A few years ago, I read of a poll of dog owners, 25 percent of whom said their pets were better listeners than their spouses. Cat owners came in at 14 percent. How can a married couple not listen to one another?
Why is listening so hard for people to do? Why do Republicans in Congress right now not listen to their constituents, and to reason and common sense, and vote for a real trial of Donald Trump? Why do they listen to his endless lies and cover-ups? And what about listening to the inner voice of conscience that says laws have been broken?
Politics aside, paying attention to one another in a busy, noisy world of self-promotion is an important issue. A great deal of the problem has to do with the ego and the habit of caring mainly about ourselves, not caring enough about the person we are with to put aside our own agenda and just pay close attention before responding. This is a habit that must be learned.
If I were to give a class on listening, I would use Erich Fromm's book, "The Art of Listening," in which he lists some basic guidelines, which I summarize:
1. The first step is the complete concentration of the listener. He or she has to banish all thoughts and be free and receptive.
2. The listener has to be imaginative, able to put himself in the shoes of the person who has something to say.
3. This means the one who listens well has some empathy: "to understand another means to love him," says Fromm.
4. If understanding and loving are separate and not linked, he concludes, the door to real sharing, communication, and listening is forever closed.
The door has often been closed in many of the lunches and dinners I have endured in the past few years. People anxiously talk about their experiences and have little interest in asking questions about my experience or ideas. When I speak, they hear me but just continue talking....So to Fromm's list of essentials I would add patience, humility, and inner peace. And I would add silence: the good listener silences his mind as well as his cell phone, and on this foundation is ready to give full attention to another. Such attention is a form of love.
Showing posts with label silence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label silence. Show all posts
Sunday, February 2, 2020
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
Paying Attention to Light
I advise my writing students to begin by observing: Look closely at someone or something and describe it. Sounds easier than it is. Paying attention is rarely simple, but it's essential if we are to be in the here and now.
I've been paying attention to the light that, even on hot summer afternoons, floods the room where I work. Thanks to shady trees and a southerly exposure, the light is diffused, its glare softened. I enjoy looking at it as it pours through the window over my desk, cooling the room.
Or so it seems. I have never, until now, put it into words. Light is, after all, a silent presence, and that's the whole point: an encounter with silence and stillness.
I ask myself, Why do I enjoy looking at light? Maybe the answer has to do with memories, half remembered, of afternoons elsewhere, in hotel rooms when we were on vacation and after a busy morning, a brief siesta was called for. Or maybe it reminds me of certain paintings, especially Vermeer's, where a lady quietly reads by a window in a room filled with natural light. Thanks to Vermeer, the light is as important as the lady or the room.
I am drawn to light. I can identify with medieval folk in Gothic cathedrals as they felt the power of colored light from the stained glass windows, suggesting a divine presence, as if the barrier between earth and heaven, matter and spirit, had been bridged and they felt, in that lofty space, a bit of eternity.
I think about light because I know the value of contemplation and find too little time for it. Richard Rohr recently wrote that most of our thinking is unstable, a series of self-centered reactions and preferences, of judging and labeling things or worrying, none of which has anything to do with being fully in the present moment.
I need time alone each day--even just ten minutes--so that I can calmly watch everything as it comes and goes, even something as fundamental as light. I need a place in the day when my mind can be still and let things float by, without analysis or judgment or feeling.
Silence and emptiness, when we make room for them in our busy lives, are open to infinite horizons and transcendence in a way that nothing else is, Rohr says.
Time spent gazing out the window, looking at the light, may seem to some busy people time wasted, but it is the overactive, busy mind that is wasting an essential opportunity for something essential to every day: the freedom of contemplation.
I've been paying attention to the light that, even on hot summer afternoons, floods the room where I work. Thanks to shady trees and a southerly exposure, the light is diffused, its glare softened. I enjoy looking at it as it pours through the window over my desk, cooling the room.
Or so it seems. I have never, until now, put it into words. Light is, after all, a silent presence, and that's the whole point: an encounter with silence and stillness.
I ask myself, Why do I enjoy looking at light? Maybe the answer has to do with memories, half remembered, of afternoons elsewhere, in hotel rooms when we were on vacation and after a busy morning, a brief siesta was called for. Or maybe it reminds me of certain paintings, especially Vermeer's, where a lady quietly reads by a window in a room filled with natural light. Thanks to Vermeer, the light is as important as the lady or the room.
I am drawn to light. I can identify with medieval folk in Gothic cathedrals as they felt the power of colored light from the stained glass windows, suggesting a divine presence, as if the barrier between earth and heaven, matter and spirit, had been bridged and they felt, in that lofty space, a bit of eternity.
