but first, tear the veil: hearing silence.

it is well documented that Samuel Beckett often sat in silence for entire days and followed the course of the sun with his eyes.

“Not that you could bear God's voice -- not at all. But listen to the wind's breathing, the unbroken news that takes shape out of silence. It's rustling toward you now.” 
- Rainer-Marie Rilke, excerpt from "The First Elegy," trans. by Edward Snow

dear little voice,

it is well documented that Samuel Beckett often sat in silence for entire days and followed the course of the sun with his eyes. if you were to walk through a telescope and back in time, little voice, you could stand in the doorframe and watch him do this, dwarfed by a great armchair in his cottage in Ussy-sur-Marne. with no paper before him, and no pen, he sat with sun like bells of heat on his skin in early day, dappled to his wits in light, arms eyeleted in sun, barefoot, watching the light’s unsteady hands move across the earth for hours, the slow tangent of sweet grass through the open window, and you: watching him, the quiet sound of someone’s breathing, the sky outside a blue pang of Silence. 

the course of the sun is presumed to be mute. daffodils and sweetgrass are presumed to be mute. the Moon is presumed to be mute. this was our first mistake.

upon accepting the Nobel Prize for literature, Samuel Beckett was requested an interview by the Swedish press. he agreed only with the strange stipulation that the interviewer could not ask any questions.

the Moon, after all, speaks a Language: the Language of Silent things; the moving of blood, the shifting of time, the pushing of water upon the earth, the ancient driving of beautiful creatures into the woods at night, moondressed and barefoot, garlands tangled in their hair, making prayers from clear stones and feathers from birds. 

and you do, after all, hold the Moon inside of your hands. the very letters of the lunatus- the only bone that stitches your hand to your wrist- insist that your contact with the world hinges on this Silence. this is because, if you listen closely, little voice, you may discover that Silence is in fact something you can hear, and that she is speaking with you. some nights you will feel her rise like that in you- like something heavy and soaked- a slow, burning, luminous flux- and you must listen. 

Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

Emily Dickinson, who seemed, in her poems, always to invite readers into a silence of “internal difference— / where the Meanings are,” wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “You ask of my companions, Hills, sir, and the Sundown. . . . They are better than Beings because they know—but do not tell.” for Dickinson, these hills were friends for- not in spite of- the mystery of their Silence, which seemed to offer a different Language, at once more strange, more spontaneous, and more ineffable than the organized patterns and noise of human speech. 

“There is always something to listen to," Beckett said. 

‘I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable,’ writes Virginia Woolf in The Waves. ‘I need a howl; a cry… I need no words.’ In The Voyage Out, she writes: ‘I want to write a novel about Silence.’
- Gretchen Henderson, On Marvellous Things Heard

Sacred Art
From Silence in Heaven: A Book of Monastic Life, 1950.

it can be very difficult to live with Silence. there are even creatures called human beings who, instead of listening to Silence, do their very best to create these messy patterns and noise so as to block it out. they do this because they are frightened. they are frightened because they are afraid of loneliness, and because their fear of Silence is a fear of loneliness, and because their fear of loneliness is a fear of Silence. they no longer trust coming into contact with the world alone because, at some point a long time ago, they confused aloneness with being abandoned. now they walk about talking very loudly, and they try to do so in groups of more than two when they can help it, and some of them cannot even walk around corners or through flowers without sticking little noise-makers in their ears. this can make human beings very loud. and this is sad because it deprives them of a certain intimacy with themselves. 

as French-Egyptian forever-questioner and poet Edmond Jàbes writes in The Book of Margins, “it is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.”  

“Indeed poetry is bounded by silence on all sides, is almost defined by silence.” 
- Hayden Carruth, “Fallacies of Silence,” Selected Essays & Reviews

“More and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it… to get to the Silence,” Beckett wrote, presumably very quietly. it is also true that the ancient Greeks believed Language to be a veil- the καλύπτω- that protects us from the brightness of things. 

little voice: there is something behind this veil. it is bright, and it is Silent. and perhaps it is bright because it is Silent, and because Silence casts a certain kind of light. there are, after all, some things we can only hear when we can hear nothing at all. 

Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic: 1.

when Beckett gazed at the course of the sun, he did not experience Silence as a condition for muteness. he experience it as a condition for language. he was listening, and in that dark chair, his silence was attention.

