• Maria Tumarkin

Image: Jez, Rani and Amrita / flickr

27 February 2010In this essay, first published in The Age, Maria Turmarkin explores what being silent or saying something actually means.

In the upstairs food court at Melbourne Central, which I visit once in a while for some quick, under-$10 seafood, two teenage boys opposite me use their  iPhone to ascertain if Hitler was, in fact, part Jewish. They are loud enough to make a deep-fried calamari stop halfway in my throat.

The boys are a picture of contentment and why shouldn’t they be — their iPhone is bursting with all kinds of salacious theories, their  cola cans are icy and their souvlakis are dripping with garlicky sauce. It is clear the boys’ quest is unlikely to be fuelled by an overriding concern for the millions of Hitler’s victims or for some kind of irreducible historical truth, but beyond that I do not know what to make of them.

There is, after all, nothing obviously malicious (mildly obscene, yes, but not sinister) in the two boys dipping their toes in the vast pool of factoids, now instantly available to them courtesy of the iPhone, anywhere and anytime. Perhaps their interest in Hitler’s secret ancestry is random and they are merely doing a capabilities check on the uber-gizmo — can it really do just about anything? Or maybe the boys are savouring the possibility of a paradox, of a startling incongruity, because isn’t Hitler being part Jewish a bit like Hilary Duff being (apparently) a virgin?

‘‘Dude, this is interesting. Hitler was not a Jew but ...’’

The boys get up, immersed in their discussion, continuing to lean unconsciously towards the iPhone as if it was the actual shared centre of their gravity. They walk away leaving me with my calamari and my silence.  Even after they are gone and I have all the time in the world to contemplate what has just happened, I have no idea whether I should have said anything — You always talk about mass murderers over lunch, boys? ... the man killed  6 million of my people ... why don’t you read about the camps instead of this puerile crap ...

In another place and another time — in, say, Western Europe for large chunks of the last century or in the postwar Australia anxious not become a ‘‘tip for the refuse of Europe’’ or in the Soviet Union of my childhood where boys like these would have talked (just as loudly) about ‘‘kikes’’, not Jews — I would be pretty sure what saying nothing would mean. The silence of complicity and cowardliness, the great lubricating silence of the ‘‘silent majority’’.

In another time and another place, I would have, or so I hope, tried to find words to spook the Dumb and Dumber, make them feel uncomfortable or maybe (in a time-honoured tradition) turn one against the other. But in this place and this time I feel much less sure-footed about my reactions, much less certain about what being silent or saying something actually means.

In the public arena silence is more often than not associated with all kinds of dark and unsavoury things — the denial of truth and exercise of power, with fear, oppression or complicity. John Pilger, for example, called his recent Sydney Peace Prize acceptance speech ‘‘Breaking the Great Australian Silence’’. The term itself was coined by the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner in his 1968 Boyer lectures to describe the all-pervasive forgetting of the indigenous Australians’ past and present.

With his customary oratorical zeal, Pilger enlarged Stanner’s vision of the Australian silence to encompass a tradition of apathetic withdrawal propelled by our fear of strangers and strangeness, which ‘‘subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war — against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country’’.

This is by now the familiar crusader view of the public silence, in which powerless are silenced by the powerful while the military-industrial-media-academia-whatever else complex perpetuates the conspiracy of silence and the silent majority, gagged by anxiety and self-interest, stands back and says nothing. Evil triumphs because good people do and say nothing, that kind of thing. Cue Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence (written in the wake of JFK’s assassination):

‘‘Fools’’, said I, ‘‘you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows’’ ...
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence.

Remarkable, isn’t it, the centrality in our culture of this figure of the warrior — the defender of inconvenient truths — battling silence, or at least a certain kind of silence, as his or her principle nemesis. Sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel pins silence down as ‘‘the most public form of denial’’. Zerubavel sees silence in our public life in largely conspiratorial terms connected intimately with pain-avoidance, fear or shame. Puss pockets of silence found wherever there is injustice or abuse.

