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Silence

March 25, 2023
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Upon this wintry night it is so still, that listening to the intense silence is like looking at intense darkness.

—Charles Dickens, Bleak House, chapter 58, “A Wintry Day and Night”

When I was a boy, maybe eight or nine, I could wake up early on a winter morning and know instantly that there would be no school that day — it was quiet. Overnight snow had left the landscape eerily silent and I could hear that silence even before I looked out the window. It was a palpable silence. A silence that filled up the air. 

Later in the morning, there would be the scrape of the snowplow on the street pavement, the glee-screaming of kids on their sleds and, if a sunny day, perhaps the sound of dripping meltwater from the eaves. But for that first moment, a signal from the natural world that the day was different. 

We may think of silence as an absence of sound, but when paid attention to, silence is a presence. As “there” as the sunlight or the children. 

Silence is something we largely miss in the busy world. When I wake up now, normally I hear distant traffic noise or the sound of an industrious neighbor on her mower shaving her lawn. This morning I opened the front door to hear the rattle of a woodpecker and a crow’s caw-caw. The world is noisy. And that’s not even counting the TV that fills the air with its constant carnival barker reminding us of the world’s clattering presence. 

Silence lets us hear our own thoughts. It is the reason Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days, and Moses and Elijah both sought solitude on Mt. Horeb, the Buddha spent five years alone in the forest, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra shunned human contact in his cave. In several Native American cultures, a part of growing up was to leave the community and spend time quiet and alone until you had your vision. 

Silence is the midwife of spiritual or intellectual awakening. It needn’t be the desert or woods; it might be a library, that other source of quiet. 

The quietest I ever remember was a press tour to the Karchner Caverns in Arizona when they were first opened to the public. A group of a dozen or so journalists, both print and TV, were taken into the cave and shown the wonders. And at one point our guide asked us all to stand several feet apart and be quiet. She had all the lights turned off and we were a hundred feet underground with no light and no sound. 

Even in the nighttime, there is light from the moon and the stars. City lights, no matter how distant are reflected back off the clouds and make nighttime at least a dull glow. If I wake up at night, my eyes adjust to the darkness and I can still make out the shadowy shapes in the room. 

But in the cave, there was no light at all. Utter and complete blackness, so that you had to trust your vestibular system and proprioception just to remain standing upright. And in that blankness, no sound intruded. The black nothingness was the visual equivalent of the utter silence.  It was as if you could have a memory of your own death — or your existence before you were conceived.

The Buddha said the only response to the “14 unanswerable questions” is a “Noble Silence.” 

Twentieth Century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said (breaking his own admonition): “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.” “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

And the Hindu sage, Ramana Maharshi, said, “The only language able to express the whole truth is silence.”

John Cage wrote in his book, Silence, “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time.” It is the thought behind his most famous or infamous composition, 4’33”, in which the pianist sits in front of a piano and doesn’t play anything for the designated amount of time.  

For the unthinking, this is a stunt, and further, proof that modern art is a fraud perpetrated on its audience by slick snake-oil salesmen. But for those who understand what is being offered — like the lotus the Buddha gives his student — it is an offer to hear the genuine music of the world — a direct connection with the now. No concert hall is completely silent, but we ignore the extraneous sounds while the piano is playing. If the piano remains tacet, we can — if we are aware — hear all the buzz of reality that is actually filling our ears. 

“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise,” he wrote in Silence. “When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments.”

(Cage was not alone. Several serious composers have written silent music, including Georgy Ligeti and Irwin Schulhoff, although most of these were written at least a bit with tongue against the cheek. And in popular music, Wikipedia list more than 70 songs made of empty air, including by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, but also Wilco, Soundgarden, Brian Eno and John Denver. There have been whole albums, too, including the 10-track Sleepify by Wulfpeck and a 1980 “spoken word” album called The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan — Side 1 is “The Wit” and Side 2 is “The Wisdom;” both sides completely blank. But none of this has the serious and meaningful intent of Cage’s 4’33”.)

