In loving memory of Bernard Descôteaux, a man of few words who knew how to read between the lines.
I waited for the carpet of snow to settle down to dare the silence, to break it too to talk to you about it. Silence is said to be a blanket, vast; it is never trivial or ridiculous.
If this Monday was designated as “ Blue Monday », the most depressing day of the year, why not a Friday in January dedicated to silence. The answers are rarely found in the noise if you were looking for just one. And talking about silence is like trying to explain love: the mystery escapes us. To explain is to betray. Several still launched themselves, including the late monk Thich Nhat Hanh in The benefits of silence : “Once you have been able to return to calm, once you have been able to establish silence within yourself, a thundering silence, you will begin to hear the call that comes from deep within yourself. »
To be able to hear the call of beauty and respond to it, a sine qua non condition: silence
Having listened to and cherished silence all my life, especially when writing, letting the source rise, I know that I cannot live without it. I pity the restless people who change the soundtrack every hour. I even bought headphones so I couldn’t hear anything, not even white noise. Mutism, from Latin mutusmute. Mutein English.
In Primer of Wisdom, the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, from his Himalayan hermitage, notes: “External silence opens the doors to interior silence. » His mother, the Buddhist nun and painter Yahne Le Toumelin, who died at 99 last year, said: “Silence is the language of the future. » And the future wants us silent for eternity.
This is a meeting that we cannot postpone.
In the meantime, winter is rolling out its carpet for us: “Snow is white silence,” writes Marc de Smedt in Praise of silence. “It muffles sounds. It settles on space, invades it, metamorphoses it. It is pure poetry, in its whiteness. She radiates calm. Snow. »
Silence is awareness
The essay “journey into the unsaid”, this eulogy of silence by Marc de Smedt, is not recent, far from it; it is a book recently reissued, revised and expanded several times, published almost 40 years ago – pre-Internet – and which still sells, year after year, a ” long seller » which has not gone out of fashion and still remains relevant. And for good reason, the outside (and inside) world is increasingly noisy. The fault of all our screens. It gets worse.
The wonderful thing about Mozart’s music is that the silence that follows it is still Mozart
“Psychological pollution is more and more enormous,” the author whispers to me in an interview, whom I met at the end of September during his visit to Montreal to give a conference. He evokes “the current frenzy of human society and the anxiety it creates”. And the author notes to what extent Westerners are afraid of silence, because they associate it with death when it is consciousness above all.
Zen Buddhist practitioner of the arid Soto school, director of the defunct magazine New keys (who explored spiritual traditions) for several years, Marc de Smedt has been interested in silence for decades and in gymnosophy, a gym of wisdom. “You don’t need to be Buddhist or Hindu to learn how to recharge your batteries. You have to move towards exercises that involve the body. » Jogging, swimming, can be done with an awareness of being, like meditation. “Silence is in itself,” emphasizes Marc de Smedt. Even in the metro, in the middle of the hustle and bustle, we can “fall in love with our breathing”, as Thich Nhat Hanh said. As soon as we reconnect, something happens. »
His book looks at the issue from several angles: “We may have forgotten, we are beings who carry all the immemorial wisdom of silence. »
Silence, the only masculine word ending in -ence, notes Smedt. He is interested in art in his book and talks to me about the silence of museums “where the works speak to us in a resounding way, because the artist has put his whole soul into it”.
Men of few words are the best, said Shakespeare, who wrote many.
Among the works in difficulty
Museums actually lend their framework to dreaming in silence. While reading The scent of flowers at night by Leïla Slimani, I discovered a writer who prefers silence to distraction. She was offered a night, alone, in the Sea Customs museum, the Punta della Dogana in Venice, in April 2019, as writer in residence. A night among the works, in this very special museum (opened in 2009) that I visited. Silence joins the vaults of this old customs house where all the boats docked before entering the Serenissima.
Literature consists of an erotics of silence. What matters is what we don’t say.
Leïla will make it an autofiction novel, encountering the powerful silence of art. “I would like to withdraw from the world. Enter my novel as one enters orders. Take a vow of silence, modesty, complete submission to my work. »
His book is filled with night and silences, ghosts and death. She wonders what the works do at night, if they wake up, talk to each other. She makes herself small, barefoot, and waits for night to fall, both intimidated and curious.
“What we don’t say belongs to us forever,” she writes. To write is to play with silence, to tell, in a roundabout way, secrets that are unspeakable in real life. Literature is an art of retention. »
One day, I discovered at the end of the book The legacy by Victor-Lévy Beaulieu the most silent marriage proposal ever. A dedication in the form of regret. And I keep this book knowing that behind its 839 pages and its golden edge is formulated a silent love, a confession that I could never have discovered. It is between the silence of the words, between the lines, that the truth is at stake. And that is why it must be cultivated like a secret garden.