Last year Four Corners broadcast a report about the role of sexual violence in rugby league culture titled Code of Silence. Silence in this context is a cover-up, a smoke screen, in which violence and abuse are able to thrive. Our language itself is filled with these ominous sounding expressions — dissenting voices are silenced ... the silent majority nods in agreement ... the conspiracy of silence ... lifting the veil of silence ... the silence of the lambs... And the verbs ‘‘silence’’ attracts more often not denote some form of intervention — silence needs to be broken, smashed to pieces or intently peered through.  And should we call up the adjectives, we are unlikely to find much relief — heavy, oppressive, pregnant, chilling, ominous, deadly. This is, it seems, the good old silence for you. A kind of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Of course, we do have accounts of the role of silence in shaping our history and identity that are not interested in evoking the idea of silence simply to further its own polemical ends. In The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of our Dry Continent, Michael Cathcart shows the powerful persistence with which early explorers and settlers imagined Australia as a silent continent, a silent wilderness outside of time. The vision of silence and, infamously, of terra nullius went hand in hand, for silence did not really describe the absence of sounds made by the continent’s inhabitants (and so the invisibility of their presence), but the absence of history ascribed to them.

We read Cathcart and we begin to understand how and to what effect this almost obsessively conjured up silence made its way into the colonial mythology, becoming one of its foundational leitmotifs. In this mythology Aborigines inhabited silence, while explorers were engaged in the task of confronting and shattering it. For their part, settlers’ task was to tame the continent’s silence and to replace it with ‘‘the orderly sounds of civilisation’’. And this is where this willed silence needs to be understood as indeed toxic and violent in its intent.

Public forms of silence do have, of course, some positive associations and uses. In our common law, for instance, the right to silence is an important guarantor of the presumption of innocence. Enshrined as a right, silence offers us protection from coercion and self-recrimination under duress. At the same time a widely observed tradition of a minute (or two) of silence puts silence at the centre of our public expressions of grief. We honour the dead in silence, which acts as a disinfectant of sorts, cleansing the living and our impure, noisy, forgetful, sacrilegious world. 

And then, of course, we have the utopian silence. Like ‘‘some old forgotten animal from the beginning of time’’, German writer Max Picard wrote some six decades ago, ‘‘silence towers about all the puny world of noise’’. This is silence as the sublime — Gulliver in the land of Lilliputians (that’s us). In most religious and spiritual traditions silence is the domain of prayer, contemplation, observance and self-denial. And, of course, in our world of relentless noise assault and noise pollution this kind of silence as the place of purity and spirituality — or perhaps by now any kind of silence — seems close to extinction. Inevitably the idea of silence becomes heavily romanticised and cajoled by various ‘‘slowing down, logging off and dropping out’’ social movements.

Still I wouldn’t want to over-ironise here. A recent book by writer Sara Maitland, for instance, speaks about the pursuit of silence not as a utopian project but as a practical and deliberate attempt to integrate silence into the author’s daily life. Maitland, who discovered and fell in love with silence during the nightly feeds of her first baby, is not interested in silence as the high-brow, exalted destination of the spiritually enlightened. She describes the first effect of being silent as ‘‘an extraordinary intensification of physical sensations’’. 

Eating and cooking became almost overwhelmingly gratifying, and then it was the turn of hearing. Maitland could soon enough distinguish between different wind sounds – the wind that was roaming free and the wind entangled in the chimney — and the rhythms of their courtship. The longer the writer remained silent, the more intensely emotional she became. Without the release provided by speech, everything from giggles to tears became deepened and amplified tenfold. The silence, Mainland writes, ‘‘itself unskinned me’’.

But whether you think of silence as the domain of oppression and complicity or as the expression of respect, humility and deeper awareness, in all of these instances silence still stands for the absence of speech, and so essentially for a lack, a void, a lacuna. Yet in the field of linguistics, it has long been understood that silence and speech do not stand in opposition to each other, but exist as part of the same continuum. Silence can be the continuation of conversation by other, extra-verbal means. Cultural critic Michael Epstein points out that the choice between speaking and not speaking ‘‘is a concealed act of speech’’.

