Let’s Not Speak

Keeping Quiet
by Pablo Neruda, from Extravagaria

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Have Mercy

Petition
by Franz Wright, from God’s Silence

Kneeling
at the foot of the universe

I ask

from this body
in confusion

and pain (a condition

which You
may recall)

Clothed now in light
clothed in abyss, at the prow
of the desert
killed
into everywhereness —

have mercy

Mercy on us all

Within this Structure, One is Free

“And in that moment I understood that everything I had gone to Thailand to look for, to search for, I had it already in my singing — the calm, but alertness,the focus, but awareness, and being totally in the moment. When you're totally in the moment, when I'm totally in the moment, the vessel of expression is open. The emotions can flow from me to you and back. Extremely profound experience.”

~ Claron McFadden, from “Singing is the Primal Mystery,” TEDxAmsterdam, November 2010

[Thanks, Kit!]

Be Still While You are Still Alive

In Silence
by Thomas Merton, from The Strange Islands

Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.
Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you

speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?”

An Air Pocket of Total Silence

Excerpt from “The Year of Silence,” by Kevin Brockmeier. Anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008. Listen to this story read by Anthony Rapp from the Aug. 22, 2010 episode of Selected Shorts titled Let’s Not Talk.

1.
Shortly after two in the afternoon, on Monday, the sixth of April, a few seconds of silence overtook the city. The rattle of the jackhammers, the boom of the transformers, and the whir of the ventilation fans all came to a halt. Suddenly there were no car alarms cutting through the air, no trains scraping over their rails, no steam pipes exhaling their fumes, no peddlers shouting into the streets. Even the wind seemed to hesitate.

We waited for the incident to pass, and when it did, we went about our business. None of us foresaw the repercussions.

2.
That the city’s whole immense carousel of sound should stop at one and the same moment was unusual, of course, but not exactly inexplicable. We had witnessed the same phenomenon on a lesser scale at various cocktail parties and interoffice minglers over the years, when the pauses in the conversations overlapped to produce an air pocket of total silence, making us all feel as if we’d been caught eavesdropping on one another. True, no one could remember such a thing happening to the entire city before, but it was not so hard to believe that it would.

3.
A handful of people were changed by the episode, their lives redirected in large ways or small ones. The editor of a gossip magazine, for instance, came out of the silence determined to substitute the next issue’s lead article about a movie star for one about a fashion model, while her assistant realized that the time had come for her to resign her job and apply for her teaching license. A lifelong vegetarian who was dining in the restaurant outside the art museum decided to order a porterhouse steak, cooked medium rare. A would-be suicide had just finished filling his water glass from the faucet in his bathroom when everything around him seemed to stop moving and the silence passed through him like a wave, bringing with it a sense of peace and clarity he had forgotten he was capable of feeling. He put the pill bottle back in his medicine cabinet.

Such people were the exceptions, though. Most of us went on with our lives as though nothing of any importance had happened until the next incident occurred, some four days later.

4.
This time the silence lasted nearly six seconds. Ten million sounds broke off and recommenced like an old engine marking out a pause and catching spark again. Those of us who had forgotten the first episode now remembered it. Were the two occasions connected, we wondered, and if so, how? What was it, this force that could quell all the tumult and noise of the city—and not just the clicking of the subway turnstiles and the snap of the grocery-store awnings, but even the sound of the street traffic, that oceanic rumble that for more than a century had seemed as interminable to us as the motion of the sun across the sky? Where had it come from? And why didn’t it feel more unnatural?

These questions nettled at us. We could see them shining out of one another’s eyes. But a few days passed before we began to give voice to them. The silence was unusual, and we were not entirely sure how to talk about it—not because it was too grave and not because it was too trivial, but because it seemed grave one moment and trivial the next, and so no one was quite able to decide whether it mattered enormously or not at all.

The New Way

The Quiet World
by Jeffrey McDaniel, from The Forgiveness Parade

In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred  
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear  
without saying hello. In the restaurant  
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,  
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.  
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,  
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line  
and listen to each other breathe.

A World without Empathy

“Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it’s important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.”

~ Gary Shteyngart, from “The Russian Immigrant’s Handbook,” interview by Deborah Solomon, New York Times (July 13, 2010)

“Empathy is the mortar that holds society together.”

~ Chuck Close, from “Strangers in the Mirror,” Radiolab Shorts (June 15, 2010)

A Verb of Time

Echology 1
by Sergey Mikhaylov, from Between the Jaws of Time

Echo knows a border, but only one—
The one, which divides sound and silence.
Echo is free to dwell in the both.
Like a bird of passage, that has lost its way,
It flies over the border—from summer to winter— 
And dies away.

- - -

The border between sound and silence
Is composed of black crosses of larks— 
Lost, they have died on their homeward way.

- - -

Echo itself is a dyke and a trotyl.
For every sound breaches the dyke,
Leaving the speaker drowned in silence.

