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.

--

Aron, Elaine. 1999. The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive WHen the World Overwhelms You

Cameron, Julia. 2002.  The Artist’s Way

Gilbert, Elizabeth. 2007. Eat, Pray, Love.

Maitland, Sarah. 2009. The Book of SIlence.

• Note the links will take you to the page of the book for one of my favourite local independent bookstores in Calgary: Self Connection books but they did not in any way know I would link to them, and these are not books that I sell as a publisher rep (except Book of Silence) and I won’t receive any monetary gain from them

Please support your local independent bookstore if you choose to buy any of these books, or order them online with a store like Self Connection

Libraries are not all vanilla 

“The man who does not read has no advantage over 
the man who cannot read.” 
 Mark Twain

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.
Raoul Vaneigem

Libraries are exciting spaces, believe it or not. I sell books to collection librarians and they are some of the most engaged, interesting and articulate individuals I work with in the publishing business. They are ardent book lovers, adamant about the knowledge, power and fun of reading and the value of free access. Librarians are excellent resource people in our culture, oft under appreciated, they have the uncanny ability to link community needs to big ideas, and can immediately put iany books or ideas that they encounter into the perspective of culture and global history. No mean feat.

There is a lot that goes in libraries besides reading dusty books. Libraries provide an alternative to corporatized culture, by providing a non-corporatized civic space. Free programming and skill building offer the chance for people to empower themselves, in a welcoming environment. A central space to  include new Canadians of all income brackets, they promote literacy, both as a value in society as well in families, by offering access to link people to books in all areas of their lives. For example, looking for a way to cook kale? Use a cookbook. Want to learn about a language? Get language CDs. Interested in building a resume or starting a club? Get a book to learn how.

Libraries also give us a space to interact with people who may not be from our own communities, or our own milieu. They have the power to democratize social relations, unlike Starbucks.

Calgary Public Library is one of the most heavily used libraries, per capita, in Canada. The new plans for Castell Central Library are going ahead, and they are seeking input from Calgarians
Go to their survey at http://calgarynewcentrallibrary.ca/

You will be asked what your priorities are for the library and what the new library can do for you.

As I filled out the survey, I imagined a beautiful and open access space, the library as civic landmark. It would centralize books, civic life, and the sharing of ideas in Calgarian consciousness via a free and open cultural space. My top priorities for this library then, in accordance with their categories on the surgery, are Arts and Culture, Lifelong Learning, Local Heritage, Civic Landmark and a Vibrant Space. I am hoping the new library will look like one of these fantastic library spaces, but this is getting my hopes up

Librarians are the keepers of our cultural knowledge. The internet is not a permanent nor neutral space. There is no accountability and it is driven by the market. Libraries are not driven by the market but are driven by larger social history both including and excluding the market.  For example, they store books that don't necessarily hit bestseller lists. And this is important because how can we know what it means to look at ourselves if we cannot see what we produced in times past? How can we know what it means to be a civic person, rather than a consumer, if we don't have any physical spaces that are about free and open access?

To me, the act of checking out books from libraries represents what Mark Kingwell calls participatory citizenship, defined as:

"...a new model of citizenship based on the act of participation itself, not on some quality or thought or right enjoyed by its possessor. This participatory citizenship doesn't simply demand action from existing citizens; it makes action at once the condition and task of citizenship." (The World We Want, p. 12)

By using libraries we are acting, and this action is a recognition of the value of the shared commons, a non commercial space for resources, ideas. It is also an act of recognizing the value of sharing our costs of housing such collections. We are recognizing the value of individual non-ownership as a conceptual space. We are recognizing the value of our shared past and the value of appointing librarians as keepers so as to make such an archive accessible and navigable in an intelligent systematic way.
Ultimately libraries are the embodiment of the value of equality and equal access, for everyone regardless of income, to the world of ideas.

If, in a kingdom of consumption, the citizen is supposedly king, then we, as kings, would all need an education to know how to rule ourselves; books are our path to such an education.
Such an education can never be had in such a kingdom where only that which gets published is that which supports the kingdom. Thus libraries and their non commercial space, as well as government grants, provide such a refuge.

