Henry Moore, 1898-1986. Reclining Figure (1951). Plaster and string. 1054 x 2273 x 892mm. On display at Tate Britain.
“Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech” (Susan Sontag).
Silence is framed; it is always a silence of something. It is absence but it is idiosyncratic absence – absence in a context, absence of a kind of sound, absence in a kind of place, generated, constructed, coaxed, or imposed.[1] To think of silence alternatively as a staple and simple absence is dangerous. It merges together the silence of the socially marginalized with that of contemplation, it divinizes suffering in its thinking of our silence before it as just as sacred as that of the believer before God.[2] At the outset, then, we conceive of silence as expressed in many distinctive forms.
I will trace three particular silences: that of Thomas Aquinas, Manuel Bravos, and Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure (1951), arguing that the interaction of their soundlessness signals their interlocution. This will be a conversation between silences, for if we are to consider them each as different, we cannot only look to their expressiveness – we do not assume that each silence will reveal its distinctive nature through statement in an outward direction alone, just as we would not assume that all people would choose to communicate through writing essays. Rather, such a method, of following a conversation, allows us to see the subtle forms of communication taking place, among them the ability of silence to respond, to generate, and to redeem.
The silent conversation I will describe begins with the interruption of the theologian’s silence into the life of the silenced asylum seeker. The soundless dialogue continues with the suffering of the silenced, that which makes them silent, provoking the creativity of the artist. The artist’s work wordlessly responds, soundlessly speaking where nothing yet has been said. Finally, the silence of the art that results redeems the silence of failed speech. It declares that the silence of words is not an outright failure, but in fact the beginning of sense. The artwork’s silence in this scenario thus redeems the silence of the theologian. We will see how one silence interrupts, displaces, generates, and heals another silence; how they communicate in each other and to each other; how they remain, inescapably, forms of speech.
I Silence responds to silence
Following daily mass on 6th December 1273, Thomas Aquinas told his friend Reginald that he would not write another word of his Summa Theologica. All he had written of it thus far, he expressed, seemed to him ‘like straw’. Words had fallen tragically short, not reaching quite far enough, failing to represent that which he had glimpsed. This silence is one in which a sense of looking replaces speaking. With Aquinas, Dante-pilgrim, in the final sphere of Paradiso was to express,
From that point on, my power to see was stronger
Than speech that fails before such sights can show,[3]
There is a long tradition of silent looking where the volume of speaking fails. Luther invokes, over and over again, the hope in ‘gazing’ at the fulfilment of future promise. Simone Weil, centuries following him, expressed it as ‘the looking which saves us’.[4] The striving of speech, its struggle to locate the meaning it desires, to search and scramble for this sense and that, finally, in frustration and fatigue, ceases. Looking, gazing, seeing, replaces it. Where speech sought and strived, the mind ticking and searching and wanting, sight only receives the light it registers, waiting and open to the stimulus about which it has no selective ability. This silence is of human astonishment.
It is at once, however, the silence of divine generosity. Aquinas’s looking is not only an indication of his wonder at what he has glimpsed, it is also a depiction of his readiness to receive, an anticipation of the giving of knowledge. Hence we see in Aquinas’s Summa Theologica the prominence of revelation, given insight. It is revealed scripture which so frequently constitutes the Sed Contra of every answer, and revealed scripture which finally offers him what he finds to be the most appropriate name for God, ‘He Who Is’. To believe that the intellect receives is to believe in the object’s willingness to give away something of what it is, to reveal itself. Thus the silence of waiting is both an assertion of human astonishment and divine generosity.
How does Aquinas’s marvellous failure of words sit alongside the suppression of the words of the asylum seeker, equally soundless? The interruption of Aquinas’s silence into the silence of the asylum seeker indicates their conversing and dialogue, their disturbance of one another, their speech.
On 15th September 2005 Manuel Bravo, a Leeds asylum seeker from Angola, took his own life in Yarl’s Wood detention centre.[5] His solicitor had not attended his asylum hearing, he had represented himself in broken English. He had not learnt that his claim for asylum had been finally refused until his removal to a deportation centre. His was one of imposed silence.
Bravo represents the silence of the stranger. Julia Kristeva has written of the voiceless foreigner, whose ‘realm is silence’.[6] She speaks of the confused space between two conflicting languages as one of quiet dejection,
‘Saying nothing, nothing needs to be said, nothing can be said. It is the silence that empties the mind and fills the brain with despondency’.[7]
The mother tongue is broken; the spectre of silence arises both in the lack of speech and the misery of thought.
Bravo’s is also a story, however, of silencing. In it there is a story untold in a court. There is a silencing of dignity – and the generating of deep distress - in indefinite detention. There is the muting of hope in an enforced return to a country where Bravo’s parents were murdered, a muting which led to suicide. Here is silence as the denial of presence, as the denial of freedom, an abuse of the affectivity of the human speaker, whose fears and concerns were not heard. The silenced body of the asylum seeker speaks of someone else’s attempts to bid for it and dictate its meanings.
It is here that we come to see the interruption of Aquinas’s silence into that of Bravo. With Simone Weil, we see the qualities garnered in contemplative silence as capable of powerfully overturning the act of unjust silencing. We see the attentive wordlessness of Aquinas, patient listening, as what is most necessary in the encounter of Bravo, whose reality seems too much for us to hear.[8] The case being made is thus that the silence cultivated by those who know that they cannot possess their object responds to the silence of those who have themselves been objectified and possessed.
