On Silence and the Inner Voice

Commonplace Newsletter #94

There seems to be a conspiracy against silence. Every shop has piped in music and every road has the seemingly endless hum of car engines and the blare of horns and the doppler effect of music and ambulance sirens passing by.

So given this you would think that silence would be seen as a luxury item, as something to be pursued, cultivated, and cherished and shown off like an expensive handbag or wristwatch. As something that is valuable, if not inherently then at least because of its scarcity. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. If anything, the opposite seems to be true. We strive to fill every even potentially soundless moment with music and talking and commentary of one form or another.

As an example- the other day I arrived about 10 minutes early to meet a friend. I was making good time arriving at the pre-arranged spot with time to spare. I was phoneless and bookless. I had nothing to occupy or distract myself with and so I simply leant against a wall and waited. I was neither arrested for vagrancy nor did I collapse from unendurable levels of stimulus free boredom. I simply waited and people watched. I recall doing this a lot as a teen, pre-smartphone and before the presence of screens and music in seemingly every public space. Waiting and looking around and planning what you were going to do later- all in your head- thinking, observing, being.¹

And leaning against the wall what I observed was passer-by after passer by enveloped in their own tech mediated dreamworld. Now, this was a fairly busy stretch of road I was on but every person under the age of forty-five (by my approximation) who walked by- in both direction- was either talking into a phone or looking at a phone while also wearing cordless earbuds. Every. Last. One. After a minute or two of recognising this pattern, I began to pay it careful notice and or so minutes later when my friend arrived I had counted 67 people lost in conversation and music (or podcasts) versus maybe a dozen who weren’t- and the dozen, I should add, were all much older than the tech addled cohort.²

This little moment of observation has stayed with me. That scene in Jim Jarmusch’s (admittedly pretty mediocre) zombie satire Dead Don’t Die where the newly zombiefied Millennials in the town all clutch their devices and moan for WiiiFiii in the way an early generation of zombie would have moaned for braaaains had originally struck me as way too on the nose.³ But what I was seeing with my own eyes brought it to mind and showed me that Jarmusch had had a point. Were these pedestrians so afraid of even a minute or two of being alone with their thoughts that they had to plug the brief limbal gap on their walk from A to B with music or conversation or some manner of podcast punditry or commentary? What was going on? What did this mean?

You can’t really convey the idea of silence in a photograph. So here’s a picture of a cat instead, who may or may not be appreciating silence. Photo by moon-app .com on Unsplash

‘Silence is so Accurate’ ~ Rothko

I’m acting as if I don’t understand the phenomenon largely for rhetorical effect. I do understand, at least in part. Until very, very recently I too have done much of my writing with headphones on and music playing on a loop- whether a CD on the stereo set to autorepeat or a curated playlist that can be left to run for hours and hours. And outside of writing hours I would invariably have a record on the turntable or an old film playing, or a podcast playing in the background that in truth, I was only half paying attention to. God help me, they were never at the forefront of my attention yet still there on the periphery with some host and some guest droning on about the Discoursetm and the state of the world/culture either in earnest or for laughs. Either way they were there, summoned up to spoil any chance of tuning into silence, into the quiet ambient sounds of being in a solitary room, working.

I get it. The voices and the music are supposed to block out other unwanted sounds and help me concentrate (I’ve been telling myself this same lie since secondary school and it obviously disintegrates into nonsense under the vaguest hint of critical scrutiny⁴) and I’m sure you might tell yourself similar stories. But this isn’t it. The truth I believe is that silence- like darkness- is a little unnerving but unlike darkness the apprehension comes not from the fact that it conceals but in that it reveals. In silence the inner voice gets a chance to speak and be heard and this voice can be inconveniently honest, at least in my experience. This voice is often alone in this world in telling you that you are underperforming, that you are settling for less than you should, that you are not living in the way that you know that you need to be.⁵ This voice demands- rather suggests- change, whether it be leaving a job that is taking advantage of you, leaving a course of study that you are only really engaged in to please your parents and so on…

No wonder we try to drown it out with playlists or podcasts, even when we are out on the street.

But this voice can be the answer. Our external searching and perpetual information hunting (and hoarding) are all ways of avoiding an answer disguised as earnestly searching for the answer. The voice, like The Shadow, knows⁶, but what it knows is that we need to change. And change takes energy and presents the real possibility of failure and who can be bothered with all of that? Better to stick your fingers in your ears or better yet stick some cordless earbuds in your ears and drown out that silence and that voice with something, anything…

But this only works for so long, at least in my experience anyway. The only way to really transcend silence, in a sense, is to embrace it. To actually listen to the voice and nothing else until it becomes dimmer and the silence behind it becomes more enveloping and more complete and more inviting. Now I don’t know anything about meditation or whether I advocate it but what I do know is that that now cliche Pascal quote- all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone - is completely true. 

To sit in silence and to simply think (or not think) is a pretty radical and subversive act. It quickly takes you off the pre-laid tracks of habit and consumption- whether that be consumption of products or consumption of endless information and content. The silence makes demands of you- spiritual demands- but it is only through this, as far as I can see, that any kind of peace can be found or any kind of life path that is not merely rote and pre-packaged can be discerned and pursued. The silence is also where all non-derivative, nonreactive creative ideas come from, at least in my experience.

What we need is all there, all around us. We just need to, literally and metaphorically, unplug our ears and listen.

Until next time,

Live well,

Tom.

1. To young readers this might sound inconceivable, but I promise you it’s true. Many a time I would wait at a bus stop doing nothing and then take a forty-five-minute journey to the city where all I did was look out of the window and then meet someone at a set location at a set time with no technological mediation involved. And this, mind you, was in the early 00s, not 1927.

2. I was amazed at how neat and stark the contrast was. But to reiterate everyone in their 60s, 70s and 80s was walking along tech free and cognisant of their surroundings.  Many would make eye contact with me and we would exchange an acknowledgement. But every last person in their mid 40s or younger were completely lost and oblivious in their smartphone and earbud world. Every last one. Of course I would have seen exceptions eventually but it was absolutely universal during the entire time I was waiting.

3. I’m not sure if I can recommend you watch the entire film but the scene I am referring to can be viewed here.

4. ‘I need music/radio/tv to help me concentrate’ is a ridiculous concept. Sure, you can make some argument for earplugs to block out genuine obtrusive background noises while working, and the same for ‘white noise’ playlists to a degree but most who listen to music while working/studying are simply overstimulating and distracting themselves from the task at hand as a form of procrastination. And in their hearts they know it.

5. Or rather the voice tells you these things because it is looking out for you, not as a prelude to selling you some info product or course for the limited time low, low price of $397. While stocks last.

6. ‘The Shadow Knows’ was the tagline of the 1937 Orson Welles voiced radio adaptation of the comic book The Shadow. The line always struck me as being filled with all kinds of Jungian significance.