When we think of silence, it is usually of the soundless variety. But there is also a very noisy silence, made up of an unconsidered attempt to fill emptiness with meaninglessness. When I listen to most TV news, I hear very little news and a great deal of jabber about the news, a chewing of the cud, so to speak — this is noise to fill space and time and is, in essence, another manifestation of silence, or at least a filling of time and space with nothingness. 

I make a distinction between a silence of avoidance and a silence of engagement. Distracting noise — much of modern culture — is really an avoidance technique so we don’t have to deal with the often uncomfortable realities around us. But the silence of the monks and zen masters is a silence that engages directly with the most meaningful portions of existence. It is a silence to be sought after. 

Such silences are not identical. There is the silence of paying attention rather than speaking; the silence of the pause in the business of living; the silence of spiritual seeking; and silence of finding the center of one’s self. The idea comes up often enough: There’s the silence of God; the Silence of the Lambs; Omertà, or the silence of the made man; there’s the Blue Wall of Silence on the other side; the Silent Majority; the Sound of Silence; a deafening silence; an embarrassing silence; a moment of silence; the right to silence; radio silence; the silence of the grave. 

In some forms of meditation, the purpose is to quiet the mind so one isn’t thinking of anything: silence of thought. Our minds tend to idle at 2000 rpms, with ideas, images, tunes or emotions running random through the braincase, like so many maenads dancing in the woods. It can be hard to get them all to shut up. But the silence achieved is revelatory. 

Debussy said that music was the silence between the notes. And music is certainly what is found in the silence: It grows from out of the silence into what can express what words cannot. 

I remember a late-fall camping trip to the Kittatinny Mountain ridge near the Delaware Water Gap and waking up in the morning to find the tent sagging under the weight of the night’s heavy, wet snow, and the familiar silence of the woods. The snow makes an anechoic landscape very like an empty recording studio: The quiet muffles the ears. 

Now, in my senescence, silence is especially hard to come by, not only for societal reasons, but because there is always a slight tinnitus ringing in my ear, and even when that quiets down and it is otherwise silent, I can hear my own heartbeat. 

Silence is a great seasoner of thought. When it is quiet, you can hear yourself think, and the thoughts flow uninterrupted by extraneous disruption. Silence is worth a great deal, all the more for its scarcity.

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This is an expanded and rewritten version of a posting that first appeared Nov. 1, 2021 on the Spirit of the Senses website. 

Washing dishes

April 7, 2018
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I am not a religious man, but I have a ritual that I perform every day: I wash my breakfast bowl.

It doesn’t seem like much, especially in this age of dishwashing machines and takeout food on paper plates, but my ritual has a long and meaningful history.

There was a year in my life when I didn’t have a job. I lived with friends in North Carolina and did their cooking and cleaning. Every morning, after breakfast, I washed all the dishes.

To others, dishwashing may seem a boring chore, but to me, it was a time to regain contact with the eons. I could stand at the sink with my hands in the steamy suds and stare out the kitchen window at the leaves blown from their trees.

I stared out the window as I worked, mentally walking down the path behind the house past the tin-roof barn and the wide rolling field where old Mr. Price grew beans and tobacco. On the far side, there was a brook that meandered into a small ravine about a dozen feet deep, wet on its north, sunless side, and dry on the south.

And across the granite that forms the streambed as it cascades through this ravine was a long white stripe of quartz, an igneous dike where molten lava once inched up a joint in the surrounding rock and cooled into quartz bright and shiny against the black of the basalt streambed.

And standing at the sink with my hands glossy with detergent, I could travel upstream into myself the same way, finding, eventually, the glistening evidence of my own deepest thoughts: people I had long forgotten, places I hadn’t remembered being, songs I had sung with my grandmother, and sometimes even peace.

And so I rinsed the hot soap from a dish with scalding water and left it in the drain rack. I reached for the next dish and I thought about other times I have washed dishes.

