Sunday, September 16, 2012

Silencium Artifex: an experiment-- The push and pull of silence

The pull of silence

Silence seems to me to be totally underrated as a source of personal energy and personal power in our Canadian culture. Rather than being encouraged into silence, we are often pushed to be extroverted, to “get out” and “do something”. Someone who prefers quiet environments is often portrayed as a loner, antisocial (a pejorative word for an introvert) and even strange. Background noise is ubiquitous as I guess it is expected that people want a little noise. So for example I was on a long bus trip, and rather than giving the passengers silence on the three hour journey, some dimwit decided that people would rather listen to popular rock music. Why would I rather listen to the Doobie brothers or Hotel California that the sounds of the rocking bus? Or for that matter, than my Ipod?

For those of us who define themselves as HSPs (Highly Sensitive Persons)  like me, background noise is a serious drain on our energy (Aron, 1999). While some people might find the buzz and music and bouncing noise of the radio, or the clash of sounds in shopping malls, for example, an exciting attractant, I find it an absolute drain on my energy and a frustrating abuse of power by the people providing the space. I am being bullied into their listening choices. 
I can’t think of a place I hate more than shopping malls. 

The theory with HSPs is that because some individuals are more sensitive to stimulus than others, they become overstimulated very easily. Overstimulation for me leads to crankiness, fatigue, physical discomfort, even hot flashes and sweating and nausea. Early warning signs for me are what I call “museum head”, a spacey, foggy void, and lack of ability to think clearly. 

Why I am more sensitive than other people is unclear. In the HSP book (Aron, 1999), it is assumed to be an ingrained personality trait. However in my case it could simply be that I have not spent a lot of time in malls since I was a teenager, so I am simply not “deadened” to all that noise, the same way I have a really hard time ignoring a TV when there is one in the room, because I don’t have one at home.

According to a psychologist I know, such overstimulation in mall design is intentional. Each store plays a different song, preferably songs that are stimulating and faster than the average heartbeat, so customers “speed up” with the song. The songs are not meant to be soothing. The hard surfaces are meant to reflect and bounce sound around. The harsh bright lights are also a sensory stimulant that are intentional. He says this is because studies show that when people are overstimulated they make impulsive decisions, against their own rational self interest, such as overspending. 

So as a humanist, a nature lover, a critic of monopolistic capitalism and a social activist, my response to this sort of manipulation is to increase the spaces for silence in my life and offer it to the people I love. 
This is what I am calling the “pull” of silence-it pulls me toward it as an idea because I want to stand up for the silent spaces in our world and the clarity and serenity that comes to me in such non-commercial spaces.

The push of silence

But there is also a second meaning to the word silence: in the sense of not speaking. There is a scene in Eat, Pray, Love in India, where one of the pilgrims was wearing a badge that notified others around her that she was in silence-as in not speaking or making verbal sounds of any kind. Elizabeth Gilbert was drawn to this and so am I.

My aim for this experiment is to take time out each week, a good block of time (ideally 5 hours consecutively), to stop all self-generative noise. I create a lot of noise, and in some ways, I define myself by the noises I make. The cooing and supportive noises I make to my cat show that we have a relationship, that I care for him, thus I am an attentive and loving pet-owner.  The chatter that I subject my husband to at the end of a day, means I am the type of wife that reaches out to him, cheerful and energetic. The phone calls I make to friends, to connect and support them or make plans to see one another. The daily calls to my mother, an attempt to be a supportive daughter for a women who is in her 70s and lives alone. So my social roles, and how I see myself in those roles, is related to this noisemaking.

But I also crash dishes in the kitchen, and play my guitar, I sing, I write music, I whistle, I chatter, I hum. I chant when I meditate. I like the feeling of using my voice as an instrument, the resonance inside my chest, the feeling of being a broadcast centre when I use it. I am a sales rep so I do my work by using my voice.

I also feel like I work ideas out while I am talking to people, ideas that might start the conversation as a niggling itch at the base of my consciousness, that by the end are flesh and form. I have spent most of my life believing that I need this discourse to think at all. 

But I am “pushed” toward silence by something inside of me that knows that, on some level, all this endless vocal output, is a slow burn for the energy that could fuel a very  large bonfire. It is a fifth chakra air spill, slowly leaking the air out my creative balloon until it deflates and leaves a pink, sad, rubber condom on the ground. All this cheery sociality leaves nothing of longing and ache, nothing of the need to reach out, in other words, nothing at the end of a day to use as fodder for writing or creative generation or thinking. 

So this is the “push” inside me to silence my voice.