Speechlessness and powerlessness often go together, but not always and certainly not automatically. There is, after all, a profound gulf between silence enforced and silence freely chosen, for this deliberate strategic silence could be a place of power and freedom.  Feminist academic Cheryl Glenn reminds us of a long-standing tradition of women’s rhetorical silence: of silence, in other words, not imposed on women but embraced and practiced by them through the ages as a rhetorical art. Just like speech, silence could be used to conceal, threaten and overpower, but also to reveal, empower and fight back. It could be an expression of defeat or of defiance and stoicism. ‘‘Neither speech nor silence,’’ writes Glenn, ‘‘is more successful, communicative, informative, revealing, or concealing than the other.’’

Sara Maitland lists an array of silences that do not denote an absence, a void or a lack — the silence of the natural world that brings on peace and contentment, the silence of awareness of self and other, the silence after seriously good sex, the silence of mystical experience, the silence of listening to music and the silence of reading and writing. 

If we find ourselves silent with other people, it may because we have hit the limit of our ability and willingness to communicate with each other or because we have reached the level of understanding and mutual comfort where words are no longer, at least for the moment, required. Friends, I grew up believing, were the kinds of people you were comfortable being silent with. Couples that are good together often come to this point of deriving great sustenance from doing their own things in each other’s presence, sometimes not exchanging a single word for hours. 

Mikhail Epstein (following the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin) notes the categorical difference between silence and quiet. Unlike quiet, silence ‘‘is a form of consciousness’’, he writes, ‘‘a method of its articulation, and it takes its rightful place alongside its other forms — to think about ... to speak about ... to ask about ... to write about... to be silent about...’’

The linguist and writer Ruth Wajnryb says it beautifully in The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, her book on the complex rituals of speech and silence in the Holocaust survivor households, like the one she herself grew up in. ‘‘I have learned,’’ Wajnryb writes, that silence is as complex as spoken language, as differentiated and as subtle. Sometimes it is self-imposed, sometimes, other-imposed. Sometimes it is driven by the urge to protect or salvage or cherish; other times, as a weapon of defence or control or denial. One thing that underscores all instances: it is rarely unproblematic.

Silence has many faces and meanings ‘‘as it fills the pauses and cracks and crannies of our discourse, of our relationships and of our lives’’. In the Holocaust survivor households ‘‘two kinds of conflicted energy’’ shape the interaction between survivors and their children — ‘‘on the part of the survivor, it is the attempt to tell and the accompanying suppression of telling; on the part of the descendant, it is the wanting to know, and the accompanying fear of finding out’’.
 
Just like Ruth Wajnryb, I grew up in the world where communication depended on the finely attuned techniques of listening to and decoding silences. In fact, in the former Soviet Union where I am from, silence was part of every conversation — as a listener, you had to be able to gauge what was not being said, who it was not being said to, what was the relationship between what was and what was not being said, what kind of listening was called for by this particular silence.

Perhaps because questions of silence and speech were so closely connected to those of life and death, silence itself felt much closer to the bone. For decades a word, a joke, a complaint, a sentence said in passing or wildly misinterpreted could alter one’s life beyond recognition. You had to weigh your words very carefully but your silences too, since any non-participation in various activities and rituals prescribed by the state carried the threat of hefty punishment as well. And so within the Soviet context, I could discern a whole symphony of different silences beyond the repressive or coercive kinds — conscious silence, pragmatic silence, defiant silence, moral silence and, of course, not to err on the side of the overly optimistic, cowardly and opportunistic silence. In the world where I grew up silence had multiple meanings, uses and registers. I am pretty sure most people out there could say the same.

How we think about silence has serious implications for the way we understand human memory. Silence is not invariably the burial ground of memory — the metaphoric place, where memories are extinguished, eroded or dissolved. We have tended to imagine that the transmission of memories and stories particularly across generations is dependent on acts of speech. Someone has to be telling the stories. But if we view silence as a rich and potent medium of communication, then it becomes apparent that it is acts of listening rather than those of speech that are the essential, non-negotiable part of any inter-generational exchange.