I recalled the night my son was born. I had been at the hospital for his birth, in the delivery room as he entered the world screaming and miry. After I had taken the usual photos and Annie went back to her room for some well-deserved sleep and the kid was cleaned off and sent to the nursery, I drove home and found a kitchen full of dishes, greasy and smeared, waiting to be cleaned. Annie had been in labor almost two days and, though I had been with her through most of it, I also had gone home periodically for meals.

Those dishes and the ones left over from the dinner at which she started feeling her contractions were scattered all over the house. I filled the sink with hot water and divided up the dishes from the pots and set the plates and silverware into the sink to soak. Steam rose from the suds.

I remember that night; I was in knots, loaded with the new responsibility of a child and desperate with the empty feeling that my wife and I no longer could live together. I stuck my arm into the water and my guts began to relax.

I rinsed the first plate and my mind went blank – the blankness of meditation. My belly loosened and my teeth, which had been gnashing through the nights as I slept for months, relaxed. I rinsed the next plate, and it clicked against the first as I settled it in the drain rack. Soothing.

My problems were not solved, but I could look at the dilemmas I faced without the desperation I had been feeling. My frenzy abated.

Dishwashing became my mantra.

I recall camping with the redhead who succeeded my wife. We were staying in an abandoned farmhouse in a hidden valley of the Blue Ridge. Looking out over the balustrade, we saw the cliff across the glade, the rocky stream that poured down the valley bottom, the second growth in the old farm fields, millions of black-eyed Susans swaying in the breeze. As the sun dropped behind the cliff, I took our supper dishes down to the stream and washed them, scouring them with sand from the creek bottom and rinsing them in the icy water. Billions of fireflies made Fourth of July for us. I left the cold dishes on a large rock to dry overnight.

I recall once seeing a twisting globe of blackbirds rise from the trees and stretch out like the Milky Way across the sky. Hundreds of thousands of birds roosting took flight and spanned the evening sky. I dipped the last pan into the darkened suds and scrubbed it.

When the student asked Zen master Chao-Chou for instruction, the sage answered, ”Wash your bowl.” All philosophies else try to figure out logical ultimates, leaving us, at the end, only a useless ash.

No matter if Plato be right, or Whitehead, or Sartre, the one action that we all share is ”washing our bowl.” No matter if everything Wittgenstein ever wrote is absolutely true, we must act as if he never wrote anything. We still must wash our bowls. If everything is explained, nothing is explained, and we are back on square one. Better to wash your bowl.

So, as I wiped the final grease from the stove top and wiped down the counters and cutting board, I replaced the salt and pepper in the middle of the table and wiped off the tabletop.

All that remained was to rinse the dishrag and dump the greasy suds down the drain, setting the washbasin out to dry. That completed, I dried my hands on a fresh towel and began on one of the day’s other tasks.

Once, long ago, when I visited a friend, Judy Crawford, no longer with us, at her mountain house up near the Plott Balsam mountains of North Carolina, I cooked her a giant meal of coq au vin and I made French bread. We had several friends over and feasted, making such a pile of greasy dishes that we all agreed to let the mess sit overnight. ”I can’t look at the kitchen tonight,” Crawford said.

I woke early the next morning and dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen. It was a little after 6, and the sun was hours from rising over the first peak. I filled the sink and started the dishes. Boonie, her cat, crawled around my ankle, looking up at me, squealing for milk. A few robins and a bluebird were scratching at the ground outside the kitchen window. It was quiet – calm and silent. I finished every last dish before Crawford woke up.

”Golly. You didn’t have to do that,” she said when she saw her shining kitchen. No, I didn’t have to, but I enjoyed it. I was at peace.

Most of what we do in our lives is frivolous – watching TV, fixing the car, reading books, waiting for the bus – but the washing of dishes is important: It is necessary. And it is something humans have been doing since before the days when Abraham lived in Ur. Washing dishes is part of being human.