Poetics of Silence I

March 8 / By Christine / In Culture, Poetry / Reply

Recently, I have been thinking about a deeper silence that dwells beneath things.  This silence sits beneath conversations, beneath tragedies and natural disasters, beneath births and deaths, arguments and washing the dishes.  This silence, which spreads like an ocean beneath so much activity, is worth paying attention to.

Simone Weil once wrote: “Attention alone – that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears – is required of me.  I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived.”[1]

There’s a challenge for me in Weil’s work that is based around the fact that she takes ‘absolute truth’ to be a given.  She spent her whole life searching for ‘truth’.  Can this belief in an ultimate truth also allow for multiple subjective truths, and take into account the fanaticism that has a tendency to develop whenever someone believes that they ‘have’ the ultimate truth (which invariably differs from other people’s truths)?

Is there a way of moving through my own subjective truth towards a deeper silence, that perhaps also sits beneath other people’s subjective truths: a great reservoir of light?

Polish poet Adam Zagajewski suggests that contemporary mass culture “is marked by its complete ignorance of the inner life,”[2] the life that provides the “final and indispensable energy propelling both poetry and people.”[3]

I’m beginning to think that this ‘inner life’ draws its energy from the silence that lies beneath things.  Perhaps paying attention to this silence is the first step towards writing poetry that expresses something deeper than my own subjective truth, that reaches below the ripples and currents of our ‘information age’ to a clearer understanding of the impact we have on each other and the world.

[1] Weil, Simone.  Simone Weil: An Anthology. Ed. Siân Miles.  London: Virago Press, 1986. (233)

[2] Zagajewski, Adam.  A Defense of Ardor. Trans. Clare Cavanagh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. (138)

[3] ibid.

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