The idea of intentionally silencing one’s own voice may seem strange for someone who loves indigenous oral traditions, stories, and who claims to be a feminist. After all, is it not our stories that connect us to one another? Is it not our voices that have been silenced for thousands of years of patriarchal hierarchy?

Yet the intention in this act, and the celebration of the inner world, is strangely empowering. I am setting the rules

So this “push” of silence, in the sense that there is something internal in me pushing for this space inside myself that I want to explore, is my experiment. 
I have begun a pact to create a silence space each week that consists of 5-7 hours of not talking, not imposing or creating auditory distraction. 

Week 1:  self nurturing, creative blossoming


5 hours 


I began today feeling refreshed and healthy.  The silence was an act of self nurturing. For the first few hours I felt content, thoughtful, self contained, strong. 

I was also relieved. I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders. now I didn't’ have to be “a wife” today and speak to my husband. Or a daughter and call my mom. I could just be invisible and indulge myself in my own thoughts and ideas. Deliciousness.

About three hours into it, I accidentally said a random word aloud midstream in a thought, for no reason. The word jumped out of my mouth spontaneously, like a fish breaking the surface of a still pond.

I was startled. I crossed my mind that the word came out of me as a way for me to check in with myself. For me to see if I was still here.

I have begun reading a wonderful and unusually deep little book called A Book of Silence by Sarah Maitland, who introduces silence into her life intentionally, including spending 40 days of silence alone in a cabin on a remote island in Scotland. In researching for her book she comes across a tradition of silence in literature, or at least about the human narrative in a remote conditions, including Into the Wild and some other books a like this. 

One of the discoveries she makes in reading these, and in experiencing her own silence, is an increased sense of losing the bounds of her identity-that is of losing where her mind and body begins and ends in space. It is like one’s own voice is a reference point to the self as object and as identity; without the voice, and hearing one’s own voice as listener, perhaps we fall into a state of the subjective, with a loss of the sense of also being an object in space. As a non-object to others, to my self. 

Perhaps my my inadvertent exclamation came from a fear of losing this sense of identity? If I didn’t hear myself in that time, perhaps I would lose myself.

But then I resumed my pact for the two remaining hours. 


I began to liken my creative production to an expanding balloon, and it is precisely the building and growing and pressure of its own internal forces, in the sense that the air inside is like expanding creativity. It is the force of the internal pressure that drives one to create. But I realized that my dialogical approach to work out fledgling ideas actually serves to drain my creative spark, sucking the air out of my ballon so to speak. And every time I chatter away I let out a little of that air. And that indeed relieves the pressure. 
One of the things that led me to this experiment was a dream. It was after I took a class on Jungian dream analysis and body movement and how, in order to discover one’s next developmental task, one can look to their own dreams for guidance on the next step. It was a workshop put on by The Calgary Jung Society who hosted the teacher, Inge Missmahl, in November 2011.

The idea is that if you look at the action that you need to take in a dream, especially a bad dream or a recurrent dream, you can get a clue as to the next step in your life’s development. In my dream I was being verbally attacked by my peers, in this case fellow publisher reps. They were criticizing me. My dreamself sat at the table and tried to defend herself, and felt increasingly weakened and worn down and demoralized by the end. 

I woke in a terrible state of humiliation. I can still recall the details, even this, years later. However, I realized after that the right thing to do in the dream would have been to stand up, ground myself as we do in Mountain pose in yoga, and let the insults and assault wash over me. To stand in silence. I didn't have to defend, that I could just be simultaneously vulnerable and strong in silence.

The other book I read was the Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Each week she encourages artist time to "play" and “fill the well” of creativity. This provides us with images and fodder for creative sparks of genius. 
But in that relief I lose the drive to create. It is precisely the pressure, the ache, the drive, almost an internal violence, that generates the creative “big bang” moment that leads to a flash of brilliance. The pressure is uncomfortable but it forces me to put it into a creative outlet, whether that be a song, a story, a poem, a dance, or a research idea. 

So it dawned on me that in order to generate my creativity in my own life, I needed to not talk about my unformed ideas. I needed to sit with them and let them come to me in other ways, through dreams and pictures and visions and poetry and sensuality. Talking was “forcing” them along and into a rational head space, and I needed to let them filter up, in silence, in non verbal forms.

So today in week one I absolutely found this element. I found my ideas flowing at one point, so freely and openly I had to sit to write them down lest I forget them. As well, a problem I have been working out in the backdrop, about what to focus on in my upcoming thesis for my masters degree, suddenly came to me clear as rain in a creative swoop, like a great stork dropping a beautiful bundle in my waiting lap. 

Silence lesson: 

I learned about the link between my silence and my contribution to the universe as a creative being.
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