“It’s an odd thing, silence. The mind becomes like a starless night; and then a meteor slides, splendid, right across the dark and is extinct. We never give sufficient thanks for this entertainment.” 
-Virginia Woolf, from A Haunted House: The Complete Shorter Fiction, “The Evening Party”. 

Silence is a word with roots in Time. they slink through the Earth and in all-spiralling directions. there is the Gothic word: anasilan, a word that denotes the softening of wind, and there is the Latin word: desiniere, that denotes something coming to a halt, such as feet do over a spontaneous, peripheral flower, or the sudden the rippling of light through a tree’s branches that turns the heart inside out. 

as words often do, these ancient letters divine secrets and practices. there is, after all, only a fine line between a word and a world. Silence’s roots are tangled in a place of perfect softness, where the wind surrenders her wild chase and suns herself in rest with the Earth. this is a Silence born from an absence of motion, little voice, and an absence of motion, by definition, reveals dimension: a space that little voices need to stretch their inner muscles, elongate the tender membranes’ of their heart, swiftly shatter their calcifications, tidy aside noise and interference, and simply create room for Noticing and Absorbing. it is to nuzzle into the Earth and take the place of that wing-winged winding wind. after all, one must create space in order to move into anything at all. and after all, one requires the brightness to know where in the space to move. it is simply a matter of being still enough to part the veil. 

little voice, this was your first language: the language of the wild, fantastic Silence of the world. the parting of the veil.

“It is the silence, rather, that obliges the poet to listen, and gives the dream greater intimacy. We hardly know where to situate this silence, whether in the vast world or in the immense past. But we do know that it comes from beyond a wind that dies down or a rain that grows gentle.”
- Gaston Bachelard - The Poetics of Space (1958) 

in Finland, when they find a crying shoulder, they whisper: pitaa hamaraa.  

pitaa hamaraa. pitaa hamaraa. keep the twilight. keep the twilight. 

pitaa hamaraa: to sit in silence as the light disappears from the earth, to observe nightfall as a time of contemplation and stillness, to allow Silence to speak with you. pitaa hamaraa. 

Nizar Tawfiq Qabbani: “Because my love for you is higher than words, I have decided to fall Silent.”

“There is… the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul… the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos,” forever poet and Silence-Seeker Paul Goodman wrote in his 1972 essay on the nine kinds of Silence:

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.
- Paul Goodman, Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry.

there is a wild, silky part of you that keeps communion with the twilight. her Language is one that falls to rest in the Earth. listen: time will vanish, urgency will vanish, any important difference between yourself and other things will vanish, and there will be no great vision or seizure of ecstasy, but the leaves, dust, thrushes, and finches will rise to speak the great, tangled Mystery of things.

it will be very, very quiet. it will be a windless day.

it will be a witnessing to magnitude. it will be the absence of nothing. it will be the presence of a little voice.

pitaa hamaraa.

Virginia Woolf’s own veil was made of cotton:

“Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
- Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being.

in 1978, two young scientists studying 500-million-year-old nautilus shells discovered that the number of lines on each chamber was consistent with the time it takes for the Silent Moon to revolve around her Earth. these shells were coated in nine liners per chamber. when you pick up a nautilus shell with your hands today, you will see, little voice, that they contain thirty lines per chamber. this means that once, a long time ago, the Moon revolved around the Earth in nine days. which means that a long time ago, She was closer to us. much, much closer than she is now. 

Silence was once closer. we hide and hide and hide from our Silences. but like the Moon, they are still there, throbbing in the dark, throbbing in your hands, throbbing in your blood. your first wild, tangled Language, only now she is simply a little more distant. a little closer to the Stars.

Edward Mass, Reaching for the Moon.

how can you speak with your Silence, little voice? perhaps you could whisper down a well. you could write a poem and tuck it in a sock drawer. you could speak into seeds and throw them from windows on a warm day. you could kiss an orange peel. you could hold your tongue out for the rain and repeat back its swallowed words.

the point is not to find a listener, but in the Listening itself. these things are all a Language for the patient exhilaration of your Life.

after all, little voice, the pearl of the moon will only reveal herself to an equally naked heart:

  Accept what comes from silence. 
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came. 

—Wendell Berry, “how to be a poet (to remind myself).”

pitaa hamaraa.

love, 

ars poetica. 

“Words move, music moves / Only in time; but that which is only living / can only die. Words, after speech, / reach / Into the silence.”
- T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, Four Quartets.