A Book of Silence (40 page)

These were the issues I was trying to think about as I strode across the hills of my childhood. After Sinai I had begun to feel that all my own inclination and endeavours were towards the eremitical silence – the harsh wrestling with the strength and tenacity of the ego – rather than the romantic notion that the ego needs shoring up, but during those long, lovely, strenuous walks I learned that I underestimated how much my perception of nature and of religious experience, and indeed of my own self, is grounded in a romantic model.

The romantic poets were so influential and important to me as an adolescent, especially in giving me a point of reference, a way of seeing myself as a writer, or potential writer. How much I got from them – even my name. I had an ‘h’ on the end of my name when it was given to me by my parents. When I was seventeen I was in love with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Both Coleridge’s wife and his mistress were called ‘Sarah’ and he had made them each drop their final ‘h’, describing it as a ‘singularly ugly aspirant’. I cancelled my ‘h’ immediately.

The romantics’ quasi-mystical approach to nature had given me a way of interpreting experiences which I could not, as a sceptical adolescent, have happily called holy and which, without some kind of romantic interpretation, might well have driven me mad. Instead, I think that heightened intuitive response to the world did nurture some sort of creativity. The lens of romantic ideology legitimated my feelings. Moreover, a romantic idea about madness – that it marked one as a ‘special’ person – is useful to all adolescents. The sense of being fragmented, worthless, ‘out-of-control’ can be balanced and made bearable by the idea that there is a
meaning
and truth that can only be discovered through experiencing extreme emotion – and valuing it. I am increasingly persuaded that both the worrying increase in mental health problems and the demonstrations of antisocial, even violent, behaviour in younger people in the West at present must be related to a lack of silence and a lack of training in how to use silence.

Towards the end of my walking, I did indeed encounter the storm I would not have dared to summon. A dark-green evening of increasing oppression and rumblings in the distance burst into one of those spectacular night thunderstorms where the lightning really does flash like strobe lights – illuminating everything in a weird, violent monochrome like an overexposed photograph. The wind got up and the rain pounded on the roof of the car. I was a little scared, but more exultant, excited and emotionally somewhat hyperactive. I realised that there are two distinct strands to this engagement with solitude and silence in nature. There is the moralistic strand that argues that a person will grow in freedom, integrity, authenticity and courage if nurtured by nature – the good mother – that her stern, even austere, though profoundly rich regime will make one a nobler, better person than the soft, smothering, but restrictive and conventional love of society. This is the tradition of Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau and Annie Dillard, at least in
Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek
. Then there is the other tradition – the tradition of the wild, of Shelley, Emily Brontë, Poe and Kerouac – which is amoral at bottom. It claims that ‘nature’
and solitude will open up an individual to the wild and mad, which is lurking there, barely contained by civilisation.

What I ultimately learned from those walks is that I had been right: there is something profoundly different about this romantic understanding and the older religious view of silence. Religious or eremitic silence, not just in the Christian tradition but in Buddhism as well, is about inner emptiness – emptying the mind and the body of desires, being purged and therefore pure: a kind of blank, a
tabula
rasa
, on which the divine can inscribe itself. It is a discipline of self-emptying, or, to use a theological term, of kenosis, self-outpouring. Whereas romanticism uses silence to exactly the opposite ends: to shore up and strengthen the boundaries of the self; to make a person less permeable to the Other; to assert the ego against the construction and expectations of society; to enable an individual to establish autonomous freedom and an authentic voice. Rather than self-emptying, it seeks full-fill-ment.

As the imagery and the practices of both these interpretations of silence are very closely related (as the use of ‘retreat’ in the Montaigne quotation at the beginning of the chapter suggests), in any specific modern life there is bound to be a good deal of confusion about precisely which sort of silence someone is enjoying at any particular moment. There seem always to be multiple layers or fragments of identity, rattling around within an individual. Nonetheless, there are some real differences in the self-understanding and indeed ‘well-being’ produced by each kind of silence; and for me they seemed to be in direct conflict. Some of the points of conflict could be simplified into binary oppositions: a person pursuing desert silence seems more likely to have a sense of time as space, compared to the romantic notion of time as narrative; to delight in ineffability rather than struggle for self-expression; to value openness and humility over autonomy and self-esteem; and perhaps above all to desire
jouissance
, the infinite opening out into eternity rather than resolution or closure, represented by a finished work of art.

I have come, for my own convenience, to use the terms ‘permeable’ and ‘boundaried’ selves, or identities, to sum up the two
positions; with desert silence seeking to make the self as open as possible and romantics trying to wall off the self from outside influences.

To put the matter somewhat simplistically, at this present cultural moment, certainly in the West, we tend to see ‘normal’, healthy people as firmly, though not excessively, boundaried. A person is, or should be, autonomous, integrated, whole, rational and independent. These socially approved boundaries are expressed, more or less, by the skin; the ‘self ’ starts, and stops, at the margins of the body. Such a self is fulfilled: filled full of self. It is neither a sucking vacuum of need nor an overflowing intrusion into other people’s space. This clear-edged person does not exist without a social framework, but there should not be very much confusion between inside and outside. The self is seen as a tiny nation state, with the rights and obligations of that sovereign entity. A nation state has the right to police its borders, repel invasion and form self-interested alliances with others. In the individual, as in the nation state (and of course these two concepts developed together), authenticity and authority depend on a smooth continuity and a firm narrative of the self. Most psychoanalysis is directed towards bolstering this sense of identity.

