The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How to Disappear: The Art of Listening to Silence in a Noisy World

“There is… the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul… the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos,” Paul Goodman wrote in his 1972 taxonomy of the nine kinds of silence. But where does the modern soul go to pasture on awareness and commune with the cosmos in a civilization increasingly savaged by noise? Where do we find, and how do we protect, those places where, in the lovely words of the poet Wendell Berry, “one’s inner voices become audible [and,] in consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives”?

Governed by the passionate belief that “silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything,” acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton has devoted his life to locating and conserving that gravely endangered species of sensorial experience and planetary poetics. Inspired by the writings of the visionary naturalist John Muir, who believed that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Hempton has spent thirty-five years picking out Earth’s rarest nature sounds, equipped with a 3-D microphone system that replicates human hearing.

Gordon Hempton inside what he calls “Nature’s Largest Violin” — the giant log of a Sitka spruce, a species prized for crafting acoustic instruments due to its rich vibratory sensitivity. (Photograph courtesy of Gordon Hempton.)

Emanating from his collection of more than 100 recordings from silent places is the idea that “there is a fundamental frequency for each habitat” — a tonal quality that shapes the sense of place and the quality of presence. What emerges is the embodied awareness that silence, like the art of sculpture, is the removal of excess material so that the true form — of one’s consciousness, of the world, of life itself — can be revealed.

Planted partway between conservation and celebration, Hempton’s lovely One Square Inch of Silence project offers a sanctuary of silence drawn from the Hoh rainforest of Olympic National Park in Washington — “very possibly the quietest place in the United States” and certainly one of the most ecologically diverse.

Silence is the presence of time undisturbed. It can be felt in the chest. It nurtures our nature.

Hempton delves into the science and animating spirit of his work in this wonderful On Being conversation with Krista Tippett, which is how I first encountered him years ago and have remained enchanted since:

Complement with The Sound of Silence — a lovely Japanese-inspired picture-book about the art of listening to your inner voice amid the noise of modern life — then revisit Mary Oliver’s wonderful poem “When I Am Among the Trees.”

HT Kottke


Published October 14, 2019

https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/10/14/gordon-hempton-silence/

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