Almost no one can tolerate absolute silence for long, the absence of sounds is like a kind of fasting, an uncomfortable deprivation that, in the contemporary world, does not have much space, and not much is appreciated, a constant practice can prove what it has had. As mentioned above: it consists of leaving the TV or radio on, to prevent silence from taking over, just to hear the sound.
Sometimes absolute silence resembles monstrous loneliness, unbearable abandonment; others find in silence only a turmoil, more or less uncomfortable; some see him as an ally, as long as it doesn’t last more than a few hours.
- Can we at least hear the echo of urban traffic or the low noise of the countryside?At least that! Silence seems to invoke death.
Is the silence of lovers very romantic? They look each other in the eye and don’t need to talk to understand each other, as we’ve heard many times, it’s to relax the silence of those who are dying for so much noise and finally find an oasis. in the acoustic jungle in which they live. Wonderful is the silence that follows happiness.
But are there other, less kind silences? As someone who reminds us that we are alone, in general, or separated from someone in particular. The silence of the answer that does not come. As the silence of the words of those who have gone; Words we will never hear, the ‘I love you’, ‘I understand you’, ‘I need you’, ‘I admire you’ that we have never heard, or have never said, the silence that stayed in us and blocked the exits The absence of words in a hard look or in a cruel gesture.
The silences imposed: “Shut up!” The fascinating silence that follows the announcement of the winner of a drawing. The silent tension of those waiting for a verdict. The silence of the universe, with its planets, stars and floating bodies, in the absolute absence of sound.
There’s something mysterious about silence that somehow fascinates us!And that terrifies us, too.
While little can be interpreted in the West as little to say, in the East it is quite the opposite: those who speak a lot are disturbing and suspected of farce; in the East, silence has a deeply spiritual meaning and is linked to the Ethical World. Mystical silence invites a journey through the intimate fibers of the roots planted in our lives.
In the East, silence is active. It’s indicative and research, introspection, encounter with your inner voice. Whoever shuts up has the power. The speaker is hopelessly attached to what he said.
In the West, silence expresses its strength in Chaplin’s classic cinema. In the intelligent mimicry of Marcel Marceau, who continued to say, “You have to understand what silence is, what the weight is and what the power of silence is. “it is difficult to understand, especially in a time dedicated to hypercommunication, although sometimes you really have nothing to say, although sometimes our conversations are only repetitions, without rest, of the same formulas spent, of the same common places, of the same social, political or commercial litany.
In psychoanalysis, silence acts as a pillar that supports the entire process, the analyst proposes his silence as an invitation for us to demonstrate our own voice, our ability to listen to our own speech, the silence of those who are analyzed, speaks of their resistance or the sudden invasion of what was too difficult to say.
Moreover, in the context of psychoanalysis, there is a form of silence that is unparalleled, after all, the unconscious is a speech without words. It is of this kind of silence that, in the face of the “unspeakable”, a new language emerges that is not made of words, to be explained; more like an intuition, a suggestion, a paradox, a pre-text to talk about himself?The material from which art and poetry are created is like this. Like the following poetry, with which we can close this topic:
The three strangest words
When I speak the word Future, the first syllable is a thing of the past; When I say the word Silence, I destroy it; when I say the word Nothing, I create something that doesn’t fit into any non-existence.
? Wislawa Szymborska?
Image credits: Victor Nuo? Thanks to your Flickr.