The Poetry of Intentional Silence (part 6)

In everyday life, the struggle to recall an old fact or to find the right words for what is unfolding in front of us, often destroys the inner emptiness that silently holds the understanding beyond the scope of the conscious mind.  The poetics of life unfolding is covered over.  Clare Winnicott once described her celebrated husband (the psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott) as someone who “made it his aim to enter into every situation undefended by his knowledge, so that he could be as exposed as possible to the impact of the situation itself. This approach was more than a stance; it was an essential discipline, and it added a dimension to his life as vital to him as fresh air.” A poetic or silent mind does not lean into learning, or into progressively accumulating knowledge. It values an emptying out, in giving up habits of representation, of categorization, and of abstraction. Intentional silence is concerned with the poetics of space, what it means to be in a place. To give silence its own poetic voice in emptiness is to honour the mysterious poetry of things and spaces in themselves. 

“I will take time to be alone today. I will take time to be quiet. In this silence I will listen… and I will hear my answers.”

- Ruth Fishel

Poets, who tend to notice small things, often wonder how they write poetry. Casting off our ‘selves’ enables us to rediscover spontaneity, the real immediacy of our relation to the world. For, ironically, our most immediate, most intimate experience is also the most inaccessible for us. A long detour is necessary before we receive awareness of it. It is in this immediate, pre-representational and pre-discursive experience of the world that all our cognitive activity seems to be rooted. In this perspective, far from being an exceptional mode of knowledge, intuition and what we call ‘dreaming’ - crucial to the poetic disposition - might be imagined as a kind of  ‘proto’ thinking. The fact that the kenotic underpinning of cognition has been so little studied is one of the most inexplicable aspects of western thought, which probably pays heavily for this oversight.   Intentional silence is not a void or absence, but an interior disposition. Speech is often the cloak of reality and all too often its tomb. But intentional silence is not a repression of words or expressivity, as much as it is a clearing in which the poetry of life might emerge. It is a reminder that, just as words express our deep belonging to collective human culture, silence grounds us in everything else; Nature, Cosmos, God.

Thomas Merton once said, “I’m blown down the street like leaves scattered in all directions.” I love that quote. It’s a radical enough statement in a world that often tends towards conceiving of a poetic sensibility as an earned or future state of mind to be worked towards or achieved. I’ve never quite got my head around the notion of academic courses in poetry or practicing poetry to get somewhere. It feels counter intuitive to Merton’s wise foolishness and misses the point that poetry occurs when there is less ‘you’ involved. To fall deliberately into a poetic way of life is to potentially become so empty that there’s nothing else to do but listen.  In Rumi’s words, the poet retains the choice to ‘...stop weaving and see how the pattern improves’.

The wonderful cultural ecologist David Abram asked recently why few people today, “...when they’re cycling past a stand of oaks, sense that those trees are sensing them”.  Abram, concerned to reconsider the cultural dichotomy of what is ‘animate’ or inanimate’ in our phenomenal experience, invites his reader to extend imagination enough to feel the sentience of the breeze and even the intelligence of our office furniture.  He broadly speaks for intentional silence and the movement to become more deeply of place, more intimately of the local earth.  From this perspective the so-called animistic affirmation that everything is alive - common to so many indigenous, oral cultures - is simply a way of speaking in alliance with the spontaneous experience of our bodily senses and in solidarity with the experience of intentional silence.  It is poetic and not projective (as the social scientists would have it), and we’d collectively do well to recover this ancestral capacity of spontaneous encounter with the sensorial surroundings as a field of sensitive and sentient powers.  Have you ever awakened at dawn to a chorus of birdsong and felt like a bird was chattering away specifically to you?  To hear the poetry of birds, all you have to do is listen, urges the author Sally Roth.  “The more you listen to your birds, the more you'll understand them. Learn to detect alarm calls, dominance signals, territorial tweets and love songs: birds will tell a lot about who might be in the woods with you and where they might be.” 

We speak of things ‘catching our gaze’ or ‘calling our attention’ because as we’re wandering the world, things solicit our attention, draw us into dialogue.  It’s a kind of conversation without words. A dried sprig of seaweed beckons my floating attention, and so I slow down to stop and gaze at it. And suddenly, in my experience, this seaweed is not dead, though it’s been lying on the beach for days or weeks. It has its own agency, retains a power, a potency to engage within peripheral awareness.  Life flirts with us.  The empty poetry of silence reveals that everything speaks, that all things have their expressive potency, although most things don’t speak in words. Everything is expressive. The colors shimmering on a glassy ocean swell speak to me and affect the cadence of my mood.  The poetry of silence is a receiving of what the natural world wishes to tell us as well as allowing the natural world to discover who we are. 

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