I think about light because I know the value of contemplation and find too little time for it. Richard Rohr recently wrote that most of our thinking is unstable, a series of self-centered reactions and preferences, of judging and labeling things or worrying, none of which has anything to do with being fully in the present moment.
I need time alone each day--even just ten minutes--so that I can calmly watch everything as it comes and goes, even something as fundamental as light. I need a place in the day when my mind can be still and let things float by, without analysis or judgment or feeling.
Silence and emptiness, when we make room for them in our busy lives, are open to infinite horizons and transcendence in a way that nothing else is, Rohr says.
Time spent gazing out the window, looking at the light, may seem to some busy people time wasted, but it is the overactive, busy mind that is wasting an essential opportunity for something essential to every day: the freedom of contemplation.
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Silence Revisited
For nearly twenty years, I have been investigating the power of silence, a topic that first struck me when teaching the later poetry of T. S. Eliot. I then discovered all the many things Thomas Merton had to say about silence as contemplative prayer. In several articles on Merton and silence, I tried to define the broader implications of silence as something more than the absence of sound.
Many other writers, I found, have explored this topic, suggesting that genuine silence is not about emptiness or negativity but presence. What kind of presence is not always easy to define, but it became clear to me that true silence has its own positive, independent existence: it is the enduring reality that sound interrupts. Or we can say it is the permanent reality that supports sound, a bit like the way the white space on a printed page exists in dialogue with the words, which come out of silence.
Silence lasts while words do not. And while such insights come from my literary background, they also come from my search for prayer, the kind that goes beyond words to an interior reality known to mystics in both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. Christians might find in contemplation and meditation an awareness of the kingdom of God within. This attention to spiritual reality through stillness and silence has been called the sacrament of the present moment.
Recently, I have profited from listening to Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and author, who sees silence as an alternative consciousness, a way of way of knowing beyond rational analysis. The ego, he says (drawing on Jung), needs words to make points and to get what it wants; the ego is uncomfortable with silence since part of us wants to argue.
But the soul, so to speak, sees that silence is more important than words. Silence for Rohr is the wholeness of being with nothing to argue about. It gives us moments in the timeless present but also something more: a sense of the eternal since time increases ("grows into a fullness") in silence, which is more significant than words.
Rohr's great spiritual model is St. Francis, who said, "Pray always and sometimes use words," referring to actions (good deeds) and silence as more expressive of love than language. If our words begin with, and come out, of silence, our words will be carefully chosen. Words not surrounded by silence (but blurted out in a great rush) can be hurtful, critical, sarcastic, hardly spiritual.
Rohr also suggests that a focus on silence as a spiritual practice prepares us for death, the Great Silence. And the other manifestations of silence in art--the stillness of paintings, for example, or the eloquent absence of sound in certain films--are also worth studying.
I remain grateful to Merton for reviving the Christian tradition of contemplative prayer and seeing its parallel in Buddhist practice, something he was exploring in Bangkok at the time of his death in 1968. I am happy to see that what he and many others have done, in both poetry and prose, continues the exploration of silence as a source of ultimate meaning as well as the source of language and music.
As T. S. Eliot wrote (in "Ash Wednesday"), the word cannot be heard here, in ordinary time: "there is not enough silence."
Many other writers, I found, have explored this topic, suggesting that genuine silence is not about emptiness or negativity but presence. What kind of presence is not always easy to define, but it became clear to me that true silence has its own positive, independent existence: it is the enduring reality that sound interrupts. Or we can say it is the permanent reality that supports sound, a bit like the way the white space on a printed page exists in dialogue with the words, which come out of silence.
Silence lasts while words do not. And while such insights come from my literary background, they also come from my search for prayer, the kind that goes beyond words to an interior reality known to mystics in both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. Christians might find in contemplation and meditation an awareness of the kingdom of God within. This attention to spiritual reality through stillness and silence has been called the sacrament of the present moment.
Recently, I have profited from listening to Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and author, who sees silence as an alternative consciousness, a way of way of knowing beyond rational analysis. The ego, he says (drawing on Jung), needs words to make points and to get what it wants; the ego is uncomfortable with silence since part of us wants to argue.
But the soul, so to speak, sees that silence is more important than words. Silence for Rohr is the wholeness of being with nothing to argue about. It gives us moments in the timeless present but also something more: a sense of the eternal since time increases ("grows into a fullness") in silence, which is more significant than words.
Rohr's great spiritual model is St. Francis, who said, "Pray always and sometimes use words," referring to actions (good deeds) and silence as more expressive of love than language. If our words begin with, and come out, of silence, our words will be carefully chosen. Words not surrounded by silence (but blurted out in a great rush) can be hurtful, critical, sarcastic, hardly spiritual.
Rohr also suggests that a focus on silence as a spiritual practice prepares us for death, the Great Silence. And the other manifestations of silence in art--the stillness of paintings, for example, or the eloquent absence of sound in certain films--are also worth studying.
