Silence, the Word and the Sacred

The Words of Silence: Past and Present

Chapter 1 THE WORDS OF SILENCE: PAST AND PRESENT Rudy Wiebe Let us consider seven words concerning silence. The first word is sound. In the Saskatchewan parkland where I was bora, the silence of living things surrounded me. We had no electricity or gasoline to make motors roar; horses and cows snuffled in barns, pigs in pole pens —chickens. I was the youngest child by four years and grew up largely alone. The winter snow falling, spruce branches or poplar leaves in wind, mosquitoes after a rain or birds just before sunrise, coyotes at night, on a hot summer afternoon cowbells, or thunder; somewhere a dog barking —these were the sounds of my growing up. These sounds were not dominating in any sense; rather, they defined the surface of fundamental silence, the way lines on a page or the road-allowance grid of the land survey assert the quintessential nature of paper or land. These small, living sounds, any one of which I can totally recall in an instant forty years later no matter in what cacophonous surroundings I may find myself, anywhere in the world, these indelible sounds were and are for me the affirmation of the fundamental silence of the universe. As Wordsworth wrote: Fair seed time had mysoul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear. Beauty and fear: the composites of silence. The second word is death. A poem byCanadian poet EJ. Pratt, published in 1937, explicates this word. SILENCES There is no silence upon the earth or under the earth like the silence under the sea; No cries announcingbirth, No sounds declaring death. There is silence when the milt is laid on the spawn in the weeds and fungus of the rock-clefts; And silence in the growth and struggle for life. 13 14 Silence, The Word and the Sacred The bonitoes pounce upon the mackerel, And are themselves caught by the barracudas, The sharks kill the barracudas And the great molluscs rend the sharks, And all noiselessly — Though swift be the action and final the conflict, The drama issilent. There is no fury upon the earth like the fury under the sea. For growl and cough and snarl are the tokens of spendthrifts who know not the ultimate economy of rage. Moreover, the pace of the blood is too fast. But under the waves the blood is sluggard and has the same temperature as that of the sea. There is somethingpre-reptilian about a silent kill. Two men may end their hostilitiesjust with their battle-cries. "The devil take you," says one. "I'll see you in hell first," says the other. And these introductory salutes followed by a hail of gutturals and sibilants are often the beginning of friendship, for who would not prefer to be lustily damned than to be half-heartedly blessed? No one need fear oaths that are properly enunciated, for they belong to the inheritance ofjust men made perfect, and, for all we know, of such may be the Kingdom of Heaven. But let silent hate be put away for it feeds upon the heart of the hater. Today I watched two pairs of eyes. One pair was black and the other grey. And while the owners thereof, for the space of five seconds, walked past each other, the grey snapped at the black and the black riddled the grey. One looked to say-"The cat," And the other —"The cur." But no words were spoken; Not so much as a hiss or a murmur came through the perfect enamel of the teeth; not so much as a gesture of enmity. If the right upper lip curled over the canine, it went unnoticed. The lashes veiled the eyes not for an instant in the passing. And as between the two in respect to candour of intention or eternity of wish, there was no choice, for the stare was mutual and absolute. A word would have dulled the exquisite edge of the feeling, An oath would have flawed the crystallization of the hate. The Words of Silence: Past and Present 15 For only such culture could grow in a climate of silence,— Away back before the emergence of fur or feather, back to the unvocal sea and down deep where the darkness spills its wash on the threshold of light, where the lids never close upon the eyes, where the inhabitants slay in silence and...