Seeking silence

As the frantic activity of another school year begins, I find myself envisioning the calmness of a life in the eye, rather than the fury, of the storm.  Would it be a respite or simply a deadening coda?

The question made me think of a poem written in my 14-year-old youth, my first and last poem ever published.  It's long since lost, but I remember a couple of lines:

Silence is not practiced as much as it once was
This generation has never felt its soft breath or its heart throb

It's hard to imagine the great void of nothing that is silence, the "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is," in the beautiful words of Wallace Stevens.  We don't like silence.  We don't like to experience its weight and the creeping fear of being absorbed by just our own thoughts.  We go to great lengths to avoid being left with them.

So we engineer an orchestra of white noise and electronic distractions to keep ourselves occupied--I hesitate to say entertained--to fill every nook or cranny of brain space that a stray thought can suddenly find.  We overload our senses and deaden our sensibilities.  We've become noisy walking dead.

Only after reading Thomas Merton did I realize that silence is, in fact, a real practice.  It is an absence that is, paradoxically, the presence of something profoundly disquieting, if you'll pardon my choice of words.

Even in a small town, there is the constant rattle of neighborhood noises:  the dogs that won't be quiet, the engines that won't be stilled, the lawnmowers that buzz and drone, the sirens that transport a crisis, the televisions that intrusively pacify.

In the countryside, I begin to find intimations of silence:  the great dome of the sky, the chilling cry of coyotes through a still night, the unimaginable open space that suggests you're alone.  And the knowledge that the vastness will continue, with or without you.  It takes courage to confront that silence.

Thomas Merton understood that.  His journals describe the most meaningful confrontation silence affords:  knowledge of and beyond ourselves.

Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.  It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

And so, I'm left with another question as I contemplate the demands of silence.  Do I dare? And, do I dare?

Smile when you call me that

One of my favorite classics is Owen Wister's western novel "The Virginian," a tale of a rugged, unpolished frontier cowboy and the softening effect a "civilized" school ma'arm has on him.  He is pitted against an Iago-like nemesis by the name of Trampas, who early in the book refers to the title character by a name that could be considered affectionate or contemptuous.

In a lethal voice, packing a gun loose in its holster, the Virginian tells him, "Smile when you call me that."

Indeed.  The contempt resonating in our labels can be polarizing and demeaning.

You can call me lithe; you can call me slim; but please don't call me skinny.  There's the fire of ridicule in at least one of those descriptions.

And so it is with words that, of themselves, suggest no more and no less than their meanings.  I'm a liberal arts major, for instance.  That means I've studied a broad range of courses in culture, language, literature, philosophy, and other subjects.

I'm pretty proud of being a liberal arts major.  It's a description I like. But the word 'liberal' itself is much maligned, I fear.

In its purest sense, liberal means tolerant of different viewpoints, open-minded, progressive politically or socially.  In its purest sense, conservative means favoring traditional values and customs, cautious and restrained, careful.  Depending on who you are, there's something to admire in either, whichever way your inclinations and beliefs lead you.  There's room for common ground if we happen to be of different minds.

But, I suggest, both terms have been co-opted and corrupted, serving whatever Pavlovian purposes their users intend.  They've been put in a "wrong" and a "right" category, depending on your viewpoints.  A "for" and "against"  A "me" and "you."  A "not on your life will I ever discuss this with you and really talk WITH you" corner.

Surely there's more room for dialog instead of diatribe.  Surely we all have, buried somehwere deep inside us, just a little of the liberal arts instinct to analyze, weigh evidence, and see the possibilities for more than one interpretation. 

But if not, I beg you this:  whatever label you affix to me, smile when you call me that.