Breaking the Silence
“What you cannot say, you have to write.” (Jacques Derrida, quoted by Jon Fosse)

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This morning’s musings are a spontaneous act of writing without censorship or control. I’ve been inspired and motivated to write this by reading about this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Norwegian writer Jon Fosse. It seems many of us in the English-speaking world have never heard of him. Wanting to know more about him, I read an article in The New Yorker by Merve Emre titled “Jon Fosse, the Nobel Prize, and the Art of What Can’t Be Named”. This paragraph leapt out at me:
When the Swedish Academy awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature to Fosse yesterday, they described his colossal, genre-spanning body of work as giving “voice to the unsayable.” What I think the Academy meant is that, across his forty-odd plays, his novels, his essays, and his children’s books, what is unsayable—the absolute depths of abandonment, shame, love, and grace—is felt without needing to be named, surpassing the mere arrangement of words on a page.
That article had a link to an interview Fosse gave to Emre last year, titled “Jon Fosse’s Search for Peace”. This interview, with its reflections on writing and grace, God and Catholicism, mystery and meaning, inspired me to risk writing without being continuously stifled by the quest for eloquence and rigour. The writer in me yearns for eloquence, and the academic in me insists upon rigour. These two are hard to reconcile, and the result is that I’m accumulating unfinished Substack posts which have defeated me because of these conflicting claims upon not only what I want to say but how I should say it.
There is a third and perhaps more fundamental pressure which I’m becoming increasingly aware of. I chose to study theology as a mature student and a recent convert to Catholicism when I went to the University of Bristol in 1991 at the age of 36. As the first in my birth family to go to university (I left school at 15 and became a typist), and as a postcolonial Scot trying to find a sense of belonging in an England that was and remains a foreign country to me, I knew next to nothing about academic disciplines and institutions. But the God question had been the wordless echo in my soul from earliest childhood. Somehow, I understood without ever having been told, that in a secularised culture I would only be permitted to ask that God question if I studied theology, though really it is the question that makes possible all meaning, all art and literature, everything that the university is supposed to engage with.
But in all honesty, I’ve never been that interested in academic theology as a systematic quest to give rational form to the ineffable. Maybe that’s why I found a way of reading and writing that allowed a Lacanian/Irigarayan perspective to shape my theological reflections. Since leaving my academic post three years ago during lockdown, I’ve drifted through a shifting, formless landscape of ideas and questions. I’m trying to find a voice that can speak outside the echo chamber of academic theology and that engages with those who aren’t interested in confessional writings, while remaining faithful to the gravitational pull of that God question. This is a black hole within from which words struggle to escape, which lacks the radiant darkness of the mystical, yet which I know is the inescapable centre of my self from which all my deepest thoughts and questions flow. It’s a sensibility that is perfectly articulated by Fosse: “this idea that God is so close that you cannot experience him and so distant that you cannot think of him.” In my meandering through linguistic labyrinths in a restless quest for meaning, I write fiction, and I explore poetry, and I read random philosophers and novelists whose writing helps me to explore that always frustrating and frustrated desire to find words for the nameless, the formless, the expressionless. This is the Lacanian real that constitutes the volcanic core of all that exists and knows not why, that divine voice that enfleshes itself in becoming but eludes interpretation and resists explanation.
The impossibility of experience and thought in relation to God is perhaps why many of my reflections—some of them shared here—revolve around silence. In our noise-sodden world, it can be the most rare and precious of gifts, and yet it can also be a suffocating and lonely prison.
I want to write about the sounds of silence and the experience of absence as the most intense and elusive sense of presence. My reading and reflections for the academic book I’m supposed to be writing prowl around questions of meaning, connection, forms of expression, desire and obsession, the ways in which silence subtends and makes possible all forms of communication, all music and poetry, all language and writing. In rabbinic thought, the text of scripture is black fire on white fire, words written against the white-out of the divine that offers them space to be but also thwarts their conceptual intentions. The blank page or screen thus becomes the metaphorical silence that makes writing possible, and the blankness must be given all the space it needs to make the written words legible.
