On Quiet Read online

  ‘Absent-mindedness is searching for the horse you are riding,’ declares an old Russian proverb. Or, possibly, the glasses on the top of your head. Oh, the torment of this new brain fragility.

  Defences have to be built to combat the forgetfulness; little scaffoldings of certainty to get you through the day. You enter the front door and your keys now have a regular home. If they go elsewhere, that elsewhere has to be paused over, noted, clocked. Because too often now a neighbour is ringing my doorbell to say I’ve left the car doors wide open, or my favourite shoes have been irretrievably lost because they must have been kicked off under a café table somewhere, and forgotten, and I walked home barefoot. The torment of disquiet.

  Iceland’s female prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, in response to Britain’s Brexit referendum, quoted poet Ingibjörg Haraldsdóttir, who said that when all has been said, and when the problems of the world have been dissected, discussed and settled, a woman always arrives to then clear the table, sweep the floor and open the windows, to let out the cigar smoke. And that it never fails.

  Mistakenly, I watch the film Still Alice starring Julianne Moore alongside two teenage boys. It is about a middle-aged linguistics professor with early onset Alzheimer’s. ‘That’s you, Mum,’ the boys josh at regular intervals. ‘Alice! Alice!’ is now their giggly taunt as my familiar refrain rings yet again through the house, ‘Has anyone seen my purse, keys, shoes?’ We jest, but this absent-mindedness feels like fallibility. The noise of the world is crowding in too much.

  In the UK’s Brexit referendum, the Leave movement won ‘without a single bullet being fired’. So proclaimed its chief brewer of hatred, Nigel Farage, a far right leader who conveniently forgot Jo Cox. Cox was a Labour politician who was shot and stabbed by a man associated with the far right several days before the momentous vote—yet for the likes of Farage she had become a brief afterthought within the Brexit maelstrom. She shouldn’t have been. She should not be vanished—relegated to obscurity—as history has shown us males are wont to do when it comes to women. We are banished into obscurity and silence; our quietness is insisted upon.

  There are sneaky screen peeks in the dead of night, plops and pings of sleep-destruction and sudden flare-ups on our blue screens as they accept more fuel to torment our sleep even further or have us pounce, first thing, upon waking. Our poor brains; those saturated, fragile, exhausted, weakened vessels. Not only do smartphones addle sleep and work but also our self-esteem, reminding us of unquiet worlds we don’t live in and relationships we don’t have.

  Bits and pieces of me are scattered everywhere, forgotten. Habits have to change, because too many details involving objects and names and places have sailed off to somewhere obscure. Milestone birthdays are attended alongside acquaintances from the distant past. Who are you again? Cripes, did I sleep with you? Where do I know you from? The disquiet in my head is too much.

  Most distressing of all, in terms of the new forgetfulness, is the effect of the fracturing on my writing. And now I’ve forgotten the thought I had ten seconds ago as I veer off into the lure of the internet. The mind must become a steel trap to snare focus.

  Writer Nicholas Carr, in his ominously titled book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, concludes that the grey matter in our brains is being rewired by the internet’s saturation in our lives. Our brains change in response to our experiences. The printed book, according to Carr, focuses our attention and cultivates deep and contemplative thought. He argues that the internet, on the other hand, is remodelling our brains in its own image—promoting too much scanning and skimming and flitting.

  The opposite of absent-mindedness requires quiet, calm, routine. Rush and panic crowd out sense, and that’s when things get misplaced. I write in fragments for a reason now. Between them, I check the news on my unquiet phone, then drift off into something else. In panic I switch back and waste time trying to pick up where I left off; there’s no longer the smoothness of unbroken focus; no longer a deep diving.

  A fourteenth century Tibetan philosopher, Lama Je Tsongkhapa, said that emptiness is the track on which the centred person moves. As does the person who dwells within quietude.

