On Quietness

Sometimes the world of things has something to say. Randall Jarrell wrote that stream water made a sound that was like a spoon or glass breathing.

–Mary Kinzie

In fantasy I’m a hermit. I live in a hut and my poems are my prayers. But in life my “home office” buzzes and dings with computer and printer. I’m a person—writer, teacher, editor—who’s too busy, overscheduled, often interrupted, and seldom caught up. Perhaps that explains why I crave quietness. Or could be it’s a common human craving. I like the idea of quietly writing at a heavy oak desk, the oak heavy enough, thick enough, solid enough to emit quietness.

Quietness is simpler than silence. Or perhaps simple is not the word I want. It’s more familiar, more homey. A quiet night at home might include washing the dishes and reading by the fire. It might include quiet music, quiet conversation, quietly sitting. A quiet day might be a day of cooking and gardening. It might include sweeping the sidewalk.

Silence is more forbidding, perhaps a bit fearsome. A silent night is a holy night. There is such a thing as getting the silent treatment. You can be greeted with a stony silence. To be silent means to refrain from speech. To be silenced is to be repressed, suppressed, censored, shut up.

To be quieted is to be calmed down. The Anglo-Norman and Middle French root of quiet (quiete) contains quietude—tranquility.

There are artists who capture quietness in their works, and gazing at their works quiets the mind. One reason I like going to art museums is to quiet my mind. I like going alone, and I may not stay for long.

Here at Seattle’s Henry Gallery, I stand before a large-format photograph (four by five feet) of a dry West Texas landscape. A barnyard, fenced with a rough-stick coyote fence, gated with a wide-swinging barnyard gate. An expanse of gravel and dry grass. The vast Texas sky. Closeup, a truck fragment—tire, chrome fender, a blur of red. A shed, shot from ground level, with the rippled roof-edge evidence of corrugated tin. On this dry ground sits a tiny (life-sized) brown-capped bird. The sun is hot. It is quiet, very quiet. You have entered this quiet country, and you see it through the bird’s eye. The photographer, Jean-Luc Mylayne, will spend two or three months to get such a picture. All twentythree of these large-format “landscapes with human traces” include a small bird. Mylayne chooses a spot where birds flock, chooses a particular bird for his subject, and allows the flock to get used to his presence and equipage. He names his large-format photographs according to the time spent—“No. 198 January February 2004.”

Is it Mylayne’s long quiet days with the birds that communicate quietness to the image and through the image to me the viewer?

Another day in another museum I go looking for another quiet image. I am on a search for what a “quiet image” might mean. Alas, this is family day at the Seattle Art Museum, the day to “Rome the World.” The museum is noisy, chattering and laughing, baby-crying, replete with running feet and parental reprimand. I look for quiet corners and quiet images, but nothing is quiet. Is it possible to find quietness amid noise? I believe it is, but not for me, not today. This quiet object I seek—does it exist? Is this quest for quiet entirely subjective, entirely in my head, my own emotional problem or psychological fixation?

No. I’m sure of it. Certain objects emit quietness: wooden spoons, diner mugs, a bowl of pears, old bones, thick books, rocking chairs creaking on old porches.

Wandering the museum, I feel agitated, dissatisfied, slightly lost. This entire museum contains not one quiet thing to look at. I wander about in a desultory manner and then go to lunch at the restaurant. The restaurant is loud like a school cafeteria. But I get seated and have a chicken salad sandwich and...