‘I still
write books. Perhaps they are silent.’
—Leïla
Sebbar, Arabic as a secret song.
I walk
hand in hand with silence. The words that emerge from me are the offspring of a
silence that has swallowed my innermost self. A silence I prefer to view as
transformative, one that allows these words to take shape from its depths and,
in doing so, dissolve it. Yet, perhaps it is a different kind of silence—one
that quietly haunts the borders of meaning, lurking in the subtle folds of
symbolism, waiting for the words to fade, allowing itself to sink back into the
comforting realm of perplexity and incomprehension.
Silence
sometimes feels like a creature with an undeniable presence. A presence that
breathes out a secret world of meaning that wants to be discovered. This makes
it complex and incomprehensible. There is nothing quite like a room filled with
a lonely silence, that is, a silence shared only with one’s mind. It doesn’t
need any thoughts or any words; it just needs to be. And by being,
to fabricate the reality around it—a quiet dog, an alluring piece of furniture,
a discreet lamp. Do they all come from the same silence? Or do they have a
silence of their own? Does my silence shape the foundations of being, or is it
merely a witness to the unfolding significance that emerges in the quietest
forms?
As a
child, I was often silenced, not literally, but emotionally. What my mind
craved had to be suppressed, forced to find alternative paths, diverting its
energy into nurturing new ways of being. I often feel my silence is an orphaned
child, still preoccupied with an existential quest. I am comfortable in it. I
thrive in it. I actually like silence, my silence. Perhaps I
have grown accustomed to it. Perhaps this silence of mine has become an
extension of a self I aspire to.
Silence
can also be seen as the suppression of words—a hesitance to articulate, to
shape an ‘organized’ ontology in favor of embracing that other realm of secret,
perhaps elusive, significance. A mental cowardice? Be it as it may, it is here,
like a blanket covering things, spreading in time and space.
*
These past
few years of my life, I started connecting silence with unexplored emotion. I
tend to now see it as a hiding place. A locus where things take place and of
which I am completely unaware. When my mind wanders like this, I go back to my
mother and how she kept my biological father a secret until I was 28. Her
silence throughout the years, as a vigilant witness, piled up strata of meaning
that slowly built this very personal reality of the unsaid. When she told me
the truth about my origins, my first reaction was, of course, silence.
Five years
after the revelation, I met my father. I had been raised by another man who
died when I was 24, so I never got to listen to his side of the story, if there
was any he could comment on—I was what we call ‘an illegitimate child.’ Meeting
my biological father and accepting this idea of a ‘new dad’ was joyous at
first. Then, hidden in that silence that haunts me, it lingered as a betrayal.
A betrayal to the man who had always been my dad. The man who had lived
and died as my father. I was suddenly robbing him of his
right. I was allowing the silence that had long veiled a lie to further
shroud his silence, his eternal silence.
This new
father looked a lot like me, or I should say, I looked a lot like him. We had
many things in common: our eyes, some gestures, even the way we walked. Lots of
things, but our skin. His skin was dark, much darker than mine. He would
explain to me this had something to do with our Algerian ancestry, which was
not directly evident in my body. That summer I read Le Premier
Homme a second time.
*
I imagine
silence, sometimes, as a tree. A tree whose branches grow in time toward a
destination that escapes me. If I close my eyes, silence becomes those branches
that move quickly—in a fast-forward fashion—with arachnid intensity. When I
open them, it is already there, surrounding me and looking at me with its
nonexistent eyes. It touches me, and then it stops being a tree to become the
creature I cannot see. Its presence is monstrous but unassuming. Therein lies
its strength and its fragility. The power of silence is it can be without
really existing. It can speak volumes and yet remain
unaltered, passive to the fluctuations of life. This power is also its doom,
its condemnation.
Some
people are afraid of its monstrosity, of its elegant and subtle way of making
itself present. They do everything in their power to banish it, to fill the
void with noise, unable to endure the stillness. But silence, like death—its
close friend—is unavoidable, and it comes and goes as it pleases.
*
Silence
sometimes surfaces populated by faraway noises. That is another kind, I guess.
It is not whole and it doesn’t achieve a mischievous grin. It is the one that
allows our mind to roam with certain safety and to believe that everything in
the world is immediate, palpable, and ever-present; that is, it makes us feel
we are not alone. We will never be alone. Silence has garnered for us this tiny
spot of disguised solitude. We hear the thud of a hammer against metal, a baby
crying somewhere for a little while, an alarm going off and then suddenly
disappearing, someone shouting something to someone else, all part of a
consistent sound that carries a sense of survival and perpetuity. Life goes on
around us, not in its most expansive way, but still, somewhere, periodical,
flowing like the blood in our veins. We are never afraid of this type of
silence. This is the one we tolerate the most. The one that reminds us that we
can still live and feel alone. All good. Nothing happens.
