Personally, I find a lot of meaning in SILENCE: wisdom, space, aggression, neglection, inability to express, repression, acceptance, patience. Contradictory in nature, silence has the power to change what’s arising. I find this idea fascinating. What makes an act of silence to go one way or the other, to remain in stillness or to become an omission? One implicates absence while the other implicates exclusion. This can perhaps relate to the idea that the power of silence has two forms: one joyful and the other disturbing. In both cases silence is the privation of speech. Of being unable to say what one wishes to say or even choosing not to say what one has to say. I find a lot wisdom in knowing when to speak up. One can also convey a big deal by the simple act of being silent and present.
Looking back at Ancient Civilizations and Traditions, I can see how silence was something sacred and even required to undergo any initiation, the text refers to the Greeks with the Eleusinian mysteries, to the Roman pantheon where the goddess Angerona commands silence with the expression of her mouth bound and sealed. I think of the Buddhist traditions and their approach to silence as something noble, as a technique used to refrains from speaking as a way to help quiet the mind and condition the body in the discipline of right speech.
The unsayable not because of omission but rather as something to be realized individually from within. Words can sometimes fall short in the effort of trying to describe emotions, feelings, events, etc. There! is when new ways of expression are so helpful, like painting, defined by Simonides (Greek poet) as “silent poetry”, the making mute of poetry, the silencing of the word. After that a lot can arise and silence becomes this act of allowing for other expressions to be expressed. Then painting silences language by interrupting the relationship of significance created between name and thing or the labeling of a thing, leaving a gap open for namelessness.
Art nowadays has become something noisy with appeals for “silence”. Hence there seems to be a tendency for the artist to transgress that by embracing silence as much as he/she remains an artists and keeps his/her conversation with the public, preserving this reclusive, silent, empty space in which this deeper experience of immediacy with art is translated into something more experimental. Art as a technique for focusing the attention, where the artist task is to open up new areas and objects of attention. The art-work there remains as a tool for perception and realization. Ultimately, silence never ceases to imply its opposite and to demand on its presence. As John Cage puts it: “there is no such thing as silence, something is always happening that makes a sound” similarly there is no such thing as “empty” space as long as there is human awareness within a cosmos in which there is always more to be seen.