The End of Silence

"This silence is not just in the gaps and spaces that punctuate sentences but is rather the lack within words that renders them articulate. For those with ears to hear, all saying is unsaying and every word is also a not. There can no more be word without silence than silence without Word. The origin, then, is always duplicitous: In the beginning is the Word...In the beginning is Silence. The quiet echo of this silence is profoundly unsetlling-in it I hear the Not that I am. Though we may long to escape it, silence can never be silenced. When we forget or refuse to listen to silence, we no longer know who we are because we do not know what we are not."



"Not everything that can be said should be said. Reticence is a particularly important virtue, especially in a time when everything as well as everybody is exposed...All too often people become complicit in the colonization of their own inwardness by soliciting the very publicity that inevitably undoes them. When this occurs, thoughtful reflection gives way to thoughtless spectacle: I am seen, therefore I am."

-Professor Mark C. Taylor, "Field Notes from Elsewhere" (Columbia University Press, 2009)

Blogging about silence is not quite like dancing about architecture-it's a little more like dancing about a statue.

I've always liked the drama of the phrase, "In the beginning there was the Word." It's the first words of the first chapter of the Book of John, the fourth book of the New Testament. If you've read any of the Bible (or books about the Bible), you know that it tends to repeat itself-retelling the same story or set of stories, sometimes more than once, in various places, sometimes using different names. The reason why is pretty obvious-without the printed word for the next 1400 years or so, the tradition was either oral or handwritten to keep telling the stories to the kiddos and pass the religion along. You had to keep them simple, easy to remember.

The echo, here, from "In the beginning there was the Word", of course, is the "In the beginning" from, well, the beginning-the book of Genesis. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth." The notion of the Word being the beginning is a powerful one. In David Plotz' book "The Good Book", where he does a pretty close, sometimes very funny, reading of the Old Testament, he points out that the Word is what kept the Jewish people together, on the same page, so to speak, through all their thousands of years of wandering. The Word is everything-before everything, there is the text. Hence the phrase "People of the Book"-a Muslim phrase describing Jews and Christians-without the words, without the text, there is nothing, in a sense, to believe in. The words hold it all together.

I like Prof. Taylor's notion that every word implies its opposite. You chose that word, and not this other one, and not, by definition, silence. Words have enormous power. Silence, the absence of speech, the blank page, gives rise to words, and worlds are created. In the beginning, is silence, and then there are words, and then there is, well, everything.

I've been quite self reflective since finishing NaNoWriMo. (pause to admire the glow from my winner's badge-winner, winner, chicken dinner.) I have this world, these people made only of words. (As I edit and reshape and retool and refine, checking things as simple as making sure someone has the same shirt at the end of the day as they had at the beginning, I'm increasingly sympathetic towards copy editors-it's exhausting, reading the same stuff over and over again. It starts to look right, even when it's glaringly wrong.) I'm sad that it's over, but I'm glad that it's done-that this story that I've been thinking about, in one form or another, since high school, is out of my head and into a finished form. I'm elated about eventually putting it onto the printed page for the world to consume, and I'm also terrified. Not just of the embarassment of missing an error, but what if it isn't the same as it is in my head? Or what if it is, and people hate it or, worse, are bored by it? You can't control that-that's the nature of art. You put it out there, and people make of it what they will.


I have ended the silence.