On silence

On silence. Why poets, and others, look for quietude – with lovers, friends, or by themselves – in lieu of words

Doodle: Good morning, Noodle. You appear deep in thought.

Noodle: Thanks for the interruption. I’m puzzled by a poem. As a professor of the humanities, I’ve read a lot of poetry, and should be able to explain this one, but I’m stumped. It makes me dizzy.

Doodle: So it’s a good puzzle?

Noodle: Not at all! The poem seems to be about not writing poems: it’s such a contradiction.

Doodle: Well, you know better than others how poetry is far more difficult than people imagine. What’s the poem?

Noodle: It’s a short one by Yeats:

Doodle: And your puzzle?

Noodle: I think it’s an obvious one. Why does the poet wish to be “colder and dumber and deafer than a fish”?

Doodle: That’s not a very nice thing to say about fish.

Noodle: You’re missing my point. Why does Yeats want to dull his senses and feelings, to the point of stillness, like a fish at the bottom of a cold pond?

Doodle: Yeats or no Yeats, there are many reasons why poets have wished for silence.

Noodle: Really? Than why write poetry? Why write verses few can understand, even professors? It’s as if they are questioning their own art. You say there are many reasons: what are they?

Doodle: I’ll give you three.

Noodle: That’s a good number.

Doodle: Here, in fact I’ll draw them for you.

Noodle: I know you’re an artist: you want me to interpret art? Maybe you want to take me back to the Tabula of Thebes, or Giotto’s chapel, with their allegories.

Doodle: Such scholarly references! Here you go.

Noodle: What am I looking at? I see a tree, and in the middle a heart on fire. Are you playing with me now, taking me back to Dante? Why not add an inscription, “Vide cor tuum”; “Behold your heart”! But Dante’s love for Beatrice spurred him to compose the finest poetry the world has seen, not to silence!

Doodle: But we are not talking about, I thought, what poets do, but what they may wish. What about the anguish his unrequited love sustained? Do you not think, for an instant, Dante would have traded his world of verse for a life with Beatrice? Passionate rhymes yield to passionate silence. Tristan and Iseult drink, with their love potion, not only love, but also death. All their subtle signs of love they created for one another, throughout their separation, fall silent when they are joined in death. So this silence rounds out the singularity, the brief, finite singularity, of the poet’s lonely life and words.

Noodle: This all sounds very medieval.

Doodle: Perhaps. But is what is old something that is past? Yeats loved Dante and medieval legends, as did Keats, Akhmatova, and many poets.

Noodle: No wonder they can seem so foreign to us.

Doodle: We are estranged from them; but still they speak to us. Here is the second image.

Noodle: Stranger than the first! A black ship on the ocean, with an insignia on its banner. Is that a bug – no, it’s a cockroach!

Doodle: Yes, another reason for silence. The name of Akhmatova helped to crystallize it for me. This is the cockroach of Stalin’s mustache mocked by Osip Mandelstam. It landed him in the gulag and brought him an early death.

Noodle: What does it have to do with my puzzle?

Doodle: This is not about love, or reaching silence in love’s fulfillment as the mark of one’s life. This is about escaping political persecution and oppression, over the course of time, and steering clear of the menacing ship of state.

Noodle: Self-censorship, then?

Doodle: Not at all. But rather a creative silence, one that one nurtures intimately, not only within oneself, but also among one’s closest friends. I know this is hard to imagine in our time of “social media” and self-publicity, when any, and it seems almost every random thought or image is recorded and broadcast. Soviet poets knew this intimate silence well. They memorized one another’s verses and avoided putting them on paper, for fear of persecution. Only after Stalin’s death did they publish them. For this act of generous creativity, they remained true to one another, and preserved in privacy their artistic mission.

Noodle: What a remarkable moment, and quite recent. As the means of publicity grew, the poets retreated from its temptation.

Doodle: Yes, a lesson for all of us, in our current technological fascination. Here is the third image, perhaps the darkest, but I think the most relevant.

Noodle: You’ve drawn a tower, situated in a meadow or garden. While the Freudian meanings may be obvious, what does it have to do with silence – or darkness?

Doodle: This image connotes the most tragic silence of all: the poet in isolation. In the first example, a poet wishes for silence to find fulfillment in love. In the second, a poet chooses silence to protect the craft of verse, and finds solace in the creative coterie of like-minded souls. But here the poet is alone, in solitude and even succumbing to madness or to the desire for self-annihilation.

Noodle: You are reminding me of Hemingway’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”

Doodle: This is well-said, and a good example.

Noodle: But certainly this extreme isolation was not Yeats’s desire!

Doodle: No, for he says his wish was not granted. He would be silent, but cannot. The image reminds me of the fate of Friedrich Hölderlin, in his tower in Tübingen. He suffered through four decades of mental darkness, witnessing his close friend Böhlendorff also fall to a nervous breakdown, depression, and suicide. And to recall the lines Hölderlin wrote to him, shortly before their mutual silences: “The soul that friends share, the arousal of thought in conversation and letters: artists need these things. For in truth we do not possess them for ourselves. On the contrary they belong to the heavenly form, which we form.”

Noodle: So this silence, this terrible isolation, came about as a result of mental illness? How does that represent a wish? You’re not helping my brain.

Doodle: I think you misunderstand me. It’s just as likely that the illness came from isolation, something we should think about in today’s society. And these pictures are images and imaginations that are relevant to a poet’s condition. If a poet loses love (Hölderlin’s beloved Diotima had just died) and then intimate friends, who becomes his audience? “A poet finds his own audience,” Brodsky once said. But where is it, without intimacy, without interiority? So the tower represents retreat.

Noodle: Retreat from what? What does that have to do with understanding Yeats? As a scholar of literature, I still have a hard time fathoming his desire for silence.

Doodle: Don’t you, as a scholar of literature, often rail against business interests?

Noodle: Yes: they are philistines, to use Matthew Arnold’s term. They show no interest in culture, but rather only in material well-being – especially their own!

Doodle: Both artists and poets have felt alienated, too, from this world of business. We often feel alone and misunderstood. Today especially this feeling can be overwhelming, and lead us into silence, withdrawing from this world. But there is also your world, too, that moves poets to be like fish at the bottom of the pond, or watchers in the tower, looking over the once and future garden.

Noodle: Wait a minute, now: what are you talking about? We scholars are keepers of the poetic flame. We introduce students to poetry, explain it to them, make audible the voices of the poet and the artist.

Doodle: Really? How can you be so certain of this? Does your textual analysis capture what a poet is trying to say? Or is it not more so an attempt to make your voices heard?

Noodle: This is unkind!

Doodle: But untrue? Perhaps it is not only lost love, or political oppression, or business obsessions that make a poet wish for silence. Perhaps scholarly readers, too, make a poet feel estranged. Yeats seems to say as much in his lines:

Noodle: I always enjoy talking with you, Doodle. But I must go now.

Doodle: Likewise: till next time!