘The Frying Pan’, and of the stories that went with them. Someone would have known more and had more authority. The author is the person with the authority to tell the stories.

Romantic silence, as I experienced it in Galloway, sharpened my memory and generated stories. Whether this demonstrates that there is an inner hidden self that is somehow truer, more real, than the ‘socially constructed self ’ and that exposure to that self, through isolation and silence, will strengthen an individual is more dubious. But it is deeply embedded in the Western cultural psyche. Wordsworth felt he needed to encounter and fortify his true self in solitude,
so that he could speak that self truly
in his poetry. This is the basis of the idea that solitude nourishes creativity and all artists need it.

It’s not very difficult to see a rather close connection between the idea of an ‘authentic’ inner self obscured and weakened by excessive social demands and classical Christian dualism, with the ‘true’ soul trapped within a ‘corrupt’ body, and a corrupt material world. One would expect a philosophy like romanticism, opposed to classical dualism, also to reject the idea of a pure inner nugget of true being, but this is not what has actually happened. The belief in the true inner self has been promulgated as a new and radical posture by all sorts of movements throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This idea was fundamental to Radical Feminism: there was a ‘pure’
*
woman-self, which had been obscured and repressed by layers of social conditioning. The emergent feminist had only to strip away these layers of ‘false consciousness’ (it was always and necessarily false) and find her ‘real’ or true inner self and become liberated. By seeing ‘woman’ as a category that has been excluded from culture and therefore not responsible for society, feminists did not need to withdraw from it into solitude or silence. This liberating work could best be done
in the company of other women
. Our medium of liberation became the group, the naming and sharing of experience through language, even though the need to do so was fundamentally based on the idea that men owned language and women did not.

There is something wrong here. It seems nonsensical to suggest that talking in groups can do exactly the same thing as silence and solitude are held to do: shore up the individual’s boundaries against social construction. If the romantics realised that they needed silence and solitude to find their authentic voice, then how can the same authentic voice be found through speaking in groups?

I think what may have happened is that two different ‘liberation’ movements bumped into each other in the second half of the nineteenth century. Romantic individualism, with its ideas about personal freedom, encountered and was engaged by political freedom movements: nationalism and anti-imperialism were important to some of the romantics, who had many of their philosophical and political roots in the aspirations of the French Revolution: organised labour, anti-slavery, early women’s rights and other emancipation movements all claimed the attention of romantic artists. Byron died defending the freedom of Greece.

By the end of the nineteenth century the conviction that the artist was entitled – indeed, was morally obliged – to abandon social obligation, to strengthen his ego through solitude, had become almost a cliché. But, more important, this idea began to extend itself (like the franchise) further and further into the general population. Everyone had the right to individual expression, everyone was entitled to shake off the shackles of social obligation and aspire to self-actualisation. Everyone had a true inner self and was entitled to assert it over any social conventions or obligations. This applied especially and particularly to groups who had been oppressed or marginalised by society. However, the overall experience of the oppressed was that they had been
silenced
, rather than freely choosing silence. It was not that their truths were being corrupted by too much social chatter, but that they were not free to speak at all – or at least not audibly. Many radical thinkers found themselves engaged on two fronts: they were active in political reform movements and at the same time advocates of individualism and therefore set against any social order. The political freedom movements saw the right to speak, and to be heard, as absolutely crucial.
For many of them this overrode the belief that the solution to the problem of the self lay in escape from the conventional restraints of society and in a retreat into solitude or ‘nature’.

Squeezed between the belief that social intercourse corroded freedom and the belief that naming oneself and one’s oppression in solidarity with others was a fundamental pre-necessity of freedom, something had to give. This pressure produced an extremely interesting development: a brand-new kind of silence. The individual would speak out and be heard. The silence, which would allow and shape that free speech, would be located not in the oppressed individual, but in a separate person: a listener or hearer. After a long and complex journey through the nineteenth century these needs and desires found a form: the psychoanalyst.

This idea of a silent listener, one who can hold the silence so that others can speak their true selves into it, is an extraordinary development. The analyst’s capacity to hold the silence is quite different from anything in religious life; the function of confessors, spiritual directors, gurus, sheiks, teachers is explicitly directive, instructive, even judgemental. Of course these roles require good listening, but in the context of hearing enough to know what to say back, how to advise, direct and assist the speaker in the task of escaping from the ego and finding their own silence, so as to hear and incorporate the divine. Even those who teach through their own silence, like Meher Baba, the influential and popular twentieth-century guru who claimed to be the Avatar, the human form of God, are
teaching
.

From 1925 until his death in 1969, Meher Baba was silent. He communicated first by using an alphabet board, and later by hand gestures, which were interpreted and spoken by one of his disciples. He insisted that his silence was not undertaken as a spiritual exercise, nor as a vow, but solely in connection with his universal work.

Psychoanalysts (and other therapists) in theory do not teach, direct, judge or instruct. They create and hold the free silence in which the subjects of the process may struggle to name themselves. They have become like God is to the contemplative.

During my brief brush with psychoanalysis in the 1980s I myself never encountered this liberating silence, and through it some place of truth and self-knowledge; I always felt every bit as much constructed by Freudian theory as I was by any other social circumstance. The psychoanalytical silence does depend on an article of faith: that naming, speaking oneself, is essential to freedom and integrity, and I was never sure enough that I believed this. Now I would question whether psychoanalysis is appropriate or even possible for anyone who is seriously given to contemplative prayer, partly because of Freud’s determination that all faith in God was necessarily neurotic, and partly because so much of the encounter with God in prayer is not merely silent but is ineffable. It cannot be spoken or described and yet it is experienced as completely real. Despite this caveat, the capacity to create such a listening silence is a strange and beautiful thing. So many people, when I have asked them about positive experiences of silence, have mentioned this psychoanalytic silence that I do not want to ignore it here.

Certainly the sort of speech, of self-knowing, drawn out by a good listener has a creative quality to it that often surprises the speaker, even in situations less consciously constructed to do so. In 2001 I wrote
Other Voices
, a drama for BBC radio. It was an attempt to present to a wider audience some of the contemporary and more radical ideas about hearing voices – a phenomenon that has been too simply treated as a psychotic symptom, usually associated with schizophrenia.
¹⁵
One strand of the play was documentary – and, with extraordinary generosity and courage, several members of the
Exeter Voice Hearing Group agreed to talk about their experiences. Sara Davies, a BBC producer, recorded over six hours of interviews with them. The tapes are beautiful, surprising, open-hearted and intensely personal. When I talked to some of the group they all said they were taken aback by how freely they had spoken – some of them saying they had heard themselves say things that they had never said or even known about themselves before. They all insisted that this was because Sara Davies was ‘such a good interviewer’. The fascinating thing about the tapes is that she says practically
nothing
. There are frequent pauses and silences, and even on the tapes this listening silence collaborates with the speakers. It generates the confidence that allows the spoken word proper space. For me these tapes have a redemptive quality. One of the biggest problems (after social stigmatisation) that many voice hearers experience is the difficulty of creating any silence internally. Too often there simply is no silence ever. Davies’s capacity to create that silence was a revelation.
¹⁶