Gimme Silence or Give Me Death
Because without silence, there is no life
You’re in your backyard, enjoying a book, a drink, or a conversation; heck, maybe all three at the same time if you're hanging with a mannequin.
Everything seems fine, but then the leafblower next door stops and you're suddenly like, "Man, everything sucked a moment ago and I didn't even realize it." A calmness rinses your neurons, like you've just received news that your maniacally scorned ex-girlfriend with a castration obsession has moved to Australia.
The relief you didn’t even know you needed feels great.
Now, swap out that leaf blower for the tornado of thought that funnels through your head.
You get the same sense of relief when that tornado evaporates.
It’s that rush of silence you get when you sit with the first drink on Friday after work. Or maybe when you collapse into a lawn chair on a nice afternoon (without that jack-off with the leaf blower next door). I often get that rush when I plop into the pew for Mass, knowing that I can't go anywhere for the next hour, so I might as well relax and be resigned to whatever comes (endless announcements; bilingual detour; a rogue liturgist hijacking the Mass).
This thing I'm describing--this thing everyone except the American Psycho-ish among us experiences--ain't just "silence." To call it "silence" is like coming out of the Sistine Chapel, nodding knowingly like Michaelangelo needs your approval, and saying, "It didn't suck."
The word “silence” doesn’t cover it any better than a bikini covers that body positive woman at the beach. “Silence” implies the mere "absence of noise," like "evil" is merely the privation of being.
I'm talking about more than silence, something more manifest--a presence, a thing with its own existence and merit. Just as the devil is the manifestation of that (otherwise philosophically-correct) notion that evil is merely the absence of being, this thing I'm describing is a presence, a thing with its own existence and merit.
There is no word for it in English, which is shocking, given English’s versatility, depth, and spectrum—from sublime genius to hellish moronic (Shakespeare to Nicki Minaj).
The Japanese call it ma, and someone lacking in ma is called a manuke, which loosely translates to “fool."
My Uncle Lao-Tzu wrote about it in Book 11. He says the spokes of a wheel don't matter as much as the hub of emptiness where they join, and the clay pot is worthless if there's no empty place to pour the liquid, and a house without empty space is unlivable.
It’s from empty space and silence that all things emerge. Things and noise come out of space and silence, which means space and silence are generative: primordial for all other things that exist. To think of them as mere “privations” of matter and noise is a flip-flopped perversion that would make Aleister Crowley cackle with glee.
It’s in space and silence that relations are formed, and from those relations comes the world of explicitness where we spend our everyday existence.
"Relations are primary,” says McGilchrist, "and form the bedrock of our experience." It’s a truth that quantum physics has discovered.
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Eric Scheske