I remain grateful to Merton for reviving the Christian tradition of contemplative prayer and seeing its parallel in Buddhist practice, something he was exploring in Bangkok at the time of his death in 1968. I am happy to see that what he and many others have done, in both poetry and prose, continues the exploration of silence as a source of ultimate meaning as well as the source of language and music.
As T. S. Eliot wrote (in "Ash Wednesday"), the word cannot be heard here, in ordinary time: "there is not enough silence."
Friday, February 20, 2015
I never heard so much silence
"I never heard so much silence," says a young woman who comes with a camera to a poor, dying village somewhere in Brazil.
This is the reaction I had while watching her interact with the villagers in the remarkable film "Found Memories," which proved to be an ideal source of reflection on the day after Ash Wednesday, when I was looking for a way to increase my experience of contemplation and silence.
Just watching the scenes, filmed in real life, slowly unfold, without music or narration or artificial light: the scenes are lit like paintings as shutters open to let in the sun or as old people walk around with kerosene lamps. The pace is slow, thank God.
As we watch an old woman bake bread, go the coffee shop in the tiny village, then to the church, nothing much seems to happen--except the big things: life, old age, death, love and memory. And the need to bake bread.
It is impossible to analyze this quiet Brazilian film; it has to be experienced. For me, it was an ideal companion in the beginning of Lent.
This is the reaction I had while watching her interact with the villagers in the remarkable film "Found Memories," which proved to be an ideal source of reflection on the day after Ash Wednesday, when I was looking for a way to increase my experience of contemplation and silence.
Just watching the scenes, filmed in real life, slowly unfold, without music or narration or artificial light: the scenes are lit like paintings as shutters open to let in the sun or as old people walk around with kerosene lamps. The pace is slow, thank God.
As we watch an old woman bake bread, go the coffee shop in the tiny village, then to the church, nothing much seems to happen--except the big things: life, old age, death, love and memory. And the need to bake bread.
It is impossible to analyze this quiet Brazilian film; it has to be experienced. For me, it was an ideal companion in the beginning of Lent.
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Fast and Furious: A reflection on time
Has any period in history felt that it has less time than ours? That is one of the many significant questions raised in an article by the editors of the journal n+1. It's called "Too Fast, Too Furious."
The great paradox of the modern age (the past 200 years or so) is that, with the development of technology, time is felt as passing more and more quickly. This is what the German theorist Hartmut Rosa calls an "acceleration society." Why do labor-saving devices that give us more free time also bring feelings of stress and lack of time?
The answer seems obvious: "The number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large and expands every day with implacable speed," Rosa says. The more "free" time we have, the more busy and enslaved to time we become. No wonder Thoreau remains enduringly popular.
At no time of year, when consumerism is in high gear, does this feeling tend of being overwhelmed by time become more apparent than the present holiday season, which involves doing innumerable things. One important point missing from the n+1 article is our ability to resist doing more things, by choosing to slow down, by not filling up leisure time with more and more apps, tweets, and other devices and gadgets and finding a space for silence.
In other words, it is certainly possible to be, as the article suggests, overly busy and stressed doing many things and feeling, like Tantalus, never satisfied, either intellectually or emotionally. But is it inevitable that we are trapped in this way?
Rosa speaks of a "frenetic standstill" in which "an eternal, unchanging sameness afflicts the age." Yet, with a minimum of imagination and training, one can enter the timeless present, which does not mean bleak affliction (as Rosa suggests) but a sense of constant presence beyond the rush of time. Meditation, whether Christian, Buddhist, or other, offers a way out of the dilemma Rosa sees as trapping us in an endless cycle of busyness.
Finding time for ourselves, for meditation and reflection, even for quiet reading, requires hard choices (turn off the media, avoid the telephone for a few hours) but seems essential for our inner life. We can find moments of transcendent stillness and peace in which we are connected to the timeless reality of God.
The advice of Teilhard de Chardin is relevant: allow God "the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete." Begin, that is, with the recognition that all life on earth is incomplete, that we are restless creatures, and that progress is any area take a very long time. But the goal is ultimately reached, if we "trust in the slow work of God."
There is, in the end, enough time. And if we make time for the timeless presence of God within us, we can, however briefly, step outside the mad rush of time and find the peace we all seek. That, at least, is my hope at this time of Christmas.
The great paradox of the modern age (the past 200 years or so) is that, with the development of technology, time is felt as passing more and more quickly. This is what the German theorist Hartmut Rosa calls an "acceleration society." Why do labor-saving devices that give us more free time also bring feelings of stress and lack of time?
The answer seems obvious: "The number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large and expands every day with implacable speed," Rosa says. The more "free" time we have, the more busy and enslaved to time we become. No wonder Thoreau remains enduringly popular.
