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.”
The elder Babylonian gods had their contemplation disrupted by the noisy younger Babylonian gods, who in turn were irritated by their raucous creations, the humans, and so determined to rid the earth of their presence. The result was the Flood. The desert sages of the fourth and fifth centuries CE wrote, “go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” The thirteenth-century German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote that if a cask is to hold wine, one must “ pour the water out; the cask must become empty and free.” Gandhi understood himself as a modern sannyasi, a Sanskrit word meaning literally “renouncer of the world.” Cage felt that humans were addicted to “controlling” sound, and that giving up that control opens us to new paths of processing information. Rejecting control means embracing creativity.
I take several deep breaths. I start to relax, undergoing what Orfield calls “perceptual adaptation.” In the dark, without any mechanism for gauging the passage of time, I am unmoored. I am suspended over an abyss, see only darkness in every direction, hear only the sound of my own breathing. Floating through the void. I wave my arms, trying to stir the dark as though it were water. It’s all about measurement: how much I hear, how little; how much I consume, how little. Cage cites Meister Eckhart: “Earth has no escape from heaven.” With absence, something new arrives.
There it is. A faint rushing noise that I am later told is the blood flowing through my veins. I turn my head, and the bones in my neck grind audibly. I make a face, and I hear the crinkle of skin. I hear a rustling, as though of wrapping paper: it is the sound of my eyelids opening and closing. In here, butterflies would thunder through the air. I roll my eyes in their sockets, but to my slight disappointment I can’t hear them shift, that’s a level beyond. There is a universe of tiny sounds I’ve been missing, that I’ll miss again.
I open my eyes wide and stare … at nothing. I have no sense of how long I’ve been here—ten minutes? twenty? I’ve gone beyond settling in and am content in my shell of nonengagement. After what seems much too short a time, Role soundlessly pushes open the door. Steve Orfield is there as well in the doorway, greeting me. Two hours, gone in a flash. I am truly amazed: I was just getting going. I emerge into the maelstrom of sensations.
The contrast is not what I anticipated. I’d thought that leaving the chamber after two hours in its near-total dark and silence would be a shock, that I would stumble around while my zombie brain tried to adapt. I am surprised at how calm and alert I feel. I am absolutely refreshed. Orfield has witnessed this reaction many times. Relatively brief periods spent in isolation seem to soothe the harried soul, longer periods derail us. As I would learn of the physical fast, the benefits of silence emerge from moderation. A wood carver described in the Zhuangzhi says, “When I am going to make a bell stand, I never let it wear out my energy. I always fast in order to still my mind.” His fast does not remove his consciousness to another realm. It opens a door, allowing him to retrieve something transcendent and bring it into this world.
John Oakes is publisher of The Evergreen Review and co-founder and editor-at-large for OR Books. This post is drawn from his new book, The Fast: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Promise of Doing Without, to be published later this month.
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We will be reading through Part One, Chapter 7 of My Antonia with Chris Benfey. Book Post free subscribers will receive weekly installments; join the conversation here in the comments.
Update: Since we posted our Notebook “Bad News Day” on Sunday, more than two hundred journalist and other employees at The Chicago Tribune have staged a twenty-four-hour walkout against their owner, hedge fund Alden Capital (same folks against whom The New York Daily News were striking last week) to protest wages and cuts that the union says interfere with coverage; The Wall Street Journal laid off nearly twenty reporters and editors from its Washington bureau; and news startup The Messenger closed, letting go its staff of three hundred without severence and deleting its website and all their work. Former journalists on X/Twitter disclosed that they had been compelled by the company to recyle other outlets’ stories in order to fuel the outlet’s outdated business model of seeking maximum clicks to support digital advertising. Axios reported that walkouts are planned at other Alden-owned publications, including The Orlando Sentinel and The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Observers note that Wall Street Journal parent company New Corp has seen record profits in the last three years.
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