What Do You Hear In Silence?
And are you scared by what it says?
I was a noisy child. I got punished for it.
School taught me that speaking was dangerous.
I became a silent adolescent. It wasn’t a healthy silence. It was a silence of fear, repression, self-doubt.
As an adult, I learned to make noise again.
Sometimes I got very caught up in my noise. That wasn’t healthy noise. It was self-obsession and insecurity.
Getting older, I’m learning to trust silence.
Silence?
It doesn’t exist. Even when there’s no external noise, there’s inner noise.
When composer John Cage entered an anechoic chamber in Harvard in 1951 (a room where the walls, floor and ceiling absorb all sound), he expected to hear silence. Instead he heard a high tone and a low tone. When he asked what they were, he was told the high tone was his nervous system, the low one, blood flowing though his veins.
Most of us would also have heard our incessant inner chatter.
In 1952 Cage wrote 4’33’’ — a piece in which the musician doesn’t play her or his instrument — s/he sits in silence. People thought it was a joke. It wasn’t.
