Unfortunately, there comes a point in every research project where one’s own personal interests are a liability. One loses the scent of the original project, sometimes never to return. For a year or so, I thought I might expand my “Experimental Encyclopedia” to include not just famous silent moments but also famous silent persons or groups of silent persons.17 But I got hung up on one thing or another, for example some fascinating and finally fruitless investigations about Abbas Diadochus, fifth-century bishop of Photiki. As I had throughout my project, I found myself less interested in the breadth or completeness of my research and more interested in the curlicues of interesting shit I learned paging through moldering books and obsolete science.
At the same time, the researcher is a searcher. He never quite knows what he’s looking for, or why. After I accepted the essential dilettantism of my project, I still mulled over its subject with genuine wonder. In the beginning, I thought silence was generic. But soon I saw the inverse. Sound was generic. Sound was obvious. But silence. There were so many forms of it. Principled silence. Practical silence. Necessary silence. Ritual silence. Religious silence. The silence of incalculable grief.
Let me expand:
PRINCIPLED SILENCE
Pythagoras himself was not a silent man, but back in ancient Greece, he taught legions of young men about the rigors of silence. He called his students “listeners.” For five years at a time, Pythagoras’s students observed complete silence. Their teachers would ask them questions they were prohibited from answering, and these questions banged around in their heads for five years, so that by the time their silence was over, you can bet they had some hefty answers. Of course, once the students graduated, they found themselves at a stark conversational loss with everyone they had known before. People wanted the listeners to explain what they’d learned by being silent for five years. But you just really couldn’t explain pure silence. It was like trying to send a parcel of light through the mail. And anyway, why should there be a shortcut? If you want to understand, why don’t you stop talking for half a decade? It was soon decreed among Pythagoreans that it was not lawful to extend to the casual person things which were obtained with such great labors and such diligent assiduity.
Tell me about it.
THE SILENCE OF FEAR
In the Gulag, a brilliant middle-aged woman who had once been a music teacher in a noted Baltic conservatory was serving a decade of hard labor for some transgression against the Communist Party for which she was never formally charged but was sure she was guilty of anyway. Some sort of thought crime, some manifestation of her rage. After long days of crushing big rocks into smaller rocks with a medium-sized rock, the woman would spend her free time in the barracks working on her pet project—a silent piano. She made the body of the piano out of a previous prisoner’s wooden crate. The keys she labored on for months apiece, filing down thin planks and tongue depressors. The box was solid, as were the keys—white and black—as responsive as real piano keys. It’s just that the instrument didn’t produce sound. Well, at first it didn’t. And then one day she was able to play the entirety of the Handel Variations. She realized that she had developed an ability to create silent music. And thereafter, long after she returned to her life of privation, she always referred to herself, much to the surprise of others, as “lucky.”
THE SILENCE OF SOLITUDE
Hermits and recluses fall into this category, though you could also call their silence principled, practical, or ritual. On a personal note, years ago, after a long depression, my friend—the buddy from Loudonville, whose Mini Cooper I stole—decided to go live in the desert for a while, to see if it would help him. He’d recently lost his parents, his girlfriend had left him, and it was just a bad time. That, plus he was born sad. So he went to the desert. He brought a tent, many books, sufficient water and food. During the day, he sat and listened to the silence. Now, he had expected it to be silent in the desert. But he was surprised at how quickly the silence began to gnaw at him. He felt that he was being confronted by the essential indifference of the cosmos. And so, to his chagrin, he started making up little songs, things like “You Don’t Love My Big Toe” or “Someone’s Abusing My Appliances.” These songs embarrassed him not because they were polluting the silence he had come to study, but because they were so childish. After a while, my friend packed up his things and headed home. He had learned something. He didn’t know what he had learned, but he felt better.
I think what he learned was that he would always be sad.
A man steps into the room in which I’m sitting and says, “Your father is dead.”
“The hell he is,” I say.
“He died three years ago. Here is the death certificate. Otto Schroder. Isn’t that your father?”
The room I’m sitting in is dim, with no natural light. I bend toward the paper he slides toward me without touching it, despite the fact that my handcuffs were removed hours ago.
“No,” I say.
“No? That’s not your father?”
I stare at the paper.
“No,” I say again.
The man sits across from me. “Do you know there’s a warrant for your arrest in three states? New York. Vermont. New Hampshire. Depending on the statutes, you could get charged with kidnapping in the second degree. The maximum for that is twenty-five years.”
I say nothing. My head begins to spin.
I have been sitting relatively motionless in a holding room somewhere in the basement of the Nashua Street Jail, with no water, no food, and no human contact. When they first brought me into this building, I was ushered into the room with a virtual cortege, a crowd of people. This graying man was not among them.
“Who are you anyway?” I say.
“Lieutenant Stavros. Who are you?”
“What sort of name is Stavros?”
“Greek. What sort of name is Schroder?”
“German,” I say. “I’m German. A resident alien. Isn’t my confession sort of just a formality at this point? I mean, you have my passport, don’t you?”
“Tell me about Erik Schroder. Tell me why you’re running from him.”
“Sure.” I shrug. “I’ll tell you everything.”
“What?” The man seems caught off guard.
“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
“OK. But could you wait a minute? I need to go get a couple people.”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
The man stands. “I’m sorry about your father,” he says. “Would you like me to get the chaplain for you? We’ve got a good one.”
“Why would I? I’m totally fine. I don’t believe your document is authentic.”
The man looks baffled. “You don’t?”
“No. It’s some kind of ploy. Psychological torture. I want its authenticity confirmed by an independent party. And,” I say, raising a finger, “I want to speak to my daughter.”
The man hesitates for a moment.
“Are you serious?” he asks.
“Yes, I’m serious.”
He’s looking at me closely. “I’ve got to be honest with you. It’s going to be a hell of a long time before that happens. Your daughter was the victim of a crime you committed.”
“That’s not how I see it.”
“It doesn’t matter how you see it.”
“I’m her father.”
“You’re in jail. You have the rights of a person in jail. Those rights aren’t the same as the ones you had yesterday.”
I pull myself up as straight as possible.
“Then I would like to speak to a lawyer,” I say. “A good one. Your best.”
The man sighs and reaches for the door.
He leaves.
He does not come back for a long, long time.
THE SILENCE OF MOURNING
Have you ever heard of Bob Kaufman? He was a poet no one’s ever heard of. He once took a legendary vow of silence that lasted ten years.
Born to a Catholic African-American mother and a German Orthodox Jewish dad, Bob Kaufman lived a revolutionary and drug-addled life as a beatnik in San Francisco in the 1950s and ’60s. Although his biography is full of disappearances and lacunae, some of us know him as the author of Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness or maybe the Abomunist Manifesto? He was always writing and reciting poetry in unlikely places. Rooftops. Street corners. The day President Kennedy was shot, Bob Kaufman took a vow of silence. For ten years, he spoke to no one. He recited no poems. Nobody even knows where the hell he went.
The day the Vietnam War ended, Bob Kaufman walked into a coffee shop and recited a poem, gifting his most glorious moment to a bunch of tired strangers. After that, his life cycled through periods of methadone addiction, poverty, and creative inspiration. It was as if he was trying to erase his life as he lived. He wrote his poems on napkins and newspapers, things that blow away. “I want to be anonymous,” he once declared. “My ambition is to be completely forgotten.”