Voice Versus Void: the Perpetual Dance of Speech and Silence

The world is full of and filled with noises, some of them musical, scores of them inaudible, many of them grating, even cacophonous. The sounds of language are no exception, ever evolving, ever transforming, disforming, reforming, disintegrating, reduplicating, disappearing, reappearing, nearing and rearing away from elusive (illusive) sense.

Am I making sense? Do I have to? What good does sense do? Is nonsense bad? Are bad and good two?

The moments between words sometimes make more sense than the moments words force their way into, demanding attention like needy children. In other words, silence can be a respite, a reprieve, an escape, an alternate dimension. Gwendolyn Brooks must have meant some version of this when she wrote that “silence is a place in which to scream”.

But silence always gives way to words, welcomes back the prodigal offspring, the unreliable narrator, submits to an unrequited desire for a love with a history of codependency and abuse. To do otherwise would be for silence to reject the truth of its desire for words. “Sometimes to be silent is to lie” said Miguel Unamuno, so Franco’s fascists placed him under house arrest to ensure he stayed quiet forever after.

In what ways do our words and actions ripple outward? Whom do they touch, and how? Do they have lives of their own? Where do they live? What does the sky look like there?

So much of the universe within and without us has yet to be discovered or even considered as possible, but still people waste words quibbling over which of the multitude of given names for phenomena most accurately embody phenomena whose bodies are not and cannot be made of words, or at least not completely. These people want reality to be a popularity contest instead of a fantastic, divine, sublime, confounding, enthralling, invigorating, and debilitating mystery. Their words crack under pressure like rotten, hollowed-out logs. They spring up from the ground like termites to destroy the homes others have managed to build for themselves. They value singularity over multiplicity, distinction over concordance, limitation over liberty.

They claim to serve capital-T Truth, but they serve only cartoonish, two-dimensional facsimiles which flatten and posterize mere snapshots of (some) truth(s) as they were glimpsed and regarded at particular moments in time, ignoring the world(s) wherein the truth(s) resided. In order to justify this ignorance, they suppose that Truth is somehow beyond the world--before, beneath, or otherwise outside the World--anything but of the World. They acknowledge the possibility of a life for Truth apart from language, but they leap from this simple possibility to the radical supposition that anything they can say can be true, that anything others can say can be false, so naturally they become preoccupied with speaking loudest, and fastest, and the most. They become so concerned with this possibility that they become incapable of seeing anything but their possible world(s): they imagine world(s) and truth(s) that might be or should be or that they hope or believe to be, and this act of imagination so occupies their mental faculties they cannot accurately see the World that is, and this selective and self-imposed blindness leads them to deny truth(s) that are because certain truths do not fit into their imagined possible world(s). In other words, truth(s) that exist in the World need not exist in their possible world(s): truth(s) that exist can be impossible in virtual reality.

A dream can appeal to all the physical and spiritual senses, whether it is a sweet dream or a nightmare. Some dreams enlighten, some dreams obscure. Some dreams vanish, and some recur. Some dreams we want to share with everyone who will listen, and some—for better and worse—we keep to ourselves.