  A mate laments the rise of the smart phone because it’s infiltrated all aspects of her life—including, most irritatingly, her boudoir. Not only does her beloved interrupt dinner parties with frequent, sparkling yet infuriating Twitter amuse-bouches, but he recently destroyed her intimate fortieth birthday dinner for two by concentrating more on his seductive new phone than on her. Then there’s his biggest crime of the lot: the insistence on checking his screen during sex. His twitching at every seductive ping his electronic companion lures him away with. Which kills the moment entirely. Which makes her want to check her own phone. Which results in deeply unsatisfying sex for them both.

  The female orgasm demands quiet. Quiet that allows concentration so a woman can slip off into another place; to catch it. For a woman to enjoy mind-blowing sexual pleasure she needs focus and commitment, to be utterly in the moment. The writer Simone de Beauvoir declared that ‘sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon, and if words or movements oppose the magic of the caresses then the spell is broken.’ And how ridiculously easy it is to dissolve that spell. The female path to orgasm is such a fragile, delicate one, and so easily lost. Our orgasms are shy to coax out, insisting on concentration and focus but also abandonment.

  It takes time to surrender to quiet; to enter the sacred, exhilarating zone when we’re jolted into life, combusted into light. The best sex involves a sense of connecting on the deepest level, with two people who are completely in the moment and focused.

  I’ve learnt the danger zones that tip me into unquiet forgetfulness and have developed strategies to cope. I am mindful of moments when I’m easily distracted—when running late, when pressured, when not thinking straight—because that’s when the mind-fragility crowds in.

  I must find a way to live with more stillness now. Write down what used to be blithely remembered, clock changes in routine, take a deep breath and take note. Because I’m remembering the forgetfulness, and I am tormented by it.

  A digital detox, out bush. The medicine of intentional quiet. A writing sojourn with no internet or mobile coverage. A necessary stilling and a reprieve from this saturated world. I was flooded by creativity and calm; I got my brain back when I thought it lost. I remembered the person I once was, pre-phone. More disciplined and focused, and more curious about my immediate surroundings. Screen removal gave me back control. Serenity and calm. The city world and all its distractions were washed off me and it felt like a huge and replenishing exhalation.

  But how to retain that sense of exhaling? How to find a way of coexisting with it in the madness of everyday life? The impossible question.

  III

  Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation … tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.

  Jean Arp

  The writer Janet Frame wrote that ‘people dread silence because it is transparent, like clear water, which reveals every obstacle—the used, the dead, the drowned, silence reveals the cast-off words and thoughts dropped in to obscure its clear stream. And when people stare too close to silence they sometimes face their own reflections, their magnified shadows in the depths, and that frightens them.’

  The deadening hush of Building 87 reminds us that too much quiet can also be a threat. We are confronted with our own self and cannot cope with that.

  There is a deeply humane beauty to communal quiet—a monk’s dinner table, the Remembrance Day silence at 11 am on 11 November, that minute’s silence at a footy match. Quiet is energised by its opposition to something el
se.

  The dark is meant to be threatening. It’s biological, something we’ve been conditioned against. Quietude is safe. The ultimate sanctuary. Yet I find quietude in darkness now; in a banishing of the incessant, busy, pushy artificial light that saturates our world.

  ‘Stars only happen in videos,’ declared my young son during our years of London living. He’d never seen stars from his home, nor the moon. London’s night sky was bathed in a vast soupy orange and the familiar dark—that quiet, dense, rich, velvety inkiness of the countryside and deserts and remoteness and awe—never managed to find a foothold in his horn-blaring, brake-squealing, siren-filled urban world.

  It was around then that my husband and I decided to come home, to Australia. To find quiet. A proper dark. To show our children that stars can exist in a city sky. And so we left that singular orange glow that obliterated all trace of an old fashioned night-time dark. We did it for ourselves, and for our kids. Yet we never quite found the proper dark in our urban life in Australia either.

  When you immerse yourself in central Australia at night and gaze up at the star-scattered canopy above you it feels grounding, ancient, exhilarating; that the world is somehow righted. Whispering to some previous self, more attuned to nature and the oldest rhythms of the earth. True darkness feels like a balm now: precious, rare and silencing. Humans are evolving to not see darkness—proper, quiet darkness—as a threat.

  ‘I see black light,’ Victor Hugo declared on his deathbed. Would a black light be quiet? We all desire a death of quietude. My mother never got it.

