There is no such thing as silence. Real silence, the complete absence of
noise, does not exist — there is always something whispering away at you,
tapping you on the shoulder and, when all else is gone, letting you know you
are still alive. Silence is one of those words that are defined not in
themselves, but by what they are not, like antiracism. There’s no real
silence: it doesn’t matter how far you go, you can never block everything
out.
It’s a strange, elliptical commodity, then, as well as being very much in
demand these days. People have begun to crave “silence” when what they mean
is a whole bunch of other stuff: peace, quiet, solitude, isolation, space,
the countryside, the chance to be left alone for a bit, freedom from
enforced human interaction, from their interminable jobs and their jabbering
spouses and their bloody kids, lovely though they are, of course, and their
ex-wives and the income-tax people and the M25 or the 7.20 to Charing Cross.
This sort of silence used to be an unwanted commodity of the terminally
poor, the outcast, the mad and the excluded. But now it has become sought
after, this desperate wish to be “getting away from it all”. You can buy a
brief chunk of “silence” from the holiday brochures, which these days
recognise a yearning — especially among men — for a certain kind of escape.
It is usually tied up with an absence of other stuff — not just noise, but
all of the despised accoutrements of daily life. It is not only the silky
whine of Norah Jones emanating from the loudspeaker system in Starbucks that
people wish to leave behind, it is the skinny latte and granola muffin they
wish to jettison too.
The new silence is somehow tied up with the notion of roughing it, of doing
without, of self-deprivation, of isolation, of naturalism.
A Book of Silence, by the feminist, or post-feminist (suit yourself) author
Sara Maitland, offers up a hymn to this idyll of self-denial, in which
silence is imbued with mystical and spiritual connotations. The cover comes
with a commendation from old beardy Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, which should knock a few thousand off the sales. But her book is
not really about silence at all, it is about the other stuff I’ve mentioned
above. Ms Maitland — divorced and with the kids grown up — fled the town for
an isolated cottage in lovely Weardale, where she attempted to be wholly
alone and commune with silence. It wasn’t quiet enough for her, though, so
she drove ever further north and ended up on the Isle of Skye. Clearly, it
wasn’t silence she was after. If it had been, she could have stayed in
Hampstead, bolted shut the door and shoved some earplugs in her lugholes and
listened to the sound of her own respiratory system chugging away. It would
have been a much shorter book, though, I suppose. Probably a better one,
too. But her real quest was for escape from the here and now, for sanctuary
in the new silence. She wanted — like many others do — to get away from you.
And everybody else. And all that stuff you have.
I’ve come quite a long way for this new silence, frankly, with my sacks of
food, crates of alcohol and panicky profusion of books. Down the M4 as far
as it goes, pursued by the gradually lessening clamour of London; then down
more roads, and up into the low hills filled with the mewing of kites and
where everything is perpetually wet. Along a mud track for a mile or so
(“Turn right at the clump of beech trees,” I was told) to a house that is
teetering on the edge of dereliction. Not even a path, as it happens, for
the last 200 yards just mud, nettles, brambles and long grass. No phone, TV,
internet, radio, no signal for the benighted mobile phone, nearest shop half
an hour away. But there’s electricity and running water, apparently. As it
turns out, rather more running water than anyone might want. I’ve beaten Ms
Maitland for isolation, for a piece of this new silence.
The house was built for an older silence. Back in the 1860s a local farmer’s
wife had a cretin for a son — a proper cretin, not just a run-of-the-mill
idiot. Out of shame at the nature of the offspring, this house was built
away from the farm, as far away from the curious and disgusted eyes of the
local population, such that it was, as was possible. Cretin House, they
might have called it, or the Dry-Dock Narrenschiff, but didn’t. Nobody has
been inside it for a long time; there’s a dusty copy of the Culture section
of The Sunday Times, dated August 2005, on a coffee table. There are
thousands of dead bees on every window ledge and lying legs akimbo on the
floor, the consequence of a large nest between the floorboards. One upstairs
bedroom has been colonised by grey squirrels, via a hole they have fashioned
in the roof and ceiling. There’s a piano in the little back room, a home to
fieldmice; it would be rude to attempt to play the thing. Never mind me, the
house itself is going back to nature, being gradually reappropriated by the
nonhuman. With a spanner I turn the stopcock on and within 10 minutes there
is a marked absence of silence as water drums down through the ceiling and,
like in one of those corporate aqua-sculptures, down the walls into the
kitchen: the pipes in the attic must have frozen and burst in winter and we
now have a very large leak. For a while it is noisier than a tent pitched
beside Spaghetti Junction. I fill a couple of kettles and then turn the
stopcock off; no washing for me, for a bit. The water continues to drip down
for hours, first in a techno fugue of 300bpm, later as the heartbeat of
someone dying.
That, increasingly, people want to get away for “silence” or, more properly,
tranquillity is beyond dispute. The flight from London (and from most of our
other big cities) gathers pace: 200,000 people left the capital last year,
and quite rapidly formerly agricultural areas beyond the home counties are
becoming the new suburbs, and soon people will have to flee from those too.
