Writing and Silence

From whiskey river:

Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.

(Thomas Merton, Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky)

Not from whiskey river:

Silence

I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths,
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities –
We cannot speak.

A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
“How did you lose your leg?”
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, “A bear bit it off.”
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.

There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of an embittered friendship.
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
There is the silence of defeat.
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.

There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d’Arc
Saying amid the flames, “Blesséd Jesus” –
Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.

And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.

(by Edgar Lee Masters, about whom I first wrote not quite a year ago)

Also not from whiskey river, but three related thoughts from Thomas Merton, over the years:

I am finding myself forced to admit that my lamentations about my writing job have been foolish. At the moment the writing is the one thing that gives me access to some real silence and solitude.

(Merton, Journal Entry, July 20, 1949)

The best thing for me is a lucid silence that does not even imagine it speaks to anybody. A silence in which I see no interlocutor, frame no message for anyone, formulate no word either for man or paper. There will still be plenty to say when the time comes to write, and what is written will be simpler and more fruitful.

(Merton, Journal Entry, December 14, 1949)

This idea of a “writing career” which begins somewhere and ends somewhere is also a beautifully stupid fiction. Yet I can comfort myself with the idea that St. Thomas occupied his mind with it for a while, when he was my age. He told his secretary and biographer Reginald that if his days as a writer and teacher were over, then he wanted to die fast. I don’t feel that way about it. And I don’t feel that my days as a writer are over. I don’t care where they are. The point for me is that I must stop trying to adjust myself to the fact that night will come and the work will end. So night comes. Then what? You sit in the dark. What is wrong with that? Meanwhile, it is time to give to others whatever I have to give and not reflect on it. I wish I had learned the knack of doing this without question or care. Perhaps I can begin. It is a matter of truth, and patience, and humility. Stop trying to “adjust.”

Adjust to what? To the general fiction?

(Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1966)

Finally, one of my favorite opening-credits sequence of all time, from The Graduate:

(Damn. Now I’ve got to add that to my Netflix queue…)
______________________

Note: The image at the top of this post is a photograph of the writing room on Deck A of the Hindenburg airship. Around the walls were muted watercolors by the artist and graphic designer Otto Arpke, such as these:

I’m sure this was a tranquil place in which to write, and I’m equally sure I’m glad never to have written there.

Found these images, among many others, at the page about the Hindenburg’s interiors at the very interesting Airships: A Zeppelin History Site.