Silence exists in more than one form. In his book Speaking and Language: Defence of Poetry, Paul Goodman eloquently evokes several of them. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Forms of Silence”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
When’s the last time you really listened to silence? I’ve been thinking about that ever since reading a passage from a book by Paul Goodman called Speaking in Language. Here’s what he has to say about silence. Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There’s the dumb silence of slumber or apathy, the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face, the fertile silence of awareness pasturing the soul whence emerge new thoughts, the active silence of alert perception ready to say this, this, the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity, the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear. The noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and sub-vocal speech but sullen to say it, baffled silence. The silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos. And I was so struck by that passage, I just keep thinking about it because it really lays out lots of different kinds of silence.
And when do we ever get to hear silence to begin with? True silence, not just less noise, but absolute silence. Right. I don’t think we do. One of the things that I have read about in the last couple of years is the parts of speech that are silence, where we think of language as being the talking part. But language is also the part where we stop talking. It’s also the part where we leave a space for ourselves or for others to pick up the thread or to continue the conversation. That silence is just as important as the utterances.
Yeah. When I do improv, it’s, one has a compulsion to keep talking, but sometimes the most powerful moments are when you’re completely quiet.
Yeah. That compulsion to keep talking is the old cop and journalist trick, right? Where you sit quiet for just a minute because the perp or the interviewee is going to feel like they have to fill it and they’re going to say something that they shouldn’t have said.
Right. The term for that in art is horror vacuoy, you know, a fear of the vacuum. You know, I have to say that I appreciate silence. I’m a guy who wears earplugs when I work and when I sleep. I like quiet a lot. I mean, a lot, a lot. But I’m also the guy who on his podcast player app sets it to take the silence out of podcasts so that it can fit more into my listening.
You actually speed up the podcast you listen to, right?
I don’t anymore.
I used to do that because you have to give it 100% of your attention when it’s really fast.
Right.
Yeah, I used to.
But now I take out the silence, which helps quite a bit. For every 10 hours I listen, I can take out about an hour of silence, depending on the podcast.
Wait, you take out?
Yeah.
You’re not just playing it quickly?
It automatically removes the silence when people pause or there’s a break between segments or that sort of thing.
Oh, man.
I guess it depends on the topic or what podcast you’re listening to. The thoughtful podcasts become frantic and manic, unfortunately.
So Paul Goodman’s silence in his book Speaking of Language, that’s the silence that I really want. Those are the moments that I really appreciate, how rare they are.
I was going to say.
Even in a church, which we think of as being a silent place, there’s still the hum of the air conditioning and the cars outside and the kids in Bible study, right?
Or even at a funeral or someplace like that, there’s music playing in the hallway and quiet, whispered conversations. There’s no real silence.
Yeah, I guess that’s what meditation is all about, too, right? Just letting those thoughts float through your mind.
We’d love your thoughts on silence as a part of communication and language.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
