The Poetry of Intentional Silence (part 7)

I had decided to marry the silence in the forest

- Thomas Merton

The psychologist Stephen Kaplan says that we enter into a state of ‘soft fascination’ when sauntering in the woods. That’s when our attention is captured effortlessly and involuntarily, and the mind isn’t straining to process a jumble of visual stimuli. Similarly, Japanese forest bathing isn’t the same thing as hiking or brisk walking. The East Asian tree tonic works best with intentional aimlessness and minimal effort. One is encouraged to let gaze be drawn wherever it wants to land, ear leaning outward into the happenstance of nature. And Nature certainly isn’t silent. Spend time among trees and you might hear birdsong, the rumble of thunder, gurgling water, breeze kissing branches, the breakfast crunch of leaves, and much more. To make a vocation of silence without privileging certain sounds over others, is to find that every place on earth has a unique sonic character.  It is to encounter the harmonious mix-up of Nature’s poetry.  

Authentic experience of silence is not static, passive contemplation, but engages the imagination, is alert to the connections between things, and is partly shaped by the metaphors and allusions which creatures, places and plants may suggest to the attuned observer. It’s nicely captured by Roger Deakin’s image of a ‘poet-swimmer’ who ‘allows things to swim into his ken’, but is actively and fluidly engaged with nature (Deakin 2009: 283).    And like all poetry, there is a deep healing in this exchange.  The idea that whole forests were assumed to be sentient and have their own intelligence is ancient. Indeed, modern research affirms that trees really do have healing powers. For one thing, they release antimicrobial essential oils, called phytoncides, that protect trees from germs and boost mood and immune system function in humans.  Nature models resilience and buffers against stress. Emerson, in his essay Nature, proclaimed that ”In the woods, I feel that nothing can befall me...which nature cannot repair.”  Silent time absorbed in Nature and in the flow of wilderness is one of the best antidotes to the modern noisy world.  It’s like resting within a living, breathing poem.

Scientific knowledge of the natural world is remote from people’s experience of nature that presents itself to us in ordinary experience. Nor does science speak of the meanings, allusions and moods that natural beings convey to the mindful, imaginative observer. That’s the domain of poetry.  In the natural scientific account, Heidegger warned, ‘the nature which stirs and strives … assails and enthrals us as landscape, remains hidden’.  In many ways, in our conscious quest for objective knowledge, we are collectively the animal that has turned its back on its true nature in favour of a domesticated self-knowledge. And in doing so, we’ve diminished our wildness of language, also the domain of poetry, in favour of the sanitised safety of scientism. Children love the wild anecdotes of their parents and are champions of the unlived poetic wildness of adults.  Just witness the wild delight of a child enthralled by tales of their father’s childhood misdemeanours.  The paradoxes and slippery meanings of words in poetry soothe something of this homesickness in us all.  It’s why good enough therapy is often poetic and a little wild in nature and uniquely values the silent spaces between us.  And it’s why the deliberate silent witness of the poetry of wild places is both a radical act and a coming home to our long lost selves.

The poet-philosopher Gaston Bachelard recommended ‘reverie’ as the primary attitude and comportment towards nature to be cultivated. By ‘reverie’, he did not mean idle daydreaming, but an alert, flexible mindfulness – an openness to the reverberations of things, words and images - closely akin to Daoist spontaneity. In reverie, the self no longer opposes itself to the world by subjecting it to scientific categories and theories, and it is also disinterested and so free from practical concerns and ambitions. No longer self-concerned, a person is able to move into the space of elsewhere, in which the poet resides.  I imagine Cage’s audience were invited into such a liminal state that warm summer’s night, if they were momentarily able to set their expectations aside.  

In Walden, Thoreau exhorted his readers to a form of listening that bore affinities to prayer, in which the flow of mental activity transported the self beyond the everyday business of civilized life.  Similarly, a bush tracker would tell you that there is no prey unless prayer is at the heart of the hunt.  Prayer can be imagined as the poetic chemistry of intent, effective not so much in its anxious, acquisitive sense, but in a way that the biblical Paul may have intended when he exhorted the Corinthian community to ‘pray unceasingly’. In silence, we grow to understand the unspoken poetry in prayer that is continually aware of the patterns of connections between all things.  In silent prayer the contemplative is vigilant to one’s participation in a resonate field or intricate web of life.

In the same summer of 1952 that silence spoke for 4 minutes and thirty three seconds in Woodstock, the French poet Francis Ponge published an essay on poetry called ‘The silent world is our only Homeland’.  He wrote whimsically of how silence nourishes humanity by offering ‘the cosmos to suckle’ should we be able to ‘lower our standard of dominating nature’, and make more permeable, our thickened skulls.  Ponge offered a hopeful future to us all, somewhat seductive in a moment of ecological despair right now, if somehow humanity might allow for a poetry of the speechless, or in his words “a few maniacs seeking the new encounter”..  He urged the ‘true poets’ away from the anthologies of the day and towards a poetry of silence that instinctively seeks nourishment in deep soil and tends to the roots of all life.  

Care to lose your mind in silence in service of the poetry of the moment?

The practice of silent poetry:

Bow deeply to the silent intuition of John Cage
Bow deeply to all beings (animate or inanimate)
Settle into a comfortable position and breathe easily - relax your mind
Set a timer for 4’33’ and begin

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