By Peyton Harvey
Silence may not exist, at least not in its purest sense. According to John Cage, there is no such thing as silence, as we consider that even when we enter into an anechoic chamber, there would be the pulse of one’s heartbeat, and the sound of our breath.
While it might be impossible to escape noise completely, certain places can appear at least more silent than others. A forest lined with Eucalyptus trees, for instance, which is not free from sound, but has the quality of quietness, more so than its surrounding towns brimming with sounds of cars and conversation. That almost-silence might be the closest we can come in the pursuit for silence in its purest form. Liam Heneghan in his essay, A Place of Silence, writes:
This form of quietness, one that is not precisely silence, is characterised rather by an absence of noise or βοή (voe) in Greek, a word that might also translate as clamour, or din. I call the sort of auditory lull that, at the same time, asserts a benevolent presence, ‘avoesis’ (that is, the absence of voe or noise).
In Heneghen’s case, he found avosesis in the forestry nestles of Athens, as he attempted to experience a quieter realm outside crowded city streets. In my case, I have always tried to find ways to hide and seek out silent solitude. In the front yard of my childhood home, there was a Japanese maple that formed a dome of leaves perfect enough to fit my six-year-old self. I would collect snapple caps to use as buttons on my pretend spaceship, and spend hours out there in silence, except for the sounds of the wind, and whatever species of birds liked to come visit our house (my mother would probably know).
I live in Oakland now, where there are trees but also many buildings, highways, loud streets, and frequent fireworks at any given time of day. Only now can I look outside and see all of it in its own particular beauty, trees silhouetted by the sunset in the distance, houses that are in need of new paint, dogs barking, cars driving, but amidst those sounds there is a certain silence, not pure or lasting, but I hold onto it, and try not to cling to tightly.
Silence has been a home to me when I was lost; noise was lesser, sort of pedestrian, too much of reality. Noise was interruption from daydreams- a reminder of the world outside my head. I always craved calm stillness as a release from anxieties.
The Greeks have a word for that particular sense of being still and silent and calm- Hesychia. It’s like a whisper. It’s also the name of a lesser-known Greek Goddess, who is now my favorite. I wish I could live in that word, in its essence, which reminds me of an olive tree. I love their silvery leaves and the oracular wisdom of being in this world longer than any human.
I used to deify silence in a way. I romanticized it as an escape from reality. The self-imposed, figurative silence of my late adolescence, when I heard the noise of living beings, taking risks, even the application of red lipstick, which I was afraid to wear on my lips. It would draw too much attention to me, and the color seemed too sexual, too loud.
Some silence is self-imposed or intentional like John Cage’s 4’33”, a musical composition wherein a pianist sits at his instrument, holding his hand slightly above the keys without making any sound for four minutes and thirty three seconds. Or in Ingmar Bergmans’s Persona , where the lead character Elizabet chooses to become mute, a statement, a refutation of the meaning of her art.
And some silence is involuntary, a deafening of a voice, rendering it speechless and powerless. I lost my voice once, not as a choice but as my body and mind acting upon me. It happened in the midst of an experience which perhaps others could recount more lucidly as I was inundated with narcotics, which helped assuage the pain of chemotherapy, but did take a number on my memory.
As my immune system waned and white blood cell count dropped to zero, I had a seizure and subsequent two-day coma. When I woke up I lost the ability to speak- a condition called Aphasia, a word which, to me, has a similar essence to Hesychia.
It was like a dream when your voice is muddled; you have some semblance of thoughts, partially discernible but unable to be spoken. If I could see the feeling, it would be looking up from the bottom of the ocean, where the sunlight bleeds through the water, then diffuses and dissolves into my veins.
My mind was not particularly contemplative; the world wasn’t missing much from my inability to form coherent words. Yet it was another on a long list of things that made me feel abnormal, not being a part of the world others were living in.
In her piece entitled Gender and Silence, Anne Carson writes- Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography. I adore this sentiment. It makes me feel like I am creating something regardless of whether or not it is my intention. My creation is me- this one self, a transient little speck of stardust. But when I had no voice, no ability to make sound into language, I was less than a self. I couldn’t create; I could only be still, silent.
Even now, as I think those pesky cancerous cells are long gone from my lymph nodes, I still have trouble feeling a part of reality. I go back to that safe silent home, afraid, I think, of living in a way where I truly live, where I speak up, whether or not I have a voice.
In his book, Catching the Big Fish, director David Lynch writes:
Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they’re like poison to an artist. They’re like a vise grip on creativity...You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas.
If I lost my voice in a movie, it might have been beautiful. I could have looked like Liv Ullmann, the elegant star of Persona. I could have been an actress in the theatre, like her character Elizabet, and suddenly lose the conviction to speak. But I was sick, unbeautiful, and a little bit of my mind was lost as well.
As I returned to college after my last in-patient chemo treatment, my mind was still healing, as I think it still is. A fog lingered in my thoughts, and this nagging sense that I must cling to every moment, because it might slip away. People might leave, or I might get sick again and then I will leave them. That feeling manifests as an ever-present anxiety.
I have these things I call emotional knots in my head. My thoughts feel like strings of yarn all tangled up and I have to pick through them gently, until the threads are released. The thoughts slowly transform into sensations, which are more pliable and less painful.
Writing has helped me, and only now do I feel close to my old self. I know I never will be the same as I was before. I’ve grown and changed into a different iteration of myself, even though I will always have a soft spot for my childhood self, launching off to space in her maple tree spaceship.
