The Sounds of Silence

WHEN I WAS a sixteen-year-old naturalist in training, we were instructed to sit in the forest and wait for the return of something called “the baseline symphony.” The baseline symphony was the music of a landscape at ease—the confluence of insect, bird, and animal song, underscored by wind and water. The dynamics of that symphony shifted as day progressed into night. There were brief caesuras, but it did not fall silent for long except in the case of a disturbance. Silence signaled the onset of weather events, a stalking predator, the encroachment of loggers, or the footfalls of a teenager with punk rock looping loudly in her brain. As I picked down the forest path, an unnatural quiet fell, broken only by the occasional bird alarm.

With practice, I learned to still my mind and body long enough for the baseline symphony to return. Insects would take up their strings, their song swelling like groundwater all around me. It was as if my vagus nerve were a dial, tuning me from static to a sublime frequency.

A couple of years later, I sat on a beach in Tulum at midnight, in the strangest quiet of my life. What is this place? I wondered. Then a sudden and obliterating wind sandblasted my face. I spent the next few hours holding down one side of a cabaña, and later slept on the ground beneath it in the eye of a storm. I’d forgotten a basic lesson: where there is life, silence always means.

I have heard many silences over the years, but rarely have they meant peace or calm. I’ve heard electric silences, like the current that runs between one blues bar and the next; between the opera’s close and the first bravo! I’ve heard the suffocating silence of a collapsing marriage; the thrashing silence of deep water. I’ve heard pregnant silences, like those that precede difficult-to-say phrases: “I am in love with you,” or “I’m not in love with you,” or simply, “I have something to tell you.”

A few months ago, in a voicemail message, my father said that he had something to tell me. And when I called back, there was a nauseating silence between my hello and his news: “Your sister is dead.”

It took me several days to hear him.

The human ear is a blunt utensil, and whole worlds of sound hum with activity just beyond its range. Bats and moths and dolphins perceive these worlds, as surely as the elephant’s trunk whiffs the water she walks toward, sometimes miles away. We can’t detect those sonic ecologies, but we must sense that they are there. Maybe that’s why silence so disturbs us, why we fill it with chatter, to drown out those spectral songs at perception’s edge.

Silence will not stand, it seems, not even in our own creations. As silent film transitioned to talkies, viewers were unsettled by the soft blows of staged fist fights, by the absence of ambient noise. The foley artist emerged to create the sounds of footsteps and rustling fabric to sync with images in postproduction. Without the effects of cause, we become disoriented. We need the crisp click of boot heels on tile, the crunch of snow, to hold our bearings.

When the baseline symphony returns to a forest, it brings the “companion call,” a short burst of vocalization bounced between birds. Social animals of all kinds use these calls to keep track of their intimates, to affirm and reaffirm the wellness of the world.

Where are you?

I’m here . . . You there?

I’m here . . . You there?

If the question goes unanswered, the mate will call again and again, with increasing agitation and frequency. If a response comes at last: relief, a return to baseline. If not: distress, chaos, and eventual desertion. We lose track of our purpose when the beloved falls silent.

During the sleepless weeks following my sister’s death, I came unmoored. My brain conjured music and murmuring voices from the silence of my bedroom, a phenomenon I have since learned to call “involuntary musical imagery.” No pillow could quiet that intrusive music. It could not be dampened by external means. Silence is typically defined as an absence of sound, but in this case, it was an instrument picking up phantoms. At the reception following her memorial service, I was seated next to a man who described himself as a “paranormal investigator.” He told me about a special device designed to record the voices of discarnate spirits.

“What do the dead say?” I asked.

“Oh, all kinds of things,” he said. Usually single words or simple phrases. Hello. Yes. No. I am here.

Normally, I’d be skeptical of such a claim, but a terrible silence had shrouded my sister’s death. I understood, intellectually, that she was gone. But my body had not yet caught up to that information. My heart kept pleading, Where are you? I wished then that the man had brought his device to the dinner. I’d never known a world without my sister’s voice, and I was desperate to hear her speak again. Even if only to hear her say, “Hello. I am here.”

