While I write, I listen. The press of the keyboard, the sound of my shuffling feet, the subtle background music of my headphones. It has never been just me and my thoughts, it can never be just me and my thoughts; I won’t allow it. I enjoy the occupancy of noise too much. I find comfort in it.
When I write poetry or essays I tend to find myself drawing from the same pool of themes depending on what I am inspired by in that particular time in my life. My obsessions translate onto paper like blood through bandages.
Right now, particularly, I can’t stop writing about silence. It is in everything I do.What is it about silence that intrigues me so much? Why can’t I handle it, but at the same time, feel like I need it? Perhaps there is something beyond the metaphor; but right now I found that the answers aren’t so much in my fluctuating span of emotions, but rather in something a little more reliable: science.
As it turns out the fear of silence is psychological. A universal social coping mechanism. How many time have you found yourself bumping into a friend, making small talk, and then panicking when the both of you stop talking? We mindlessly babble for the sake of making the experience less awkward with the idea that your yapping is somehow what the other person wants too? We rarely bask in the rarity that is noiselessness because background noise has always been with us, so we become uncomfortable when it gets taken away.
The meaning of silence is the absence of intentional sound. Because if you think about it, is there really such thing as pure silence? Silence is the absence of the foot tapping, the headphone music, the background noise of the television; the things we do without realizing it.
An example of this phenomena is in the work of a composer named John Cage who made a living in creating noise, as well as creating the lack of it. Cage intentionally created pieces of music with long periods of silence. His philosophy being that the activities that make up music must be seen as a single natural process. And in turn, would regard all kinds of sound as potentially musical; even silence.
He even composed a piece named 4’33’’, in which the performers would remain utterly noiseless on stage for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. In his concerts, these long stretches of silence would make people uncomfortable, causing them to cough, shuffle in their seat, and whisper to their neighbor. There was too much empty space. There was not enough noise. The tension in the room was palpable, I would imagine, but to Cage it was exquisite. In a book he wrote titled “Silence” he refers to the silence as poetry; an artform in itself.
The modern plague of noise pollution is one that is getting to our heads. So how can we learn to be okay with emptiness? To take time to bring a form of mental clarity, even for a moment?The solution is to make it a priority. I was once told by a therapist that in the intensity of our lives, we unintentionally neglect our bodies.
Take a moment to be still. Shut the television off while you’re washing the dishes, take a walk without your phone, don’t feel the need to talk just to fill empty conversations, take deep breaths in the stillness of your bedroom; and learn to be okay with yourself, your thoughts, the people around you, and emptiness. So eventually, we find ourselves not shuffling in the silent symphony, but hearing the music.