At no time of year, when consumerism is in high gear, does this feeling tend of being overwhelmed by time become more apparent than the present holiday season, which involves doing innumerable things. One important point missing from the n+1 article is our ability to resist doing more things, by choosing to slow down, by not filling up leisure time with more and more apps, tweets, and other devices and gadgets and finding a space for silence.
In other words, it is certainly possible to be, as the article suggests, overly busy and stressed doing many things and feeling, like Tantalus, never satisfied, either intellectually or emotionally. But is it inevitable that we are trapped in this way?
Rosa speaks of a "frenetic standstill" in which "an eternal, unchanging sameness afflicts the age." Yet, with a minimum of imagination and training, one can enter the timeless present, which does not mean bleak affliction (as Rosa suggests) but a sense of constant presence beyond the rush of time. Meditation, whether Christian, Buddhist, or other, offers a way out of the dilemma Rosa sees as trapping us in an endless cycle of busyness.
Finding time for ourselves, for meditation and reflection, even for quiet reading, requires hard choices (turn off the media, avoid the telephone for a few hours) but seems essential for our inner life. We can find moments of transcendent stillness and peace in which we are connected to the timeless reality of God.
The advice of Teilhard de Chardin is relevant: allow God "the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete." Begin, that is, with the recognition that all life on earth is incomplete, that we are restless creatures, and that progress is any area take a very long time. But the goal is ultimately reached, if we "trust in the slow work of God."
There is, in the end, enough time. And if we make time for the timeless presence of God within us, we can, however briefly, step outside the mad rush of time and find the peace we all seek. That, at least, is my hope at this time of Christmas.
Monday, October 6, 2014
The silence of a Polish film
One of the striking things about the memorable Polish film Ida is its silence. Scenes unfold without much music and in square frames reminiscent of films from 1962, when the story is set. This keeps the characters generally distant from the viewer, shadowed in the mystery that informs them.
The main character, who is called Anna, a novice about to take final vows in a Catholic convent somewhere in Poland, is told by her only relative, Wanda, that, in fact, the young woman's name is Ida Lebenstein. She was a Jewish child taken from her parents during the war and raised in an orphanage.
She responds to this, and to all the other surprises that await her, with a quiet reserve and stillness as well as with wide eyes. As she and her aunt travel in search of the family's burial place, we are shown, amid the grim Polish countryside, glimmers of light and meaning as one chapter in the history of European suffering is illuminated with a remarkable eloquence.
The characters have mysterious depths and raise unanswered questions, and the narrative generates a restrained suspense. This is not a movie with broad appeal--unless you are looking for something artful and purely cinematic with a spiritual depth.
The main character, who is called Anna, a novice about to take final vows in a Catholic convent somewhere in Poland, is told by her only relative, Wanda, that, in fact, the young woman's name is Ida Lebenstein. She was a Jewish child taken from her parents during the war and raised in an orphanage.
She responds to this, and to all the other surprises that await her, with a quiet reserve and stillness as well as with wide eyes. As she and her aunt travel in search of the family's burial place, we are shown, amid the grim Polish countryside, glimmers of light and meaning as one chapter in the history of European suffering is illuminated with a remarkable eloquence.
The characters have mysterious depths and raise unanswered questions, and the narrative generates a restrained suspense. This is not a movie with broad appeal--unless you are looking for something artful and purely cinematic with a spiritual depth.
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Praying in Public
The recent Supreme Court case involving the town of Greece, NY and the "issue" of prayer in public meetings has prompted much attention, none of it as valuable, for my money, than the blog post of Morgan Guyton, "Would Jesus Pray at a City Council Meeting?"
Guyton brings me back to my old topic of contemplative prayer and the need to create a monastery within where we rest in God. Silence and solitude are required. I have published several articles on such themes as well as numerous posts.
So I was pleased to see Mr. Guyton refer to prayer as creating a monastery "where we can sit and enjoy the presence of God." He thinks of praying as going to one's inner room, as Jesus did, and praying to the Father in secret. The result is an intimacy that is clearly incompatible with public meetings.
How can we have an intimate conversation with God if prayer becomes "a public performance and an inner farce," as implied in the arguments presented to the court?
I don't think Guyton wishes to rule out the validity of community prayer or the church as a praying community, but his emphasis on the private, personal nature of prayer as an intimate connection with the divine is important.
"No inner monastery is created by a prayer that has been clipped onto the beginning of a secular meeting," Guyton writes. And I say 'Amen.'
Guyton brings me back to my old topic of contemplative prayer and the need to create a monastery within where we rest in God. Silence and solitude are required. I have published several articles on such themes as well as numerous posts.
