On silence: When August started in February

Dear cosmic lover,

I feel like writing to you about silence.

It’s raining in Cairo. It’s been raining non-stop all day. I’ve been sitting on my balcony for hours, listening to the sound of rain and smelling the damp wood of the railing. I know that if I really make friends with all the little things that populate life, I’ll be saved.

I enjoyed being silent with the cosmic lover; silence is a test of how well a relationship is working. It comes in many versions: sometimes, when people speak, it can be as good as silence, like when it’s sunset and D’s deep voice becomes this ethereal, vibrating substance.

Silence has haunted me since Rabea — the silence of dead people, of broken relationships, broken dreams. It took years for it to become more than just a painful absence, for it to actually make sense.

What I really feel like asking is: when does silence become an act of resistance?

The cosmic lover’s silence is dynamic.

Something about this sentence has triggered a flood of feelings; I grab my laptop and write you back: “Sometimes, when people speak, it can be as good as silence.”

I make a conscious effort to resist the urge to fill gaps with words. I strong-arm myself into not feeling the awkwardness, willing the other person into believing it’s not there either. I like to think of silence as peace with myself, as rising above pressure and vanity, but it has created a default setting that requires a good excuse to override it, an excruciating self-administered test that I need to pass before I’m allowed to speak. Despite the safety of the cosmic lover’s kindness, indulging in this writing is an act riddled with insecurity.

I’ve been struggling with this silence within myself. I realize my thoughts and feelings run around in circles, constantly pushed away from the surface.

Yet my biggest silence has been an act of self-forgiveness, of permission to retreat and leave others at the front lines.

Sometimes silence feels like control, a way to stop chaos and make way for an organic process that puts things into place. Sometimes it’s a loss of control, allowing something held in place by sheer persistence to crumble, change shape, float away.

I love you. It feels good to talk.

I’m rediscovering what it’s like not to fear language, not to be hyperconscious of its inherent inadequacy and stay silent as a result. I’m not sure that I’ve written anything from the heart in the last five years. From 2014 onward, the silence was being silenced, gradually, insidiously, but oh-so-effectively, until I grew to fear the written word itself.

Can we say that being in silence makes you vulnerable? It seems strange that allowing yourself to be vulnerable works as an act of resistance. But is there anything that demands more courage? Without vulnerability, real change is impossible. I think of Nietzsche, quoting the Greek poet Pindar: “Become who you are.” That endless stripping of layers, faintly audible in silence, like the whispering of souls.

The impulse to create begins — often terribly and fearfully — in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence.

– Adrienne Rich, Arts of the Possible

Although it’s a term we’ve come to use routinely over the last few years, I felt a sense of “apocalypse” most acutely in the few days preceding June 30. One or two nights before the fateful day, I was out late driving and felt as though the city’s ghosts were wide awake and murmuring incomprehensible melodies of what was to come. Contractions and convulsions coursed through me all night that night, an odd collusion of body, nature and politics. A new publishing project was born the next day, alongside new silences, including yours, ours.

One day, I’d like us to talk about natality.

We walked repeatedly into the Rabea sit-in, unsure why exactly. Was there a truth hidden there? A key to navigating what we were going through? In the evenings, we partied into the curfew, an attempt at navigating in the high seas. Out of a brief stab at artmaking, I learned that the word “reckoning” originally referred to the act of calculating a ship’s position at sea. I like this linguistic exactitude, but also the bewildering dissonance it can bring about, one that eventually grows into the mother of silence.

There is a recurrent thought I have, with no idea as to where it comes from: if I were to be injured one day, what kind of injury would I be most okay with? My answer has always been the loss of my tongue. The image of my speechless self is not bleak.

The silence I’ve been writing about, the one that I feel I’m slowly overcoming, was a loud one. It was filled with the noise of splintered and conflicting images, interlaced with feelings of helplessness and overwhelm. In the past few years, I’ve experienced a strong loss of self. The cosmic lover, that beautiful undefined many-limbed being, has taken away much of that fearful state of mind. So has the readiness of your bodies to become boundless.

Give me your bodies.

Every spring, I cherish the opening and closing lines of T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

The poem was written in England, in the same era of post-First World War silence that L excavated from Walter Benjamin’s writing. The introductory lines quoted above are entitled “The Burial of The Dead.”

Our April starts in February; that’s when the trees begin to bloom. Our so-called Arab Spring did not actually start in the spring, either.

But I’m losing my thread. Am I doing so intentionally? Beyond these lines, The Waste Land is a fragmented collection of images and conversations in English, German, Italian, French and Sanskrit. They range from the darkly surreal to the seemingly banal:

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What the poem amounts to is over 400 lines of augmented, confused silence. Its words abandon their designated function as signifiers. However, the silence of this poem is set inside parentheses that work as clues (with a few other poetic hints scattered in between). As stated above, April is the cruelest month. And then there is the ending:

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih    shantih shantih

Out of these lines, we can reread the entire text as a form of mantra. Shantih shantih shantih. Peace peace peace.

In my life, there has been: al-shaab yurid isqat al-nizam. The people want the downfall of the regime. But what mantras have come after? What other silences, other fragments, have resonated within me?

It was in the spring of 2017, four years after Rabea, that I began writing songs for a new musical project. I went into it with a strong sense of brokenness and disorientation. I had these bits of text scribbled into my notebook, about silence, about depression, about suicide, but I couldn’t manage to string together a coherent body of lyrics for even a single song. I threw these words at the other two band members, and they added their own. We ended up with a strong, healing group experience and five songs that don’t seem to make sense at all; our own collective wasteland.

Is it better to speak without making sense than not to speak at all?

Dear cosmic lover,

When M wrote his letter, I went straight to this popular passage from Benjamin’s The Storyteller:

With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent — not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.

After the war, many people rushed to interpret silence — including Benjamin’s own — as an act of resistance, of agency-driven refusal to speak in the face of atrocity. But certain intimate texts, like the “Berlin Chronicle,” help us unpack his silence differently. While critics point to “the madness of the war and betrayal of language” as that which makes storytelling impossible for Benjamin, he himself speaks of how the sight of dead bodies strips the self of the I, “the immolation of our deepest selves in shock.” The I that speaks has just been immolated.

I was telling M that I’ve come to realize that “becoming” is what I’m interested in now, at this age, in this age: becoming as the constant journey out of self. And I feel, in Benjamin’s references to the immolation of the self in the battlefield, that there is a certain becoming, a becoming of the war’s corpses as the only possible modality of existence, without an I, without a self. Now, I don’t know where this puts silence on the spectrum of resistance versus the obliterating power of violence. But outside of said spectrum, if you think about silence as a form of becoming, then there may be possibilities for things like affordance, healing, the ability to grapple with the massacre without erasing it with meaningless words, the ability to speak again, perhaps.

I don’t think anything we said when Rabea happened had much meaning and yet we congratulate ourselves for not having gone silent.

I love you and miss you.