A Book of Silence (4 page)

There are so few clues. No one wants to talk about it. We live in a culture that is terrified of the process of ageing, and in which women are encouraged to take artificial hormones so that they do not enter into this magical condition. But it is not just a modern phenomenon. Middle-aged and menopausal women are conspicuously absent from most myths and traditional stories: first you are the princess and the mother, then you vanish and reappear as aged crone. Even psychoanalysts throw up their hands in despair; at menopause women move beyond their help and good management. Helene Deutsch gives a particularly brutal, but not atypical, analysis of her own helplessness:

Probably the suggestion that such women might like to go and live alone and experiment with silence would not come comfortably to a proponent of ‘talking therapies’.

Unfortunately there is such a taboo around menopause, and such a wide range of ages at which it takes place in individual women, that it is hard to tell whether a turn to silence and solitude might be connected with this life event. There is, however, an interesting group of women saints, who lived highly active lives ‘in the world’ and then in their forties took a mystical path, joining religious orders often of considerable austerity or becoming recluses. Hilda of Whitby did not become a nun until she was middle-aged; Bridget of Sweden was married, had eight children and was a lady-in-waiting to the queen before she started to experience her visions; she became a nun and founded her new community when she was in her forties. Although Teresa of Avila became a nun at twenty, she had what she called her ‘interior conversion’, which opened the way for her visionary experiences, in 1555 and in 1562 she began her reform movement, moving her order (the Carmelites) back towards greater silence. So I am tempted to believe that there is something significant in this passage for women at least.

As I became more interested in silence I became intrigued by the negative silence and secrecy that has made menopause almost inaudible culturally – except occasionally, like Sarah or Elizabeth in the Bible, where the restrictions or freedoms of menopause are miraculously overcome by the direct intervention of God. Throughout the 1990s I wrote a series of short stories about menopausal women, refinding them in old tales and inventing new ones.
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A lot of these, old and new, are about women making unexpected changes in their lives, opening up their imaginations and finding a new self-sufficiency. They are also stories deeply imbued with the countryside, and the rhythms of seasons and growth.

While I was researching for these stories I learned a strange and beautiful thing. Birds have hollow bones – their bones are not solid like mammals’ bones, like human bones, but are filled with air pockets, a bit like bubble-wrap only less regular. (This is why when you pick up a dead bird it feels so insubstantial in your hand, unlike, say a mouse.) This is a deft evolutionary development – archaeopteryx,
the earliest winged dinosaur, had feathers but solid bones – to make flying easier for them. At menopause women’s bones thin out and fill with air pockets – in acute osteoporosis, under a microscope they are almost indistinguishable from birds’ bones: at menopause women can learn to fly as free as a bird.
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Oddly enough, in my own fiction, flying – dragons, witches, birds and angels – has often appeared as an image of women’s freedom, so this discovery was especially delightful. When I look back at those stories now I cannot help but sense that something new and happy was going on for me over these years.

Perhaps not surprisingly, parallel with this I discovered the silent joy of gardening. In my childhood gardening, which meant almost entirely kitchen gardening – fruit and vegetables – had been a chore, an unending series of household tasks in which we had all been required to participate; needless to say we did this in a highly organised team spirit and it had never seemed to me like a pleasure or a source of contemplative serenity. My husband had a lovely garden at the East End vicarage, but it was always very definitely
his
garden; I felt no jealousy and was happy for him both to make the decisions and to do the work. The garden behind my cottage in Warkton was
my
garden. Everyone should have her first garden on Northamptonshire loam – it is so encouraging: you stick in a spade and it cuts into this rich, fertile, dark soil, never too dry and never boggy, with few stones and a generous well-balanced nature. Everything grows fast and strong.

And of course it grows silently. In our noise-obsessed culture it is very easy to forget just how many of the major physical forces on which we depend are
silent
– gravity, electricity, light, tides, the unseen and unheard spinning of the whole cosmos. The earth spins, it spins fast. It spins about its own axis at about 1,700 kilometres per hour (at the Equator); it orbits the sun at 107,218 kilometres per hour. And the whole solar system spins through the spinning galaxy at speeds I hardly dare to think about. The earth’s atmosphere spins with it, which is why we do not feel it spinning. It all happens silently.

Organic growth is silent too. Cells divide, sap flows, bacteria multiply, energy runs thrilling through the earth, but without a murmur. ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’
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is a silent force. Soil, that very topmost skin coating, is called earth and the planet itself is called earth. It is all alive – pounding, heaving, thrusting. Microscopic fungi spores grow, lift pavements and fell houses. We hear the crack of the pavements and the crash of the buildings – such human artefacts are inevitably noisy – but the fungus itself grows silently. Perhaps we are wise to be terrified of silence – it is the terror that destroyeth in the noontide.

Gardening puts me in contact with all this silent energy; gardeners become active partners in all that silent growth. I do not make it happen, but I share in it happening. The earth works its way under my nails and into my fingerprints, and a gardener has to pay attention to the immediate now of things. In one’s own garden one must not be caught unawares – a single sprout of couch grass can grow five miles of roots in a year, while lurking silently behind the delphiniums, which are growing less extravagantly but just as determinedly in the opposite direction: up, up, upwards, and creating a magnificence of blue as though they were pulling the sky down to them. I have to pay attention to that silence.

