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Stillness
- Ohio University Press
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67 Stillness C H A R L E S B A X T E R My work is rooted in silence. It grows out of deep beds of contemplation, where words, which are living things, can form and re-form into new wholes. What is visible, the finished books, are underpinned by the fertility of uncounted hours. A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed under. It is sometimes necessary to be silent for months before the central image of a book can occur. —Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects I T ’ S L A T E A T N I G H T , A N D Y O U are quarreling with someone on the telephone, long distance. You have reached a stalemate of sorts, where nothing remains to be said.You cannot hang up. But you cannot say anything more. So you remain on the line. Neither of you utters a word. A moment like this stirs the air with an odd and indefinable feeling. It is not like the silence after a quarrel in a room, because AT&T is going to bill you (or the other person) for this silence. This gap—this emotional and technological emptiness —is literally going to cost you. In the days before fiber-optic technology, these moments also happened to put you into the wash of background transmission noise. Behind your mutual silence in the foreground 68 ◆ C H A R L E S B A X T E R came the faraway hiss and gurgle of the wires. Sometimes, distantly , you could hear other conversations. Straining not to speak yourself, you might end up eavesdropping on someone’s random casual happiness.You might hear laughter, laughter hundreds of miles away, still faintly audible. The hiss and gurgle and the laughter are the markers of time moving through stillness. ◆ I N O N E O F his film reviews, James Agee refers to “expressive air-pockets of dead silence.” The reference is to intentional gaps in the dialogue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Expressive air-pockets of dead silence.They are theatrical, and relatively easy to manage on film or on stage (think of Pinter). But how does anyone get them into fiction, where the flow of words must continue line by line, page by page, until the whole thing stops? We often think of silence as being a blank, a null set, or of all silences being similar, expressing the same thing, the same nothing. We may not actually need John Cage, however, to show us that silence is an intensifier—that it strengthens whatever stands on either side of it. Directed in this way, silence takes on a different emotion, a different color, for whatever it flows through or flows between. What’s remarkable is the degree to which Americans have distrusted silence and its parent condition, stillness. In this country, silence is often associated with madness, mooncalfing , woolgathering, laziness, hostility, and stupidity. Stillness is regularly associated with death.The distrust of silence and stillness comes to us as a form of muddleheaded late-Puritanism, which looks upon idle hands as the devil’s playground, and silence, like Hester Prynne’s silence, as privatized rebellion, a refusal to join the team. The daydreaming child,or daydreaming adult,is usually an object of contempt or therapy. Vitality in our culture, by contrast , has everything to do with speed and talk. In postmodernism , speed and information, combined through data processing, have moved into cyberspace. It is no wonder that the metaphor [3.219.233.54] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:02 GMT) Stillness ◆ 69 of the superhighway has stuck and has become an instant international cliché. But when speed is made to be the defining feature of action, violence is usually not far away, violence defined here as the loss of control under conditions of great velocity. Violence, unlike daydreaming, is not—this is worth our attention —an object of contempt. Fear, perhaps, but not contempt. Our fascination with violence is equal to our fascination with data processing; they are two coins in the same pocket. ◆ W H AT C O N C E I VA B L E R E L AT I O N is there between narrative violence and data processing? Speed, for one thing, and the necessity of coping with information that may be both dangerous and evanescent. People who work all day at computers often get keyed up...