How to be a Poet

silence

“How to Be a Poet” by Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i  

Make a place to sit down.   
Sit down. Be quiet.   
You must depend upon   
affection, reading, knowledge,  
skill—more of each   
than you have—inspiration,   
work, growing older, patience,   
for patience joins time   
to eternity. Any readers   
who like your poems,   
doubt their judgment.   

ii   

Breathe with unconditional breath   
the unconditioned air.   
Shun electric wire.   
Communicate slowly. Live   
a three-dimensioned life;   
stay away from screens.   
Stay away from anything   
that obscures the place it is in.   
There are no unsacred places;   
there are only sacred places   
and desecrated places.   

iii   

Accept what comes from silence.   
Make the best you can of it.   
Of the little words that come   
out of the silence, like prayers   
prayed back to the one who prays,   
make a poem that does not disturb   
the silence from which it came.

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Presented without comment: an extended excerpt from “The Thing that is Silence” by L.M. Sacasas, topic of which is The World of Silence, a 1948 book by the Swiss philosopher Max Picard.

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Silence, like darkness, tends to be conceived chiefly as an absence, as nothing in itself. Darkness is merely the absence of light and, likewise, silence is merely the absence of sound. Considered this way, it’s tempting to imagine darkness and silence both as negations of some more positive reality. Light is to be preferred to darkness, and sound to silence. We bear this out when, if darkness or silence threaten, we instinctively flood our living spaces with both light and sound.

Not surprisingly, I suppose, it is hard to describe in words what I have chiefly learned from Picard. But if I were to try, it is this idea—which became more than idea, something sensible to me—that silence is what Picard called an autonomous reality, it is something of itself and not merely a negation, and, critically, that it is part of the nature of silence to be a vital, renewing force from whose absence we suffer more than we know.

“When language ceases, silence begins,” Picard explains early on. “But it does not begin because language ceases. The absence of language simply makes the presence of Silence more apparent.”

At another point, Picard puts the matter this way:

“Silence is not visible, and yet its existence is clearly apparent. It extends to the farthest distances, yet is so close to us that we can feel it as concretely as we feel our own bodies. It is intangible, yet we can feel it as directly as we feel materials and fabrics.”

Those were the lines that first helped me perceive silence as an autonomous reality, and they did so simply by leading me to think again about what silence feels like. When in the presence of silence, I do not feel an emptiness, rather I feel something. Something looming, something active, something that is at work on me. Having had over the last few months the occasion almost daily to sit in silence for a few brief moments, I came to describe the experience as the feeling of silence carving away at my interiority like a sculptor chipping away at stone, as if silence were stripping me of all that was not essential.

In other places, Picard’s descriptions of the phenomenology of silence take on an almost mystical quality, and, indeed, Picard is a religious thinker. He writes, for example, “Silence contains everything within itself. It is not waiting for anything; it is always wholly present in itself and it completely fills out the space in which it appears.”

I’m not sure how that sits with you, but it rang true to me. And as I read more and more of Picard, silence increasingly took on a certain solidity. It felt more and more like a presence and not an absence at all. It is, ultimately, a benign presence, but, in truth, it can often feel threatening and unsettling. For, as Picard puts it, “Man does not put silence to the test; silence puts man to the test.” And we do not enjoy being put to the test, however much we might need to be put to the test and would be better for having sustained it.

For all that Picard has to say about silence, he is also quite insistent that language has primacy over silence so far as human beings are concerned.

“[Silence] is creative, as language is creative,” Picard writes. “And it is formative of human beings as language is formative,” he adds, “but not in the same degree.” In his view, “It is language and not silence that makes man truly human. The word has supremacy over silence.”

But he immediately warns that “language becomes emaciated if it loses its connection with silence.” Thus Picard believes, writing in the mid-20th century, that the task before us “is to uncover the world of silence so obscured today—not for the sake of silence but for the sake of language.”

It was at this point that I began thinking about my earlier reflections on language under digital conditions. Perhaps it was the superabundance of speech, words, noise, all the more pronounced since Picard wrote more than 70 years ago, that paradoxically weakened our language and rendered it feckless and ineffectual.

