Day 28: Silence

Is it weird that two of my favourite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are (1) the episode in which nobody can talk and (2) the episode in which everybody sings?

I just watched the former, and oddly it spoke volumes to me. I wondered about silence, about how we would communicate if we couldn't talk to each other. Go one further and eliminate electronic communication. The written word in printed (or handwritten) format would be our primary means of conveying messages to one another, not just over long distances, but in face-to-face interactions.

That is, of course, if we survive that long without the sounds of our voices in our ears. The show demonstrated a city-wide depression, aggression and numbness from the loss of voices, and I'm not sure how long society would last in the 21st century without electronic communication on top of that silence. (I'm taking that into consideration because the show was set in the 90s, and email wasn't that big a feature of regular life for most people in Sunnydale.)

It's interesting, of course, because we live in an era in which fewer people are writing to each other, and while we encourage people to talk about their feelings, few actually do. Imagine if they couldn't, literally speaking. If people couldn't voice their opinions, how would that change them? Would we all become mindless, or would we be more willing to read what those around have written? Would violence be the first response to anger, rather than a last resort?

I suppose right now, I'm considering this on an emotional level, too. For the first time in a week or so, I haven't felt like I was under any undue pressure. I don't have the book to worry about, I don't have to be concerned about meeting a word count. I can relax. I could relax. And I did. I suppose I still am. I got to eat breakfast with my family and know that the only thing I had to do was get ready for work afterwards. I could eat dinner when I returned home, and afterwards relax on my bed, and then go to watch Buffy with a cup of tea and an ice-cream (I'm not sure they're a pairing that usually go together, ice-cream and tea, but they seemed to work well.)

All in all, the emotional silence of the day was a relief.

To be fair, I did it to myself. No one said I had to write three books in a month. No one forced me to only focus on those books. On top of that, no one has done or said anything wrong to me that might get me unduly upset. All of the emotional noise of the past week has been brought on upon me by myself and my own decisions, and the pressure I applied on myself.

It felt good to get a break from that.

Tomorrow, since I don't appear to have any other plans, I think I'm going to do my Big Bad Poetry Day. It could be fun, it could be productive, and writing poetry has always helped me to deal with whatever's on my mind. Tomorrow, of course, it won't just be a twelve hour catharsis session. I'll probably write poems about nature and friendship and all the usual things people write poetry about. But I have ideas to experiment with, and I'm going in with one goal in mind: to have fun.

Silence

Silence, silence, silence, terrible and hanging, gnawing away at this weakened island from all sides; the sand washes into the sea and nothing is left but the reclusive tree of the knowledge of good and evil, forever entombed in a quiet storm.

Silence

The first few moments of silence seem to be the worst. Every time I hear it, or fail to, I learn something new about the silence, about the quiet. It gets deep inside, worse than any words, worse than anything anyone could do us me. It's like torture, not knowing what's going to happen, what already has happened.

I can't help but hear the silence. It gets inside before I realise it, and everything starts working all too fast for my own liking. Rapid conclusions, rash and dangerous, are met with fear, panic, suggestion! Nothing I can ever do will prepare me to deal with it. I'm an emotional being; it's my greatest asset, but my greatest liability, and in the silence I hear the thoughts I don't want to. In the silence I feel the panic set in, and I'm reminded of everything that's happened in the past.

The details aren't important. Not the ones behind this text, nor the ones behind the fear. None of that is important, but moving on. Except... I don't think I can ever move on. What's why I'm becoming a teacher, though, isn't it? Because I know how hard it is to get past all this, and I don't want to see another person have to experience it, not if I can help it. Sure, I couldn't help myself, but that was different. That was so much different.

In the silence, I hear words of torture. Not just when something bad happens, or when I think something bad happens, but just... just when there's silence. Sure, I try to fight it off with music or with traffic, but the silence always creeps in. You know that time when the cars are all gone and the song ends? That's when it gets inside again, and the wheels all start working. It's like... oh, you know the story of getting a thousand chimps together with typewriters and they'll eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare? Well, it's like that, only instead of Shakespeare, its dark, sometimes Gothic poetry. It's perhaps the most depressing thing I can create, and yet I don't want it to stop. Every time I write them I feel a freedom I can't describe. The closest thing would be like being released from a cage. If the cage was also on fire.

Of course, I can't always share the poems. I do occasionally. Every second poem seems to creep into the public eye, but some are a bit too personal. Some I only want a few people to see, until I can work up the courage to submit them somewhere. That's always an option, if I can manage it. I could take another option too, and just try get a poetry book published, but I doubt anyone would accept the poetry of an author who hasn't yet gotten something published in an established magazine, or won a competition or anything like that.

All that from the word silence, the idea behind silence... It produces a strange aroma that drives the mind wild. It sends us spiralling down dark alley-ways, always in search of meaning. Silence. Sweet, beautiful, painful silence.