Silence And Solitude

Postal Poetry is, in its own words, “a fantabulous showcase for collaboratively and individually created poetry postcards”. It’s run by Dana Guthrie Martin and Dave Bonta. I’m thrilled that my first submission, The Emergency, has recently been published. Details of how you can contribute your own postcards can be found here.
I came up with the idea for this submission after my holiday in Ireland this summer. I have an ongoing fantasy about living on my own, in the middle of nowhere. I suppose it’s the flipside of my early and ongoing desire to live in England’s capital city, this occasional desire for stillness, silence and wilderness.
Coincidentally, between acceptance and publication of The Emergency, both Rod Liddle and Sara Maitland have written on this subject for The Times and the Guardian respectively. Maitland’s article is based on the experiences that she has documented in A Book Of Silence, recently published in the UK by Granta.

“One of the effects of enforced silence is a heightened awareness, of the senses suddenly sharpened. It is not just, during the daytime, the shrillness of the chaffinch and the wren beginning to get one’s goat: it is that with the moronic fugue that accompanies urban life excised, other stuff floods in to fill the space. According to a Brazilian study earlier this year, silence – or more properly, unaccustomed quietness – mimics the effects of tinnitus. Tinnitus is that terrible ringing in the ears experienced by about 25% of the population, the cause of which has not yet been determined (although it manifests itself with undue regularity in the ears of pensioned-off heavy-metal guitarists). The point is, with regular sound removed, the body acts quickly to fill the gap.”

Rod Liddle

“My assumption had been that silence was monotone; that it would be very pure, very beautiful but somehow flat, undifferentiated. But the more silences I encountered, the more silent places I inhabited, the more I became aware that there were dense, interwoven strands of different silences. Silence can be calm or frightening, lonely or joyful, deep or thin. There is religious silence; a self-emptying silence, and romantic silence – what Wordsworth called the “bliss of solitude”.”

Sara Maitland

My fantasy is just that. My holidays are a temporary retreat from a location and a lifestyle that I’ve chosen, that I would choose again, that generally makes me very happy. I might occasionally daydream of a reclusive existence on top of a cliff with only a dead sheep for company, but sooner or later I always turn around.