An unwitting consumer without access to knowledge outside the system is not a ruler but is merely a tool- a tool of a system designed to exploit those very tools at the bottom.

Thus the library card, and its free passage to knowledge, is a shining jewel in such a kingdom and librarians become the gate keepers of our freedom.

Kindle could carry advertising

Here is an article about this

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/90449-kindle-could-carry-adverts.html

The interesting side to this is the argument that is "adds value" to the Kindle to include advertising on the "expensive little bugger". Does this imply that advertising could keep the price of this junk item-an example of blatant consumerism if I ever saw one-down via the ads that help to support Amazon's profit margin?

I would like to know how adding commercials adds value? Even if they are specifically designed for my demographic. This is another reason why books are far superior to e-books in my opinion

cheap books, $10 each, excellent for kindling

This morning's Quill blog wrote about the "uprising" of consumers against Amazon. The customers are complaining that Amazon is over-pricing their Ebooks. The cutoff for ripoff, it seems, is $9.99. 

On the one hand I can see why these Kindle users feel resentful: the pricetag for the Kindle alone could make a reader feel that she is entitled to a lifetime of cheap books supplied exclusively by Amazon, as payback for the upfront investment ($350 USD approx). 

But my concern is this: if Amazon responds to their customers and reduces prices of all Ebooks to under $10, how are they going to do it? They operate on slim margins already.  They took on all the R&D costs for the creation and programming of the Kindle, got it to market & paid for the promotion and advertising. They have invested a lot of money in this project and likely need to see a return on that investment. They are certainly not in the position to cut much from the lining of their pockets. So that means, inevitably, that Amazon will put it to the publishers to adjust their pricing.

Publishers can price Ebooks lower than regular books. Publishers save money with EBooks (vs. regular books) on production and distribution: the printing, shipping, handling, sales, distribution, storage, returns and cataloguing costs are non existent or minimal. Around this the advocating consumers are right: publishers should be able to reduce the price significantly on an Ebook over a printed book. But publishers still have a lot of costs built into producing the content of a book, whether electronic or printed: editorial, legal, royalty, book & cover design, office overheads etc. Ebooks are content only.  They compete with regular books, and the more copies that go out as Ebooks, the less copies potentially get sold of regular books. And yet in this sandwich generation of Ebooks and print books, the publisher's costs are the same because they still have to cover all their distribution costs for the regular books. Plus, smaller print runs means a significant increase in the unit cost per printed book. For now, the old distribution system still needs to be in place for the hard copy books.  I think it is probably impossible for publishers right now to set their pricing in such an unproven marketplace, they must be guessing. The other issue is the control of the content: once it is out, it is out. Look at any electronic data and you can see this problem. So E-users need to understand that it is not simply a matter of how much it costs to produce the individual book they are E-reading. It is part of a system of publishing on the brink of a change and these publishers need to make sure they plan good business models now to stay profitable.

Frankly I think these outraged consumers expect a lot. How many hours of pleasure, how much information, how much value in society and culture do books provide? Do we want the book industry to survive? Do we want publishers and editors and real writers to continue to exist?These are the questions we should be asking. It can't be a question of value. I pay $25 for a DVD that only takes 2 hours to watch, that I may it watch two or three times. So what is the problem with paying $25 for an Ebook that gives me far more hours of pleasure, more in-depth ideas and more to take away than a movie? We pay $5 for a latte for goodness sake. 

