Like when you were a child

on writing to silence

There is a book I read frequently, a book about the sea for very young children. On a double page spread about the deep ocean, everything is black, but for the eerie white outline of two shapes. Around the first is written, in the tiniest writing:

hello.

is there anybody there?

When I read it out loud, I read it in the smallest possible voice.

Under the shapes, if you pull back the darkness, there are two jellyfish. The second one is responding:

yes.

I’m here.

[In the smallest possible voice]

The lights, the book says, are a method of communicating. Little rippling on-off signals in the most unfathomable dark. As a child, I think I would have loved this book, this page. I do, as an adult. I love it because it is mysterious and lonely and tender, as well as a metaphor for a fact. I think my reasons would have been the same at any age, even if not articulated so.

I am beginning to think that all writing is writing to silence. It has always seemed to be an urge towards communication. but sometimes we are communing with a silence, a non response.

We want a response. But we use our little light to outline what is not there, too. Is it that we write and read because we want that as well?

Not an original thought. Barely a thesis. I am writing in the relative silence of my kitchen, digestive gurlgings of the dishwasher aside, while my child sleeps. I gulp silence like a tonic. I try to think widely from this currently fragile place of silence. I try to think at all. I have not written in a long time, and so I’m trying here. Not necessarily to have a voice, but to more be a small traveller. A blink. To be seen or not seen. Accepting that.

I find memes, which I have time for, and books in the crushed hot flicker-bright hours of night, which are mine, and yours. This post is about listening, but the name of the blog is about sound. Sound will be another day. Posts here will be on various themes, probably pithily one-word, with whatever poetry and literaty quotations shake loose.

I close my eyes and imagine the darkness there is richer, deeper than it really is.

Often there are lights behind my eyes anyway. Does that happen to you?

Do you want to see we will find there?

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