Alchemies of silence

This week’s winner

MANILA, Philippines –  Miro Frances Dimaano Capili, 17, is sophomore at UP Diliman studying BA Political Science. Miro has received three first prize Palanca awards for “Vinyl” (2010, Essay category), “The Nature of Nurture” and “Rated X” (2010 and 2008 respectively, Kabataan Essay category). She was a fellow for Creative Nonfiction at the 49th Silliman University National Writers Workshop.

Think of the terrible life of words, the unstoppable roar of sound that comes rushing out of people’s mouths and seems to have no object except the evasion of silence. What must the stones think of us? Sometimes I imagine that if we were very still we could hear, rising from the forests and oceans, the quiet laughter of animals, as they listen to us talk. Steven Millhauser

I

It has been two nights since I met Steven Millhauser in hard muscled fact. His hands in mine, I pry him wide open, allowing the artful pulse of his insight to meet the world I have been born into until it is in comparison waxen and ailing; until it is taken to an elsewhere behind the need for definition, where laughter can only hope to be a specter of happiness, where moments avoid the irresponsibility of tongues and instead are segmented by the heart and mind, the barometries of cognition. I do nothing to improve the lighting, which my back resting on the bed cannot afford me. Neither do I move to close the mouth from which issued little clucks of satisfaction and expletives of amazement, my head shaking from disbelief at how many lifetimes’ worth of singularity the author can fit into a page. My legs dangle off the bed, laughter confusing my body between tautness and limpness, the wonder of learning working into my bones. Fragmenting and rebuilding my verities.

II

I began to sense that there was another place, a place without words, and that if only I could concentrate my attention sufficiently, I might come to that place.

II.5

All mornings are glorious in their treatment of waking light. I can imagine how long the breath of creation had to be held in place, anticipation grappling at its patience, for the lookout hills of Valencia in Dumaguete to have gathered so much height and artfulness.

I am watching the birth of words. It is so simple, here, to know greed and turning and returning as yawning sky crowns stirring sea, the earliest flickers of light folding into an entire body of themselves. Liminality. The movement of the world stills the two of us. I look over to where you are seated a chair away. One of your legs is dangling over the armchair, I remember; body easy, lids heavy with—

Suddenly it occurs to me that there are so many things I could say; that they had been handed to me by the statures of light refracted onto our mountain, and here I was saying none of them, when around us the supple rhythms of life were robbing the silence even of comfort. The fullness of the moment was hesitating, shaking its head, starting off for a place where it would be more appreciated. So I tried quickly:

 “If you try to look out right there — you can see where the sky and sea meet. It’s beautiful.”

Your loud, unheeded laughter ripples the morning awake. I don’t know what to say. The thick of trees around us appear to have been roused by the strain of the moment, by the disparity of our reactions. It is easy with this brand of noise to believe in betrayal. I knew then, as I know now from how sparsely we exchange even the politest of words half a year later, that I had borne a great injustice to the world with my attempt to silence silence.

Inert is another word that this morning has taught me.

III

So much of my life has been spent steeped in the consciousness of what others have written. My mother would later tell me that on some days after school I would much rather have re-watched our tape of Mary Poppins, and to keep her ears and sanity from swallowing their umpteenth spoonfuls of sugar she had to keep me busy with a good book. She kept several of my favorites on the lowest rung of our shelves where I could easily reach for them. Among these was an entire series of Disney chapbooks, and I learned that the pictures in Donald and His Nephews tumbled and wagged their feathers and sang because words moved them in the same way. If you took them out the stories make no sense. Characters breathed only within the kern and ligature between verbs, and when spaces interjected adjectives they held their identities until the next.

A boy I had liked in my bursting youth handed me Samuel Beckett in a dark love poem I couldn’t understand but loved anyway, because the words he collocated had both ways and weighs.

Another: the wind of literary tattle has brought to my knowledge some outdated, but no less salacious gossip — the meeting of great minds, for instance, gone too great for the possibility of peaceful discourse. It has happened, and will continue to happen until words cease to rouse and tousle and anger and praise. They are dangerous and curious things, words, but also of laconic purpose. That is precisely why they bicker.

But the idea startles me still: they are, after all, fighting about words. Which is a way of saying that they are bickering over the fullness of ghosts.

All art is both vivified and limited by assumptions. Among all the writers I admire, and perhaps even those whose books would never reach the auspices of my knowing, is a mutual assent that within each word is a world, pressing in from all places of being. And rightly so, for why else, then, become a writer? Francisco Arcellana loved words. Eric Gamalinda, Jonathan Franzen, Annie Dillard, Robert Hass. Even Ernest Hemingway, in earnest spewing only the strict minimum of words to jar the reader. Updike, D’Agata, Cheever, every other John of consequence.

