Write a poem from the roaring silence.
Tags: loud-silence, epic-earth, poet's moniker, poem
NOTES & QUOTES
From Annie Dillard (1982), Teaching
a stone to talk: Expeditions and encounters...
About silence:
"it is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall
to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate the
grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused
the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under
every green tree. Did the wind used to cry, and the hills shout forth praise?
Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living
things say very little to very few. Birds may crank out sweet gibberish and
monkeys howl; horses neigh and pigs say, as you recall, oink oink. But so do
cobbles rumble when a wave recedes, and thunder breaks the air in lightning
storms. I call these noises silence. It could be that wherever this is motion
there is noise, as when a whale breaches and smacks the water—and wherever
there is stillness there is the still small voice, God's speaking from the whirlwind,
nature's old song and dance, the show we drove from town. At any rate, now it
is all we can do, among our best efforts, to try to teach a given human
language, English, to chimpanzees…" (p. 88)
"The mountains are great stone bells; they clang
together like nuns. Who shushed the stars? There are a thousand million
galaxies easily seen in the Palomar reflector; collisions between and among
them do, of course, occur. But these collisions are very long and silent
slides. Billions of stars sift among each other untouched, too distant even to
be moved, headless as always, hushed. The sea pronounces something, over and
over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I have
tried." (p. 89)
"At a certain point you say to the woods, to
the sea, to the mountains, to the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be
wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear
it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those
created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or
raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's
word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is
it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep—just this one. The birds
and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and
clouds: they all do it; they all don't do it. There is a vibrancy to this
silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you
give your life's length to its listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls
up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or
lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression; instead,
it is all there is." (pp. 89-90)
