Sounds Of Silence
Completely unrelated to food, but thoughts on silence, being heard and saying the wrong thing.
There are many noises that I encounter in one day at my flat. The hum of cars trailing down Downham and Southgate Road. Countless police sirens. The twangs of country music that waft over from the garden flat two doors down. Jubilant and sometimes ear-piercing screams on the basketball court. A baby crying. A mother shouting. A gaggle of girls smoking and laughing on a balcony. The thump of music from upstairs, the same track played at a dizzying volume, accompanied by whoops at almost the exact same time each week. Sometimes glass shattering. Once, the sound of a mirror dropping three stories around the corner in my stairwell at 3am. Wind rushing through my letterbox, the metal rapping against the door frame. The whir of the bathroom fan. Rain tapping on my neighbour’s metal shed. Me tapping against the keys of my laptop. Stock bubbling on the hob. My oven, which makes an audible exhale when you open its door. The gargle of the dishwasher, and the washing machine sounding like it’s about to take off.
These are the sounds of living in a city, and often I respond with silence, if only to observe or to balance out the cacophony. I take it all in and wonder what it means.
I live alone and unless I’m on calls or have friends over, there are days where I can remain mostly silent. At times I talk to myself, but more often than not I’m screaming inside my head, the engine exhaust of overthinking rattling my brain. I think about how saying something out loud does not give it permanence, but in fact does quite the opposite. You breathe a thought out into the air, and it dissipates into a whisper and then into silence. It can linger and stick in someone’s brain for a while, but human memory is fallible and unreliable at times, and eventually will fade. Writing things down leaves a mark. A paper trail. Evidence of emotion. It can be unsent, perhaps, but never unseen.
I watched this fascinating Ted Talk by Christine Sun Kim, an artist who was born deaf, and whose work explores the concept of sound. In one analogy, she talks about language as if it were a piano, each finger pressing down on a key that might refer to a different grammatical parameter, such as facial expression, body language, speed etc. She infers that English is a linear language, moving from one key to another; whilst ASL is more like a chord. “All ten fingers need to come down simultaneously to express a clear concept or idea in ASL.” she signs. “If just one of those keys were to change the chord, it would create a completely different meaning.”
Not only did it make me think about how incredible it is that a visual language like ASL can denote so many different meanings through a smaller or larger movement, but it’s also making me reconsider how I think about silence. We all know the expression “the sound of silence”. Silence can be piercing. It can say so much more than words. I often think about words that I have left unsaid. How not saying something can feel as much as a declaration as saying everything. Or how silence can linger between two people and offer up an ambiguous sort of conversation. I love you. I hate you. I need you. I’m scared of this. I’m jealous. I’m tired. I’m comfortable.
This is one of the reasons I despair at the online world. Specifically the way writing appears on the internet. As a writer, it’s my job to be able to infer tone in the way I present words. I think, if you’ve read my newsletter before, you’ll realise that I have somewhat of a meandering, self-deprecating, at times nervous tone. I like to use brackets a lot, which I often associate with a sort of whispered self-awareness. Trying to show that I’m in on the joke. But things can get lost in translation, and when you aren’t in front of someone, the words you write on a screen can be confused. Misinterpreted. You’re writing your own thought and it’s being sent through trillions of transmitters, and it lands onto someone else’s screen, and therefore their own orbit. They can only interpret it based on a certain amount of knowledge that is given to them on the screen, or the context of how much they know you as a person. I guess what I’m trying to say is that writing on the internet begets a conversational ‘silence’, just millions of people quietly typing into oblivion.
When I write to someone online, I’m not ‘saying’ something as much as translating a thought from my brain into my fingers. Without saying it out loud (and by out loud, I don’t just mean speaking it – signing it would be a form of this, too), I fear that the humanity of it is removed. It just becomes a little quip I’ve crafted to sound a certain way. Too rehearsed. Too divorced from reality. I imagine what it would look like if I could sign what I meant rather than what I said, and I believe it would appear softer. Warmer. The musicality of movement giving my thoughts an alternate voice to what feels too complex to express.
So much of our interior life is played out in silence. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about being reactive. It’s one of my most toxic traits – my impulse to say something before thinking of how someone else might read it. (I almost said ‘to say something I don’t mean’, but I kind of think that notion is a fallacy – we often mean what we say, we just don’t think about how it will be received or question why we think it). To declare something epic when it might not be the right moment. In many ways I’m still working out what is better or more truthful.
It’s clear to me that I feel silence most violently when I am alone. Aside from the obvious clamour that comes with a crowd, even a quiet bus elicits storied expressions and piques curiosity at someone else’s inner monologue. Whatever impulsive thing I might say, I need to sit in front of someone and watch their reaction, even if it’s in complete silence, to understand how they feel. The wordlessness in an online state is far more excruciating, confusing and unclear than wordlessness in real life. After all, it’s often true that a body cannot lie.
One of Christine Sun Kim’s drawings shows how p (for the musical term piano, which means to play softer) can be filtered down thousands of times. “No matter how many thousands upon thousands of p’s there may be, you’ll never reach complete silence.” That’s comforting. That the silence we think we hear is not an absence of feeling but a translation into another expression.