Fear seeks noisy company and pandemonium to scare away the demons.
—C. G. Jung
I fear silence because it leads me to myself, a self I may not wish to confront. It asks that I listen. And in listening, I am taken to an unknown place. Silence leaves me alone in a place of feeling. It is not necessarily a place of comfort.
The Roman goddess of silence, Angerona, held her finger to her lips as she stood in the posture of both pain and peace. My mother knew herself, and she kept her silence as a possession. It was hers alone. She didn’t have to write about it.
I do.
On Friday, August 29, 1952, a pianist named David Tudor stepped onto the stage at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. He sat down on the piano bench, closed the black lid over the ivory keys, and clicked a stopwatch he held in his hand. During this time he was turning the pages of a silent score. He stood twice, to open and close the piano lid between movements. After four minutes and thirty-three seconds, the pianist stood up to receive applause. The audience was stunned.
This was John Cage’s masterpiece.
“What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds.” John Cage remembered that premiere performance in the Catskills, now known as 4' 33". “You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
Silence introduced in a society that worships noise is like the moon exposing the night. Behind darkness is our fear. Within silence our voice dwells. What is required from both is that we be still. We focus. We listen. We see and we hear. The unexpected emerges. John Cage sees the act of listening as the act of creation.
“It is not a question of having something to say,” he would answer in a fictional dialogue between an uncompromising teacher and an unenlightened student. “Relevant action is theatrical.”
4' 33" was theatrical.
My Mother’s Journals are theatrical.
John Cage’s silent concerto was considered a scandal inspired by another scandal. One act of courage begets another, especially in art. In 1951, the American artist Robert Rauschenberg created White Paintings, a seven-panel exploration of white, 72 inches by 125 inches by 1 1/2 inches, oil on canvas. When it was first exhibited at the Stable Gallery in October 1953, it shocked the art world. There was no acceptable narrative that could be attached to it except, What does this mean?
“This particular group of works,” said Rauschenberg, “were somehow sort of icons of eccentricities…they didn’t fit into the art world at that time. I did them to see how far, you know, you could push an object and yet, it’d still mean something…There was a kind of courage that was built into them in their uniqueness. Most of the work in this collection scared the shit out of me, too, and they didn’t stop frightening me.”
During this time John Cage was deep into Zen Buddhism. He gave a talk at Vassar College, where he said, “There should be a piece that had no sounds in it. One can imagine a breathing space.” In a later interview he said, “The thing that gave me the courage to do it finally…was seeing the white empty paintings of Bob Rauschenberg to which I responded immediately.” The composer saw the White Paintings as “landing strips” for light and shadow. What Rauschenberg executed was something akin to silence.
Rauschenberg was not the first artist, however, to experiment with the power and palette of white. The Russian artist Kazimir Malevich painted a large, asymmetrical white square tipped inside a larger white square. He titled it White on White. He called this departure from painting the visible world “supramatism,” defined as “the supremacy of pure feeling or perception.” He painted his white squares in 1918, the year after the Russian Revolution.
“White is energy—impulse—it is question and answers—it is total in its spirit,” writes Richard Pousette-Dart. “White is something you endlessly return to.”
Wassily Kandinsky calls white “the harmony of silence.”
If John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg are conceptual artists, then perhaps my mother is a conceptual artist as well. Are her “white” journals the contrapuntal gesture of a woman making her own private critique of cultural expectations?
Was Mother creating a parody of women’s journals, the wasted time we spend writing instead of living? Why look back on the page when we can be present with the moment?
Is it a brutal rejection of solipsism, her call for engaging with the world rather than the self?
My Mother’s Journals are a transgression.
My Mother’s Journals are a scandal of white.
My Mother’s Journals are a “harmony of silence.”
I think of the desert. At high noon the desert radiates white. If any place holds silence, it is here. Silence—that is time you are hearing. I feel it as a vibration more than the absence of sound. Yet, as Cage suggests, “there is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot.”
There is always something to see, something to hear. There are ambient sounds all around us, even in silence, especially in silence: wind, birdsong, insects. Perhaps the silence Cage is honoring is the stillness we seek in the natural world, born of solitude, where our capacity to listen is heightened by our ability to embrace quiet.
In the desert I often whisper. Junipers are excellent sounding boards. They have been shaped by wind. Rocks seem to care nothing about what I say, yet when I speak to them, they feel porous, capable of receiving my words and taking them in as part of their history of brokenness.
My Mother’s Journals are capable of receiving my words.
I return to John Cage. During World War II he sought the softer notes. “Half-intellectually and half-sentimentally, when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to be no truth, no good, in anything big in society. But quiet sounds were like loneliness, or love or friendship.”
This feels equally true now as we find ourselves a nation at war again. We are engaged in two wars, big wars with big costs. The only thing quiet about them is that the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have remained largely hidden, denied except to those who are fighting them. This is our national lie, that somehow these wars exist outside of us. America’s War on Terror has silenced us, turned us into sleepwalkers, not only unable to speak, but afraid to speak out. In times of war we can use our voices as a stay against those who are suffering. In times of war, survival depends on listening to that suffering. Cage understood how the unexpected action of deep listening can create a space of transformation capable of shattering complacency and despair. He bravely called for silence as an intentional stillness that could infiltrate our imaginations: “Then we should be capable of answering the question, ‘What ought we to do?’”