Drove last night through a cloud come to earth. Weather.

It rained for many miles. All grey, the edges of things blurred. Everything looked the same. Up and over the pass it rained but it was as if the higher I drove, the closer I got to the cloud’s natural home, the less giving the grey masses felt.

Past Snoqualmie, the rest stop at Indian John, all wet and standing water. But then the road down onto the high plateau and the weather tired. The rain sputtered out close to Ellensberg and the world took on contours and colour again.

By the time I crossed the Columbia, the roads were still damp, and the earth smelt life a giant white mushroom but the clouds had retreated back to the sky.

Still, they were there. The moon rose unnoticed, even its light was indistinguishable from the general haze of neon celestial reflection.

I slept at a rest stop, under a sleeping bag in the back of my car and woke just before the sun crested the horizon. Ripped open, the clouds were, where the waning moon pushed through high in the southern sky. I awoke on a long slow breath.

Today is the psychiatric assessment, and a (probably not very pleasant) road sign for my 13 year old niece and yet I was more relaxed than I have been in months. The source of the gift of a contented sigh? A gift of cloud, rain, light and silence probably.

When I unfurled and left the car to go get hot water, I found a folded $100 bill clipped under my windshield wiper. Odd the world.

I am struggling with a book by Sara Maitland called A Book of Silence. I actually quite like it and there are parts that resonate deeply with my own experience of silence. The problem I am having is that the book is so resolutely Christian.

Actually I am not sure that is the real source of the problem but it is the only thing I can think of that explains what I am experiencing when reading the book. Let me give you an example. In the chapter called “Desert Hermits” she wants to discern and then understand the difference she perceives between two forms of silence. She has come to understand the two forms as the kind of silence that allows the Self to emerge (or create Itself) and the other is the kind of silence that abnegates personal identity, emptying one out until all that is inside is the Silence. The first (silence) she exemplifies with Kafka and then the Romantics and the second (Silence) with the those (usually Christian or at least religious) who seek an emptiness that is to be filled with God (or in the case of Buddhism, the loss of illusion).

She uses two quotes as reference points.

You said once that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess, that utmost of self revelation and surrender…that is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why can there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. (Kafka, Letters to Felice)

We must cross the desert and spend some time in it to receive the grace of God as we should. It is there that one empties oneself, that one drives away from oneself everything that is not God and that one empties completely the small house of one’s soul so as to leave all the room free for God alone…it is indispensable: the soul needs the silence of it, the inward retirement, this oblivion of all created things. (Charles de Foucauld, from Ann Freemantle’s book Desert Calling)

Of course I can feel the difference between the way Kafka and de Foucauld sought – and the difference between what it is they sought. This sense of becoming empty (whether to release Self or destroy self) is one all essentially quiet people can intuitively grasp, even one like me who does not require a god to explain the sense of unbearable intimacy that comes from being overwhelmed by that which is infinitely large. And the thing is that both the Self and the Silence are that – infinitely large.

The fact that I can identify either way is part of the problem I have with Maitland’s silence/Silence. I do know what “both” feel like.  I know Kafka’s need as well as I do de Foucauld’s and they are not different, not really. They are both about the loss of the sense of separation. That which Maitland calls solitude/silence (evoking the Romantics) approaches the identity of self and universe by expanding self until it explodes in a kind of ecstatic sense of enfolding of the universe – not humanizing reality but including more and more into what it is to be “human,” so that “to be human” becomes ultimately meaningless — there is nothing that isn’t “to be human.”  This is what Robinson Jeffers was going for in his inhumanism (or should have been if he wasn’t so pissed off at our inveterate stupidity).  The Silence that the hermits sought, that is also achieved through making “to be human” meaningless. It is found by eliminating elements of what “to be human” means until one’s self/identity implodes — and that black hole of the Void (longed for by Simone Weil) is finally found to be at the center of the universe — where one’s self used to be.

Both paths lead to the same experience/event. There one finds a singular identity. It is universally encompassing and inexpressibly minute; monolithic and multitudinous, and our normal sense of isolation, incompleteness, finitude and threatened meaninglessness is utterly vanquished.

I suspect that my problem with what feels like an artificial division in Maitland’s book is compounded by the fact that even with her quotes she can’t seem to hold up the division. Near the end of this same chapter she gives us the words of an Egyptian hermit.

“What is there to love about the desert?
“We love the peace, the silence…You can pray anywhere. After all God is everywhere, so you can find him everywhere.” He gestured to the darkening and dunes outside. “But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself. (Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain)

This last is supposed to be an example of the second kind of seeker and yet, what the Silence provides is nevertheless the Self.

It is not, I think, the the goal of the querent that decides between the “exploder” or “imploder” as Maitland’s book implies, but something to do with cultural expectations and probably basic personality. A bit like solace sought…an extrovert will seek it in the company of others; an extrovert, no. Yet it is still solace that is sought, and found. It is these implications that bug me about the book and, to be honest, I associate this kind of rhetoric with the proselytizing tendencies of religious folk. Not fair perhaps, but there you are.

