Thoughts on Silence & its Breakage, Partially in Response to the Theses

Thoughts on Time, Silence & Breakage, Partially in Response to the Theses

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“While activism reacts to crises with speed, organizing intervenes by slowing time down.”

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In the Bhagavad Gita a battle is about to begin.
Arjuna does not want to kill his kinfolk the enemy.
“Hold on,” he says. “Should we or should we not kill our kinfolk the enemy? Let’s discuss.”
Krishna comes. Everything pauses. Time, everything.
Arjuna says, “Your birth was later and the birth of the sun was earlier.”
Krishna says: “Fighting is your dharma.”
They stop to talk about it. The battle is still on pause. Within the pause, it is revealed that...
Once their discussion stops, time unpauses I guess.
Should we or should we not kill our kinfolk the enemy?
Is this an allegory or what?
Pause. Discuss.

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Most machines that people invent are invented to amplify the voice. The microphone is just the one whose stated purpose matches its use.

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It took me time to learn that my best friend was the person who could be silent with me. The longer we know each other the more time we are able to spend in silence. Our secrets become friendly and domestic. Our silence, cultivated, turns it into a kind of play, an erotics of proximity and a tender taking-in-hand of discrete bodies. This is “the manifestation of trust, which is to be together without demand for a time”. Our silence is a rite. An abbey is a quiet consecrated house. I never lost my first awe.

The genius of ritual is to unite people across difference, not by erasing their individualities (though it may) but by inventing an untransportable commonality. The best rites are nearly impossible to explain to other people; they cling to a time and a place with a stubbornness that makes them hard both to explain and to sell. Test this thesis: ask someone who is not a trained storyteller what their most meaningful experience in college was. Like dreams, these rites are too fragile to survive language. It will conclude with “you had to be there”. To read an interesting account of such is to read a fabrication. The ash ritual only interests people in its theatricality, its dragginess. The content bores them. The content stays safe.

I once tried to come up with a list of places in which silence (no dentist music) took place in public. This list went:

1) Shamdenominational Moments of Silence in high school (confusion)
2) Vigils for cauzez and dead people (sadness)
3) Planned Parenthood waiting rooms (terror)
4) A meditation session I went to once. (pleasant)

This list is mostly bad. It got a little longer and extraordinarily better when I came to Olympia and started going to Quaker meetings to experiment with organized silence. And they’re only listening for God—imagine, if you were listening for everything! If I were you I would go there to investigate. It’s very good. To watch the flow of thought through an hour is good. The nacre of placelight on the wall. To watch the hours over weeks add up, graceful good abacus, is to count up to wholeness. I stopped going when I stopped hurting a little.

Going back to the emails I wrote to my quiet friend about my first weeks in Olympia:

”In the hour of silence that is meeting I don't think there's been a meeting where I haven't cried yet…But there's something wonderful about being able to cry in front of people. The same kind of wonderful, in a way, that being naked in a lockerroom full of women is. It's not that you're any less fucked up or that your body loses any of those qualities that cause you (not you: me) to loathe it outside that separated sphere but that to be naked among naked people is to be stripped of pretense. To be reminded of everybody's meat-animal weakness. You'd be amazed how many grown-ups cry at meeting.”

Their silence contains such fierce care it’s hard to face. I stopped when I couldn’t face it.

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a famous story: when the bomb goes off, Oppenheimer quotes...
pause

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Silence is so good. Its resistance to commodification is unparalleled.

So far as injustice forces us to be other than silent, we should be pretty mad.

Syke! (Psyche!). I love speech like I love my backbone.

Silence is just where I go to when I’m out of breath.