The Poetry of Intentional Silence (part 2)

The poetry of intentional silence engages more consciously with ideas of noise and silence that lie beyond the subjective biases of these concepts as they’re conventionally deployed. We might perhaps think of noise, whether desired or dreaded, as sound that, for the time we’re subject to it, dominates our perceptions; whereas silence is the state in which we find ourselves taking in the most varied array of sounds possible. It is only then that the poetry of the world might be heard.  In this sense, intentional silence would be the particular contemplative movement towards an equilibrium of quiet and sound that allows us to relax our resistances and maximize our connection to the natural world around us.  

Intentional silence is concerned with the absence, not of sound per se, but of noise which is obtrusive, unnatural or salient. When, for example, the Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart muses that his incredible sculptures are mere ‘outposts of silence’, he brings attention to intentionally liminal forms that invite respite from the intrusive noise of a busy city and an occasion to pause and notice. Cities need those spaces as contemplative plumb lines to an otherwise marginalised poetic sensibility amidst the concretisation of life.  Kierkegaard’s silence of ‘the lily and the bird’ is similarly at once the silence we refer to in everyday conversation and something less familiar, a ‘preparation’ deemed essential to depth experience and spiritual life.  That intentional silence is the restraint or ‘bracketing’ of what ordinarily intrudes, in order to recognize something more clearly (or poetically), is made explicit in Arthur Schopenhauer’s remark that only a ‘silence of the will’ enables ‘a purely objective apprehension of the true nature of things’.

Someone sitting quietly on a beach may speak of the profound silence of the place, despite being perfectly aware of the rhythmic lapping of breaking waves on wet sand.  The sound of the waves which were part of the silence during the afternoon may then become something else when, at night, the person is drifting towards sleep.  For silence to be both intentional and poetic, what requires to be stilled is, in the words of Max Picard, ‘the flow of the purposeful’. The silence which enables authentic experience of the world is a kind of holy uselessness, a retreat or abstention from human interests and ambitions, including those which inspire obsessive categorization or labelling.  To genuinely respect what Heidegger thought must ‘remain unspoken’, like the Zen practitioner of shikantaza, is to make oneself as clean as a new sheet of paper, so that the nature of being can write her poetry upon you.