Does Maitland’s division matter?  I think it does. For the same reason that it is important to realize that ecstatic experiences are artifacts of the human brain and body and not artifacts of mythological beings (i.e. we have some power in the situation), the false division of silence and Silence obscures — and the whole point of seeking is to actually find.

and of course there was a guy who bugged me. Right at the end of the day this fella comes into the archive to get to hold this bible that belonged to Spokane Garry. OK so I get that. I mean, imagine holding Darwin’s own manuscript! Yeah. But you know how I know that’s what he was doing? And what it meant to him? And the history behind the particular version of the gospels this represented? And where Garry got it from? And where the fella taught?

He came into the archives to talk.

Fucking dweeb.

I woke at 4AM. I did some online research (Indian trade routes in the Pacific Northwest and the movement of alcohol along them). I went out for coffee and returned to the motel for more research. I went to the archives at 11AM and browsed through ephemeral material relating to my interest. It is bloody amazing to me what archives like this one have stored away in their cabinets. I went out for a bite at the museum cafe around 2PM and found a Jordanian woman who made me a kick-ass Greek salad and Turkish coffee.  Talk about a kick.  What a delight she was. She brought me honey cake because it tastes so good with the bitter coffee. Then I went back to the archives until it closed at 5PM.

I spoke with the wonderfully competent archivist who just went and got stuff she thought I would want to see and the young cook who wanted me to really enjoy her coffee and found that they added to my calm. I sat at the table with my coffee and honey cake and looked out over the little outdoor theatre and realized I would love to spend the rest of my life doing this – hunting for treasures, both historical and human.

I am at work in the silence of an empty office. I have just been promoted and since the woman I am replacing goes on maternity leave Wednesday (pregnancy has proved difficult for her this time), I have come into the office on a holiday to clean up some files I know I won’t have time for next week. So I am listening to music and working.

The empty office is lovely. Empty like this it feels as if the space is a doorway to some other place, some green wisdom that seeps in through the windows but with all the people who are normally here, its gentle fragrance is lost in the musk of bodies in motion.

It’s rainy today. I can see the water trails on the windows but can’t hear the water as it hits. The music and the thickness of the glass: I am insulated by the hush. Resphighi is playing now and between the silence, the rain and the music, it is enough to evoke “Sunday Morning.”

I think a lot about what Stevens was trying to say with his poetry, “Sunday Morning” in particular. There is the thing about the death of the gods, the end of the god paradigm as the West has come to know it. There is the question of what to replace it with, whether the sensuality of the world is enough, or whether like his muse he must seek after certainties. Harold Bloom argues that Stevens cannot persuade himself to a resolution of what Bloom calls dialectical alternation between Fate and Power. It is as if he sees in Stevens a riven psyche, a Janus face that is turned to the idea that the gods twist our lives for us, and another face that is turned outward to a world in which we are alienated by an immense freedom, unable to be helped because there is no one there to see to us.

It may be. I cannot say what was in Stevens mind but I can say that I have never reacted to “Sunday Morning’s” stanzaic dialog in this way. I don’t see the downward movement of the pigeon’s wings as an image of our end. I have never reacted to the death of the sun, to dark, in this way. And why a pigeon and not a hawk or some other more lordly bird?

The eighth and last stanza reads:

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Maybe Bloom is reacting to the idea of “isolation” in a negative way. Maybe I just don’t get the existential fear of being godless, but I have always thought that the isolation of the sky is linked to the island solitude, and therefore an icon of freedom. Apparently, the wide water that separates the godly minded from that which Stevens calls unsponsored freedom is as inevitable as the disagreement between those whose paradigm of choice is based on the world of evidence and those whose world is based the narrative of faith.

But it is the things of the world that both begin and end the poem. Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, and the green freedom of a cockatoo: Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness. Those berries, and following, the casual flock of pigeons: they are us I think – pigeons as a trope for humanity. It is the ambiguousness of their flight within the horizon of freedom that makes them such a perfect image. Their flight, curvilinear paths inside the hoop of the world, this is not a Janus face but more a penopticon set in the mobile head of a million birds strung out across the world.

Pigeons are such mundane birds, apparently directionless, with no swift wing or piercing eye. Yet they know how to live in freedom. As the sun sets, they extend their wings and sink to their nightly rest. This is the thing I think Bloom missed. At night pigeons rest. They gather together, allow their voices to murmur quietly for a while and roost. They know that the freedom of the sky is best sought by them during the light. It is not a sinking into death, but a graceful extension of life into sleep, where the day can be reborn and where the darkness can be honoured for what it is.

I’m done now, with work. It’s past dinner time and I have suddenly realized how hungry I am. The chai latté I brought with me has long since gone. I turn off my computer and monitors, get up and turn off the printer and the lights and then return to my desk to sit for a few minutes watching the rain runnel down the window glass. I have another day off tomorrow. I wonder if the sun will return.