After today’s viewing of Into Great Silence, I started to think a little bit about silence. Isn’t it amazing how “silence,” when posited within varying contexts, can invoke so many different responses? The silence of a lightly lit church often incites reverence, a certain humble veneration. The silence of a dark attic or graveyard usually engenders fear or trepidation. The silence endured whilst scuba-diving several meters beneath the ocean rouses wonder and unequaled awe. As an aside, and interestingly enough, how would those responses of veneration, fear, or wonder change if the contexts were instead filled with sound? It’s an interesting thought. I don’t think many of us would be afraid in that nighttime graveyard if we brought along our iPod and listened to our favorite music. At least, the fear would be significantly diminished. Silence alters everything.
The movie today was filled with silence. What was your response? I was rather curious at first. Who in their right mind would produce a movie which lacked an audio component entirely? I mean come on…at least Koyaanisqatsi had music…but this? Although we weren’t able to view the entire film, I believe we were given a picture of how serene our lives could be. Aside from the hustle and bustle of our daily existence, aside from the devices, aside from the unneeded stressors and unwarranted worries, and aside from the noise; what is there? There is only…silence. And as I said earlier: silence alters everything.
When your life is silent, what happens? I usually gain a new sense of calm and center when I’m immersed in silence (placed within a certain context of course). Many an epiphany has arisen from moments of deep and profound silence. Silence and meditation is also medically beneficial to both our minds and our bodies, allowing us to concentrate and heal. Conversely, noise interrupts and breaks through moments of simple repose. One needs only to envision how sound travels as vibrations, tremors which displace and disrupt the very air we breathe, to appreciate the disturbance induced by noise. From dawn till dusk, our lives are usually replete with noise. We can’t seem to escape noise. In the morning, we habitually awaken to the berating and beleaguering sounds of our alarm clocks. Do you wake up naturally? Not many people that I know personally do. What would your life be like if your body was able to make its own schedule and imbibe silence for as long as it needed in the morning? Throughout the entire day, we are bombarded with noise and consternations ad nauseam. Many times, we even fall asleep to the tune of the TV in the background. Sometimes the TV is replaced by our MP3 player. But nonetheless, the inundation is still the same. We are environed within a cage of noise. But would we have it any other way? Humanity is so adapted to noise that it has nearly begun to embrace a certain hostility towards silence. We really don’t like silence do we? We feel out of place and disrupted by something which is the effective opposite of disruption. Only the most powerful of events can summon one to the world of silence (e.g. a funeral service, a spiritual experience, poignant memoriams, etc…). I wonder how strange an occurrence this would have represented to our ancestors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I can only imagine how they must have lived their lives, lives undoubtedly filled with more silence than those lived today. I would probably say that the diminishing of silence in existence has a direct correlation with the production and acceptance of devices, in Borgmann’s sense, and the overpowering onslaught by technologies designed to make and sustain their own noises. This deduction thus draws me to a certain conclusion in light of Borgmann’s reasoning: if we stave off our total and maddening love for devices and work more to embrace those focal things/practices which Borgmann catalogues, then maybe, just maybe, we will once again begin to hear and intimately know the tune which silence proclaims.
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