No Sound in Silence

In Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, a narrator says of Rosa Burger, “She was mistress of her own silences.” To be mistress of her own silences suggests to me that Rosa is comfortable with the space that opens when conversation or really, any noise, ceases to occupy the spaces. Rosa’s silence here seems to me more than a momentary cessation of sound but an active decision not to further a line of discourse, not to make any response to a space opened in the noise, not to fill the silence with any thing further. To be mistress of her silence suggests that Rosa feels no need to continue a line of conversation; to address what she believes might satisfy the other; or open the conversation to further conversation or noise. Rosa remains satisfied to say nothing unlike Hamlet, who complains that about his dear father murdered he can say nothing but remains very voluble. In this regard I think of Poe’s Imp of the Perverse: to stand precariously at the cliff’s edge and be urged by something within to leap to certain death rather than leave the void empty. As if the void as an active presence demands to be filled. I think of silence as that void into which I am often almost perversely impelled to leap and to fill the emptiness that the silence seemingly oppressively presents to me. Unlike me, Rosa Burger is mistress of her silences: she can stand comfortably at the cliff’s edge and experience no urge to jump into the void.
     To linger peacefully in silence has become near impossible in our current frantic, frentic environment: there is noise everywhere! In the yoga studios in which I practice the sound of the heating units incessantly turning on and shutting off; and the clang of dropped weights in the gym adjacent to the studio floor disturbs the silence I would learn to master during any single yoga session. Everywhere, even in these studios, the ring of a mobile phone intrudes on the potential silence as does someone’s overly loud conversation either to the person immediately to her right or miles and continents away. The internet encroaches noisily and too conveniently with a simple finger click away for anyone with access, and when all else fails there are the televisions or radios to drown out the silence. Music emanates everywhere and fills the silences. I think of Thoreau: “Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.  . . . we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.”  More, the thickness of our lives shows a disrespect for ourselves. Our noises suggest we would not be alone with ourselves; we need to distract ourselves from ourselves.

     Were I not to fill the silence with sound then it would be my thoughts that would fill that emptiness that I invite the noise to suppress. My noise—a refusal of silence--prevents those daring even dangerous thoughts from arising that t would rise to consciousness but for the presence of the noise. I invite noise to keep the silence away. But Rosa does not fear the rising of her thoughts into consciousness; she appreciates her solitude even in the midst of assembly. She seems to me unafraid.