A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.
A little rice? A little soup? I'd rather die reading the early texts you sent about my breasts. I wouldn't take a picture- infidelity!- and so instead had conjured them with words, for which, with words, you gave me back a tongue we dragged across the skin of common thought. Such is our lot, our shared disease or gift. Like Bernini's angels propped somewhere in Rome
Our brain is constantly assessing risk and safety. Being judged, rejected, or demoted within a group can register as a threat to belonging, something that, for most of human history, meant a threat to survival. Thus, silence may merely be an intuitive default response while the brain assesses the safety of the social situation. When we sense danger, however subtle, say an unpredictable leader or a dismissive tone, the amygdala becomes alert, and the brain shifts into a state of heightened vigilance and self-protection mode.
I first became interested in silence over 15 years ago when an overdose of New York City noise got me wondering if and how I could find refuge in its opposite, in absolute quiet-something that was not merely a reduction in or lack of noise, but a vibrant counterpoint to the sounds which we assume define and shape our lives.
In 1952, John Cage shocked audiences by staging four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. His composition 4'33" was an attempt to make nothing audible. It was inspired in part by Robert Rauschenberg's White Paintings (1951), entirely white canvasses that work as blank screens to register shifting shadows and reflections, and project them as art. 'A canvas is never empty,' says Cage, quoting Rauschenberg, and 4'33" bears that out, as random ambient sound - coughing, shifting, programmes rustling - becomes a kind of music.
