viragette

I read that somewhere, years ago. I was young enough to be astounded by the novelty of the idea, and old enough to be doubly shocked that it so surprised me. Because I hadn’t realized that the unspoken could be used so intentionally. And how could I have, really, when I needed to read the banal, literal statement before I could grasp the elusive truth of it? I had believed that the silents bits were unfortunate but unavoidable. A source of unpredictable error, a noise in the signal. How could someone communicate what they meant you to understand by not telling you?! Clearly there are conversational ninjas in Japan.

Since then, I’ve gotten down to wondering how this happens. My investigations have been slow because, frankly, I like the banal, literal truth. I take things apart to see how they work, even though it pains me that when you dismantle something beautiful, it loses it’s beauty. Dismantling a machine to understand how it works is punctuated by moments of exhilaration. Putting it back together is exhilaration mixed with equal parts despair and tedium. To take a living thing apart in the attempt to understand it is almost unbearable, even in metaphor - even if it is only a speculation. It seems as certain as gravity that very little will submit to being refashioned by the hand that has torn it apart out of idle curiosity. This is why surgery seems so bizarre. The idea that a month ago someone reached into my father’s chest and attacked his still, unbeating heart with needles while a machine pumped his blood? And from this he was made whole again? Completely illogical. But, last weekend, he cooked us all chili and blueberry muffins. He was so tall and himself that, without thinking, I backhanded him in the sternum after a smart remark. He turned his head and sort of gasped, sort of coughed out “I’m fine.” The truth of that must be in the silence.

Despite how I know the costs of trying to understand, my relationship to understanding truth is like a nun’s to God. How can it be contained in words? How can I ever explain that? It makes an oddball kind of sense that I could try to talk around it, but what I didn’t realize was that you could fashion the silence to convey your meaning. Shape it, I assume, by surrounding it with what is spoken.

I wasn’t even sure that I could hear that silence. I was listening with so much determination to what was spoken, sifting it and dismantling it even as it was created. I couldn’t just leave it to hang there.  If it was never whole - how could I listen for the shape of the unspoken?

It has occurred to me recently that, when I hear someone recite a poem that they have written, I reflexively listen to the silence. To what is not said. Because I hear them that way, the poet. I listen for that thread that connects the ideas, their words, to them. To the truth. And then I try to keep it in sight. Sometimes I can close my eyes and hear that thread surrounded with words like slants of afternoon sunlight, transforming dust into floating stars. Sometimes it’s more like the flash of scissors. You don’t reach in there, but you don’t lose the thread either.

What I think I hear now in the silence is it’s flexibility. Words can keep things in neat little bows. Like a surgeon’s knife, what is spoken can make the present tangible in a way that defies the reality of the present moment - it’s shape and feeling - it’s intangible, fleeting truth. People think they can defy death with words! Maybe what we leave behind, instead, is the space between them. Because it makes so much sense to me now that what is not spoken breathes life into what is. What is not spoken is the mystery that keeps me listening. It is the allure. It is why a good story never reveals the whole truth, and why a death sentence is written to sound as bland as a lease. The power to captivate is not in what was said, it is in what I heard.

Depeche Mode - Enjoy The Silence 7.4 MB