Nauseating, suffocating, thrashing, pregnant, electric. Silence is absence, or it’s an instrument. It can be avowed and entered like a cloister, or dispensed as “treatment.” Silence is the screen for our shadow play. Porter of desire, fear, mental noise. It is golden, or it is violence. It is the fence around wisdom, the scaffold holding the poet’s broken lines. It speaks the unfinished conversations of the sleep-deprived. But so long as there is a listener there to hear it, silence always means.

 

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Lisa Wells is a poet and nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s, Granta, The Believer, and n+1. She lives in Seattle and is an editor for The Volta and Letter Machine Editions. She is the author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World.

Comments

  1. Nicely written honey I think of your sister everyday

  2. Nice article Lisa! Your writing brings memories of thoughts gone by. Thank you.

  3. Well written. While I think many of us long for the quiet afforded by nature, it is very true that silence there is rare, and usually telling. I remember walking once in a small woodlot, surrounded by city, in which no birds sang, no mammals moved. It was eerie.

  4. I stayed once for six weeks in a canvas topped structure; most sounds penetrated the thin material. Wind, rustling, little coos of the night. When I came back to my bedroom in the city, I was uncomfortable, it was too silent, and I felt anxious. I’m sure it was because I had adjusted to the sounds of night, meaning that I could feel safe when surrounded by typical benign sounds. Lovely article.

  5. This is so beautifully written, poetic, musical, dissonant as needed. You have opened my eyes to the forest in which I live. It’s silence is the result of the very noise I make. But when I simply walk out my door I am in quiet teerrain and the birds calling to one another enchant me these days. I even installed and app to identify the various songs. I live on a large waterfall and am constantly comforted by its noise that some find too loud. Last night, for the first time we were surprised by the loud calls of bullfrogs. Thank you for this beautiful, heart-opening article. I will never “hear” silence in the same way again. I wish you healing in your grief. It is always so hard. We are tempted to suppress it, but it only remains, waiting for us to be ready.

  6. What a beautiful article. In the silence – you say so much. Thank you!

  7. Thank you. Your words pierce through. As a quiet mind drawn to sitting in forest academies, who has been brought to tears by the silence of aTulum night, and an end-of-life doula who wonders if some kind of wisdom will whisper to us if we wait long enough, I hear you. In gratitude…

  8. Wow, this article really touched me. The silence I remember most was on 9/11. I went hiking in the Arizona desert in the middle of the day…like the world had stopped. No airplanes in the sky, and fewer cars than normal.

  9. Thoughtful message here. Sensitive. In this regard, I recommend the book The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music int he World’s Wild Places. by Bernie Krause. Happy ? Endangered Species Day

  10. This was absolutely beautiful to read. Uplifting and solemn, hopeful and sad all at once. Very moving and I am touched, reminded of my own pain that I’m learning to heal in the forest. I keep searching for silence to hear myself, but maybe that’s not what I need at all. Perhaps it’s the symphony of the forest that quiets us all.

  11. Thank you for sharing your experience of ‘Silence!’ My son often asks me why do I need to hear something rather anything all the time. I always would laugh and never find an appropriate answer. While reading your piece I realized that I too fear silence as I too have experienced numbing Silence a few times in life. Even though I practice mindfulness I am yet to experience joy in Silence.

    Silence in itself is too pure to constrict by assigning it a meaning.

    It is indeed interesting to see the varied interpretation of it.
    I have heard a lot about the beauty and joy of pure ‘Silence’ and I look forward to experiencing it someday.

  12. I am inspired to listen more closely to silence.

  13. I really long for silence. I have tinnitus and the sound of it in my head and ears is constant. The sound varies from time to time but it is always there. I have come to accept it as part and parcel of my daily life but still I do sometimes wish I could just switch it off and hear silence and peace.

  14. It was an excellent read .I enjoyed and came to the end of the article…without noticing…beautiful flow
    Thanks a lot Lisa .God bless.

  15. It takes patience and time but the blessing of silence soothes, in this world of hurry

  16. I remember the silence of walking on a path on one of the Bahama cays. There was no one, no sound. I thought I was in heaven, because I was in another world and it was beautiful. People hardly notice the silence between musical notes or poetry, but there is a statement there in the absence of sound. Thank you for your beautiful words.

  17. Thank you for the beautiful words.They have a soundless silence of their own.
    It is the peace one feels in meditation.

  18. A lively beautiful article written with the echoes of silence words. Lovely.

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