They accept the word as world.

For why else write?

III

For someone with such learned hands in arranging language it is heresy, we might think, to hate words. It is disconcerting how much of himself Millhauser reveals in his stories; how confident he is in the clarity of his fiction that writing is the best way to impede the reducibility of our humanness — but also how much he knows, even then, that words can ever only hope to beget meaning. 

John Updike said in his review of Franny and Zooey that people know more than they are told. And it is true that when Steven Millhauser calls himself in interviews a magician, whose purpose is to gather respect by sleight of deception, then he exhausts the criteria. He is a learned illusionist. His greatest deception is that of himself: he is letting on much less than he should.

If I had wanted to learn how to sear a coin with a cigarette and pull it out without severing the alloy, then I wouldn’t have finished Eisenheim The Illusionist or Martin Dressler or Dangerous Laughter when Google could have supplied me 954,738 variations of the trick in “1.04 seconds.” The trickery of magic is of an illusion lighter even than words, which we all think precious. We read to arrive at some interposition of experience and meaning.

And we do know, especially as readers, more than we are told. We know that Steven Millhauser is not a magician — a magician could never have worked so much latent wonder into the weave of his tales that, if grappled with, allowed to brew, and lived out, could by themselves transmute into verities. He is an alchemist. His base metal is the period, his product the question mark.

It is easy to imagine him dreaming up his stories — which are also warnings against the overabundance of order in this world — chuckling all the while. All thirteen stories in Dangerous Laughter are ultimately of a dark and unfunny nature, for each is a question extended to the insult of the reader’s comfort, willpower, and the basic human tendency of extrapolation. Conjecture is of no use to him. The period is a deception of the mind, the child of a human fear of meandering, whereas a question moves. The trees rustle with our laughter because the mind pulls, tumbles with new ideas, reels. Throughout life it must be made to reel.

Movement, of course, is indispensable to meaningful literature, the latency of which is measured by how much we are rendered by the work willing to open ourselves and let the flow into our lives. I speak here not of a personal-social transition, which is valuable to the formation of ideology, but by comparison squat to the transmutation of being to creating, of the perceivable to the possible.

A chair is hope, the angular grace of cheekbones a reminder of childhood prayers. I become what I see. I am earth, I am air. I am all. My eyes are suns. My hair streams among the galaxies.

In beginning any of his stories I have had to prepare myself for insult; to believe that I have invested belief in too many things in this life, trusted too much in the beauty and promises of the sun, spoken too many words and meant so few of them. History of a Disturbance, the fifth story out of thirteen in the collection, speaks to me as if I am learning an entirely new way, the new way, which is I suppose the direction of responsible literature—to explore and dare build its own visions of morality within the human experience.

Writers do not command words. They rearrange values, inverting stirrings into verities.

Gary Snyder agrees. “And that’s the real work: to make the world real as it is and find ourselves real as we are within it.”

I wanted a writer who could tell me why I needed to watch the sun rise once in a while. I needed a writer who could show me why its yawning brightness had already enough magnificence without my spoken words interposing the fullness of the light. 

IV

We are shut off from the fullness of things. Words hide the world. They blur together elements that exist apart, or they break elements into pieces, bind up the world, contract it into hard little pellets of perception. But the unbound world, the world behind the world— how fluid it is, how lovely and dangerous. At rare moments of clarity, I succeed in breaking through. Then I see. I see a place where nothing is known, because nothing is shaped in advance by words.

V

Because of these stories we are made to cherish each other and the seen world for its decadence, and the unseen world unharmed by words for being, quite simply, beyond. We need the singularity of sunsets, even in our comparative smallness to them, to what they represent. We need to feel small enough; be small enough before a vast thing of beauty, if it is to be of beauty, if we are to feel singularity. And we mustn’t—needn’t talk about these things. In History of a Disturbance he writes of an underself, a world of experience fulminating at its hilt behind ours. Unlike the wife to whom the nameless speaker of the story addresses this open letter I am seduced by the idea that everything is behind everything: that life is happening elsewhere, where hunger stays in the heart and never disturbs the body; where movement is sound; where stillness is movement.

Words are inert. And yet Millhauser succeeds at writing in the language with which he can be understood, and meaning in another not of our world and our weld.

I regard him with a sort of tinkering admiration—he is the writer I can only hope to become. Or the un-writer. I try to be responsible, now, with words. I tell people less and love them more, try to use more nouns than verbs, hoping to somehow recreate new realms of experience, because there is virtue and alchemy in silence; because looking at a house, you were able to see all four sides and both roof slopes. But then, there’s no “house,” no “object,” no form that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and nameless sensations, shifting into each other; because it is never about using the right word, but the right world, to right the world.