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(silence)

by Alessandra Baltodano
Through memories, anecdotes and brief visual observations, Alessandra reflects on the refuge of silence, that vast and generous space that contains us and allows us to listen to the voices of the world.
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Lying in bed one morning, the sun comes through the window to my left forming a stream of light right in front of me where millions of dust particles float. My hand reaches out into the light and tries to grab the particles, but when I close my fist nothing is left inside. I must be four years old or younger. That memory ends when my dad comes into the room and asks me what I'm doing. I don't remember my answer, in fact, in that memory there isn't any 'idea', I don't know what I thought about what I was seeing. The only thing that accompanies that memory is a sensation, a kind of magnetism towards the universe that unfolded in front of me in that narrow strip of light. 

Shortly after that, life began to delineate itself with thoughts, and since then, my mind has been a crammed place. I learned early on that value in this world was tied to ideas and the ability to articulate them coherently. In the house where I grew up, reason and logic reigned. I learned to construct solid arguments, to speak clearly, to anticipate answers and to have reason on my side. I became so eloquent in my ideas that for a long time I never doubted them, their veracity.

The first time I sat down to meditate the instruction was clear: count our breaths to ten and the moment we realized we had been distracted by thoughts, simply start over. It was the first time I became aware of how crammed my head was. Counting to ten felt like walking through a landmine field: thoughts ready to explode every other breath. Ideas, arguments, responses, all demanding my attention, all trying to convince me they were true. But in between the thoughts, an exquisite sensation: a silence, a void, a refuge.

It is difficult to describe silence without speaking of what it’s not. Abstention from speaking, omission, absence of sound. But the absence of sound is an impossibility in our world. Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, makes the distinction between sound and noise. For him, silence is the absence of noise, “the silence of all those sounds that have nothing to do with the natural acoustic system (1)." He says that in silence we can feel the presence of everything. The problem, he warns, is that silence is an endangered species in a world that has inundated reality with engines, generators, alarms, and so on. There are not many places left where we can listen to our inner and outer landscapes. 

But even in the quietest places our minds can be very noisy. In her book, A Stroke of Insight, neuroscientist Jill Taylor discusses another book, Why God Won't Go Away. In it, two other neuroscientists describe their research, in which they monitored the brains of Tibetan meditators and Franciscan nuns to observe their brain activity at the moments in their meditations or prayers when they felt they had reached the peak of spiritual intensity. The findings showed primarily a decrease in activity in two areas of the brain: the language centers of the left hemisphere—causing brain chatter to be silenced—and the area of orientation that allows us to define the physical boundaries of the self—causing us to lose track of where we end and where the world 'around' us begins. That is, the sense of transcendence, spirituality, unity or whatever we want to call it (God, even) is related to a silencing of the discursive mind and a loss of the notion of limits.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to go to a Quaker meeting (or Friends meeting, as they call it). The Quaker way of worship consists of sitting together in silence for an hour. Sometimes a person receives a message and shares it with the group. Sometimes nothing is said for sixty minutes. I returned twice more to these meetings at different times. In one of the sessions there was a brief introduction to the practice, and the woman who described it said that they met in silence to listen to 'God's quiet small voice '. In English (one of the languages in which she gave the explanation) she used the word 'quiet’ where in Spanish she used 'still'. Another translation for ‘quiet’ is 'silent'. My grandmother, a devoted Catholic, passed away a few days after I went to that silent gathering. For years, my grandmother prayed the rosary every night. I have the intact memory of her when she visited us in San Jose: sitting on the edge of the bed, in silence, emitting barely a murmur, repeating the Hail Mary so many times that the words lost meaning and became a single infinite thread: hailmaryfullofgracethelordiswiththee.....I don't remember us being told not to disturb, I do remember that the presence of that silence was enough to understand that noise was not welcome at that moment. As Hempton says, 'quiet is quieting'. When my grandmother passed, I realized that it had been her who had taught me how to pray, not because she had taught me prayers to repeat, but because she had shown me how to be in silence, how to make space for the small and silent voice of God.

Taoists call the space between thoughts the fertile void. Truth, according to Taoism, is found in silence. That which has no name is the beginning of all beings and nothing can be known from that which has a name, from that which is defined or definable. Again language, again limits. It is as if language was a line that emerges from silence, tracing forms that for a moment give the illusion that the vast void is is, exists, is tangible. Language gives silence form, rhythm, texture; it delimits silence in fragments that give shape to the void and make us feel that we can grasp it. Silence is the mother substance, every language is an attempt to put limits to a substance that spills over. Like my fist trying to catch the particles of a floating universe. Nothing is ever left inside. Language is beautiful because it has the capacity to reveal to us the silence in which we float, but language was not meant to be permanent, a good language, I believe, should dissolve back into silence. It should trace forms that fade away, it should want to grasp the floating universe, and also recognize that nothing is left inside the fist. Instead, we became addicted to limits, to feeling that the world is solid, definable and permanent, that truth is what has a name. We gave language the impossible task of telling us what is true, when all language wanted was to make us notice the silence that contains us.

Silence is the mother substance, every language is an attempt to put limits to a substance that spills over.

When my mom was pregnant with her first daughter, she asked her grandmother about her sisters' names. My mom was looking to give a name to what didn't yet have one. My great-grandmother traced with language the form of the name of one of her five sisters and then fell silent. The rivers in her eyes overflowed, and then she declared: we do not speak of that. My great-grandmother's sisters had all been killed during the Holocaust. This anecdote of the names has always been interpreted in my family as my great-grandmother not being capable of speaking about them. But lately I think there is something wise in her decision not to name them, that perhaps it was more intentional than we give her credit for. I imagine the moment when, in an oversight, she let that one name slip out. I imagine the terror of naming and defining them, of exposing them again to the hostility of what can be named, enlisted, captured. In the shelter of silence, my great-grandmother's sisters were safe, they could be eternal. Perhaps my great-grandmother felt that her responsibility as a survivor was to keep the silence—keep from Middle English kēpen: ‘to protect, take care of, look after'. 