I like to think, when I go those dark places in which I tell myself that I’ll never get all better, that I’ll never be good enough, that life isn’t worth it anyway- that the darkness is beautiful, and worthy of writing about, like I am a character in a novel.
But all I really wanted was to feel real. And make glorious romantic mistakes like I saw everyone do while I was stuck inside unable to put on my own socks, nowhere to go, no reason to put mascara on un-eyelashed eyelids.
I remember a story about the making of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Jim Carrey had recently come out of a devastating heartbreak, and was in a dark place. The director told him to stay in that place because he was beautiful.
That’s how fucked up the business is, he said. But he stayed in that darkness, and the movie was wildly beautiful in a way that holds both deep sadness and profound joy in the same, entreating hand.
If I were to stay there, I might call it beautiful. I might want to sink into it, succumbing to it like the voice of a siren. But I had an Ithaka in my memory. My Ithaka was lightness in the dark, noise in the deepening silence, life among the deadly, stormy waters.
Healing might be like a wave, asymptotic, never really arriving. I am trying to accept that. I think if I do, then I’ll be enough for myself. And the world would be enough for me.
And then sometimes the world becomes too much, and I want to escape it. I started writing this piece in the hope of celebrating silence as that escape, as I have always been partial to its gentleness, its isolative quality, and its being defined by an absence of something.
It seems so obvious now that I can’t pit silence and noise against each other as virtue and vice. Although many have, including the Ancient Greeks and Christian monks in the middle ages, and artists throughout time.
Professor Heneghan continues his exploration of silence by writing of the practices of these monks, who chronicled their love of hesychastic stillness in the Philokalia:
Down through the centuries, hesychastic practice continues and indeed finds a home in contemporary spirituality. The central message endures: silence is a virtue; noise a distraction.
And one of the authors, Evagrios the Solitary adds: If you cannot attain stillness where you now live, consider living in exile, and try and make up your mind to go.
Escaping from the noisy distractions of life does sound appealing to an extent; especially when we are discerning about what we are escaping from.
Heneghen differentiates between different sounds we find on Earth: anthrophony (sounds generated by humans), biophony (sounds generated by non-human organisms) and geophony (sounds generated by non-biological natural elements).
While I like getting away from sounds emitted by fellow humans, I am drawn to those of nature, both the abiotic and the biotic. To relinquish everything which is not still is first fairly impossible, and second, perhaps not even desirable. I want to be done trying to escape, and try more to understand the world which is presented to me, even if that means making friends with sadness, noise, and the knowledge that I will only get a little time to know them.
I want to arrive at a place in my mind which accepts. Accepts my own imperfections, that I will never be as beautiful as Liv Ullmann or as skillful with words as Anne Carson. Accepts that I am a little less significant than I think am. I wonder how many people can make it there, to be content with being a little dissatisfied.
I’ve been ugly before, the kind that makes you not want to look in the mirror. I had no hair, and my face either swollen from steroids or sunken in from lack of nutrition. Now my face and body are healthier, and I have chestnut-colored ringlets hanging just below my shoulders. But I am still in that upward plane of wanting to look more beautiful, to feel smarter, to be just a little bit perfect.
I met a man who told me I was the most beautiful girl in the world, that he’d never met anyone like me, that I had a certain kind of soulfulness. He said I love you within the first three days of dating, but I never said the words. And with that overconfidence of a seasoned salesman, he decided I wasn’t enough and sought out another iteration of love with another woman. I had thought his attraction was particular to me, as mine was to him. But he chose to voice his adoration outside of what we created together.
I came away more determined to be better, to be enough for someone else. And now I love someone who didn’t say I love you until our one-year anniversary, but when he said those words, I knew they were particular. He doesn’t call me the most beautiful girl in the world because I don’t have to be. I can be in between. And he can love the imperfect parts of me, as I love him.
That feels like enough sometimes, for him to see me and accept my ragged poles. But I need to inhabit that space in my mind which is just my own.
Writing has been providing me a home in that way. It is solitude; it is stillness, except for the kinesis of my fingers.
I feel connected to the sounds of reality, a little more real because my thoughts can be heard by others.
It is part of me now, unable to be extracted. It is my Earthly, molten core, pulsing love and iron into my bloody web of arteries.
It’s a revenge against my once-cancerous cells. Though, that seems a bit too strongly phrased. I strangely have a soft spot for those tiny mutated eukaryotes who were just serving their purpose- to grow and multiply. We (my doctors, my drugs) silenced them, froze their spindle fibers in metaphase, whispered softly to never return. Now the desire to write is malignant in my veins, and I empathize with that blinding urge to create and grow. To write through the pain, to write beyond it.
Rebecca Solnit writes: Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.
I’m writing to a nameless page, in the hope to reach you- the sounds of your thoughts, the images wrapping your head. I’m searching for connection, and an indefinable balance, but I am almost always swinging between the silence of my mind and the noise.
Peyton Harvey is a writer currently based in NYC, and is a second-year nonfiction candidate at Columbia University. Her publications include Reed Magazine's Gabriele Rico award for nonfiction, and numerous book reviews for ZYZZYVA literary magazine's online blog, where she was an editorial intern. She is currently working on a hybrid biography- memoir, exploring her fascination with the actress Liv Ullmann. @peytonlharvey