Have you noticed how common is has become for people to say how much they long for peace and quiet? I know I do.
Silence, I have long believed, would be a lot better than the cacophony of noise I experience as wallpaper to my world. It’s there wherever you go; taxis hooting, discordant music in shops, advertising on radio and TV, cars with sub woofers pounding waves of sub-sonic wrap into your ears, police and ambulance sirens, dogs barking, people shouting into cell phones, microwave ovens, washing machines, dishwashers all firing short, sharp beeps at you, demanding instant attention.
“Silence.” I have said, “Just give me silence!”
In fact I wrote a speculative poem some time ago inviting those who read it to share my silence — even although, in retrospect I have never experienced real silence. The poem went; I, who claim to need nothing, need you, within myself to share the silence.
These days there is so much noise about the place, except perhaps when we go into the country — that achieving any form of quiet is almost as difficult as landing on Mars and it will take as long to get there. Yet we continue to say to people here and there, more often than not, “ I must get away, I need some peace and quiet.”
The truth is, however, that in reality, I have not given much thought to exactly how it would be had I the silence I claim to want. This was brought home to me while reading a book on the Spanish painter, Francisco de Goya, a master of 19th century who lost his hearing after a bout of illness when he was 47 years old.
The book titled Old Man Goya was written by Julia Blackburn a writer with an uncanny ability to imagine, then describe, thoughts, feelings and perceptions. I met her in an extraordinary book titled the Emperors’ Last Island about Napoleon. In the book she imagines what he must have been thinking as he stood, at the edge of a cliff, his hands clasped together behind his back looking, with melancholy eyes from St Helena, north towards his beloved France from which he had been exiled.
A book of Goya’s etchings was given to Blackburn when she was young. Now, after visiting places he frequented studying his art and reading about Goya she has written this biography of his deafness in an attempt to capture in words, his energy, his passion and his genius.
Here is what she says after he went deaf. “(Goya) had entered a place without birdsong or music, without footsteps approaching or dogs barking in the distance.” “Deafness”, she writes, “is said to be the most shocking of all sensory deprivations.
It locks you inside a cage and, since you can’t share the communication of language, it threatens to turn you into an idiot. “The real world becomes strangely two dimensional and empty because nothing exists beyond your own immediate field of vision. “The silence that envelops you becomes terrifying. People appear and disappear like so many gesticulating phantoms.
Then all you can do is withdraw into the privacy of your own being and wait for the storm to pass. “Do the deaf dream the sound of the rush and hiss of waves breaking?” she asks, “Do they dream of dogs barking or piano music playing? Do they listen to voices speaking to them and wake with the belief that the power of hearing has been miraculously returned? Or do they wake …..crying to dream again”.
Since reading the book, instead of longing for silence as I once did, I now lie in bed for a while after I have woken and listen to the first sounds of the new day.
I hear the nasal trumpeting of flock of Egyptian Geese as they flap overhead, I hear the low rumble of the train taking the early birds to work, the rustle of the wind in the leaves on the tree outside my bedroom window, the squeak of the wheel on the bicycle pedalled by the man who delivers my newspaper, the sound of rain on my roof, turtle doves cooing, “work harder, work harder .“
And I yearn no more for silence but rather for quiet, that I may hear more of life around me and know the joy that there is in being alive — and listening.
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