hearing
it’s hard to listen properly to silence. It’s not necessarily actual silence, it can just be something that we’re not attuned to enough to hear. I was watching an ant walk around the floor or my bathroom the other day. It has black and white tiles and to my perspective the ant would jump in and out of existence as it went about its day. I was in a terrible place to be able to see the ant and my perception of it was pretty useless. It’s silence (or disappearance) meant nothing nor did it’s sudden appearance. It’s meaning was obfuscated by my placement, my perspective.
When I contemplate my almost disappearance from this space, I wonder about this from an egotistical and personal perspective.
Saramago’s novel Seeing was good because it made clear how silence is (or at least can be) full. It’s difficult to interpret and probably you have to be extra careful because it can serve as a place to hang things that we wish were being said. A self-reflexiveness and specifically the tools that let you be able to detect transference and counter-transference seems to be necessary.
I’ve loved the idea of cultural clearings from Phillip Cushman’s book. It’s been many years and it’s still one of the richer books I’ve read. It offers an amazing set of tools for thinking.
When silence is too hard to hear, too distant to be able to be able to start to perceive, I would pay careful attention to practitioners and listen to them talk outside of the spotlight. It’s too constraining in the spotlight - too many forces keeping one on track. Miriam’s refusal to give in in her blogging is remarkable, especially as everyone else leaves the early idealism behind, forgotten. And part of something Steven just wrote motivated me to publish this. I won’t excerpt it, because I suspect that would make it less visible.
August 19th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
this past saturday night on the danforth in greektown toronto sipping tea on a park bench i met two fine greek older gentlemen. we sat chatting about power, democracy and many other topics while they waited for the science shop to take out the telescopes to view the space station and the full moon, something the owner of the shop does every full moon. We were discussing the north, and Patou told us that there is a place in the arctic where the winds from all directions meet forming a state of atmospheric equilibrium which creates in sonic terms absolute silence. He also said that this is a sacred inuit space that is known to highly evolved people on a spiritual scale, since this state of absolute physical silence leave individuals very frightened to the point of driving people crazy or to enlightenment. su introduced into the conversation sound proof rooms and the responses from people who spent time in them who found the space to be deafening, yet the only sounds audible in the space were internally generated - their heartbeat, air moving through their bodies and blood circulation.
I will miss the sound of your thoughts in this blog yet feel tremendous joy at knowing that there will be other amazing discoveries waiting for you outside of this space.
August 20th, 2008 at 4:38 am
Sounds mean nothing with the spaces of silence to separate them.
A while back, you set me off on the idea of machines that can forget. I wonder if we can also imagine machines that can choose to be quiet.
August 20th, 2008 at 5:35 am
*without…
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