I cannot even begin to imagine my great-grandmother's pain. The dimension that the unnamable takes in those circumstances. But I do know that in the moments of my life when my heart has broken I too have found refuge in silence. In those moments, my mind, of course, has wanted to trace the language to try to contain the uncontainable. Skillful as it is, it does so in beautiful, eloquent and convincing ways. A noble effort, but futile; and one I have learned to doubt. Silence, on the other hand, has opened up vast and generous, capable of containing everything, precisely because it does not try to name it. 

I want to clarify: mine is not a call for self-censorship. I know that the stories the mind creates about pain have their place. But the stories about pain and pain are not the same. The words with which we describe the world and experience are not the world nor experience.

Language is comforting because by tracing lines around experience, it gives us the illusion that we can contain it, explain it, control it. Marina Abramovich says that the opposite of silence is a mind at work. The discursive mind works hard to trace rigid lines that give us a sense of certainty, something to hold on to. And the more rigid the thoughts, the more solid we feel the ground we stand on and the walls that protect us are. It is like clenching our fist tight, tight, tight, avoiding opening it so that we don't have to face the reality that there is nothing inside. That there is no ground, no walls, no limits. 

The words with which we describe the world and experience are not the world nor experience.

In Estonia, during winter, the landscape becomes completely white, any reference or landmark is covered by a flattening blanket that extends indefinitely. Estonia is already a particularly silent place, but covered in snow, the landscape absorbs sound and immerses the world in a deep calm. It is a quality of silence I had never experienced before. It is disorienting. My first winter there, I went for a walk one day on the beach near where I lived. The water on the surface was frozen and the water below was moving thick and slow. The sand had been replaced by snow. It was so silent that the traces outlined by my inner voice came through loud and clear—I once talked to a friend from there about this: about how in the silence of Estonia there is no escape from our inner dialogue. I started to walk closer to the sea, but suddenly a paralyzing fear stopped me: I had no idea what I was walking on. I think the sensation of surrendering to silence is similar: we are disoriented by the vastness, by not knowing, by not having certainties. Relating to silence implies relating to the unknown, to what we do not understand, to what has no answer or sense. We fill the experience with words, ideas, thoughts, because it unsettles us to recognize that we are contained by something much vaster, something beyond the limited horizons of our mind (2). 

I am intrigued by the experiment with the meditators and the nuns. Why is there a section of our brain in charge exclusively of giving us the sensation of separation? Why is it deactivated when we silence the inner voice? And whose is this inner voice in the first place? Who is it that crams my head with thoughts?

The irony is not lost on me, of writing five pages to talk about silence. Of filling the blank page with so many thoughts that accumulate in my mind. Perhaps this text is not about silence, but about language (is it possible to talk about one without the other?), about finding ways to soften language, to release it from its rigidity. About the urgency and importance of suggestive languages that arise barely perceptible, without closing forms, without creating limits. Languages that dissolve back into nothingness and take us with them into the refuge of silence—like poetry, which leaves large areas of the page blank, and in which the language is so subtle and open that the voice in my mind is silenced to make room for someone else's voice. Perhaps that is the heart of the matter: opening up to the space where we can hear other voices. Where we can, as Hempton says, feel the presence of everything.

A few years ago I made a short film as part of an observational film course. We had been given only one indication: as far as possible we should avoid talking while filming. For months I accompanied and filmed Maria, an art therapist who worked with children. Maria is a woman of few words and in her sessions the dialogues were minimal. Much of the hour was spent in silence, and she seemed to be able to touch that silence, to observe it delicately, to hear in it other voices that did not speak in words. On one occasion I went with her to the seashore to pick up stones that she wanted to use in one of her activities. I was impressed to see how she gave each stone the same attention she gave to the children. Observing them quietly, feeling their texture, listening. Before this experience I had been through thousands of classes where I had been told that in order to make art you had to have something to say, and I had never felt that what I had to say was all that interesting. But now the instruction was practically the opposite: to renounce to say something. To observe in silence. To offer that silence back. And suddenly I felt that making art was absolutely transcendental, not in order to say something, but to return to silence.

 

In silence—the space free of noise and in danger of extinction—I can listen and tend to my inner voice, but it is also there that I can interrupt it. Let silence silence me. And in that refuge of silence where my mind can lower the guard of language and limits, I can finally listen to the world, make space for those other other voices. That of wind, bird, tree. That of gesture, cricket, rain, breath. That of mountain, stone, ancestor. That of the universe that unfolds in front of me in a strip of light.

From Their Listening, a Temple


A tree rose there. What pure arising.
Oh, Orpheus sings! Now I can hear the tree.
Then all went silent. But even in the silence
was signal, beginning, change.


Out of the stillness of the unbound forest,
animals came forth from dens and nests.
And it was not fear or cunning
that made them be so quiet,


but the desire to listen. Every cry, howl, roar
was stilled inside them. And where 
not even a hut stood


or the scantest shelter
to contain their ineffable longing, 
you made them, from their listening, a temple.


Sonnets to Orpheus I, I
By Rainer Maria Rilke

 

CREDITS

Videos, Photography & Text
Alessandra Baltodano

Costa Rica. 2024

Published in November, 2024
Volume 9, Issue 6

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