So I was pleased to see Mr. Guyton refer to prayer as creating a monastery "where we can sit and enjoy the presence of God." He thinks of praying as going to one's inner room, as Jesus did, and praying to the Father in secret. The result is an intimacy that is clearly incompatible with public meetings.
How can we have an intimate conversation with God if prayer becomes "a public performance and an inner farce," as implied in the arguments presented to the court?
I don't think Guyton wishes to rule out the validity of community prayer or the church as a praying community, but his emphasis on the private, personal nature of prayer as an intimate connection with the divine is important.
"No inner monastery is created by a prayer that has been clipped onto the beginning of a secular meeting," Guyton writes. And I say 'Amen.'
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Yearning for Silence
Tim Parks, an Englishman living in Italy, is an interesting writer whose books about Italian culture I have enjoyed. A recent piece of his in Aeon magazine, however, struck me as missing the mark a bit, although, being about his personal spiritual quest, Who am I to judge? (as someone else recently asked)
His topic is the yearning for silence, a topic of great importance to me. He says we fear silence and long for it at the same time because it involves the end of the self. Huh?
Well, Parks, having no religious experience with prayer and with only a 10-day Buddhist retreat under his belt, finds that a discussion of silence involves consciousness and selfhood, with which I agree; but it also involves, he says, "the desire to invest in the self and the desire for the end of the self." But it's more than Self!
His Vipassana experience taught him that "our excessive interest in our own wordy thoughts" can dissolve as language melts away during the meditative breathing but that meditative "techniques" return us to the noisy self, the busy mind, something most people understandably long to escape from. And he learned what most beginners know: that silence and stillness are related.
Parks does not seem aware that he is on the edge of the ancient mystical tradition of contemplative prayer, the practice of the presence of God in silence. Whether or not this is a technique or not, it is lifelong pursuit (for monastics and laypeople alike) of the union of the self with God in which the self falls away; but this is not a loss but a fullness of experience.
The experience of God-with-us-now in the present moment is a loss of the self-conscious self but also a discovery, according to Thomas Merton, of the true self, the one known by God, who dwells within at the center of our being.
I hope Parks looks more deeply into silence and practices it regularly, that he reads Merton and Thomas Keating, John Main, and others like him in the Christian tradition. Their work is richer than the essentially secular and limited approach he has outlined in which the fear of death and the loss of the self becomes the result of silent meditation.
I want to tell him: What seems to be lost in the darkness of silence is the self, but that is only the first step on the mystical path that can't be clearly explained, even by great poets like John of the Cross or T. S. Eliot, except to say it involves finding the true self in the love of God.
That may not make any sense to some readers, and I am not sure I understand it myself. That's why we call it a mystery, the kind without a solution or answer.
His topic is the yearning for silence, a topic of great importance to me. He says we fear silence and long for it at the same time because it involves the end of the self. Huh?
Well, Parks, having no religious experience with prayer and with only a 10-day Buddhist retreat under his belt, finds that a discussion of silence involves consciousness and selfhood, with which I agree; but it also involves, he says, "the desire to invest in the self and the desire for the end of the self." But it's more than Self!
His Vipassana experience taught him that "our excessive interest in our own wordy thoughts" can dissolve as language melts away during the meditative breathing but that meditative "techniques" return us to the noisy self, the busy mind, something most people understandably long to escape from. And he learned what most beginners know: that silence and stillness are related.
Parks does not seem aware that he is on the edge of the ancient mystical tradition of contemplative prayer, the practice of the presence of God in silence. Whether or not this is a technique or not, it is lifelong pursuit (for monastics and laypeople alike) of the union of the self with God in which the self falls away; but this is not a loss but a fullness of experience.
The experience of God-with-us-now in the present moment is a loss of the self-conscious self but also a discovery, according to Thomas Merton, of the true self, the one known by God, who dwells within at the center of our being.
I hope Parks looks more deeply into silence and practices it regularly, that he reads Merton and Thomas Keating, John Main, and others like him in the Christian tradition. Their work is richer than the essentially secular and limited approach he has outlined in which the fear of death and the loss of the self becomes the result of silent meditation.
I want to tell him: What seems to be lost in the darkness of silence is the self, but that is only the first step on the mystical path that can't be clearly explained, even by great poets like John of the Cross or T. S. Eliot, except to say it involves finding the true self in the love of God.
That may not make any sense to some readers, and I am not sure I understand it myself. That's why we call it a mystery, the kind without a solution or answer.
Friday, August 2, 2013
The death of darkness
I remember vividly my first encounter with pitch-black night. I was about 10 years old, and my family was visiting my aunt's summer home "out in the country," as we said, far away from the lights of St. Louis. My mother's alarm at the total lack of light is probably what makes me recall those few nights. I came to see night as a time of fear and danger. In more recent years, I have been aware that the night sky of our cities and sprawling suburbs is not really dark in that natural way it once was.
