Hush

Notes on silence (also, happy holidays)

There is a hush over December. Nights are long and muted, and everything, from the pace of my mornings to the grazing of the goats, feels a beat or two slower. There is a simultaneous anticipation for the new year and desire to revel in holiday festivities that renders time stretched, luminous, and gauzy—and through it, moments of quietude swell.

I grew up with the idea that if I sit in quiet for too long, ghosts will start speaking to me. Through the shimmering, vibrating hum of the silence in my bedroom, disembodied voices would, in my imagination, glint into my ear, hushed, unintelligible, chilling. I believed that, like the third eye, once I unlock this secret skill, the door will forever be open and the dead—from the indifferent to the malicious—would never leave my shoulders.

Eventually, that fear of ghosts evolved into an inability to sit with my thoughts. Maybe they were always the same thing. The effect was certainly the same: a habitual avoidance of quiet. I itched at the absence of sound. At its most unbearable, silence was a ball of fabric inside my ears that expanded as the depth of my attention to it sharpened. I felt it in my jaw, at the back of my teeth. Sound, cutting through the fabric, the pressure, was what set me free.

I fortified the wall between myself and the unbearable by making silence impossible. In the dark of early mornings, I would play music to soothe my fears and overactive imagination. A movie or series I’d already seen would run in the background as I worked, its familiar sounds an auditory comfort blanket against the quiet and the anxious sense of time running out. Doom scrolling on Instagram lulled my mind to perfect thoughtlessness. For a time, meditating would rouse in me a physical rage I couldn’t explain.

What we avoid inevitably haunts us, and this longtime evasion of silence didn’t completely banish the specters. Filling the quiet with sound was like trying to shake off a tail stealthy and incessant in its pursuit. I may have increased the distance between us, but it continued to follow me like a shadow. That embarrassing conversation with an aunt, my unfulfilled and abandoned aspirations, the unwanted touches I wasn’t sure were real, the four-hour interrogation at immigration, the loneliness of my adolescence, the people I should probably apologize to—neither music nor witty dialogue made them disappear.

In the absence of computers or on the cusp of sleep, I was defenseless. Ghosts, both real and of my own creation, triumphed with ease. I would close my eyes so hard as though I could shut them out like blinding light, or whip myself into order with a loud, verbal shut the fuck up! Writing in my journal was, for a long time, hurried, like a brisk walk through a dark evening and into my house with all its lights on.

This refusal to make space for the undesirable also meant blocking out the divine. My mind was constantly unsettled, like a snow globe one never stopped shaking, and in this state clarity was an unattainable dream. My capacity for observation, dulled. Anxiety, unsurprisingly high. I was going through the world guided by rhythms I cannot say were truly mine.

The recent years slowly revealed to me the cost of avoiding silence. In my inability to hear myself, I went where the wind, carrying the voices of fortune, marketing trends, or stronger personalities, took me. Suppressed memories pounced unexpectedly, at the most inopportune moments. It showed in my writing too—the glaring lacuna, the smoke and mirrors, the protective metaphors. How could I speak—and if, as Julia Kristeva says, a speaking being is a believing being, how could I believe—if I didn’t listen?

So, I have. This past year has been a long exercise in listening and observing. Taking occasional walks where I treat the crunch of my footsteps like music. Unlearning the habit of resorting to sound when I do not want it. Seeking through the leaves the bird whose song I just heard. Keeping an archive of interesting quotes and fragments of public conversation I overheard. Listening to what a friend is saying between the lines. Paying attention to the melodies of people’s accents. Meditating even when I am just eager to jump into my day. Writing in silence even, or especially, when the page is blank and haunted.

To Alice Notley, “the world is intensely telepathic, infused with the past and continual thought of all the living and all the dead”. What I feared now seems to be gift: to be at ease in silence is to tap into this telepathy, into this rich repository of human thought from which my own thinking, clear and free, may be done.

Dorothea Lasky, in the spirit of Notley, also writes that in writing poetry,

[…] we always engage with ghosts. Maybe what we perceive quickly is what poetry collects for us, a space of half-impressions, of sensual residues. And maybe the things we only see or feel for an instant are the spaces of non-reality—superreality—coming into this world.

Amid the gift exchanges and celebrations, I am making space for silence this season. I listen to what the ghosts, mine and yours, have to say. Happy holidays.