Silence

Aeon is a terrific site, dealing with deep concepts in elegant fashion ranging from the limits of science to the notions of being human in a reality we struggle to understand. In Robert Twigger's thoughtful piece titled Desert Silence, he touches upon a subject both profound and right, the power of silence and how it applies to being human.

There is an Arab saying that the donkey that bought you to the palace must be dismounted before you can enter.

If it’s windy, you still get it, the silence. But only at first. Then you notice the wind on clothes, or the rustling of a tarpaulin. If the wind is really high, it’ll be picking up sand and shooting it like mist over the ground — swirls, not cloudlike but dreamlike, silky, low-down patterns of the universe, all lit up. The desert is windy at certain times of the day, sometimes all day. You never go days without wind, but there are always periods of calm. Strangely, they often coincide with that moment of getting out of the car, with its big tough tyres and hot exhaust pipe and ticking, contracting bonnet.

You start listening to the silence. You start listening for imperfections, proofs against its existence. Maybe the ticking is reassuring, but it grows less frequent, fainter. People look for proof of their beliefs when they are young, when they are charged with hope. Many give up at what seems a very early age. They prefer the comfort of denial, of nothing with a small ‘n’, a rubbish nothing, easily shouldered aside by music, appetites, money, entertainment and controversy culture, stuff. Cars. The car that got you here, which you can now leave behind. 

I experienced this kind of profound silence in Death Valley, prior to becoming mostly deaf, and the impact on yours truly was amazing as it forces one to not think, to be in the present as the only thing one experiences in this kind of environment is one's self, a moment that has reamained with me to the present day. Interestingly enough, now that deafness is part of my equation, I experience silence when taking out my hearing aids in order to get away from the incessant noise of modern society. something that annoys my wife to no end. At the same time, I now understand, in small part, how the deaf remain  forever separate from the world, existing in a kind of silence the hearing will never experience unless they go to the desert and get away from it all, even if it's only for a short time.