I thought of this as I skimmed an interesting new book with a fascinating topic, the gradual loss of darkness on Earth: The End of Night by Paul Bogard, whose interests are primarily ecological, though he ranges widely from an opening visit to the Nevada desert, some of the darkest geography left in the U.S. Two-thirds of Americans and Europeans no longer experience real night, real darkness, he says.
We live in a semi-twilight glow of artificial light, a world marked by light pollution. Finding natural darkness in our world, as Bogart shows, can be a challenge. His book is well-written and documented, a collection of revealing facts and insights from various perspectives.
Included, very briefly, is the religious, with two pages or so devoted to darkness in Christian tradition, and with nothing really about the mystical tradition such as John of the Cross's dark night of the soul or Rilke's "I am in love with night."
This spiritual dimension of night is a major part of what interests me about the topic, the parallel between darkness and silence: Just as silence is not the mere absence of sound but a kind of presence or reality in its own right, so it seems that darkness is not the absence of light but, as in so much myth and literature, a creative source of life. The feminine aspect of darkness (the womb) as something quite other than frightening or evil has often been discussed and is beyond Bogard's scope here.
He comes closest to treating such material, in what I have read, in quoting from members of the Native American tradition, who see darkness as a time of healing, as the earth rests. It is a time of rituals and ceremonies when spirits can wander across space and time. At night, says a Cherokee who is interviewed, one should be able to cross into other worlds and other eras, as in ancient times.
One of the striking features easily overlooked about earlier periods in the West, such as the Middle Ages, was the dramatic contrast between the dying of the day and the onset of night, when it was really dark, when people could look up into a velvet-black sky alive with stars and planets, as night's shadow extended into space.
The author does cite the Bible, both the story of Samuel and Christ in the agony of the garden, among many key events that occur in the spiritually alive darkness when the ultimate mystery of God is felt. If religion tends to "illuminate" and study such things, the stories themselves remind us that darkness has to do with the mystery of being, what the mystics call the "negative way"--that ultimate meaning, or God, is unknowable, obscure.
I am glad to have come across Bogard's book and share his need to celebrate the few dark spots we have left on this artificially illuminated planet and to lament their loss elsewhere. I would welcome more discussion of the creative power and mystery of darkness--as well as the power of light.
I thought of this as I skimmed an interesting new book with a fascinating topic, the gradual loss of darkness on Earth: The End of Night by Paul Bogard, whose interests are primarily ecological, though he ranges widely from an opening visit to the Nevada desert, some of the darkest geography left in the U.S. Two-thirds of Americans and Europeans no longer experience real night, real darkness, he says.
We live in a semi-twilight glow of artificial light, a world marked by light pollution. Finding natural darkness in our world, as Bogart shows, can be a challenge. His book is well-written and documented, a collection of revealing facts and insights from various perspectives.
Included, very briefly, is the religious, with two pages or so devoted to darkness in Christian tradition, and with nothing really about the mystical tradition such as John of the Cross's dark night of the soul or Rilke's "I am in love with night."
This spiritual dimension of night is a major part of what interests me about the topic, the parallel between darkness and silence: Just as silence is not the mere absence of sound but a kind of presence or reality in its own right, so it seems that darkness is not the absence of light but, as in so much myth and literature, a creative source of life. The feminine aspect of darkness (the womb) as something quite other than frightening or evil has often been discussed and is beyond Bogard's scope here.
He comes closest to treating such material, in what I have read, in quoting from members of the Native American tradition, who see darkness as a time of healing, as the earth rests. It is a time of rituals and ceremonies when spirits can wander across space and time. At night, says a Cherokee who is interviewed, one should be able to cross into other worlds and other eras, as in ancient times.
One of the striking features easily overlooked about earlier periods in the West, such as the Middle Ages, was the dramatic contrast between the dying of the day and the onset of night, when it was really dark, when people could look up into a velvet-black sky alive with stars and planets, as night's shadow extended into space.
The author does cite the Bible, both the story of Samuel and Christ in the agony of the garden, among many key events that occur in the spiritually alive darkness when the ultimate mystery of God is felt. If religion tends to "illuminate" and study such things, the stories themselves remind us that darkness has to do with the mystery of being, what the mystics call the "negative way"--that ultimate meaning, or God, is unknowable, obscure.
I am glad to have come across Bogard's book and share his need to celebrate the few dark spots we have left on this artificially illuminated planet and to lament their loss elsewhere. I would welcome more discussion of the creative power and mystery of darkness--as well as the power of light.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Writing and Being Still
A recent piece in the New York Times, "The Art of Being Still," by novelist Silas House caught my eye. Especially his comment, "too many writers today are afraid to be still."
