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

Full immersion: Aesthetics and ethics and The Chronology of Water

 An extraordinary thing happened to me this spring. I stumbled upon a book that really challenged me. The Chronology of Water, a seemingly benign book, exposed cracks in my psychological assuredness, and forced me to examine a habit of avoiding pain in my life. I was not ready for it, but, ready or not, there it came.

       I sell books for a living. As a publisher sales representative, a lot of books come across my desk, thousands every year. I can never read them all and I must sell them based on catalogue descriptions, author notes, and reviews. I only read selectively. And, after hearing Powell’s Bookstore had sold 1000 copies of this one, I read the opening chapter. I then raved about it to a local bookstore to motivate them to hand-sell it. A woman I know, I will call her M., a discerning bookseller who works at the store, phoned me a week later at my office.

  “Heather, thank you for this book. I have never read anything like this before. What did you think of it?”

Embarrassed, I had to backtrack and explain that I had only read one tiny chapter. Thank goodness I was honest. She pleaded with me to read it all, saying she needed me to finish it so she would have someone to talk to. She said, “I am 50 years old and it changed me. I don’t understand what happened but I can’t stop thinking about it!”

       Uneasily, even a little resentfully, I read more. It was slow going, and so emotionally powerful I was a bit traumatized every time I opened it. Then one day I put the book aside to read later, when “I had more time”. Truthfully, I was afraid of it, but I didn’t realize that at the time.

       Then I was asked to read a work of creative nonfiction for a class and write a book review. In a fit of bravery, curiosity and obligation (to M., to the course, and to myself), I went back to The Chronology of Water. This time I read its short chapters slowly, each little dose jolting me, stirring forgotten pain, opening memories to my own past. I put it down frequently, to process, to ponder, to write in my journal. But it kept leading me in to its dangers and pleasures. This was unprecedented for me. Uncharted.

       Now I sit on the other side of that experience, struggling to put it into words. M. was right; after it was over I was dumbfounded. I had to call her at home to make sense of it. I was intrigued by how this small book had broken us open. Why were we so affected? This memoir of a girl surviving a painful childhood, reaching beyond her world as Olympic hopeful, is of a sister and daughter who lived as a drug user; but she is also a mother, an artist, a writer, a wife. It is told in fragments, with slant and specificity. It is edgy, often experimental. Many of the experiences have no mirror experiences in my own life. Yet somehow it transcended all its specificity, weirdness and experimentalism and connected both M. and me to our own memories, and to that which is universal. How did Yuknavitch do this?

       First, this is an exemplary work of non-fiction. Yuknavitch’s life is unusual. She struggles to overcome abuse, violence, horror, and self-harm; but there is also love, joy, and ordinary pleasures here as well. However, the real gems are in Yuknavitch’s originality in the telling: her style, narrative structure, and character portrayal, and the braiding of these so beautifully with metaphor. She achieves Carole Bly’s “ancient balance” between sensory experience and contemplation, and the book serves as memoir and commentary on time, memory, consciousness and identity

      Vividness is conveyed in the continually shifting prose, varying from enlightened insights to carnal sensuality. The continual switch from prose to poetry, intentionally speeding up and slowing down the reader’s pace, is not unlike the experience of a time warp in a car accident: action unfolds in micro-seconds, while the experience of time is weirdly elasticized. This plunges the reader into full immersion by centralizing the body in memory, and doesn’t rely upon the usual Cartesian mind-body separation. Lidia^⁠ brilliantly uses language to recreate these somatic experiences:

The day my daughter was stillborn, after I held the future pink and rose-lipped in my shivering arms, lifeless tender, covering her face in tears and kisses, after they handed my dead girl to my sister who kissed her, then to my first husband who kissed her, then to my mother who could not bear to hold her, then out of the hospital door, tiny lifeless swaddled thing, the nurse gave me tranquilizers and a soap and a sponge. She guided me to a special shower. The shower had a chair and the spray came down lightly, warm. She said, That feels good, doesn’t it. The water. She said, you are still bleeding quite a bit. Just let it. Ripped from vagina to rectum, sewn closed. Falling water on a body.

