The Search for Silence
I love words. And sound. I love loud, bright cities and all the dissonant multi-sensory noise they bring — distant music, street sounds, voices, cooking smells, trains.
Noise can be fertile. Noise can be the birthplace of joy, ideas, and vibrant art.
Ultimately I find myself craving silence and stillness. I crave all forms of silence — auditory, visual, spatial, and inner silence. Silence is the birthplace of all my work.
I’ve joked that my career trajectory over the past 25 years illustrates a clear arc toward silence, moving away from the noise of rock and the endless words of acting to physical theatre, poetry, and instrumental music. It’s as if I’m constantly paring down the need for words and commotion.
Silence is something we source in order to create, that we employ as a tool while we create, and that we place in our work for effect, rhythm and communication.
Defining silence and noise is like defining solid matter — the more closely you look at it, the more space there is inside, and the less obvious it all seems. They are not polar opposites. There isn’t a dualism to silence and noise. All silence contains some element of noise, and all noise contains, deep within it, some element of silence.
Humans with the capacity for hearing will never experience complete silence. Even in a soundproof chamber or the deepest cave, we’ll still hear something — even if it’s just our own blood circulating.
John Cage famously noted hearing two distinct sounds in a soundproof chamber. The first was the dull roar of his blood. He was told that the second, a high-pitched sound, was that of his nervous system operating, but that’s been proven impossible. Most likely, it was just a good, old-fashioned ringing in the ears.
But, that realization that no true silence exists was foundational to his creation of “4:33,” his piece for piano with absolutely no performed music whatsoever. For 4 minutes and 33 seconds, the pianist sits at the piano without playing, while the audience gradually begins to hear the music around them — coughing, shuffling, outside traffic, nervous giggles, outraged grumbling.
Last week, I asked Outer Voice subscribers to weigh in on their impressions of silence. What does it mean? How does it make them feel? What art embodies it?
The replies were illuminating. Readers said silence is:
“The space in which you listen rather than hear.”
“A stillness of the senses.”
“The absence of sound, or perhaps the adjusted quiet of a thousand tiny sounds.”
“When the human quiet allows for the filtering through of soft, precious sounds. Paradoxical, perhaps.”
At one point in his career, painter Mark Rothko stopped providing artist statements for his work, saying, “silence is so accurate.” At the time, he was rankling at the increased scrutiny success brought to his work, as well as the expectations and demands of gallerists, collectors, and the public. He said,
“When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors no critics no money. Yet it was a golden time, for then we had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity and consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I will not venture to discuss. But I do know that many who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where they can root and grow.”
This points toward the fundamental purpose of silence for the artist and the audience.
Space.
Silence, whether it is auditory or visual, is about space. How silence is used dictates how that space is either created or reduced. Well-used silence can give us enormous expanses of space or make us breathlessly claustrophobic.
Silence is structural. Filmmakers and composers use it to mark movements and acts, to dictate rhythm, to create space for shock, joy, or love.
Filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman were masters of both visual and auditory silence. In films like Stalker, Tarkovsky used visual space to represent the liminality between worlds, allowing the camera to linger in excruciatingly slow, long pans or to freeze on empty rooms. Bergman did the same with both the camera and the microphone, his actors bouncing from frenetic moments of fierce dialogue to long expanses of wordlessness.
Swedish filmmaker Mia Engberg is in the process of crafting an entire pragmatic philosophy of visual silence. Her feature, Lucky One, is her most recent experiment in the aesthetic.
She says,
“… visual silence explores the idea that through reducing image and expanding sound in film, a radical new collaborative space may appear, one in which the spectator's own [imagination] is an essential part of the film itself.”
This October, she’ll publish an entire book on the subject, titled Den Visuella Tystnaden, which means I just have a few months to learn to read Swedish.
The great composer Arvo Pärt said of silence,
"On the one hand, silence is like fertile soil, which, as it were, awaits our creative act, our seed … On the other hand, silence must be approached with a feeling of awe. And when we speak about silence, we must keep in mind that it has two different wings, so to speak. Silence can be both that which is outside of us and that which is inside a person. The silence of our soul, which isn't even affected by external distractions, is actually more crucial but more difficult to achieve."
Poet Aram Saroyan seeks silence like a filmmaker — aurally, visually, and structurally.
Perhaps the shortest poem in the English language is Saroyan’s four-legged “m.”
Poets like Allen Ginsberg, Carol DeLugach and Andrei Codrescu have given us one-word poems. Saroyan’s poems are some of the most playful, using fingerprints, typefaces and spacing in an attempt to convey what might be as close to silence as any writer can get and still… write.
That said, Ginsberg wasn’t without hesitation.