  The end of the world will not be marked by a bang but by silence. By a long exhalation. A slide into quiet. Akin to Building 87’s quiet.

  Night stokes our non-visual senses. A friend who’s gradually going blind says that sex is getting better as her sight is diminishing. ‘There’s a great bonus in not seeing,’ she laughs. ‘You just relax. It’s sex without ego.’ And one of the most popular sex toys is the blindfold, of course. In darkness’s quiet, the tenderness of touch can be electrifying.

  Thomas Edison believed that the undeveloped being would improve under artificial light, and in the 1870s he developed the light bulb. But it cast a relatively gentle, benign glow compared to the forensic, intrusive light of the chilliest blue we’re increasingly exposed to today. Inside our homes are cold light bulbs and blue screens that are far removed from the honeyed warmth of intimate candlelight. Outside, for city dwellers, are street lights and office lights and spooked lights flicking on at the slightest movement, condemning us to a permanent, unquiet state of non-darkness. Light pollution triumphs, colonising the far corners of our cities’ nights.

  I sleep with an eye mask because there’s too much of light’s insistence into the velvety dark and it doesn’t feel healthy; it feels like an ancient, long lost body within us yearns for something more earthed and silent. An enveloping black now seems like a precious commodity. We’re too awake in our screen and light-saturated world, our senses too alert when they shouldn’t be.

  Our innate fear of the dark has meant that light has bullied its way into wherever it can. Man has a noisy impulse to control whatever he can, which extends to the domain of darkness. We want to obliterate the dark just as we want to harness so much else in the natural world, whatever threatens or annoys or inconveniences us; whatever is in the way.

  Our sleep is increasingly harangued by electronica’s sly, demanding presence, the blue screens and blips; their noisome light. We’ve ceased to honour the quietness of darkness, its magic and mystery.

  A car is a woman’s shed. Quietude can be found in it, alone. Gunning down country roads with the windows down and the music up, with an elbow resting on the door, sun- and wind-whipped. A hand steals up, butting the breeze; the wind snatches an apple core. The road trip can brew such an uncomplicated, strong, pure happiness. The writer in me uncurls; there’s no distraction, no demands, no rubbing out. It is dangerous, this. Too seductive and too removed from the unquiet world.

  In the desert, quietude seems like an impenetrable mystery where God has uncurled upon this earth. In the luminously remote places, the silent and sanctified places, if you quieten and hold out your palms, perhaps the tears come, perhaps. You may feel the hum of a waiting presence—if you are quiet enough.

  The dense quiet of a planted pine forest is not quietude. It is threatening because our hackles are raised, our wariness pricked; the space feels too layered by loss. Ditto the quiet in a nursing home’s high-dependency ward—it is the quiet of what could be ahead of us. Then there’s the concentrated hush of Building 87, reminding us of a world without sound and of the terrifying aloneness, where all that is left is just our heartbeat and our churning, unquiet mind. And no one else.

  Antarctica is one of the quietest places on our planet and in summer one of the brightest. Our largest frozen continent has never been permanently colonised. The emptiness is battering. Humbling. Diminishing. On a still day there’s no sound of the wind, or restless water, or trees threshing in the breeze because there are no trees. The silence hums, the emptiness is penetrating. Closer to home, the salt pans of central Australia have a similar silence. And presence.

  The scene: the local pool with a bunch of school mums, and my four-year-old is gently strumming her fingers through my hair. I’m yakking on about how I sometimes get so tired after school runs that I sit in the car outside the house afterwards, immobile, for five or ten minutes; in the lovely silence that doesn’t talk back at me, in one huge and restorative moment of stillness.

  These car moments are intensely therapeutic, and the women around me all agree we need them in our lives. We sink into companionable silence contemplating that little pocket of peace in the great rush of our days; mine made lovely by the fingers sifting through my hair like a tiny, tender rake. As if on cue, the fingers’ owner pipes up: ‘I think you’ve got nits, Mummy.’

