Diary: (2) John Oakes on Silence

Desert Hermitage in Wadi Naqqat (5th–6th Century CE), eastern desert of Egypt. The Endangered Hermitages project of University of Ljubljana in Slovenia (Jan Ciglenečki, director) is documenting and creating a photographic survey of monastic sites in the remote deserts of Egypt dating from the Fourth Century, CE, onwards. Photo Jan Ciglenečki ©Endangered Hermitages Project

Read Part One of this post here!

At first I can’t sit still. I fidget, I whisper to myself; the words die, as though smothered by the heavy silence. Without the support of other humans—struts to bolster us against the vacuity of existence—we become unbalanced. To be conscious is to be conscious in relation to something else, and our consciousness is defined by these interactions. Collectively or individually, humans are agents of change. We don’t often sit still. Our inclination is anti-entropic—to do something, to exercise, to educate ourselves. Solitary confinement in prison has been shown to lead to a higher rate of recidivism, higher rates of overdose, homicide, and suicide. The vast social experiment that accompanied the COVID era, when more people confined themselves to their immediate living space than at any time in history, saw bursts in drug overdoses and suicide.

And yet what if stillness—a lack of activity and a lack of processing—are also necessary to life, opening us to new, more productive ways of being and thinking? I recall the “spaces between the joints” of the Zhuangzi, the third century BCE Chinese text essential to Daoism, an antecedent to Buddhism. “Don’t listen with your ears, listen with your mind. No, don’t listen with your mind, but listen with your spirit. Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but spirit is empty and waits for all things. The Way gathers in emptiness alone. Emptiness is the fasting of the mind.”