“I tend to distrust one-word poems, or very arty sort of, you know, one-line-a-page poems, unless somebody wrote it that way, decided to write one line a day. I tend to distrust poems that don’t look accidental on the page. The more accidental they look, the more curious I am. What kind of accident happened?, or what did the guy see?, or what did the girl know, at that moment?”
Not all minimalist poets, or poets who pare work down toward silence, are one-word poets. William Carlos Williams created exquisitely spare lines, and poets like Robert Creeley and Turner Cassity play with spelling, grammar and space.
Painters like Robert Ryman, Mary Corse, Robert Rauschenberg and Jo Baer created entirely white (and also entirely black) paintings. Some of them, Ryman and Baer for example, brim with stillness. Others, a few of Sam Gilliam’s and Rauschenberg’s black paintings in particular, are like choppy seas of silence, somehow simultaneously loud and quiet.
Jennie C. Jones has a distinctly contemporary grasp of visual silence.
Isamu Noguchi, his mentor Constantin Brâncuși, and artists like Elizabeth Catlett and Donald Judd magically created silence in physical space with sculptures that emanate a stillness born both from the artist and the material itself.
Noguchi’s In Silence, Walking and Charlotte Posenenske’s Large Revolving Vane seem to sit at opposite poles when it comes to density, mass, and form. Yet each exudes silence the best way it can be communicated — without words.
Silence can be many things, and it can mean many things.
Outer Voice readers said:
“What silence means to me most is growth. If you can find yourself letting it create silence within you, it is a place where you fight battles in the subconscious that carve pathways to healing and permission to grow.”
“Silence is sleep, a kiss, being in the garden, hiking, cleaning, relief from the madness inside my brain yet at the same time can be an invitation to indulge vices, activating to anxiety, enhancing of fear and escalating to compulsion and obsessiveness. Silence can build strength when people have the courage to sustain it.”
As artists and audiences, our personal relationship with silence dictates how we use it and how we react to it.
For some, it’s a bottomless well of inspiration, a home to return to, an eye in the hurricane of modern life’s demands. For others, it’s oppressive, frightening, boring, a stifling echo chamber of very loud thoughts.
Artist Stefan Berg created a wordless graphic novel about Glenn Gould, called Architecture of Music.
He said the book explores,
“The contrast of black and white, positive and negative space, line and texture, size, shape, orientation and sequence are each considered in relation to tempo, speed, both audible and visual noise, and most importantly the silence of sound (Gould is best known for his perfectly timed empty spaces).”
“The turning of the page is what is most significant about the wordless novel: the power to control a succession of images in time. In this way it is akin to the silent film. Wordless novels are filled with language; it is in the reader's hands and minds to develop their own interpretation, and that goes for an exhibition of images on a gallery wall as well.“
We know that wordlessness does not equal silence, nor does it mean a lack of language. Berg reminds us that the language is there — it’s always there — it’s just up to us to interpret it. Yet another use of silence to create space, in this case the freedom to unpack meaning for ourselves.
Our relationship to silence is a complicated one. We all seem to crave it in one form or another, yet we lead lives that move in the opposite direction. We scroll endlessly, consuming chatter, advertising, empty distraction. We’re captive to the 24-hour news cycle and our addictions to outrage, offense, and argument. We binge watch shows we’ve seen a hundred times, and cue up Marvel and John Wick movies for (very enjoyable) mayhem and a cacophony of images, sounds and violence.
We take noise with us everywhere. We bring speakers and phones, loud boats and ATVs into nature, polluting it with unsolicited noise upon noise. We have speakerphone conversations in public, stream shows on our phones in restaurants, turn on our devices the moment the fasten seatbelt light goes off.
We are noise addicts.
Why? I propose it’s because silence is uncomfortable. It is rich and fertile and dark, and it’s also scary. We have to embrace the discomfort of silence to break our addiction to noise.
Silence disrupts the profitable noise of buying and selling.
To break our addiction to noise, we have to embrace two opposed concepts: boredom and awe.
Boredom, we’re learning, is actually a rich source of inspiration and fulfillment. The problem, it seems, isn’t the boredom itself but rather how we choose to fill that time. When we embrace it, boredom gives us space to dream.
Awe and silence are inextricably linked. Not only do we approach silence with the awe that Arvo Pärt mentioned above, we also experience awe through silence.
In a great conversation between former Dominican priest Matthew Fox and Buddhist Lama Tsomo, Fox says, “I think all awe renders us silent, and therefore all experiences of awe are this quick trip back to no sound, no word, to nothingness.”
He adds, “I think all creativity comes out of an encounter with silence. And when you think about what is an experience of awe … it shuts you up.”
Embracing silence may not increase our sense of awe, but it certainly increases our sensitivity to it and our ability to stop and notice it.
If we come to nature without our noise, if we come to the canvas or camera, the pen or the piano without bringing the noise we use to distract ourselves, what are we left with?
Ourselves.
And I’m willing to bet that we are enough.
