For several days when we were young, my sister stayed silent. She was perhaps twenty, a student of spirituality. I was thirteen, a student of surliness. She announced that she would be silent for a while and then commenced to be so. My parents were gracious about it. Seems like there’s a lot more room in the house now, said my dad. We should applaud and celebrate this form of prayer, said my mom. Cooool, my brothers said. Is this permanent?
Eventually my sister spoke again—to yell at me, as I recall—but I never forgot those days. I was reminded of it recently when she emerged from a very long silence at the Buddhist monastery where she now lives, and I asked her what her first words were when she emerged from her silent retreat, and she grinned and said, “Pass the butter,” which I did, which made her laugh, because those actually were her first words after the retreat.
I really wanted that butter, she says.
Is it hard to be silent? I ask.
In the beginning it is, she says. Then it becomes a prayer.
I contemplate snippets of silence in mine existence and find them few; but I find that this delights rather than dismays me, for the chaos and hubbub in my life, most of my sea of sound, are my children, who are small quicksilver russet testy touchy tempestuous mammals always underfoot in the understory, yowling and howling and weeping and chirping and teasing and shouting and moaning and laughing and singing and screaming and sneering and sassing and humming and snoring and wheezing and growling and muttering and mumbling and musing and so making magic music all the livelong day. Which is pretty cool; though it will not be permanent.
But sometimes they are silent and I am a student of their silence: my teenage daughter absorbed in book or homework, curled in her chair like a cat in the thicket of her room; my sons asleep, their limbs flung to the four holy directions, their faces beatific, their bedclothes rippled hills and dells, their beds aswarm with socks and shirts and books and balls; or all three children dozing in the back seat of the car as we slide through the velvet night, their faces flashing cinematically in my mirror as streetlights snick by metronomically; or the way they sat together silently before the silent television one crystal morning, four years ago, and watched two flaming towers crumble down down down unto unthinkable unimaginable ash and dust. Silently the towers fell, and silently my children watched, the twin scars burning into their brains.
I ask my sister questions:
What did you do when you were silent?
I listened, she says. I listened really hard.
Did you make any noise at all?
Sometimes I found myself humming, she says, but it wasn’t any music I’d known before. Which is pretty interesting. Where does music come from that you never heard before?
Good question, I say.
And I found, she says, that it is relatively easy not to talk to other people, but much harder not to talk to animals. Isn’t that odd? Why would that be?
Another good question, I say.
We had peacocks and guinea fowl at the monastery, she says, and I was sort of in charge of the birds, which we had for two reasons. The peacocks someone gave us, which we thought was a generous if unusual gift until we had them for a while, and we realized what loud vain foul mean evil creatures they are, at which point we all thought, What sort of sick human being would deliberately give a peacock to another human being? It’s a punishment to have peacocks around, they peck and screech at you and make your life miserable, but the guinea fowl, now, they’re not mean, no, that’s not their problem, their problem is that they are without doubt or debate the most unbelievably stupid creatures ever to walk the earth, so incredibly stupid that you wonder how in heaven’s name they ever managed to survive as a species, and the times I really really wanted to talk had to do with those guinea fowl, who were so mindbogglingly stupid I wanted to shriek. I mean, if they were three feet away from the henhouse, and somehow got turned around so they were facing away from the henhouse, well, rather than have the inclination or imagination to turn back around, they’d stand there sobbing and wailing, as if utterly lost in the wilderness. Ye gods. You’d have to physically pick them up and turn them around toward the henhouse. You could almost see the delight on their faces as the henhouse reappeared. There it is again! It’s a miracle! Ye gods.
Let us consider silence as destination, ambition, maturity of mind, focusing device, filter, prism, compass point, necessary refuge, spiritual refreshment, touchstone, lodestar, home, natural and normal state in which let’s face it we began our existence in the warm seas of our mothers, all those months when we did not speak, and swam in salt, and dreamed oceanic dreams, and heard the throb and hum of mother, and the murmur and mutter of father, and the distant thrum of a million musics waiting patiently for you to be born.
I rise early and apply myself to my daily reading. Herman Melville: All profound things and emotions of things are preceded and amended by Silence, and Silence is the general consecration of the universe. Thomas Merton: A man who loves God necessarily loves silence. Jorge Luis Borges: Absolute silence is the creative energy and intelligence of eternal being. Book of Job: I put my finger to my lips and I will not answer again. Melville once more, poetically pithy in the midst of the vast sea of his sentences: Silence is the only Voice of our God.
To which I can only say (silently): amen.
It’s harder to be silent in summer than in winter, says my sister. It’s harder to be silent in the afternoon than in the morning. It’s hardest to be silent when eating with others. It’s easy to be silent in the bath. It’s easy to be silent in the bed. It’s easiest to be silent near water, and easiest of all to be silent by the lips of rivers and seas.
The silence of chapels and churches and confessionals and glades and gorges, places that wait for words to be spoken in the caves of their ribs. The split second of silence before two people simultaneously burst into laughter. The pregnant pause. The hot silence of lovemaking. The stifling stifled brooding silence just before a thunderstorm unleashes itself wild on the world. The silence of space, the vast of vista. The crucial silences between notes, without which there could be no music; no yes without no.
I study the silence of my wife. Her silence when upset; a silence I hear all too well after twenty years of listening for it. Her riveted silence in chapel. Her silence rocking children all those thousands of hours in the dark, the curved maple chair murmuring, hum of the heater, rustle of fevered boy resting against the skin of the sea from which he came.
My sister was loud as a teenager, cigarettes and music and shrieking at her brothers, but she gentled as the years went by, and much of my memory of her has to do with her sitting at the table with my mother, the two women talking quietly, the swirl of cigarette smoke circling, their voices quick and amused and circling, the mind of the mother circling the mind of the daughter and vice versa, a form of play, a form of love, a form of literature.
I rise earlier and earlier in these years. I don’t know why. Age, sadness, a willingness to epiphany. Something is opening in me, some new eye. I talk less and listen more. Stories wash over me all day like tides. I walk through the bright wet streets and every moment a story comes to me, people hold them out to me like sweet children, and I hold them squirming and holy in my arms, and they enter my heart for a while, and season and salt sweeten that old halting engine and teach me humility and mercy, the only lessons that matter, the lessons of the language I most wish to learn; a tongue best spoken without a word, without a sound, hands clasped, heart naked as a baby.