A Book of Silence (41 page)
Authors: Sara Maitland
Almost everyone knows about the Highland Clearances. During the century between the 1780s and the 1880s approximately half a million Gaelic-speaking Highlanders were ‘cleared’ from their traditional homelands and way of life. A large number of them emigrated to Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand. In many cases this relocation was forcible and violent, or, as John Prebble puts it, the history of the Clearances is ‘the story of people, and of how sheep were preferred to them, and how bayonet, truncheon and fire were used to drive them from their homes’.
17
These clearances were processed with considerable violence: one contemporary account describes a clearance in vividly painful terms:
The consternation and confusion were extreme. Little or no time was given for the removal of persons or property; the people striving to remove the sick and the helpless before the fire should reach them; next, struggling to save the most valuable of their effects. The cries of the women and children, the roaring of the affrighted cattle, hunted at the same time by the yelling dogs of the shepherds amid the smoke and fire, altogether presented a scene that completely baffles description – it required to be seen to be believed.
18
The empty isolated silence of the Highlands was created by the wanton destruction of a whole culture; there was not even any intention of creating something beautiful, just a desire to make more money out of land. One of the reasons why the Highlanders were so vulnerable is that Gaelic culture did not see land as something
ownable
: there were no tenancy agreements or tenancy law in the Highlands. Clan culture was one of reciprocated needs, not landownership.
But at least there is a history and a folk memory of the Highland Clearances. The clearances in Galloway are almost entirely unknown, although they were probably extensive and raised rather more resistance. The landowners had to call the army out to deal with groups calling themselves ‘levellers’ because they levelled the
stone walls that were being built to enforce enclosure of fields that had once been common land. Galloway had its own Gaelic language, as one might guess from the name itself; unlike Highland Gaelic it has completely disappeared.
19
Standing in the clearing at Laggangairn, looking at three different silenced societies, I was filled with sadness, and the sadness was part of the beauty. This beautiful wild silence exists under the shadow of the people silenced in order to create it. The silence of oppression, the silence that does ‘wait to be broken’ and needs to be broken in the name of freedom, exists inextricably entangled with the
jouissance
, the bliss of solitude. At least the Desert Fathers did not have to worry about that – no one wanted their desert. The price of this silence is silence. And it suddenly felt very expensive.
1
John Milton,
Paradise Lost
, Book iv, 481–8.
2
William Lecky, quoted in France,
Hermits
, p. 22.
3
Quoted in Waddell,
Desert Fathers
.
4
Gibbon,
Decline and Fall
, chapter 37.
5
James Wilson,
A Voyage around the Coasts of Scotland and the Isles
(1841).
6
Michel de Montaigne,
The Complete Essays
, trans. M. A. Screech (Penguin, 1987). I find it fascinating that Montaigne should have picked this particular image. He himself was from a noble family and probably never entered a ‘back-shop’ in his life – ‘trade’ being even more despised by the French landed classes than by their English equivalents. While Catherine of Siena, who grew up over her family’s dyeing shop, had spoken of a ‘hermitage of the heart’ where she could retreat to be with her beloved, Montaigne chose the commercial metaphor.
7
Thomas de Quincey,
Collected Writings
, ed. Masson (Edinburgh, 1890), p. 235.
8
Thomas Carlyle,
Critical and Miscellaneous Essays
(1838).
9
William Wordsworth,
The Prelude
(1850).
10
Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.
11
George Eliot,
Felix Holt
(1866).
12
Wordsworth, ‘The Advertisement’ to
The Prelude.
13
Storr,
School for Genius
, p. 33.
14
Meher Baba, ‘Meher Baba’s Universal Message’, World’s Fair pamphlet, 1964.
15
See chapter 2 for more on this topic.
16
Sara Maitland,
Other Voices
, produced by Sara Davies for BBC Radio 4,
Afternoon Theatre
, 2001. The play later won a Media Mental Health Award. My deep gratitude goes to Sara Davies and the Exeter Group of the Voice Hearing Network.
17
John Prebble,
The Highland Clearances
(Secker & Warburg, 1963), p. 10.
18
Donald Ross,
Scenes at Knoydart
(1853), quoted in Prebble,
Highland
Clearances
, p. 278.
19
The 1901 census lists ninety-one individuals in Galloway as Gaelic-speaking.
*
It is not clear why Kirkcudbright was a Stewartry (the only one in the UK) rather than a county, except for the obvious fact that it had a steward instead of a sheriff – but so it is. ‘Kirkcudbrightshire’ was a term invented by the Post Office at the end of the nineteenth century – and the area is still called ‘The Stewartry’ for the purposes of the local Regional Council.
*
Civility – like ‘civilisation’ – is derived from the Latin word
civis
, ‘city’ (just as ‘polite’ is derived from
polis
, the Greek word for ‘city’). In the classical period the countryside was seen as uncivilised and ‘rude’. Much of eighteenth-century neoclassical culture was built on this notion that nature was the enemy of humanity and needed to be brought under control.