The biggest argument  I have heard in favour of Ereaders, besides the potential price reduction for consumers, is the environmental benefit.  It is true trees will no longer be cut down for books if books are no longer being printed. But the production of plastics is a horrendously polluting industry, will we be saving the environment from harm if we were manufacturing as many Ebooks as there are readers? Especially because they have a limited shelf life (unlike regular books).  ALL electronics inevitably end their short little lives in landfills, useless and dangerously seeping contaminants into the water supply, in places like China. Just look at the photos by Edward Burtynsky (see my last post for links) to see pictures of these landfills. I doubt the Kindle is going to "save" anything except Amazon and it certainly won't "save" books in my view. In fact it could do more harm than we know to publishers, independent booksellers and the perceived value of books.
An interesting discussion is here
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10214054-1.html

Burtynsky Exhibit at the Whyte Museum in Banff, Alberta, Canada

The Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies is hosting Edward Burtynsky: The Residual Landscapes

For more info go to www.edwardburtynsky.com 

or www.whyte.org

Burtynsky is one of Canada's most prominent photographers, made famous by the documentary Manufactured Landscapes. His photos are in galleries around the world including the National Gallery of Canada and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, the MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York. The opportunity to see his work in its life-sized glory in Banff is a special treat. These are incredible pieces of scale and seeing them in a book as a small reproduction does not do them justice.

Burtynsky's photos are of scarred landscapes changed by industry. These are haunting pictures, simultaneously beautiful and horrible. They are seriously disturbing images: he is exposing the oil, mining and other heavy industries' dark side, the side that most people never get to see. By exposing this, he brings the real effects of our consumer lifestyle into our consciousness. As a consumer most days, I don't think about how the product got to me, I just see the lovely product on sale at the shop. But this photographer, by his amazing ability to scope out the details and the whole picture at once, forced me to understand the universal scale of this big economic and social experiment we call the modern world.  It is truly scary stuff, and I think overwhelming to anyone of conscience. But weirdly, although I was looking at evidence of worrisome pollution at an incomprehensible scale, I was also seeing gorgeous images characterized by beauty and symmetry as well. In his photo "Oxford Tire Piles #8", he is shooting from above a landfill dump of millions of chalky, deflated automotive tires in Westley California. In the centre of the photo runs a brown fault line of reddish dirt. When I saw this photo, my reaction was immediate: "I drove here. I participated in this mess, I own a car and like the convenience of it. I drove here to Banff today, I put on new snow tires last month so I could get to see this very exhibit". My responsibility for, and connection to this pile of tires is obvious and awful. But there is something else going on here too: I also saw a stunning and gorgeous photo, the nip of yellowish- green grass poking from the background that runs seemlessly into the amber road of earth. It is a perfect composition and is strangely calming when I can forget for a moment the reality of it. This is wonderful stuff and I want to see more. 

I think that the most startling image of the exhibit is the oft-shown Nickel Tailings series, I saw image #30, from Sudbury Ontario. When I was looking at this photo I had to keep reminding myself that this was man-made, not a natural thing. It was so wondrous and pretty that I felt the way I do witnessing the Northern Lights or a harvest moon. Even though my thinking self had to keep saying that this harvest fed us with toxins and death. This duality of emotion is so strong for me while looking at these images. With just a camera this man had me thinking about the context and limits of human knowledge and understanding. I was pondering how amazing the human mind is, that we can conceive of two competing realities and yet on another level cannot accept it. I cannot split into two minds, though these photos ask that of me. 

The largest series of the exhibit was the series on the Alberta Oil Sands, taken in Fort McMurray in 2007. From the tiny photo in the exhibit brochure, the flat greenish field with the pretty finger-like patterns in pale yellow, looks like a tennis court, bordered by neat grey, divided in the middle by a row of short, orderly posts. On closer inspection the "green" of the "court" is actually a huge pool of poisonous waste sulphur. When I walked around that room and saw these giant images surrounding me, all hung together like that, I fully understood the vastness of this experiment and the scope of this man's work to photograph it. It is a respectable chore, one Burtynksy undertakes at great risk to his own health, and as a society we need it. We are indeed ready for this.

In his artist statement Burtynsky says "These images are meant as metaphors for the dilemma of our modern existence, they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear".  I felt all these complex and competing emotions and to me this is what art does and why we need it in our society!

The Globe and Mail did an amazing in depth feature on the Alberta Oil Sands, narrated by Burtynsky and showing Burtynsky's photos see here for the link:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/v5/content/features/oilsands/index.html