SILENCE

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

Suddenly, out of nowhere, random, background sound has begun to bother me.

I used hardly to notice coughing and programme rustling at concerts but now it is a real struggle to ignore it and get back to the music. I used cheerfully to eavesdrop on mobile phone conversations and wish I had the courage to say such clever things as: "Sorry, could you repeat that, I didn't get all the figures" or "is that all?" but now it is only cowardice that prevents my asking people to shut up.

I have recently noticed the background traffic noise as I sit in the garden and I can get used to that because after a while it loses its random character but a fly on a window pane is assuming the aspect of Black Sabbath at a tea dance.

The part of this problem that is physiological and psychological is something I will just have to get used to but part of it is sociological. We seem to have lost all the unwritten rules about what you do in private that you do not do in public, such as discussing pleasant or simply necessary bodily functions, slagging off colleagues, friends and family and, above all, swearing.

Railway carriages are an uncomfortable amalgam of warring boardroom, men's locker room, Freud's couch and the ante-room of a brothel, with warring hi-hat leaking out of competing personal stereos -- though not so personal -- and all I want to do is to read my book or think.

If I were a rich man, I would go and buy some silence.

It's not so easy as you might think because physical laziness implies transportation to the final destination; and even if you walk for miles with a backpack you can still hear tractors, aeroplanes, speed boats and distant trains. You have to be so rich that you arrive and then wave away the transportation and forbid it or any other to come near without your express wish. So most of us are stuck with the aural grime and graffiti.

The worst problem, however, is not the machinery -- it's the words.

Most of them aren't worth the effort.

It seems to me that they are there because most of us cannot handle silence; we don't know what to do with it, just as I don't know what to do with spare time and fill it writing such things as this.

There is a vacuum at the heart of our culture, a sense that we are getting ready for our own funeral, that drives us to constant utterance. If we did not know it before 1914, we certainly know it now. It started, this suspicion of emptiness, with Malarme in drama, Bruckner (of all people) in music and Kandinsky in painting but now it is central to our culture. Beckett, Giacometti, Jackson Pollock and Kurtag each in their different ways strive not to make statements unless, in the spirit of post modern playfulness, they are making statements about not making statements.

After a lifetime of exploring the question of post Shoah utterance, George Steiner has now tabled a new question, imprecisely but forcibly: does our culture see itself as being in the late afternoon?
To which -- or he would not put the question that way -- his answer is affirmative.

As this is one of the most beautiful books ever written, beautiful in its utter sadness, I will describe it no further but answer his question in my own way.

There may be a way forward but there is certainly not a way back. We are, as a culture, incapable of making the positive, self-confident statements from Herodotus to, let us say, Milton. The Enlightenment started as an attempt to make clear statements, innocent of the entanglements of Mediaeval theology but the enterprise ended in a blizzard of subordinate clauses. In spite of the bourgeois self-confidence of the 19th Century, in spite of the advance of knowledge, particularly scientific, the questions grew louder than the answers.

Of the 20th Century there is little to add; we tried to annihilate each other and the planet with us. We are still set on our course. To make a statement of any kind about ourselves as if we were basking in the long Summer of 1914 would be regarded as madness.

I do, however, believe that there is a way forward but it requires three qualities we seem not to enjoy in abundance,

• penitence,
• self-restraint and
• silence.

I would have thought that the penitence is obvious; as a loose cultural association the West has a lot to be ashamed of. In view of our ecological present danger, I would have thought that the self-restraint was pretty obvious, too; we might want to argue over some of the commas in the Kyoto Protocol but that is the kind of self indulgence we must forebear. If we are to survive we will have to be a good deal more approximate in our requirements.
As for the silence, we need it to consider what we are, what we have and how we might piece it together. We may not make the positive statements of a Dante, a Beethoven or a Poussin but globalisation may bring us to a hitherto unimaginable richness of collage and cross-fertilisation. We may be able to say something about brotherhood and sharing as powerful in its way as the classical form and the romantic utterance but first we must retreat to consider.
As birds fall silent at dusk, so must we.

To continue the Steiner analogy, it may be that our new culture will exist under the light of the moon which only reflects the sun we formerly knew. If so then our achievements will be more quiet, more intimate and more intricate. We show no signs of understanding this as we blast our way across the scarred face of the earth;

• the blast of the gelignite in the mine;
  
  
• the blast of the bomb in the street;
  
  
• the blast of the music at the crossroads;
  
  
• the blast of the scandal in the prasesidium;
  
  
• the blast of the expletive in the sanctuary;
  
  
• the blast of the cellular phone in the adagio.

I realise that these statements have a post-modern quality of their own. Just as it is absurd for Derrida to urge the uselessness of books in a book, so it is absurd for me to urge silence by adding to the general background noise.

Have we not got enough culture to be going on with, enough books, melodies, formulations, images?

Perhaps for most purposes we have, but there is such a burden of anachronism in what we love that the pain of encountering it is palpable. Yet we rage at the formalisation of inarticulacy in art, we resent the synoptic, we twitch at the ambiguous. The art that whisperingly, almost mutely, pleads for us to turn the volume down is met with a roaring, intellectual drunkenness.

It is our urge to continue to explore, to utter, which is the obverse of our self-indulgence and plundering. Perhaps when we are properly quiet in our culture of penitence and restraint I will no longer feel the need to write and will fall silent.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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