Or they are unable to unwilling to be quiet with their busy lives in which writing time is sandwiched in between parenting, earning money, maintaining a home, etc. House does not mean that writers have to sit still in a lonely garret. He means their minds have to be quiet.
His piece includes much sensible advice, especially for emerging writers who spend a lot of time talking about or planning to write or reading about writing or attending conferences. His advice, like mine, is to do the reading and networking in a limited way to keep your mind open.
How do we become still so that we "achieve the sort of stillness that allows our senses to become heightened"? In writing extensively about silence, I have talked about the need to slow down and find spots of contemplative time. House is practical in recommending that writers use every moment they have to think about the story or article they are working on. And nothing else.
The issue is not, How many hours a day must I write? But: How can I use my driving, shopping, chore time to reflect on one thing (my writing) only, without distractions? He recommends what my wife, Lynn, has always done: writing constantly in her head. In her periods of silence, she is actively thinking about her characters and what she wants them to say or do. Little of this is written down in the initial stages.
Writers can go for weeks without putting words onto paper, but, if they follow House and many, many other authors, "they write every waking minute." They do so by cultivating an inner silence that blocks interference (cell phones, etc. off) and opens the channels of observation. The quiet mind comes when we turn off our overly busy thought patterns and remain quiet, open to what may come as we focus on living in the present moment.
Silence and writing seem to be opposed; yet silence and stillness are more than the absence of words and activity. They relate to a disciplined habit of listening to and observing what the universe has to reveal. And it can be done amid all the no-mind duties we must daily perform.
Or they are unable to unwilling to be quiet with their busy lives in which writing time is sandwiched in between parenting, earning money, maintaining a home, etc. House does not mean that writers have to sit still in a lonely garret. He means their minds have to be quiet.
His piece includes much sensible advice, especially for emerging writers who spend a lot of time talking about or planning to write or reading about writing or attending conferences. His advice, like mine, is to do the reading and networking in a limited way to keep your mind open.
How do we become still so that we "achieve the sort of stillness that allows our senses to become heightened"? In writing extensively about silence, I have talked about the need to slow down and find spots of contemplative time. House is practical in recommending that writers use every moment they have to think about the story or article they are working on. And nothing else.
The issue is not, How many hours a day must I write? But: How can I use my driving, shopping, chore time to reflect on one thing (my writing) only, without distractions? He recommends what my wife, Lynn, has always done: writing constantly in her head. In her periods of silence, she is actively thinking about her characters and what she wants them to say or do. Little of this is written down in the initial stages.
Writers can go for weeks without putting words onto paper, but, if they follow House and many, many other authors, "they write every waking minute." They do so by cultivating an inner silence that blocks interference (cell phones, etc. off) and opens the channels of observation. The quiet mind comes when we turn off our overly busy thought patterns and remain quiet, open to what may come as we focus on living in the present moment.
Silence and writing seem to be opposed; yet silence and stillness are more than the absence of words and activity. They relate to a disciplined habit of listening to and observing what the universe has to reveal. And it can be done amid all the no-mind duties we must daily perform.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Escaping all the Noise
Our crowded planet is also an increasingly noisy one. When electronic beepers are not sounding, people are sounding off at great length on various media and in person. I find that going to lunch is sometimes an endurance test: the restaurant noise makes hearing many conversations a strain (and my hearing is fairly good).
A recent article in Parade magazine talks about what it is to live surrounded by a constant bath of noise: living in loud areas can raise the blood pressure. The word noise, we are told, is related to the Latin word for sickness: nausea.
A longer article in the Guardian by George Michelson Foy recalls his own experiment in searching for the quietest place on earth. Trying to escape the dull roar of Manhattan's ceaseless sounds, he visited a monastery, an Indian sweat lodge, and a nickel mine. None was quiet enough. Finally, he discovered the quietest place on earth: the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota.
Whereas some visitors to this small room, thoroughly insulated to absorb every imaginable whisper, find it unbearable, he enjoyed the experience. Most people would experience claustrophia or other problems being sealed in such a room, cut off from the comforting sounds of human life, but his record 45-minute stay in the room was (he says) calming and peaceful, as he listened to the blood rushing in his veins and other bodily functions.
I remember reading a few years ago about a man visiting the bottom of the Grand Canyon and finding the silence there frightening. I doubt if he would head for Minnesota's Orfield with its 99.9% sound-absorbent chamber.
Realizing to his disappointment that total and complete silence is possible only in death, Foy was sorry to end his 45-minute submersion in solitude and silence. Being comfortable with the feeling of absolute calm, he felt rested and peaceful, sorry to leave after only 45 minutes of what many would see as sensory deprivation akin to torture.
Like Foy, who associates silence with happiness, I have been a seeker of silence-- but not the physical absence of sound. I enjoy reading, contemplation, meditation and writing with only the half-conscious sounds of modern life (air conditioning) or birdsong in the background.