Interestingly, Picard devotes a small chapter to the radio. Friends, it would be hard for me to overstate how much Picard appears to despise the radio. Although, to be fair, it is not radio itself he despises, but how the radio pushed silence to the margins of our experience by filling our spaces with a practically infinite supply of noise. You can imagine as well as I can how the advent of television, portable electronic devices, and finally the internet and smartphones have heightened the situation Picard found so distressing in his own age.

It is the easiest thing in the world to read Picard as a crank, particularly in the chapter on the radio, who could not come to terms with the way the world changed around him. I would encourage us to lay aside such judgments long enough to consider the possibility that Picard is on to something and that we would be better off if we sat with his claims for just a bit.

I mentioned earlier how we think of silence as an absence just as we think of darkness as an absence. Interestingly, in a relatively obscure passage I come back to frequently, Hannah Arendt made the following passing comments about darkness:

“Everything that lives, not vegetative life alone, emerges from darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at all.”

Perhaps, we could just as easily say that everything that lives emerges from silence and however strong its tendency to express itself in sound it nevertheless needs the security of silence to express itself at all. Or something like that. The point is that we may need silence more than we’re willing to acknowledge and despite the fact that we have grown so uncomfortable with the presence of silence.

Returning more specifically to the relationship between language and silence, Picard offers us a series of valuable reflections in a style that is characteristically evocative and figurative.

“Words that merely come from other words are hard and aggressive,” he counsels. “Such words are also lonely, and a great part of the melancholy in the world today is due to the fact that man has made words lonely by separating them from silence.”

“Words that merely come from other words.” Are these not the words we are now most likely to encounter given the immediacy, intensity, and scale of our digital milieu? Words that have not passed through silence, silence which might nurture mutual comprehension and considered responses, but have rather emerged reactively and kinetically, even violently, from other words.

What Picard writes of his own time seems all the more true of our own:

“In the modern world language is far from both worlds of silence. It springs from noise and vanishes in noise. Silence is today no longer an autonomous world of its own; it is simply the place into which noise has not yet penetrated. It is a mere interruption of the continuity of noise, like a technical hitch in the noise-machine—that is what silence is today: the momentary breakdown of noise.”

By contrast, Picard believes, “one can hear silence sounding through speech. Real speech is in fact nothing but the resonance of silence.” What would it mean for us to so nourish our words with silence that they may be described as the resonance of silence. Again, the language is figurative and evocative, but perhaps that this the only kind of language that will do to help us perceive these subtle realities.

Finally, there is one last portion of Picard’s reflections that I will bring to your attention.

Picard asserts that “silence is the only phenomenon today that is ‘useless’.” “It does not fit into the world of profit and utility,” he continues, “it simply is. It seems to have no other purpose; it cannot be exploited.”

This uselessness is precisely what gives silence, in Picard’s view, its healing quality. Consider these words:

“Yet there is more help and healing in silence than in all the ‘useful things’. Purposeless, unexplainable silence suddenly appears at the side of the all-too-powerful, and frightens us by its very purposelessness. It interferes with the regular flow of the purposeful. It strengthens the untouchable, it lessens the damage inflicted by exploitation. It makes things whole again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation into the world of wholeness.”

This wholeness emerges from Picard’s metaphysical reflections on the nature of silence. At another point he speaks of silence as a substance that enters into us. That substance creates a buffer among the various, often conflicting realities within us. Our own contradictions must pass over the substance of silence before coming into contact with one another. In this way, silence is a substance protective of our inner life. Picard also suggests that “man is better able to endure things hostile to his own nature, things that use him up, if he has the silent substance within …. Technics in itself, life with machines, is not injurious unless the protective substance of silence is absent.”

These are not words to be analyzed. They are, I believe, simply to be contemplated, and their truth ascertained only in practice. But they struck me. They struck me for the promise Picard holds out of help and healing and wholeness. We live in a scattering time, to borrow a line from the poet Richard Wilbur. All the forces at play within us and without seem to be centrifugal forces, pulling us apart. I remain interested in understanding the nature of these forces. The critical conversation remains important. But I’m increasingly interested in how we might find and deploy alternative ways of being in the world. What are the practices that will sustain us? Silence may be just such a practice, and we may do well to experiment with whatever possibilities are afforded to us to enter into silence and to allow silence to enter into us.

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