Bill, silence is like colour. We lay arbitrary cultural categories on something that is a continuum. The perceived distinctions that create 'noises' are in that sense virtual not real. Silence for me carries connotations of 'being quiet' as well as of 'listening'. A metaphor for being receptive is to be still, which doesn't mean 'being quiet' but being able to select from the noise around us. When we imagine that we being quiet it's just a metaphor for reflection. Of course if there is too much going on, too much noise, then we get lost, can't listen. The idea of that emptiness is required to carry the eternal is analogous to the idea of objectivity as an absence of values. Both of these attitudes assume that a person can become a tabula rasa. If we claim a state of emptiness (silencing the conscious voice) then our actions are likely to tend towards the traditional (what seems automatic or natural). On the other hand we need to make space , another metaphor for silence, in order to hear new things or to take stock or to listen (to what is always around).

"I would like to talk about silence in the forest,
and how silence could be the same as violence,
silence is not peace, silence is also raw light
and raw blood of tree's leaves. Listen to a bird in the silence! Listen to an axe in the forest! The bird's axe in a silent forest."

Christophe, a sculptor, Southern France.

Silence can also mean not making a choice (as opposed to listening and then acting). Silence as a result of distancing. And in some ways this is akin to Cage's 'throwing sound into silence' 2, where he aimed to create sound that was distanced from identity. If things are really left up to chance (which can never really be true) then I don't see much difference between this attitude of privileging chance and the essentialisms of modernism.

What makes Cage's work so interesting (for me) is his method of including what might at first be perceived as silence or non-music into his compositions, but these 'negative spaces' attain a presence because they were placed in the context of art (hence were given a particular story or identity). If they really remained 'objective' we wouldn't be able to hear them. And that 'objectivity' is also my criticism of his work. If I can't find a structure or little stories in his work, then I can't relate to it. It might be full of noise but then it becomes silence to my spirit.

The postmodernist project has opened up the arena for an acceptance of various forms of expression, yet at the same time a tendency to denounce the narrative as biased denies engagement. A bit like saying 'OK, you can all make as much noise as you like now but for God's sake, don't pause to tell any stories. Having something to say only shows up your naivety.' Odd, because even when someone believes they are not making particular choices, like Cage in his compositions, they are. All human expression is a process that articulates 'some relation between the imagination and the systems of signs that construct our ( ) world.' 3

"Perhaps the most deafening silence is the one used as a smoke screen. Yes we had Apartheid, an unjust system, but we were not being hypocritical about it. The whole world knew about it, but did not choose to confront the problems of racial tension in their own back yards, unwanted orthodox Therivardan Buddhists refugees (No prizes for guessing where they were given a home, yep South Africa). So in silence it seems to me that we hear only what we want to hear."

Eddie, visual artist, South Africa.

In the play, The Road Home 4, are the words, "in the centre of that silence there is a story not being told". This performance told stories (many stories) of children of war. Another child told the audience, "I saved myself by being silent in the circle." In the face of the enemy, hiding his subjectivity and being silent to the atrocities that happened around him saved this child's life. At the end of the performance many victims of war came to the stage to tell their stories. Two of these were the daughters of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. This theatre provided a means for removing a silence caused by intolerance (distancing). We heard the stories from various viewpoints and were reminded of the consequences of being silent to acts of injustice. Yet I feel 'silenced' when it comes to the issue of Kosovo, because I don't know how to help except to give money for aid.

"When everything carries a message we crave silence."

Dave, visual artist, U.S.A.

"Did you know that your blood sings? That the desert throbs and that every piece of earth has its own particular vibration? That we can learn to hear if we are quiet."

Charmaine, visual artist, Australia.

Jack on the box, oil stick and charcoal, 1993,
by Dave Taylor.

"Technically, in performance, the problem is that there is no such thing as real silence. I spent years working in non-verbal, silent, abstract theatre. This was possible indoors, but when the material was moved outside, an airplane flying overhead, the passing of automobiles, all made the use of silence problematic. Silence was attractive, because it seemed to lead one into the subconscious, the sublime, another dimension, another world. Outdoors it was necessary to create a protection of sound/music that would control the content of the performance, and as soon as this occurred, there was a loss of privacy, of the personal, of delicate vulnerability. Still, in the more visceral work of Butoh, it is possible to even transcend the silence of outdoor "silence". I remember seeing Shankai Juku performing in Edinburgh, Scotland. Four naked men hanging upside down, their bodies covered in white powder, shaved heads, suspended by thick rope thirty, forty feet from the concrete sidewalk over the steps of the front of the Scottish National Bank. As they writhed slowly in the silence, the sound of the cars honking, the diesel trucks roaring by, the footsteps and calling of voices from the streets created a tapestry of sound against which their silence shouted. "

Bill, actor and theatre producer, Nazareth, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

Postmodernist writers have shown us that there is no real silence, no particularity or category that can be called the 'absent' - that's where the noise comes from, not so much the new technology, but our awareness that every time we make a choice, we are omitting something. The awareness of what has being omitted keeps calling.
Our Information Age is an Age of multiple ghost images.

"Recently in talking about the relationship of the soul to the spirit, it appeared to me that we are like a whirlwind, a hurricane of energy, and at the center of that energy is silence, the soul. It is from silence, stillness, that all force emanates, and without silence there would be no terror, no life. Silence, then, is the force that gives shape to what otherwise would only be noise. We often think of nothingness as the absence of something, but in reality, it is the presence of nothingness. In Eastern thought, all life is the balance if Yin and Yang, life and death; in this way, death is within us, perhaps it is our very soul, like the silent eye in the center of the storm, like the silent center of quiet thought at the heart of our every true action."

Bill, actor and theatre producer, Nazareth, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

For the '98 InterSociety of Electronic Arts symposium, I was invited to make a presentation in response to their themes of 'Revolution' and 'Terror'. In response to what seemed to me to be noisy themes I chose a performance rather than a lecture as my approach and one where a meditative atmosphere would be created so people could feel at ease rather than bombarded with the images and texts which were projected. Our sounds for the performance were the noises the audience made when we removed the sounds of the words. At the same time salt, used as a metaphor for filtering what we receive from the environment, was passed from hand to hand.

Detail, Making Salt, 1998
More about this performance.

The Making Salt performance involved taking texts from this century's political, historical, & philosophical ideas and putting them into a system. The system was like salt itself: the texts were fluid, remaining visible only for some minutes while other texts were typed over them and then in turn were replaced by other texts. At the same time, constantly changing video images were projected behind the boards that the texts were being typed onto. There was a lot of material in terms of references and associations but it was presented gradually and images flowed to the next just as the texts did. I wanted to give the feeling of the 'noise' of our times, and to present it as something with silences or structure.

Notes

1.Arts Dialogue, a magazine co-ordinated by the Bahá´í Association for the Arts, carries stories, interviews and articles on all aspects of the arts. See: http://bahai-library.org/bafa

2. "Composition becomes throwing sound into silence and rhythm..." Cage: Campana, 1989: 219, "to make a musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory..." Cage, Silence, 1958: 59

3. Manifestations -Performing the Word, Polly Gould, 1998:10

4. The Road Home, a 90 minute theatre piece, was performed by the River Arts Repertory in association with John Burt at the Hague Appeal for Peace in May 1999. It premiered in New York in April 1999 and will go on tour.