Permeable selves, on the other hand, tend to be less rationalist and less atomised. Religious identity, for instance, tends to be affiliative rather than nationalist. I suspect that this is why in the West, still dogged by nationalism, we have great difficulty in coping with the international dimension of Islamic politics, for good or ill. The number of newspapers that rushed to tell us, in slightly shocked tones, that the Beslan terrorists ‘weren’t Chechnyan’ as though somehow they should have been, is interesting. In many of Bush’s statements about ‘the evil ones’ there is the subtextual suggestion that part of their evil is that they aren’t ‘patriotic’ in the old nationalist sense and cannot, therefore, be addressed with the old rules of play: diplomacy, bribery, threat and ultimately war.

In the context of the modern boundaried self, Freud is right: religious belief is neurotic, and spirituality delusional and an inappropriate form of self-expression. If a person believes in a God (any
God) as an external Other who has a value equal to or higher than the individual’s, then ego boundaries are necessarily going to become shaky: the thrust of most traditional spiritual practice is to make them ever more shaky. If there is a God – if there is truth and meaning other than the purely material – outside the self, then the self that is permeable has greater access to such truth than the more strictly boundaried self. In this narrative the appropriate identity may well be one that allows in the most from outside, which allows the Other to break down or through the boundaries. When a community collectively accepts the existence of powers outside the individual, then anyone who has access to those powers has a value to the community.

So a modern narrative will say that anyone who lets the (divine or delusional) Other too far in, who weakens their own boundaries, or has them weakened, is ‘mad’, as we see extensively in modern psychiatric discourse. While a religious or spiritual narrative will tend to sense that those who will not consent to be used by the forces of the Other are the mad ones.

I certainly do not want to be seen to be saying that a religious structuring of identity is somehow ‘better’ than a romantic one, or vice versa. There are downsides to both models. For example, within a religiously framed understanding, weaker boundaries are a good thing. But what often actually seems to happen is that the boundaries are re-erected elsewhere – often around the community of believers. Although behaviour that the boundaried self would need to describe as delusional can be contained, ‘heresy’ cannot. Societies that are tolerant of excess at an intra-personal level, are frequently very intolerant of ideas that threaten the wider framework – and punitive of originality, intellectual challenge, or unbelief. Constructing identity around a religious understanding may also be guilt-inducing. If you believe there is a God out there who is both good and powerful (and very few societies go for a deity who is mean-minded and impotent), then if something goes wrong it has to be someone’s fault. Blame and guilt become commonplace, and potentially destabilising. Finally, if one allows for the intrusion into
the daily of ‘spiritual forces’, one is also likely to allow the incursion of other powers of the irrational. These are often very dark forces. Weakened ego boundaries do not protect a person the way a sense of autonomy does; they let things in, because they are designed to. Undefended, these can be devastating to the self.

But equally there are negative effects of constructing identity around romantic ideas of authenticity, including the concept of the true inner self. Individualism requires a belief that all rights are equal and that they cannot be in competition – but actually what we have seen in the past few years is that this is simply not the case. The right to have freedom of speech and the right not to have one’s religion held up to mockery are demonstrably incompatible. Democratic voting systems do not deliver freedom and equality. Assertions of independence weaken communities. Another negative effect of tight boundaries is the inability to accept any authority, so that a personal response to something can become more important than the facts or reasons that triggered the response: ‘I feel’ becomes synonymous with ‘I think’ and ‘I believe’.

And perhaps the most interesting things about all this is that neither model seems to be very efficient at delivering its promised goods. Under an ascetic, disciplined spiritual model of identity in which the ego is to be stamped out and the self made available to the Other, the ego fights back with astonishing energy and success. Religious societies are not havens of peace and serene joy, never mind of kenotic self-giving. At the personal level, achieving enlightenment or canonisation or sheik status or holiness or right standing or serenity or wisdom or bliss (or any of the other ways in which the permeable self has been described) has been extremely rare – and the virulent insurrection of the indomitable ego is usually held to blame. However, 250 years of being nice to the ego, paying attention to it, focusing on it, indulging it and valuing it, does not seem to have strengthened or secured it at all: this authentic or true self turns out to be distinctly feeble. Identity is more at risk now than it has been for centuries. Replacing the core values of community, authority and tradition with the new ones of individualism, freedom
and change does not actually seem to have enhanced a sense of identity – indeed, rather the reverse. Alienation, a sense of loss, self-harming activities and mental health difficulties are more frequent rather than less frequent. A sense of the ‘common good’ has apparently evaporated. The right to the ‘pursuit of happiness’ does not deliver happiness.

For my final walk, I did not go up into the hills, but westward along a section of the Southern Upland Way to the Laggangairn standing stones. These are two tall stones, the remaining evidence of a lost stone circle, probably from the third millennium
BCE
. They are a long way from anywhere, in a clearing in the ubiquitous forestry plantations, and they are strange and rather wonderful, partly because their isolation means that they are less guarded about with fences and interpretation boards than most ancient stones remains. You just come upon them standing there, over four miles from any public road or human habitation, as they have stood for 5,000 years. They are scored with carved crosses, Christian symbols, but very ancient ones cut in the eighth century. Laggangairn was on the old pilgrim route to Whithorn, where St Ninian first established Christianity in Scotland, in the fifth century. What I had not known until I walked there, though, was that there is also a ruined steading at Laggangairn; once, probably in the last 200 years, this almost unbelievably remote site was someone’s home. It was probably not as isolated, of course – there are ruined steadings all over the hills, as there are on the outer isles; they are the shadows of a whole way of life that has been silenced by modernity itself. Suddenly, I was confronted with a whole complex history of silences. We know virtually nothing about the people who with such labour created the stone circle; we know remarkably little about Ninian and his
Candida Casa
(white house), the original church at Whithorn, which remained a place of pilgrimage and a cathedral until the Reformation. Even his role as Scotland’s ‘evangelist’ has been silenced in popular culture in preference for the later Columba, and the more romantic glamour of Iona. And until I saw the abandoned farm I had not really thought about the ‘Lowland Clearances’.