Silence Nice?
Winter Solstice, 2021
Silent Night won’t shut up. By Halloween it blares. By Thanksgiving it grates. By now it lumbers lifeless like all zombie music in public spheres, no longer registering as foreground sound. Fine by me.
Silent Night only enters my good graces for an hour or so each year, late on the evening of December 24th. Then, looking up into cold abyss of long departed, just arrived light, I love Silent Night.
Then, I think about the terrible connection between the silent and the sacred.
By “terrible” I mean the ancient sense of the word: formidable, powerful, inspiring sometimes awe, sometimes wonder, sometimes fear. Like love.
By “sacred” I mean the sun around which you choose to revolve, your pilot-light-core, your own secret meaning for your own breathing existence; that meaning before which you will bow without resentment and for which you will sacrifice without complaint. Holy without the hypocrisy.
By “silent” I mean what the old librarians meant. The library is your head.
I like not talking on stage, and I like it on screen. A strong effect. Cut my lines. Just give me a light, a mark and a lens. Talk conceals. Silence reveals.
But that’s art. And artifice. In the bloodrush of life - no lights, no marks, no audience - silence is a frightful thing. I avoided it for years. I instinctively feared it. With good reason, as it turned out.
Here there be dragons.
Have you ever considered yourself to be, in some vague but definite sense, different than the rest of the human race, removed from the species, as if you were observing the behavior of aliens, as if the collective wisdom and ways of the strangers into whose world you were (surely by some great mistake) born could not possibly apply to you, leaving you not only free but, indeed, compelled to create your own society of one?
Welcome to my disease.
From boyhood it has been so. A defense? Yes, of course. But also a seduction, one with many charms. How well guarded is the citadel of obstinacy. How secure is the temple of self. Sacred silence is its great enemy.
In sacred silence, and in the practice of it, there is truth. Frequently it is hard truth (not everything will get better, not everyone will be better, all things pass, few things matter, no thing lasts) but always it is fitting truth.
There is a solidity to silence that draws a person back to it despite themselves. Eventually (astoundingly) it really does form up, like old modeling clay, into a shape very nearly resembling peace.
It helps.
You can’t put a leash on it, though. That’s where the “terrible” comes in. Don’t play. Once, in a time of severe moral failing, I checked into a monastery for a weekend of silence. I was living wrong, had been for awhile, and didn’t need a monastery to tell me what I already knew. But I thought the silence would give me, you know, just a lovely little gloss of peace over my failure to actually take responsibility and action. Well. Let me just say - silence is not your bitch. Wasn’t mine, anyway. Damn. I got out of there and turned on some noise! But the noise didn’t work as well. And louder noise worked even less well. I think this is the key to silence’s mum power. Once heard, it can never be unheard. It waits. Silence never insists. Such an annoyingly agreeable bastard.
Increasingly since, and incrementally so, I’ve put more and more silence, in the service of and in the search of what is sacred to my life, into my life. The choices are small; turn off the screen, listen to your breathing, tell Alexa to play nothing. Sometimes pray, sometimes think, most times drift. Still, it is a hard discipline. My silences are neither all calm nor all bright, and rarely do I sleep in heavenly peace. I love myself a lot less. But I find that I can love outside myself a lot more, and something in stillness makes me want to.
Oh love that will not let me go — I give you back the life I owe.
This is the longest night. In the midst of it, despite it, I wish for you a most terrible, most formidable, most awesome and most sacred silence.
I guess we should sing now.