First, to be attentive, to suspend thought, to be empty, and ready ‘to be penetrated by the object’ is to be willing to receive truth as it is, to receive the sufferer in all of their distress, to be ready to feel the pain of their story completely. The dispossession of silent gazing and looking towards that which is beyond words lends itself to the attention the silenced and suffering require in their moment of affliction. Where ‘warmth of heart, impulsiveness [and] pity are not enough’, the attentiveness of the theologian’s wordlessness is able
‘to recognise that the sufferer exists, not as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled “unfortunate”, but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark of affliction.’[9]
Second, in that those who enter with Aquinas the silence of waiting know the cost of that silence: the demand it will make, to respond and change, personally and politically, in relation to what is glimpsed.[10] They know the ‘willed suspension of one’s rational agendas’; [11] they know that in that suspension they will encounter Rilke’s unshakeable and unshaking statement: ‘You must change your life.’[12] Thus, the few who practice properly waiting in silence are themselves best equipped to be changed by the interruption of the sufferer, most inclined to act and respond to their distress, to think differently. They are most ready to invite the asylum seeker into their home, to attend their court hearing, to visit them in detention, knowing the costliness of such acts upon their comfort and complacency, knowing the change that such encounters will always, inexorably, demand of them.
Aquinas’s silence interrupts the silence of Bravo and asks, ‘”What are you going through?”’ and it asks that with full awareness that the cost of listening to the answer will involve their life changing.[13] One silence, in its attentiveness and readiness to change, speaks to the silence belonging to those whose words have been unjustly supressed. Silence responds to another silence.
II Silence generates silence
In that space of soundless patient listening to the tragedies that never found a voice, in the conversing of one silence to another, emerges a second instance of communication.[14] We move now to consider the way in which a Bravo-like silence produces an expressive silence elsewhere, namely, in the production of works of art.
The silence of Bravo I will now discuss is a silence of potential. It is the silence that indicates something has been left untold. We sense it as a premature silence, it is tragic and yet also full of promise – we feel it bursting with what is yet to be heard.
It is a silence we become aware of in the act of listening. When the stories of those who are silenced are attended to we slowly become aware of the vast insight yet to find voice. As we pick up details in no particular order we sense that we are only scratching the surface, we sense the complexity and hugeness of the narrative which is hitherto untold, which we are about to hear. Alexander Master’s biography of a homeless man named Stuart depicts what I am pointing to in the author’s decision to write backwards.[15] He begins with Stuart’s death and proceeds to zoom into his life, ending with his childhood. At the outset, with only a few details, we sense (and feel in our hands) the enormity of what has yet to be said. The lives of the silenced, Stuart and Manuel Bravo among them, have about them a silence of the yet to be said. Our anticipation of the utterance to come constitutes this silence’s ‘perennial question mark’.[16]
This is the silence that generates another silence. The question the suffering silence always poses, of what more is to be discovered, provokes further silent expression in the form of visual art. The exchange takes place, first, as art responds to the sense of excess in the sufferer’s silence, and second, as specifically visual art meets the need for a kind of expression emancipated from words. The conversation we trace here is one of response and retort, as the artist wordlessly answers Bravo’s silent stirring and soliciting.
First, then, the exchange occurs because of the fundamental responsive nature of artistic forms. There is an intersection between a story that begs to be told and the artist’s alertness to what is incomplete. The artist is one who has a sense that, as Jacques Maritain puts it, ‘things are not only what they are’.[17] To encounter the silence of the untold story is accordingly a deeply creative experience.
Second, visual – soundless – art, of all the arts, is generated in this conversation because words and sound appear insufficient and inappropriate. Insufficient, because the suffering of the silenced frequently appears too awful to use words at all. We feel there are no words for the genocide of whole communities, or the prostitution of children, for instance. Inappropriate, because imposed suffering often seems to have been inflicted through words. Words have manipulated and hurt, they have belittled and dominated. Provoked by this need for a new medium free from fallen words, visual art emerges. The final word’s stark absence sets the scene for a creative journey into soundlessness. Silence is generative of another silence.
It is in this exchange that we find Henry Moore. His work is rooted so clearly in an experience of historical suffering: his own experience in the trenches, his response to the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War, and his living through the austerity of the post-war decade.[18] His distorted figures express the untold story of the vulnerable body of the war victim. His work wordlessly represents something of untold history. It grasps towards the many hidden scenes and unnamed victims of war. It answers the silence of potential in its own visual silence. Silence generates another silence.
III Silence redeems silence
To focus on one of Moore’s works, Reclining Figure 1951, brings us to witness one final communication of a silence with another.[19] The distinctive silence of Reclining Figure occurs because it is a piece of visual art. It is an entity without life. It is defenceless, unable to deploy speech to its ends, always vulnerably open to our interpretation and manipulation, as John Berger made so clear in his Ways of Seeing.[20] More than this, however, the specific form of this sculpture suggests its silence. It is a work that relies on absence. Empty space so expressly makes up the shape of the body. These voids in the stone are like the silent pauses in our speech.