I sat on the stool and closed the little plastic curtain. I could hear her humming. I bled, I cried, I peed I vomited. I became water.(25)

We are inside the scene via a ruptured narrator, details relayed in hindsight and slanted by her pain. Hindsight offers not neutrality but insight into the symbolism in metaphors, these shaft down into a readers mind, as Carol Bly eloquently says, alighting a million satisfying connections. Indeed, this passage refracts my own remnant grief, igniting pain in the ballooning cavity that is my chest.

       Structurally, scenes are recounted out of time and place, and are not chronological.  This narrative choice is more satisfying because the meanings inside Lidia’s mind, not clock-time, dictate the linkages. Lidia starts the book in the middle of her life, at the stillborn birth, a metaphorical beginning. It is significant because it is grief that leads her to a writing class and eventually to this book. This structure, like my bookseller M. said, makes it feel like Lidia has somehow gotten inside of our own heads, inside our own structuring of memory.  It exemplifies Yukavitch’s incredible insight into the way memories are tenuously connected to the narratives that form our very identities.

       The book’s crucial elements, style, structure and language, link consistently to a central organizing metaphor: water. Water is a prominent substance in the events in the story as well. Lidia was a competitive swimmer and water was her balm: she used swimming as a healing activity and escape from her abusive home life. She and her sister shared lovely baths after their father’s destruction. Her father suffered a disabling drowning accident. Years later his ashes are committed to water.

       Water’s properties are also integral to the philosophical underpinnings behind the book. Like language, Lidia shows that our memories and our lives are watery, mutable and fragmented. In this way, we ourselves are changelings.

I thought about starting this book with my childhood, the beginning of my life. But that’s not how I remember it. I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.(28)

       Water is also a suitable metaphor for what must be done together, author and reader, in the communion that is this book: to enter the turbulence and allow one’s self to float; to trust that immersion will carry us to a safe landing. Reading this book with open heart and mind is an expedition into those fearful waters of our own existence, and could lead to something wonderful. “I may have been a big fat failure at making a home, but I made up how to make something else in its place. Out of the sad sack of shit that was my life, I made a wordhouse” (191). 
We float on your wordhouse, Lidia. That wordhouse is both an act of creation and a safe place to reflect on life, yours and our own.

       Yet the wordhouse is her hideaway. She never uses her art to retreat, but uses it only to reframe truth. Thus, this book, as beautifully crafted as it is, goes beyond “craft fascism”. Lidia is engaged, always, in the world, in the ethics of judgment of right and wrong. Her wordhouse is the place for examining and articulating the truth that resides inside us as living bodies. From giving voice to those aspects of ourselves that remain unexamined, and embracing fearlessly her internal darkness, we begin to see a new possibility for truth, as existing within us in opposition to the dominant discourse. Her process is just the opposite of what Bly calls “immunity” in art, sought by aesthetes; it is more like a leaning into the full disaster of living.

       By reading this book we learn to be brave creatures. But we also steal a little from Lidia Yuknavitch. We live vividly with her memories in her wordhouse for a while. We use her language to connect to ourselves, and hopefully, to that which we love. We follow her charted course, reframing our own pain into a new story.

       And she gives us this most willingly. For me, her courage was the resounding wake-up to reflect upon my own unexamined pain. Lidia’s lasting gift then is her resounding sturdiness, and it is this that cleaved a tiny oasis for me to examine my life as Lidia would, and reconstitute my own story. Such wisdom and craft shows that Lidia Yuknavitch is a remarkable contributor to the culture and literature of our time.

      

Notes

---

Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon is one of the leading independent bookstores in the US.  http://www.powells.com/

M's conversation is reproduced with permission. March, 2012.

Craft Fascism is Aldo Alverez’s term for the retro approach to writing literature: an act of shoving aside of feelings in order to develop the craft of writing.

Bibliography

Bly, Carol. 2001. Introduction. In Beyond the writers workshop., xvii-xxiv. New York: Anchor Books.

———. 2001. Taking on three demanding situations first. In Beyond the writers workshop., ed. Carol Bly, 3-32. New York: Anchor Books.

Miller, Brenda, and Suzanne Paola. 2005. Tell it slant: Writing and shaping creative nonfiction. New York: McGraw Hill.

Yuknavitch, Lidia. 2010. The chronology of water. Portland: Hawthorne Books.

Julie & Julia: savouring the nuances of life

I went to see Julie & Julia. It is a wonderful movie! I found it refreshing and original and of course, about two of my favourite topics: food & France

Of course on a deeper level, this movie was not just about food & France. Honestly, it resonated with me, and I would guess many other women, on different levels.