We may be a culture of speech worshippers, believing together with Thomas Mann that ‘‘speech is civilisation itself’’, but we are also beginning to think much more deeply about silence. The most acclaimed Australia film of 2009, Samson and Delilah, has been praised for its minimal reliance on the dialogue and for the kinds of spaces in characters’ interiors as well as in the worlds they inhabit and pass through, which the film’s wordlessness has opened up. David Stratton’s glowing review of the movie was titled ‘‘A world beyond words’’. 

We can in fact learn a great deal from the way silence is employed as a powerful and at times transformative aesthetic and critical practice not only in cinema but also of course in music, theatre, performance, dance, and visual arts. Think Chekhov, Cage, Beckett, Cunningham, Bergman, Malevich and Duchamp.  American music theorist and a musician in her own right Jennifer Judkins points to musicians’ keenly-developed abilities of listening to silence: “In the process of testing the characteristics of each stage and hall prior to the concert, the musician is also discovering the nature of silence in that hall.”
 
The ability to listen and to hear necessarily encompasses in itself the ability to listen to silence, to recognise its quality and meanings and emotions contained within it. This kind of realisation is increasingly seeping into our world and it may seem kind of ‘‘special interest’’ or esoteric, but it is bound to change the way we think about politics, culture, media and the public sphere itself. For so long most of our political, artistic and intellectual projects have been about the prized possession of a ‘‘voice’’, but now a new generation of academics, artists, media practitioners and activists are telling us that acts, publics and cultures of ‘‘listening’’ resonate culturally and politically, and that, to a large degree, they structure the lives of our cities, the direction of our politics and the exchanges within and across cultures.

And now that the importance of listening has been unearthed, surely an interest in different registers and cultures of silence will follow. In fact, from what I can tell, this interest is already here. In a recent series of programs on Radio National titled Stories of Silence, silence is a fully-fledged, intensely meaningful presence. It is not an absence of speech, not a metaphor for something else, not a poetic flourish, but the epicentre of powerful and memorable stories about all kinds of things from life in the Holocaust survivor households to the cowardly, complicit silence of a mob.

We listen to a highly articulate young woman who stopped talking at the age of five due to a condition known as selective mutism and whose words come to us courtesy of another young woman’s voice — that of a gifted Australian actor Miranda Pia. El, we discover, communicates without speech. The silence with which she greets the outside world is by no means the blanket refusal to enter into any conversation. But to hear El, we first need to learn how to listen.

We come to recognise a very different kind of silence that people with mental illnesses often crave — silence as the safe heaven from voices in their heads.

We listen to the music written by the accomplished Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin who has been composing with this kind of silence on her mind ever since her son was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

There is the dark, vicious silence of sexual abuse that in the case of German writer Corinna Waffender’s merges together with the silence about her family’s Nazi past — silence that binds her family together even as it dismantles and erodes the ties between its members. Radio, of course, is a particularly potent medium for making us listen to our own listening.

In her Letter from Bundanon the late Dorothy Porter described working on an opera, Eternity Man together with composer Jonathan Mills — she was in Bundanon ‘‘scratching for words’’ while Mills was there too ‘‘scratching for sounds’’. ‘‘The natural world,’’ Porter wrote, ‘‘can creep up on you in the silence like the march fly that has just landed noiselessly on my bare leg. The silence can be a haunted and itchy space, thick with known and unknown histories and presences, all indifferent to my spooked frailties.’’
 
This is what we keep forgetting about silence — its thickness and vast carrying capacity, its itchiness and potency, the way it can swallow us whole or take us apart. Yet our every conversation, every relationship, every journey, every crisis and epiphany is a reminder of silence’s hundred faces and of the undeniably central place it has always been able to claim in our life.

First published in 'The Age' A2, February 6, 2010.

Image: Jez, Rani and Amrita / flickr