Silence has become a rare currency. Noise leads us everywhere. Through her recent paths, our collaborator Monique Durand leads us into the rustling of silence, a balm for our bodies and minds in these noisy times, a common good to cherish and protect. First of eight articles.
I have walked, run, flown, sailed, on land, sea and air, crisscrossed some corners of the world, in search of it. Sometimes brushed against it, touched it, held it in my hands like a rare and shimmering fruit. It, the silence, “that one hears when nothing is heard1 “. Silence is this sky of Tadoussac, under which I write these words, on the way to the east and my distant country. One would fall asleep in its coppery vapors, a sky of the beginning and end of the world, gently frightening. My favorites. “Silence is not seen, it extends far away, and yet it is close to you, so close that you feel it as your own body2. » Near and far, it unfolds like a landscape.
Scientists generally distinguish three categories of soundscapes. Biophony, which includes sounds of animal or plant origin: birds, frogs, cicadas. Geophony, which includes the sounds of Empedocles’ four elements, or earth, water, fire and air: falling stones, branches, the melody of watercourses, the trembling of the wind in the trees. Empedocles? Greek philosopher and physician of the 5th centurye century BC, who attempted to discover the pattern of the cosmos. Finally, anthropophony, which covers all sounds of human origin. “Modern anthropophony is, today, in the process of giving the final blow to natural silence,” writes Jérôme Sueur, a researcher in ecoacoustics at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Human noise is imposing itself and making millions of years of evolution and sound diversification disappear.”
Our ears are under constant siege. Everything must be filled with something, and this something is generally more or less sonorous. Our vehicles. Our lawnmowers. Our music, often generously offered to the entire neighborhood at the hour of the evening birds, aperitifs and blessed conversations. Planes, trains, all our sputtering machines. The unstoppable muzak in shopping centers, restaurants, on construction sites, and even sometimes in schoolyards. Even in the most enchanting and delightful places.
Recent scene on the ferry Saaremaa 1. We cross the Saint Lawrence from Matane to Baie-Comeau. The sky is opening after days of rain. The sun has just appeared, making the river sparkle, which here looks like the sea. The indentation of the coast towards the east is like bear paws plunging into the waves. This bay of Baie-Comeau is, in my eyes, one of the beauties of the world. On board, microphones spit out music that plays on a loop, throbbing like a toothache, annoying like a cloud of black flies. A sailor smiles when I ask him if he puts up with it all day. “We get complaints,” he says, “but some passengers like it.”
“Noise harassed the body,” writes Jérôme Sueur, “causing loss of concentration, decreased alertness, reduced learning and sleep disturbances.” In addition to generating stress that can be expressed through behavioral disorders, cardiovascular problems and endocrine disorders. “It is essential,” continues the expert, “to consider noise as a public health problem.” A problem to be treated like pollution.
The silence of some is not the silence of others.
I continue my journey east. A large bear crosses the road, fortunately at a good distance from my windshield. A short stop at the majestic Pointe-des-Monts lighthouse, between Godbout and Baie-Trinité. A dense fog has risen above the sea, amplifying the silence, it seems. I hear a foghorn in the distance. Foghorns have the same effect on me as the cry of snow geese in the mid-season: each time my heart fails me, flying away to indecipherable lands. “Silence is not simply the absence of noise,” says Alain Corbin, a specialist in the history of sensibilities, “but a condition of contemplation, of reverie; it is the intimate place from which speech emerges.”
It is a small yellow bird glimpsed one morning on the green canvas of the Uapishka forest, in the Groulx Mountains. A spruce leaning on the side of the Churchill River, in Labrador, as if embracing it. Large century-old pines, an afternoon on a balcony in Magog, cathedrals of quivering needles. “Silence strips us, it “simplifies” us, writes Sylvie Germain, it furtively illuminates us from the inside3. »
Another stopover, this time in Baie-Trinité. The crabbers have returned laden with their tasty gems and are champing at the bit to leave. But at this second, there is no sound around. Two black ducks are splashing around at the end of the dock.
There are so many other silences besides those of nature. That of a bedside lamp illuminating a book. The silence of Jean Paul Lemieux’s paintings, of Léa Pool’s films. Or the elliptical writing of Gabrielle Roy. The voice of Joni Mitchell. A blues by Miles Davis. “True music,” he said, “is silence and all the notes only frame this silence.” The hands suspended and the eyes turned towards the sky of the pianist Emil Gilels, after his Arabesque by Schumann, a prayer, in the Moscow hall no one breathes anymore. Or the end of an organ piece, one day, with my mother at Notre-Dame de Paris. The seconds that followed left us panting, breathless, in a kind of “thickening of silence4 “.
“The silence of some is not the silence of others,” claims ecoacoustician Jérôme Sueur. “Our auditory positioning depends on our physiology, our psychology and our experience.” In short, each person has their own silence. According to the specialist, the state of silence would only be found if we are at peace with ourselves. Perhaps. Could silence be the ability of a peaceful soul? Perhaps.
A dense, inexhaustible material
Be careful, silence is not only sublime or soothing. It can be heavy, contemptuous, destructive. Or the symptom of a malaise, a tyranny, a trauma. The silence of so many assaulted women, of abused children. The deafening silence of the military fronts between two shells. The silence of those who were silenced. That of God. “Where was he in Auschwitz?” the writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wondered all his life. The silence of Large cemeteries under the moona work by Bernanos, published in 1938, in which he denounces the oppression under the Spanish dictator Franco. How many other large cemeteries or mass graves under the moon elsewhere in the world? And this beautiful verse by Victor Hugo: “Do you believe that the tomb, dressed in grass and night, is nothing but silence?”
The material of silence is dense, inexhaustible. This summer I am taking the side of silence as the dreamy consciousness of the world, such a beautiful expression borrowed from the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. This series will take us into various states and places of silence, bearers of dreams and meaning. I have never forgotten these words of Julius, a resident of the Faroe Islands, lost pebbles between Iceland and Scotland: “Silence is when I am sitting on the moor and, for all noise, I hear my heart beating.”
Last short stop, on the Gabrielle-Roy culvert that opens onto the immense bay of Sept-Îles. It has started to rain. The sea of tranquility is there, just ahead. Long red cargo ships anchor in the distance, emerging between the sea vapors like apparitions. It is raining on my eyes. It is raining silence.