First I think it aptly describes some of the essential dilemmas of women's lives:

-Where are we to put our energy?

-How are we to maintain balance, within our own selves and outwardly in our lives, our careers, our relationships?

-How are we to find and make meaning?

-Who are our models and where is our support?

J&J each struggled with the core question of where to put their energy, and they both stumbled upon it by the simplest method: they made a conscious decision to do what they loved to do, regardless of the outcome. On a subtler lever this meant trusting that this simple connection to the outside world meant something important. That it was worth honouring, and in doing so each woman honours her self.

About balance: this has to be the biggest issue that I see with my women friends and my own life. J&J reminds the viewer to savour the sensory experiences of her own life, literally through food, but also by enjoying her relationship to her self as much as the relationships with those whom she loves. It is about balancing the inner life with the outer life. To let go of "doing" long enough to "be". How to live a subjective life, rather than being a mere observer of one's own life. J&J becomes essential advice for maintaining grace in difficult situations (read: how NOT to have meltdowns-advice I could have used in my twenties!). It is also about not being stuck "in your head" and learning to rely on other more "feminine" senses-intuitive, emotive, sensory-to guide us in our choices.

I loved each woman's relationship to her husband in the movie. Their husbands were their centre beam in their "house", their main support. Not because they were weak women, but the opposite. These men kept them "real" by encouraging them to listen to and trust their own, inner voice.

Another source of strength for the J&J characters in the movie were other women as role-models. Today we are so fortunate to have so many great women to look up to: women like Julia Child, who were leaders even in the most domestic of ways. Amelia Earhart, in a more unconventional way, is another of those women. I look forward to the forthcoming movie starring Hilary Swank (though too bad about Richard Gere playing Putnam-that really sucks). Other personal heroines that I have mentally asked the question " what would she do in this situation?": Barbara Kingsolver. Beryl Markham (you must read her wonderful book: West with the Night). Grace Kelly. Meryl Streep. Coco Chanel. Murielle Guiliano. My Nana.

The one common denominator among these women: they knew themselves and were not afraid to be themselves.

It is particularly interesting to me that J&J found their liberation from convention in the most conventional of pursuits, the 50's housewife's domain: the kitchen. For many women the kitchen represents subservience, tedium, dependence and overwhelm.

I was a staunch feminist in University and I stayed away from the kitchen as much as possible in my newlywed days, and a lot of my women friends still don't cook anything (or at least anything from scratch). I can understand this position. It isn't political for most of them, it is personal and more often just practical.

For me however, I now love to cook. My biggest moment of growing from girl to woman came at the surrender to this fact. I love looking in a fridge that supposedly contains "nothing" and being able to use my creative flair for frugality and exposure to other cultures to create a nutritious and beautiful meal. Cooking to me is liberating, powerful and life-affirming

Another thing I personally loved about this movie was the ultimate aim of the two main woman: both J&J focussed around one goal: getting published. Getting published in a book, with a real publisher and all the symbolism and value in that from sharing knowledge and bettering the world, to being validated. The book represents la creme de la creme

Being published on the internet is not life affirming. It is a popularity frenzy and a trend, a "movie of the week". It is impermanent & disposable, more like a magazine.

Books are permanent. The publisher's responsibility as gatekeeper and protector of proper language are especially of value today, in light of the crap being "published" on the internet (including, some would argue, this very blog!)

I see this as another aspect how books are a tactile form of idea-sharing and they are one of the most beautiful achievements of human civilization. Julia Child's wonderful book Mastering the Art of French Cooking can probably be found if you google the recipes online (I don't want to try), but it is just not the same. An E-Book, even if the e-version is available on my IPhone with a full complement of do-dads, is not the same. Electronics will never be the same as as the beautiful smell, feel and weight (and cooking stains) of a properly bound, solid, printed book.

So although this movie appears to be about food I think it is really about about courage: allowing one's self to be really out there in the world, living with passion and making the most of one's life within the limits we are given. And sometimes that looks pretty domestic, and I applaud this movie for being completely unapologetic for that.

So now I have ordered a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (sheep that I am) because I have to try that amazing Boeuf Bourguignon recipe, Julie and Julia's first, and soon, hopefully, to be my new specialty