Snows and Silences
once a birdbath, now a snowcone
Snows and Silences
The snow which has fallen, flurried, mounded, masked, morphed and so firmly adhered to and re-shaped our lives here in Scotland in recent days, could be considered a kind of meteorological solo. It has afforded us an opportunity to live very differently for a period of time. Nature has been an inescapable force in our lives and we have had to submit to its power. Normal routines have been suspended, priorities have radically shifted, and there have been, for some of us at least, greater opportunities for silence.
Just as there is more than one type of snow, so there is more than one type of silence. Sara Maitland, in her extensive and fascinating enquiry into silence*, identifies two seemingly incompatible traditions: the ego-surpressing, self-emptying silence pursued by the early hermits and later by the great monastic orders and the self-expressive, ego-affirming silence sought by the romantic tradition and valued as a means of accessing emotions and facilitating the expression of individuality and creativity.
My own solo seemed to reflect both these silences at different times. The early part of the day was taken up by heightened sensing, intense experiencing of the environment and the almost frenetical creation of a linguistic response. In contrast, the later part of the day took the form of a meditative walk, when it was enough to meander at a slow pace through the environment, not thinking about very much at all, not needing words.
Sara Maitland sees silence very much as a positive thing, countering the prevalent western view of silence as a negative, a deficit or absence, “something waiting to be broken”. She positions silence not as the opposite of language but as a separate state. She notes that recent neurological research shows that while language is processed in the cerebral cortex, silence, or at least the areas of the brain engaged by meditation activity, is processed in what in evolutionary terms is an older brain area, the sub-cortex or brain stem and limbic system. This in turn suggests the existence of a pre-linguistic or semiotic state of consciousness,
“It seems to me that silence offers those people who want it a return journey into the semiotic, the seedbed of the self.”**
When words “fail” us or we experience ineffability, could this be because we are experiencing the world from a different, more ancient, consciousness? Is it possible to experience reality without the mediating effects of language? Language defines us as humans and plays a triumphant role in defending our egos. Who are we and what does it mean when we cannot access words? I am beginning to get the message that the more extended our concept of self and the more permeable our ego-boundaries, the more likely we are to find out.
*A Book of Silence: a journey into the pleasures and powers of silence
Granta 2008
** ibid, Pg 281