 

Echology 2

Silence gives birth to echo too. But as the echo,
Born by sound, differs from sound by rising
Levels of silence, so the echo of silence
Differs from silence, that gave birth to it,
By swelling sound, that afterward
Reaches that value, which makes it be able
To give birth to echo, that afterward
Drowns by itself...............................
Thus, the one, who has answered "forever",
Is overtaken by silence that shouts "never".

Echology 3

Two silences are given to man:
The one surrounds him,
The other fills.
Man becomes the third one,
Listening as his words echo in those two.

Two words are given to man:
Yes and no.
He becomes the third one—a verb of time,
Flowing between the one and the other.

Two times are given to man:
Before him and after.
He is in between and follows the both.

Two lives are given to man.
He is the difference.

[Thanks Jonathan Carroll!]

No Other Meaning

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm
by Wallace Stevens, from Harmonium

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

[Thanks Mark!]

Opening to Sounds

“Everything supports wakefulness if you are willing to let yourself be awakened by tenderly yet consistently connecting though your senses. Everything. But it requires a brave heart, and a mind that sees the folly in clinging…to anything.

As an experiment, see if you can be here in the pure awareness of hearing, surrendering over and over, again and again, to a hearing that is always happening without your having to do anything or exert yourself at all…opening to sounds and the spaces between them, and to the silence lying inside, underneath, and in between all sound.”

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn, from Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness

Hands

Dłonie (Hands)
by Maciej Jurewicz

A short documentary about silence.

 

@jscarroll

Everything is Alive

Keeping Quiet
by Pablo Neruda, from Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Now we will all count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,
let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.

The fisherman in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn’t be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren’t unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,
if we could perhaps do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I’ll go.

The Ability to Be Still

Excerpts from Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle:

Silence is helpful, but you don’t need it in order to find stillness. Even when there is noise, you can be aware of the stillness underneath the noise, of the space in which the noise arises. That is the inner space of pure awareness, consciousness itself.

You can become aware of awareness as the background to all your sense perceptions, all your thinking. Becoming aware of awareness is the arising of inner stillness.

* * * * *

Any disturbing noise can be as helpful as silence. How? By dropping your inner resistance to the noise, by allowing it to be as it is, this acceptance also takes you into that realm of inner peace that is stillness.

Whenever you deeply accept this moment as it is—no matter what form it takes—you are still, you are at peace.

* * * * *

Pay attention to the gap—the gap between two thoughts, the brief, silent space between words in a conversation, between the notes of a piano or flute, or the gap between the in-breath and out-breath.

When you pay attention to those gaps, awareness of “something” becomes—just awareness. The formless dimension of pure consciousness arises from within you and replaces identification with form.

* * * * *

Do you need more knowledge? Is more information going to save the world, or faster computers, more scientific or intellectual analysis? Is it not wisdom that humanity needs most at this time?

But what is wisdom and where is it to be found? Wisdom comes with the ability to be still. Just look and just listen. No more is needed. Being still, looking, and listening activates the non-conceptual intelligence within you. Let stillness direct your words and actions.

[This handout contains is a summary of strategies developed by Shinzen Young designed to support experiencing these insights directly.]

As If For The First Time

My Name
by Mark Strand, from New Selected Poems

Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.

Listening to Silence

From Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle:

The equivalent of external noise is the inner noise of thinking. The equivalent of external silence is inner stillness.

Whenever there is some silence around you—listen to it. That means just notice it. Pay attention to it. Listening to silence awakens the dimension of stillness within yourself, because it is only through stillness that you can be aware of silence.

See that in the moment of noticing the silence around you, you are not thinking. You are aware, but not thinking.

Thirsting for Silence

From “Author of the Week: Anne LeClaire,” The Week Magazine (April 10, 2009):

If you were to run into Anne LeClaire on April 6, she wouldn’t talk to you, said Anne Stein in the Chicago Tribune. Every first and third Monday of every month, the Chatham, Mass., novelist carries a card that reads, “I am having a day of silence.” Don’t expect to get through to her by phone, either. On those days she also refuses to listen to the radio, watch television, or surf the Internet. “My single determination when I began was not to speak,” she says of a practice she first undertook 16 years ago. “But the more comfortable I became with silence, the more I thirsted for it, and the sounds I’d accepted unquestionably became noise.”

In her new memoir, Listening Below the Noise, LeClaire admits that her experiment in playing mute at first annoyed her fisherman husband, said Julia McKinnell in Maclean’s. LeClaire points out now that her silence has saved him more spats than he knows. “How many times do we jump into an argument when, if we waited a day, our words would be tempered?” she says. Keeping mum apparently puts everything in perspective. “Much of what we think is urgent,” she says, “can wait a day or two.” She’s convinced that holding her tongue has also made her more creative and productive. Every day spent in silence is so energizing, she says, “I feel like I’ve been to a spa.”