Wiltshire, Hampshire, Somerset, Northants, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and
Dorset are now deemed easily commutable, alongside those first railway
suburbs from the turn of the 20th century — Kent, Buckinghamshire,
Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey, Essex and the Sussexes. What is
classified as the “southeast” of England — a political definition these days
rather than one based upon geography — expands every year and now stretches
west to Bristol, northwest to the Cotswolds and due north to the cute
honeyed villages of Rutland, Leicestershire and southern Lincolnshire. Our
island grows ever noisier, ever busier. The Campaign to Protect Rural
England regularly produces a “tranquillity map” that shows, county by
county, the extent to which our yearning for peace and quiet is eroded each
year. It’s another one of those misery maps you see every morning in your
newspaper — the maps of cancer rates, teenage pregnancies, knife crime,
heart disease and so on. And showing a similar distribution. The tranquil
areas, marked in green, where you are free from perpetual traffic noise,
have been pushed to the margins of England — the Welsh Marches, the Somerset
levels, Northumberland. The one English county south of the Pennines with a
healthy dollop of green just happens to be the one that, according to The
Sunday Times a few weeks ago, was the only county in the country to see a
rise in house prices over the last year: Shropshire. This is surely no
coincidence. There is still plenty of peace to be had west of Wenlock Edge
and the Strettons, where England merges imperceptibly with Wales — but maybe
not for much longer. They — we — are moving in there, too.
Tranquillity and relaxation are synonymous; so too their opposites, noise and
stress. The European Union estimates that 3% of all heart attacks are caused
by traffic noise. I do not know how they have worked that out, whether
they’ve burst into the intensive-care units and grabbed the patient by the
throat and said: “Hans, it was the cars that did it, wasn’t it?” But you
would not dispute it, colloquially. And again, it is more than mere noise;
we seem not to function, not to be terribly happy, when we are too closely
surrounded by our neighbours, when there is no escaping them. Most of the
countries in the world with both a high standard of living and a high index
of public satisfaction and happiness are those in the first world with
extremely low population densities: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway,
Sweden and, to a lesser degree, the USA. We like the idea of space, or the
illusion of space, close to hand. It is thought that we work best in small
communities where we know one another and where we have space to move
around. There is a difference in temperament between the people of crowded
countries and those with room to breathe. You can see this effect in
miniature if you are a regular commuter. Take a train at 8am and it will be
late; most likely, you will not find a seat and your fellow commuters will
be fractious or withdrawn. Take the same route at, say, 5.30am and it will
be on time and people will talk to one another; they will do that human
thing of extending courtesies.
Late night in Cretin House, no silence. I have lain on the floor in the living
room on top of crushed bees for six hours, reading. The noises that occurred
during that time were as follows:
1. The continual drip of the water down from the ceiling, gentler now.
2. The quiet roar of the stand-alone gas heater.
3. The perpetual susurration of the oak and beech trees outside; you hear each
leaf fall.
4. Before nightfall, the mewing of the kites and twice the keening cry of a
buzzard.
5. At dusk, the sharp yip of a little owl, the very noise they dub onto
Midsomer Murders to let you know it’s getting dark and someone’s about to
get bludgeoned to death with a candlestick.
6. After 10pm, the ghostly hoot of a barn owl.
7. At about midnight the strangulated yowl of a fox near the back door.
8. Beyond all that, the distant rush of water from the stream.
And, now and again, the bark of a dog maybe miles away and the roar of a
motorbike without a silencer heading into Carmarthen, 15 miles away. Closer
still, there is the occasional scampering, the odd rustle, the creaks and
sighs of entropy.
One of the effects of enforced silence is a heightened awareness, of the
senses suddenly sharpened. It is not just, during the daytime, the
shrillness of the chaffinch and the wren beginning to get one’s goat: it is
that with the moronic fugue that accompanies urban life excised, other stuff
floods in to fill the space. According to a Brazilian study earlier this
year, silence — or more properly, unaccustomed quietness — mimics the
effects of tinnitus. Tinnitus is that terrible ringing in the ears
experienced by about 25% of the population, the cause of which has not yet
been determined (although it manifests itself with undue regularity in the
ears of pensioned-off heavy-metal guitarists). The point is, with regular
sound removed, the body acts quickly to fill the gap. John Cage, the
philosopher and musician, is famous for his “silent” work 4’33 — which is
not, of course, silent. It is simply that the musicians are not playing
anything. “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time,” he
wrote. “There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as
we may to make a silence, we cannot.” When Cage visited the anechoic chamber
at Harvard University, a device intended to impose total sensory
deprivation, he was startled to hear a cacophony of sound: a rushing, a
gurgling, a whispering. What is it I am hearing, he asked. It was his blood
pulsing around his body; it was the whistling of his nerves. Deprived of
extraneous sound, we turn in on ourselves. Cage was absolutely delighted —
he had known this all along, instinctively. Of his famous silent work he
once said: “I have nothing to say. I am saying it. That is poetry.” Silence
has been used since in music, and it is always filled in, consumed. The
brain craves stimulation and deprived of it searches out something to fill
the vacuum. According to a study by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis last year,
“when a listener encounters silence in a musical work, impressions of the
music that preceded the silence seep into the gap, as do expectations about
what may follow”.