*
In
Jane Eyre
(1847) Charlotte Brontë, the great romantic novelist, was the first author to give a first-person voice to a child, a stylistic and structural strategy which is now commonplace.
*
In a vacuum, and space is a vacuum, light travels at 1,079,252,849 kilometres per hour. A light year is the distance that light would travel in a whole year: 1,079,252,849 x 24 x 365.
*
This analysis rather deftly dodged the idea that ‘pure’ means ‘purged’ rather than ‘essentially innocent’.
A
fter this expedition, when I returned to my own house in Weardale I did not feel the easy welcome, the sense of slipping into my own steady silence that I had become used to. I felt unsettled, restless and frustrated. I had clarified to my own satisfaction that there were indeed two different sorts of silence. But I did not see how I could have both. Too much attention to kenotic, self-emptying prayer, to decreation, breaks down the boundaries of the self; weakened boundaries prevent the creation of strong narrative. And vice versa. But I still wanted both.
The frustration was made more annoying because I had a powerful inner sense that somewhere beyond the divisions I was experiencing there was a way of living and writing that could integrate these two silences. I started to look for people who had indeed done both – had sought their own inner silent emptiness in communion with their God
and
created literature. At first sight there appeared to be a long and encouraging tradition. Hildegard of Bingen, the wonderfully eccentric twelfth-century German mystic and polymath, produced a string of remarkably original works, both about her own interior life and about the world more widely – including perhaps the first description of female orgasm
1
, and a feminist precursor to oratorio, a mystery play with an all-women cast, except for the devil who is male and, because of his fall from grace, cannot sing. There is a strong strand of poetry whose authors seem to find their voice from profoundly contemplative experience, like the Spanish Carmelite monk, John of the Cross. Above
all there is a great deal of very fine non-fiction, from personal accounts of spiritual experiences, like the
Shewings
of Julian of Norwich, through spiritual teaching, to memoir and autobiography. There is also a long tradition of nature or travel writing, like Annie Dillard’s
Pilgrim
at Tinker’s Creek
. Above all, perhaps, there is Thomas Merton. The deeper he plunged into silence the more he seems to have written – autobiography, spirituality, politics, poetry, theology – increasingly responsive to the world outside his hermitage and increasingly conscious of and attuned to the act of writing itself.
2
What is missing from this list is fiction and especially novels. It seems very curious to me that the usual prose form of individuals deliberately engaged in trying to empty themselves of self is autobiography. Before he went to Gethsemane, the Trappist monastery in Kentucky in 1941, Merton wanted to be a writer, but his two novels had failed to find a publisher. In his journal he comments on this:
I have tremendous preoccupations of my own, personal preoccupations with whatever is going on inside my own head and I simply can’t write about anything else. Anything I create is only a symbol of some completely interior preoccupation of my own. I only know I am writing well when [I am writing] about the things I love.
3
This does not sound like a self emptied of self – it sounds like raging egotism – and yet, in the last count, even people who build in a rhetoric of self-abnegation – ‘I write only in obedience’ (Thérèse of Lisieux is an example of this strategy), ‘I write at God’s direct instruction, contrary to my own desires’ (Hildegard of Bingen), ‘The writing is worthless, do whatever you want with it’ (Simone Weil) – end up writing autobiographically. Why should this be so? Perhaps it is because fiction involves creating whole new worlds and this requires a greater assertion of the ego than recording what comes, as gift, into your own silent life. Perhaps true silence is such a absolute engagement that there is finally nothing else to write about except the struggle to lose that very last
thing
(the ego) that binds you.
All silence is a search for a particular kind of truth; perhaps metaphor, and particularly the sustained metaphor of fictional characters, comes to feel, even to be, a lie, an untruth. Novels require narrative, plot and resolution or closure, all of which are linear and time-bound and therefore deeply alien to silence.
I did not have any answers, but I experienced a deep restlessness and, with it, a writerly curiosity. I wanted to be both a silence dweller and a writer. I wanted to write silently, somehow to
write
silence
. I did not know how it could be done; I did not even know if it could be done. But I very much wanted to try to find out.
Over the following months this imperative but uneasy quest led me to some practical decisions. The first was I would move house again. If I was not feeling comfortable about what I might write, it seemed important to ‘downsize’ financially. If I wanted more silence, I did not need or even want such immediate neighbours nor so much space – Weatherhill’s three bedrooms, two living rooms and big kitchen were considerably more than any solitary requires. What I wanted and needed was a hermitage.
Finding one turned out not to be at all easy. In the first place there are not that many houses that are both truly isolated and very small: isolated houses, especially those in the sort of wild austere scenery that I had identified as my terrain of silence, are usually old farmhouses, which tend to be substantial, and the more isolated the more substantial, because before cars they needed to be fairly self-sufficient. In wild places even the farm workers’ cottages are very often within or adjacent to the steading. I knew that the kind of house I wanted did exist, but they aren’t exactly hanging around waiting, especially in this era of second homes.