I’m especially interested in how we learn to interpret silence as a form of bodily communication between all forms of life and natural phenomena, if we pay attention to the wordless language that surrounds us and immerses us within materiality. We know that trees communicate through fungal networks. The more we discover about the nature of silence/the silence of nature that surrounds us—the music of the birds and the whales, the whistle and burr of the insects, the rustle of grass and the rhythms of the sea, the mystical dance of the quantum cosmos that weaves us into illusions of bodies inhabiting time and space—the more we realize that all of creation is a vast primordial Word reverberating in emptiness, enfleshing meaning as it ripples outwards into the smallest fibres of our being and the most fragile whisper of life incarnate in microscopic miracles of nature. In the words of the psalmist:
The heavens declare the glory of God;
and the firmament sheweth his handywork.
Day unto day uttereth speech,
and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
There is no speech nor language,
where their voice is not heard.
Their line is gone out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
It is my deepest conviction that we must rediscover how to listen to these words that the world speaks in language beyond human speech, which we encounter only as absence and alienation. We are not earthlings capable of existing in perfect harmony and communion with the non-human world, for our consciousness is a falling away from animality into the human condition. Consciousness is the precondition for language. It is an unhealed wound that forever divides us from natural being so that we must use words to bridge the gap, and yet it is the unique gift that makes us human. This is why speech is an act of sorrow and loss, and we must learn the poetry of yearning and mourning if we are to begin to restore our relationship with nature.
It also occurs to me that silence is the most necessary and the most fragile of all phenomena. It is so easily shattered and broken, and so impossible to impose. It is both utterly free and beyond human control, and utterly dependent upon human cooperation. As I write this, I’m listening to the burble of doves and the white curtain beside me rustling in the breeze. Attending more closely, I hear the starlings wittering in a nearby tree, and in the distance I can discern the murmur of the outgoing tide beyond the dunes. Yet somebody has been mowing their lawn, and it’s only in this sudden silence when the mower has stopped that I’ve become aware of everything else. I realize the noise has been creating a subliminal irritation in me. The conflict between mechanised productivity and leisured silence surrounds us all the time in our modern world.
The relationship between the necessity and inadequacy of form is in a sense what I’m exploring when I refer to language and silence. It’s the capacity of grace—which we might also call intuition, serendipity or, more fundamentally, desire—to overflow all structures and institutions and yet to derive its coherence from those forms of leaky containment. This is for me perfectly expressed by Fosse’s explanation of why he converted to Catholicism—an explanation which word for word resonates with me:
If you are a real believer, you do not believe in dogmas or institutions. If God is a reality for you, you believe on another level. But that doesn’t mean that religious dogmas and institutions aren’t necessary. If the mystery of faith has survived for two thousand years, it has to do with the Church becoming an institution. You need a kind of common understanding. But that doesn’t mean that the dogmas are true in a religious way.
In the world we are living in, I feel that the powers are economic powers, which are so strong. They run it all. And you have some forces that are on the other side, and the Church is one of them. And for the church to exist—and the Catholic Church is the strongest one—you have to force Catholicism in a way. The Church is the most important institution, as far as I can see, of anti-capitalist theology. You have literature and art as another institution, but they aren’t as strong as the churches.
So here I stand—a Barthian standing place perhaps where there is no possibility of standing, but I lack Barth’s evangelising zeal. I don’t want to convert the world. I want the kind of Catholicism that James Joyce describes as “here comes everybody”, which knows when to keep its fingers on its lips and tiptoe through time. I experience it as the desire to be less fully Catholic in order to be more fully human. In a perfect world of reconciling grace, these would be one and the same, but that is not the world we live in. Again, Fosse says it so much better than I can:
In this fallen world, to use that Christian phrase, life is a kind of gift and a kind of grace. But then it becomes all too paradoxical. Everything for me, in a way, ends up in a paradox. And sometimes I feel I’m so full of contradictions that I can hardly understand how I manage to stay together, to be one.
So I offer this here as some random reflections, resisting the voice of my academic ego in the background telling me to tidy it up, edit it, rearrange it, work on it. If nothing else, I’ve given you a link to the voice of a seer whose work I have yet to read, and may never read, but who dignifies the Nobel Prize for Literature with his presence and us with his wisdom.
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« The more we discover about the nature of silence/the silence of nature that surrounds us—the music of the birds and the whales, the whistle and burr of the insects, the rustle of grass and the rhythms of the sea, the mystical dance of the quantum cosmos that weaves us into illusions of bodies inhabiting time and space—the more we realize that all of creation is a vast primordial Word reverberating in emptiness, enfleshing meaning as it ripples outwards into the smallest fibres of our being and the most fragile whisper of life incarnate in microscopic miracles of nature.« Yes, please. I see it, I feel it, I hear it, and I’ve got shivers.