Slowly, snails
It is good to consider the onslaught of transformations we are faced with everyday, at every turn. There is nothing which so marks our time as rapid and enormous change.
These changes afflict us with the loss of our relationship to the created landscape and the great smothering of face-to-face relations by the digital realm. The common denominator between the loss of the stars, the plague of advertising and plastic choking the land, and machines coming between people in the most mundane of interactions, is manipulation. Manipulation is a form of change. It is not the only one. And the nature of manipulation requires our special wariness, as manipulation so often defines itself as “necessary.”
We face a manipulation which seeks to rob each one of us of even the barest capacity to engage reality. You no longer can determine a single thing outside your doorstep and increasingly few within your dwelling. Decisions are reached by algorithm and enforced by administrators far from you: you are not a woman, you are a birthing hole. You may not make conversation with a face at the grocery check-out, but you must talk to the machine. You cannot light your home with the incandescent light but must swallow the rapid blinking of the LEDs. You may not use legal tender but swipe your palm. Your body is an artifact which belongs to the System. Your soul is non-existent, but if it were real it too would belong to IT.
This change is more like a thousand meteors hurled at the earth simultaneously than a river shifting in its course over time. Indeed, these changes are a rebellion against the mystery of time. All time entails risk and the Managers cannot risk risk. So rather than letting time makes it course, they eradicate it with a terrible leveling. And so we step out to go about our lives and find the ground has been switched into quicksand.
These quicksands seek to make us lose our minds amidst our flailing within the Noise. And with the best of intentions we do struggle. We struggle with words, with plans, with goals, with manifestos and schemes. A plethora of noise in response to the Noise emerges, and it is all the more confusing to the seeking Faces of men and women attempting to make their way through this howling wood. In the end it seems these flailing movements to respond to machinations with machinations are easily seized upon by the quicksands to smother us all the quicker. We must be smothered, we must need rescuing. In fighting the Quicksand we sink faster and reach out for the only solution allowed - a completely enclosed pseudo-reality in which our attention and free will are eradicated forever.
The Machine resents our humanity. Therein lies its goal and its weakness: no one can be human for you. No one can be your face or move your fingers. The machine strives to devour our attention because without it we are de-souled and dis-embodied, helpless and ready to be made risk-free and robotic.
To contemplate, to perceive, to stand in silent stillness - these require a unity of heart, body, and mind. This unity is restorative of a healthy relationship to reality even when that reality is a series of ceaseless brawling noise. We cannot pull ourselves out with more words. This essay cannot pull you out. But your own contemplation and silence can.
To see again!
The Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa testified to the transcendent silence, a haiku which reached new audiences in the West through J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. It reads: “O snail. Climb Mt. Fuji! But slowly, slowly.”
How many words could be spent trying to explain Ma (the space, the pause) and one-breath poems? The noise would drown it. The poem is the poem. The world is the world. And the prayers of silence speak for themselves.
Let the princes of this world attempt to claim all reality for their domain. The hallowing of small things goes on.
A spiritual cousin to Issa, the Frenchman Max Picard spent a lifetime contemplating silence and the face.
There are no longer any silent men in the world today; there is no longer even any difference between the silent and the speaking man, only between the speaking and the non-speaking man. And because there are no silent men there are also no longer any listeners. Man today is incapable of listening; and because he is incapable of listening he can no longer tell a story, for listening and true story-telling belong together: they are a unity.
If we want to live in a world of meaning we need silence. If we want stories and not advertisements we need silence. If we want the works of our hands to be hallowed and made beautiful we need silence. Noise eschews meaning. Noise eschews stories. Noise hates beauty. Noise hates both Being and Becoming. Noise has neither the beauty of true roots or the mystery of time bringing the seasons. It simply a false “Is” usurping existence: noise is the first and perhaps last form of the rebellion against Creation.
The path to Creation and its Transcendence is through silence. It is in silence we see anew, hear anew. From there we can move again, make again, pray again.
Don’t worry if you can’t read it all. Don’t worry if you can’t take a picture of it all. Don’t worry if you can’t see it all, hear it all, eat it all, have it all. That noise is a lie. Your attention is the gift, and it is the space you make for it which lets the light of God make things holy.
Silence is the mother of beauty. In silence man learns to draw with his own hand. The work of the hands is alive, the digital artifacts are sterile. A computer cannot know the space or silence through which Creation emerges. It cannot transcend its craving for endless noise. What the hand doesn’t record is as meaningful as what it does.
The man who exits the Noise and enters silence can find reality is speaking to him. He can see it and hear it. And then he can find himself in relationship to reality. The joy, the great witness to God’s goodness, is right here: when we lay down our noise we are called into the romance of reality, the romance of the Holy Trinity. For life is being and becoming. It is seeing face to face. Not screens, but the faces of Men.
An endless flood of middlemen promise to see for you. To hear for you. To think for you. To move for you. One day they hope their machines may even Be for you. Their world promises no romance or response. It is only the competing monologues of the self-damned.
Don’t let them take you with them.
No one else can contemplate or pray for you. In that thin thread of attention lies something the princes of this world long to capture, but remains under your will in even the most challenging of moments. I pray the thread stays all your own until you find from Whom we have arisen.
Harrowingly beautiful. You've touched on the answer to our times—brought forward for our notice that still small voice calling us out of the sound and fury and back to His presence. What a perfect piece to begin a new week. Thank you.
The Dore illustration is one of my favourite works of art.
Oh, but finding moments of silence with five young kids is an unusual thing! When they are with their dad, it's peculiar, sometimes I'll go the majority of the weekend without even turning on music although I long to have time to sit and listen to that as well. Somehow silence needs its time as well.