Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

OK. So yes, it’s probably true that our world is a nightmare of little digital hands grabbing at us for attention.

But is that fundamentally different from our past? Yes the digital bit is, but not the time sinks. Not for some of us anyway.

My mother’s life (or my grandmother’s) – most of her life was spent defending those few moments alone whilst on the toilet. She spent her life pulled at by competing demands. Husbands, not so much, but still the cross-talk of work and manly games (football, cricket, horse betting, music, card parties, friends and family weekend rituals) made their lives pretty noisy too. I do think that most men in the middle classes and up often had an office door to garner some quiet but my family were predominantly lower class until very recently and they worked ship yards, factories and other such places. No office doors there.

So I wonder what is really happening about our lack of quiet. Is it really that we are noisier, more bothered by the grasping hands of our attention, or is it that the life that my maternal ancestors suffered has just spread out and infected most of us?

As the author of the article points out, sometimes the only way out is to run away. I wonder if that’s why the law (and society) is so harsh on women who “abandon” their kids and take off for the quiet of a non-human world? If oxytocin fails to make a person stay in what can be a life sentence in purgatory, then the law needs to force indentured servitude if it can, or punish the escapee if not?

Hmmm. I think I might be in a bit of bad mood today.

Anyway, yes. Silence is wonderful. I walk long hours to get some. I leave home to escape the demands of dirty dishes and empty cat food bowls. And I can spend way too much time browsing the internet whereas my mother didn’t live long enough to use the internet. Nevertheless, nearly the sum total of her life minutes were claimed by some duty, demand, or desire of one sort or another.

Apart from the specific details of our duties, I’m not sure the noise level in my life is really that much different from those ancestral women to which I can lay claim.  The real difference, it seems to me, is that because of feminism, of women’s rights, I can say “no” legally even if with not too much social acceptance. And because of that, my noise level might realistically be less than that of my mother’s or grandmother’s.

And the idea of moving to rural Japan to escape digi-noise? I wonder what sorts of people can really make that happen as a solution? The whole thing smacks a bit of the golden past syndrome. Only those who see themselves in power positions in the past want it returned. Those of use who were servants rather enjoy our noisy now, because unlike then, we can get more than a half day off a week in which to go for a bit of a quiet stroll.

I also read—a wonderful, funny, provocative book by Lyn Cowan which I will tell you about later. I wrote down some impressions, some dream images. But mostly I just walked, sat and watched.

Come supper time I went to my favourite vegan restaurant and had dinner. One of the reasons it is a favoured restaurant is the site itself. It is on the second floor of a two story building overlooking a very nice stretch of tree-lined street. There are big picture windows on two sides and the table I usually choose is right up against one of those windows overlooking the street. I got to the place at civil twilight, bought some tea and sat for about 40 minutes before I ate, drinking tea and watching the light seep out of the sky and fill up the thousands of little white light bulbs that decorate all the shops and bistros along the street. Then I ate dinner when my two companions arrived.

I need those multitudinous moments of silence. It is not just a desire but a need. I cannot be me without them.

Oh so wonderful, the silence and order.

The consequence, though, is that I reach perceptual overload rather easily these days. I drove to the library this morning and found Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” on the radio and was listening as I drove. I love the piece but when it came to an end I had to turn off the radio since I found myself jittery from the power of the music. The quiet came down with a bit of a slam and I took a breath. The dark silence in the car was cool, like iced lemonade in the shade on a very hot day. I drove this way for the rest of the trip.

After errands I came to the coffee shop I most often frequent. Inside I found a young mother with two very small children, both of whom were noisy. Ack. Not only that she was one of those young women who was a cheerleader in her high school days (I know that because she found the opportunity to list her 18-year-old self’s accomplishments to her friend). She had the most annoying, perky voice. Her entire conversation was about her soft stomach (she just gave birth some 8 weeks ago), her husband’s hard working ways, the perfidy of the people in her church for not talking to her mother, and how her husband is going to be gone for the next 8 weeks or so. Gads.

It took me 20 minutes after she and her children left to feel the quiet again. Not her fault of course, she can talk about whatever her friends will tolerate, but it does speak to my intolerance of too  much noise. In my past I have often used music played very loud to manage overload. When on the edge of people overload (I have a really hard time being too close to other human beings, I get really jittery and my head gets rapidly overfull with sensation), I used to plug in my headphones and jack up Rammstein or Icon of Coil and use it to calm down, but I find this is not tolerable any longer. Now it seems that only silence will do. That, of course, could be problematic since the human world is hardly a silent place, and I haven’t found a way to manage the sheer volume of noise we people produce.

Oh well, perhaps another methodology will present itself in time.

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.

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.

He came into the archives to talk.

Fucking dweeb.

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.

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.