In Warkton for the first time a garden became precious to me – it became an occupation, a resource and also my first glimpse that there might be art forms that I could practise which were not made out of words. Gardening gave me a way to work with silence; not ‘in silence’ but
with
silence – it was a silent creativity. The garden itself, through that silent growth, put in more creative energy than I did; it grew silently but not unintelligently. I started to think about gardens; not so much about gardening, which I see as a technical skill like spelling is for writers, but about gardens themselves. This meant looking at other people’s gardens and reading about the history of gardens. To my surprise, because he is usually criticised among feminists for his rationalist philosophy and his desire to ‘manage’ and control nature, I found myself deeply in tune with the Renaissance figure Francis Bacon, who made himself three notable gardens and
also wrote
Of Gardens
(1625), a personal and individual essay about beauty and taste, and
Sylva sylvarum
(published after his death in 1626) in which sections 5 and 6 are devoted to his ideas about gardening. Although actually he was a fine experimental horticulturalist, he too saw this as preliminary technique. The skill was necessary to create a garden, but the garden itself was not, in his view, simply a place to display one’s gardening skills. He said of his garden in Twickenham that he ‘found the situation of the place much convenient for the trial of my philosophical conclusions’.

More important, it got me interested in how gardens might reflect ideas, thoughts and desires, just as literature or painting does. Gardens, I learned, were very central to a great many religious traditions, as places of contemplation and silence of a physical kind: Zen gardens, European monastic gardens, the Persian and Moorish water gardens. ‘Professional’ silence seekers (hermits for want of a better collective noun) have always gardened. Improbably high in the Himalayas, in northern caves and on rocky islands, in Middle Eastern deserts, there they are, digging, scrabbling, weeding, watering, growing what they can – vegetables, a little grain and flowers, unexpected beauty in the harsh silence of their lives. They are seeking silence as close to the earth, to the silent power of growth as possible, becoming, as they would say, ‘grounded’. Traditional Christian monastic life is built around two silent enclosures – the church and the cloister, which is also a garden – the secret, enclosed space, the
hortus conclusus
. The word paradise comes from a Persian word for garden.

I discovered there were modern and secular interpretations of this tradition – gardens that reflect, illustrate and develop personal philosophies and ideas of beauty; gardens that really are a form of art: Little Sparta, the late artist Ian Hamilton’s garden in Lanarkshire; Charles Jenks’s Garden of Cosmic Speculation; the Veddw, Anne Wareham’s garden near Monmouth. These gardens are an open-ended, always changing way of exploring personal meaning and the interior world; they are lovely places that hold together nature and culture; they find meaning in very mundane processes – and these are silent.

With the garden designer Peter Matthews I wrote a book,
Gardens
of Illusion
, about such gardens.
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It was enormous fun to write. The gardens, and their gardeners, were so fabulous, so eccentric and so various. They made me think with a new part of my mind, even as I was beginning to learn how to do it myself.

However, the research for
Gardens of Illusion
had a side effect, which was to prove every bit as important. We had to travel extensively around the country to see these gardens. Up until then my main experience of the British countryside had been of rich green places; Northamptonshire replicated in many ways the rich dairy country of coastal Galloway: a green and pleasant land of pasture and prosperity – deciduous woodland, gentle rivers, prosperous old farms and charming sheltered villages. These are places of peace and contentment. What I encountered in these long drives across the country was another ‘mood’ of landscape, the wild and desolate places that still, and perhaps surprisingly, occupy a great deal of space in our supposedly overcrowded land. The bony spine of the Pennines and Cheviots running half the length of the country; the high western ranges of the Lake District and Snowdonia; the harsh smooth sweep of the east coast, the fragmented islands strewn west; the naked heave of the Yorkshire dales and the central Southern Uplands, and the vast emptiness of the Highlands. I began to realise that it was not peace and contentment that I craved, but that awed response to certain phenomena of the ‘natural’ world in which words, and even normal emotional reactions, fail or rather step away from the experience and there is a silence that is powerful, harsh and essentially inhumane. These landscapes have been called ‘sublime’, a word that also describes an emotion and aesthetic as well as actual scenery. I discovered in myself a longing for the sublime, for an environment that, rather than soothing me, offered some raw, challenging demands in exchange for grandeur and ineffability.

Another of the things I started to do during this time in Warkton was pray. Actually I did not
start
to pray at all – I had been praying for years; I had been a practising Christian since the early 1970s, I
had already studied and written some theology and probably thought I was quite religious enough. But as my life became quieter and more solitary I found that my own prayer life was growing in interest and in the time I spent on it. It was not that my faith ‘deepened’ or indeed altered at all as far as content goes, it was that my living out of this set of convictions and practices shifted inwards. It became more silent, more interior, and I did more of it, in a more systematic and businesslike way. It also became more silent. I started to do what Buddhists normally call ‘meditation’, or in Christian terms, perhaps, ‘contemplative prayer’. This is a discipline of trying to empty one’s mind of its egotistical concerns in an attempt to align oneself with reality. For Buddhists it usually means exploring beyond the ‘illusion’ of matter and individuality; for Christians it means trying, through both the created order and particularly through the life and resurrection of Jesus, to experience and participate in the infinite love and mercy of God. Both traditions offer techniques for attempting this, as well as ‘signposts’ to discern whether you are on track or not. Thomas Merton, one of the most famous modern contemplatives, summed up the process as ‘listening to the silence of God’. Almost all serious writers on contemplative prayer, from all traditions and across history, are clear that this kind of praying can only be developed in a context that includes a great deal of silence.

I find praying difficult, challenging and very hard work, but I also find it necessary, surpassingly lovely and crucially important. It began to supersede deipnosophy as my favourite thing. It became, and remains, one of the central reasons why I went hunting for silence, and why I am now sitting in the sunshine looking down a long silent valley. Of course, at this point in my adventures I did not guess that this was what was going to happen. It was simpler than that: I was on my own, I had a new sort of space and time, and one of the things I turned out to be doing with that space and time was praying.