There are
gaps, of course, moments in that continuum in which silence creeps in with an
unexpected, almost debonair quality. It signals something we are not ready to
pay attention to. It whispers (but how could it?) that there it is, waiting. It
reminds us that it is and will always be the architect of form. The master of
beginning and endings. The only one who knows something we don’t.
But we
brush it all aside and keep on going, hiding under the illusion of eternity,
thinking that if there is something of which we should be aware, it’ll come to
us in a shimmery pose, and, of course, with a colorful conversation.
*
All I have
said so far (and will go on saying) only concerns a very personal silence. The
one that travels in one’s mind and establishes a body in space. At times, what
that kind of silence does is refract its possibilities. It alters the
multiplicity of thought and reconfigures a state of the world according to its
own rules, only acquiescing to its own judgment. And so, everything is consumed
by it. Everything falls into its metaphysical mirage. There is no escaping the
sinister glow of the dust that settles quietly on the windowsill or the slow
descent of velvety specks beneath a beam of light.
These are
the most terrifying moments of silence. This is when I feel my existence
stretch to its fullest. As if something were beckoning me over, and all I could
do was observe—my heart full of deep awareness. This is the only time I am not
that comfortable with it. The only moment in our long relationship in which my
body feels uneasy, pushed into a sense of levity, suddenly lifted into a state
of weightlessness that drains the reality from everything around
me.
This is
the darkest kind of silence. There is a psychological displacement within a
physical space. The soul of the unsaid is so strong it becomes capable of
dislocating my sense of being in this greater picture where
silence is. We are one by coercion, if you like.
The pull is relentless and absolute. The mind vanishes or seems to vanish, and
the materiality of form becomes a supple indication of existence. Only when
interrupted by a sudden noise or by words does this type of silence disappear
into a temporal exile.
*
And so, at
some point then, words do come along.
I have
been erecting a kingdom of silence for a long time. In it, everything that is
born wants to find a home of solitude and peace. The natural inclination of my
words is to settle down, to understand the anatomy of their ‘self’ as an
anatomy of repose. All my writing endeavors seem destined for concealment as if
they might find refuge within it. Yet, in truth, they often ignite the
opposite—a restless urge to know, to push beyond what is written, and to tear
away the veil that obscures their innermost substance.
Silence
then amplifies, carving channels through which a want, too cryptic to decipher,
makes its way and expands this land of everlasting quietude. It becomes a
prerequisite to my thoughts. There is no multiverse of silence. There can only
exist one dimension in which silence acts as the purveyor of a promise, a
demiurge that reigns over a territory.
Words flow
effortlessly, unrestrained, and free. They find their momentum, and as they
locate their contrapuntal intensity, their mere appearance institutes a sense
of eternity. Although there is no time to really think about it, there is this
motion in their might that indicates that they ‘are here to stay’ (even if that
is not possible). And when silence comes along again, out of the blue, I
actually get it. It is never a matter of opposition but of harmony, of
consonance. Of yin and yang, of course.
Still,
words seem to fight, not comfortable enough to understand the minute vibrations
of biological (ontological?) solidarity. They have a way of their own, and in
their mindless effort to find peace, they carve out a barren landscape for
their own success. In this back-and-forth, compensation comes, at least, in the
possibility of nurturing time. That is, in the magical, unique experience of
delving into the depth of an existential game: my body alone in a room, settled
in an exploration of solitude and self. A useless endeavor, perhaps.
We could
say words are still scintillating in the incorruptible silence that fills every
crack and knows every corner. Silence somehow completes them, and there it is,
the harmony I was referring to. Except that it sometimes feels anticlimactic.
Why does it seem as if silence says it all? Why is it that a room full of
unspoken reality is a room that could rob the integrity of words? Is this just
a superficial account of the being of silence? Is it just an
analysis of the surface of what actually goes on in the real depth of any
silence, always built to actually expand words and make them live in their
pristine origin? A step away from their first indentation?
There is
always an element of trouble. An element that, at the end of the day, will
speak to us about a false reconciliation, a wrongful move.
And, thus,
silence has one final quality. Perhaps, for me, the scariest one: it makes me
think that no matter what I say, no matter how many words I utter, how many
words strive to escape the grasp of oblivion, doing their most to reach out and
create bridges, they still become—as soon as they are read/heard—trapped in a
terrible cycle of solitude. Forever forgotten, forever silent.
Marina Burana