ut the heightened awareness extends beyond anticipation or memory, or hearing
one’s own body going about its interminable business: it teeters into a kind
of vulnerability or, at the least, susceptibility; a form of psychosis, I
suppose. Left alone with ourselves, we turn inward and the slightest
disturbing current produces emotions and reactions we find difficult to
comprehend rationally. It is this effect of silence, close to that
occasioned by LSD, that has commended the state to the spiritual gurus, the
religious communities, throughout the years. As if the stuff conjured up out
of a sort of artificially imposed nothingness were somehow more valuable
than the business of everyday life, where we are bombarded with sound.
Certainly it is true that quietness and solitude have the consequence of
imbuing everything that happens with an uncommon resonance. Lying on my
carpet of crushed and desiccated bees, I read Ian McEwan’s novella On Chesil
Beach and felt, at the end, desolated and heartbroken. That’s never happened
to me before with anything by McEwan, I can tell you. Hell, I almost cried,
before I poured myself a good measure of Jack Daniel’s, lit my 400th
cigarette and opened Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There
was no crying after that, believe me. The reaction to On Chesil Beach was
occasioned more by the setting in which it was read than by the story
itself, I would reckon. It was a wistfulness, a self-pity, summoned less by
the author than by the circumstances, however temporary they might have
been.
Gibbon goes on a bit about the Romans, doesn’t he?
This vulnerability, or whatever you would call it, slips easily into paranoia
if the silence is prolonged. Certainly the rather mimsy Sara Maitland felt
this as she sought out ever greater sacks of solitude and isolation, in
Weardale
or up on her boggy strip of land in Skye; the susceptibility turns to
insecurity and the insecurity very quickly to paranoia. Silence
is used as a technique in torture, or punishment: leave people to themselves
for a while and that should do the trick, they will break. The
sensory-deprivation chambers made famous by Ken Russell’s silly flick
Altered States could easily mimic the effects of psychotropic drugs,
creating hallucinations and propelling those who used them towards a
temporary barking madness. And away from the torture chambers, silence is a
technique used in the witless pseudo-science of psychotherapy — a recourse,
you might imagine, by an intellectually bankrupt industry to the easiest
weapon at its disposal. Let’s just keep quiet and see if that does the
trick.
And there is also this other thing, accidie, from the Latin root a cedia,
meaning numbness, sloth, disinterest, laziness and sluggishness. Maitland
makes a lot of this in her book about silence, its creeping invasion, its
ineluctable pull upon the senses, its dragging downwards. It was certainly
familiar to those who urged the cultivation of “silence” upon others for
religious or spiritual reasons. There are the writings of St John Cassian
(AD360-435), for example, a Christian mystic from the Dark Ages, who warned
against such lassitude in Book X — Of the Spirit of the Accidie. Accidie, he
suggested, was akin to dejection and was “a dangerous and common enemy
to dwellers of the desert and especially disturbing to a monk at about the
sixth hour (midday)”. He called it the “noonday dawn”.
Elsewhere, accidie is noted as one of the seven deadly sins, and has more
recently become the synonym of “anomie”, or alienation — which,
interestingly enough, is often supposed to be the product of a
depersonalised industrial society, the very construct that makes us seek out
solitude and silence in the first place. You might suggest to St John
Cassian, and to Sara Maitland, that accidie is simply a pretentious word for
torpor, for the ineffectual manner in which we disport ourselves when not
obliged to present our faces to the scrutiny of other people.
On the second night, at 1am, lying on the crushed bees reading a book, alive
to the noises from beyond the window pane and beyond the edge of my
eyesight, there was a screech, a howl, and a low and sinister hissing noise.
It was as if a giant snake were in combat with a large and voluble goose.
What the f*** is that, I panicked, throwing my book to one side. Then I
noticed steam or smoke rising from the carpet beside my book and, as the
hissing subsided a little, the steady drip of water, bouncing off the bodies
of dead bees. I looked up: the water was now running down the light fitting,
over the hot bulb and — still boiling — onto the carpet beside my head.
That’s enough of this, I thought, and lit a candle and turned the
electricity off at the mains and made my way up to bed. The next day I
booked into a nice B&B in nearby Laugharne, where there is silence out
on the estuary, except for the spooky hooting of the oystercatchers and the
curlews, but more to the point a bath I can sit in without ending up fused
to the national grid. And a restaurant next door. There is no such thing as
silence; really, the stuff we all seem to be after is space, and escape.
Away from the clamour and obligations and importuning. This new silence is
something we once had in abundance, before the motorcar and the tripling of
our population. It is not a yearning for sensory deprivation; in a way, it
is the reverse of that.
