TECHNOLOGY, POLITICS ETC ON SPEECH AND LANGUAGE, PART 2

First, here's a poem by Yves Bonnefoy -

Between sky and room
Sometimes our mirror
Takes the small earthly
Sun in its hands,

As though
The paths, the hopes
Of things and names
Joined on the same shore.

We start to dream
That downstream from this river
of peace, words will not ask
Too much of the world,

That words will not cut
The throat of the lamb
That trustfully
Follows our speech.

- Part I, Towards the Same Shore
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The world is noisy; within the confines of my office I am not impervious. I can hear the sound waves penetrating my thin walls, and learn - by awful accident - certain information that are as unwelcome in my stock knowledge as the lyrics of an average rap song. How much of what we know gives us growth? How much of what we hear moves us? If a secretary calls the other end of her phone a little piece of shit, does that embolden our spirit?

The great American environmentalist-poet Wendell Berry has known so much of this bang and babel about and around us that, in his essay An Entrance to the Woods, he refers to a visit to a forest as some kind of death which, for all intents and purposes, could really mean some kind of rebirth -

"The man who walks into the wilderness is naked indeed. He leaves behind his work, his household, his duties, his comforts - even, if he comes alone, his words."

Ahhh, a world of silence. A rebirth indeed.
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How much of our comfort are we willing to part in exchange for silence? And how much of silence do we really need? Let's be careful of what we wish for...
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I still remember this episode from a long-ago tv show called Tales From the Unexpected where a man (I can't remember why, probably because of his noise) was condemned to virtual silence by an Orwellian state. The twist here was that rather than telling him to shut-up, the rest of society was ordered not to listen to him. For a while, the man enjoys this. When he falls in line at a canteen and orders for food and is ignored, he helps himself and gets all the food he wants. Problem starts when he is sideswiped by a car and nobody helps him because they do not hear his screams of pain and anguish. He goes to a hospital and nobody attends to him because, well, he is not there.
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Recently I have encountered two fictional characters whose lives, for a while, have been governed by silence. One was Lucy, a 12-year old kid from Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies who runs away from home (sort of; her mother actually persuades her to) and moves to her uncle in Brooklyn. When she reaches his townhouse, she refuses to talk and her method of communication is reduced to a shaking and nodding of the head. The readers will learn later on that while Lucy's silence is seemingly self-imposed, there is actually a higher authority that regulates this imposition: the religion practiced by her mother and stepdad asks them (and its members) to commit to silence evrytime they sin; somewhere along the way, Lucy thinks she dis something wrong.

And then there is Dwayne, the 15-year old boy from Little Miss Sunshine who initially refuses to talk while living in his rebellious world of Nietzche's existential angst. And as he was able to vividly convey, silence can be very subversive.
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We oftentimes see a sign that says Silence is Golden. But if the world is flooded with gold, will gold be precious? If the world is nothing but silent, will all that silence be golden? Is Lucy's silence cute? Did Dwayne prove his worth in salt by refusing to talk? If silence had historically ruled the day, will the slaves find freedom from leg irons to enable us now to - ironically - listen to the words of Martin Luther King?
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Lest we forget, silence is the refuge of the weak and crowning virtue of the strong. While the tyrant can gag us dumb, sometimes, the very enemy itself does not have a voice.