  Oh, for the soothing balm of a private car moment that instant. Everyone is laughing, and looking slightly aghast, and inching away as once again it’s confirmed that I’m the woman who makes other mothers feel good about themselves. And the woman who craves the privacy and peace, the restoration and escape of her shed on wheels, too much.

  Wild animals bring us into the shock of quietude. Coming across them unexpectedly, in the dark or the bush or even on a suburban street, you instinctively still. Contain yourself, quieten. You crave being in their presence, you want them close. Kangaroos on a suburban nature strip in Canberra. A flash of a fox on a moonlit round-about. Penguins stopped with curiosity near Antarctica’s Davis Station. We have to still ourselves into quietude to connect, and to stir that ancient, long lost body that yearns, instinctively, for something else.

  The feeling: we’re all in this together.

  Hic sunt dracones, or ‘Here be dragons,’ was the warning for seafarers on an old copper globe known as the Hunt-Lenox Globe, dated to 1510. The words are inscribed across the south-east coast of Asia.

  Quietude is the opposite of that sentiment. It is the deep familiarity and certainty of home. It is the extravagant surrender into who you really want to be. And women—working women, mothers—so rarely get to be that.

  Lieutenant William Dawes was quiet. A listener. He was the timekeeper in the early colony of Sydney—a quiet profession in itself. And in a series of tiny, fragile notebooks he recorded the Grammatical forms of the language of N.S. Wales, in the neighbour-hood of Sydney. He did this by befriending a young Eora woman named Patyegarang. Dawes’s notebooks are a meticulous chronicle of three months of contact between two very different people from two very different worlds. Dawes was able to establish a connection because he was quiet. He didn’t coerce or impose. He listened.

  I love going somewhere I’ve never been and a car allows me that luxury. It makes me think I can drink the world and it feels like my soul is unfurling in it. It reminds me of the woman I once was. Open, free, curious and earthed; quiet and receptive within exhilarating strangeness.
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  French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard said that ‘driving is a spectacular form of amnesia … everything is to be discovered, everything is to be obliterated.’ As a woman, it’s an empowering space where you’re in control. Motherhood is about the loss of control; a loosening, a letting go.

  There’s little that is quiet about a loss of control. Being free affords you a quietness of the soul. Being in a car, alone, removed from the hubbub of regular life, affords a mother a quietness of the soul.

  Sydney’s founding Governor, Arthur Phillip, wanted to learn the language of the Aboriginal people to foster communication. He had several men captured, but most Aboriginal people were afraid to go into the colony’s main encampment. Timekeeper Dawes lived in a small and isolated hut removed from everyone else. It was a safe place, a welcoming place, a place of quietness.

  Patyegarang visited many times. She may have been Dawes’s lover. Their relationship was characterised by quietness. She taught the Englishman the beautifully tender word Putuwá, which means ‘to warm one’s hand by the fire and then gently squeeze the fingers of another person.’

  That is a connecting quietude, and so I try it, and yes, oh yes.

  From Notebook B, page 34, Patyegarang: ‘Nyímun candle Mr. D.’ Meaning ‘Put out the candle Mr. D.’

  From Notebook B, page 36, Dawes: ‘Mínyin bial nanadyími?’ Meaning, ‘Why don’t you sleep?’

  Patyegarang: ‘Kandúlin.’ Meaning, ‘Because of the candle.’

  The word kandúlin is itself quiet.

  Occasionally I find myself in a church; Evensong in particular draws me in. There’s something … all calming … about these deeply quiet, illicit experiences. A crack through the veneer of indifference; a gentle drip, drip, through the noise of busy life, the restlessness and the anxiousness. I feel ‘righted’ by these assignations, balmed.

  As a nation, we need to listen more to Aboriginal people. William Dawes had the courage to be quiet. We all need to heed that lesson and be better listeners. Our national anthem encourages Australians, all, to rejoice. But we don’t, do we, on 26 January? Not all of us. And as a nation that prides itself on a laconic sense of tolerance and inclusivity—a fair go for all—that’s a problem. Because most of the people resolutely not joining in the rejoicing are the ones who were here first. Who are not listened to enough. Disquiet over the date is a murmur deep in our nation’s psyche.