On Silence: Richard Rolle, John Cage, and Zero.

I often wear a cross which depicts, on a red ground, the body of Christ as a single diamond. It puts me in mind of the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist scripture about impermanence, non-materiality, and lack of separateness in persons, things, and time. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, talks about mutability as the characteristic of our world; he’s also very interested in time. I think that silence, also, partakes of mutability, impermanence, and lack of separateness between ourselves, the world, and the divine.

            ‘Being,’ says Matthew Fox (in The Coming of the Cosmic Christ) ‘one might say, is silent.’ But silence itself is actually full of sound, as John Cage found when he placed himself in a sealed chamber in a laboratory to experience ‘absolute silence’ or as close as one can come on this earth. He heard the sound of his own blood rushing through his body: it was surprisingly loud. I think of the two minutes’ radio silence enforced on the BBC by the slow entry of a large audience through a single door at the premiere of Britten’s War Requiem in Coventry Cathedral: enough to frighten any technician, as according to the producer, Richard Butt, ‘the radio audience heard nothing but the sound of a large, silent congregation waiting for something to happen.’ Yet listeners wrote letters of praise for the ‘wonderful silence’ preceding the first chord of that devastating yet transfiguring music. That performance was also followed by silence: by which we mean, no intentional sound was made.

            English mystic Richard Rolle (in The Fire of Love) speaks of his ‘spiritual song’ which he delivers in silence, song that is the gift of fire, song that no one else can hear. Cage’s blood sounds are also the gift of fire, as his body consumes the fuel for him to live. Now diamonds are also the gift of fire (more prosaically, a combination of high temperature and great pressure) and become perfectly clear, harder than any other substance in the universe, and yet not imperishable, as the Diamond Sutra tells us, because nothing is imperishable: in fact, imperishable is exactly what Nothing is.

            Aquinas begins his explorations by telling us what God is not. (This might be a place to begin with our friends the Atheists, who seem so sure they know what God is). Just as zero is vital to both the higher and the lower mathematics, so emptiness or silence is vital to our knowledge of the divine. To take John Cage again, the famous piece 4’33” features a pianist performing a Trinity (four minutes and thirty-three seconds) of silence in three sections; Cage later revised this to be playable by any instrument or combination of instruments for any length of time. The silence, however, will be full of ambient sounds.

            Consider the ambient sounds following the silence of Jesus after his final words: ‘Truly, this man was God’s Son!’ (that is, the King: Mark’s centurion, Pilate’s official witness on the crucifixion detail); ‘Certainly this man was innocent!’ (Luke’s centurion); the voices of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea seeking the body from Pilate (John); the mourning of women looking on (Matthew). Not to mention storm sounds and earthquake sounds and tramping as soldiers return to their barracks. We wouldn’t hear music without the silence between the notes (as Mozart found most beautiful); we wouldn’t draw recognisable objects without the negative space; we couldn’t see the Resurrection unless we first know the silence, full of mortal, mutable, impermanent sounds, following the death of Christ.