I doubt if I would be happy in an anechoic chamber, but I know that the quest for silence is important and profound in mysterious ways. I don't see it as a source of happiness, although a period of silent meditation produces a calmness of mind and a serenity much needed in a too-loud world.
Mostly, I follow the lead of Thomas Merton, who wrote extensively about the silence of contemplative prayer during his 27 years as a Trappist monk in Kentucky. As a result, he could really hear the rain beat down (a wonderful passage in Raids on the Unspeakble) in what he calls a welcome kind of speech. He was fully attuned to the world of nature outside his hermitage and felt connected to people around the world, many of them his readers. In writing, he felt close to God and saw in silence a "friendly communion" with millions of others able to take time out from the constant distractions of everyday life to experience a brief moment in the timeless present.
"The real journey of life is within," Merton wrote. He did not need to seek the quietest place on earth. As to happiness, he would probably understand what the woman, asked by Inspector Maigret in one of Simenon's stories, says when he asks her, "Have you found happiness?"
She responds, in an Old World way that would seem totally foreign to today's Americans, "as much as anyone is entitled to."
A recent article in Parade magazine talks about what it is to live surrounded by a constant bath of noise: living in loud areas can raise the blood pressure. The word noise, we are told, is related to the Latin word for sickness: nausea.
A longer article in the Guardian by George Michelson Foy recalls his own experiment in searching for the quietest place on earth. Trying to escape the dull roar of Manhattan's ceaseless sounds, he visited a monastery, an Indian sweat lodge, and a nickel mine. None was quiet enough. Finally, he discovered the quietest place on earth: the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota.
Whereas some visitors to this small room, thoroughly insulated to absorb every imaginable whisper, find it unbearable, he enjoyed the experience. Most people would experience claustrophia or other problems being sealed in such a room, cut off from the comforting sounds of human life, but his record 45-minute stay in the room was (he says) calming and peaceful, as he listened to the blood rushing in his veins and other bodily functions.
I remember reading a few years ago about a man visiting the bottom of the Grand Canyon and finding the silence there frightening. I doubt if he would head for Minnesota's Orfield with its 99.9% sound-absorbent chamber.
Realizing to his disappointment that total and complete silence is possible only in death, Foy was sorry to end his 45-minute submersion in solitude and silence. Being comfortable with the feeling of absolute calm, he felt rested and peaceful, sorry to leave after only 45 minutes of what many would see as sensory deprivation akin to torture.
Like Foy, who associates silence with happiness, I have been a seeker of silence-- but not the physical absence of sound. I enjoy reading, contemplation, meditation and writing with only the half-conscious sounds of modern life (air conditioning) or birdsong in the background.
I doubt if I would be happy in an anechoic chamber, but I know that the quest for silence is important and profound in mysterious ways. I don't see it as a source of happiness, although a period of silent meditation produces a calmness of mind and a serenity much needed in a too-loud world.
Mostly, I follow the lead of Thomas Merton, who wrote extensively about the silence of contemplative prayer during his 27 years as a Trappist monk in Kentucky. As a result, he could really hear the rain beat down (a wonderful passage in Raids on the Unspeakble) in what he calls a welcome kind of speech. He was fully attuned to the world of nature outside his hermitage and felt connected to people around the world, many of them his readers. In writing, he felt close to God and saw in silence a "friendly communion" with millions of others able to take time out from the constant distractions of everyday life to experience a brief moment in the timeless present.
"The real journey of life is within," Merton wrote. He did not need to seek the quietest place on earth. As to happiness, he would probably understand what the woman, asked by Inspector Maigret in one of Simenon's stories, says when he asks her, "Have you found happiness?"
She responds, in an Old World way that would seem totally foreign to today's Americans, "as much as anyone is entitled to."
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Art and the Voice of Silence
It was, fittingly, while waiting for my vision to be tested this past week, that I found a magazine called (I think) Art and Antiquities, with an article about the work of Helen Wilson, a New York painter who has been working for more than forty years painting clouds and skies. Included were some fine reproductions of her paintings.
Her style is aptly called abstract impressionism. Wilson's canvases show her experiments with varying shades of color as she tries to find the "color within the color," as she puts it, as she tries to capture the subtleties of time as it alters nature. It's as if each color has an infinite number of nuances, as if her brush were a string producing an endless series of notes or a pen creating words with such refinement as to suggest the timeless within time.
This reminded me of my own explorations, in a 2010 article in Cithara, of the relation of silence and the arts. Paintings, in particular, often speak in the timeless voice of silence when time tends to stand still.
I always think of Vermeer's "View of Delft," in which the 17th century Dutch master captured the present moment as it was becoming past, with darkening clouds suggesting an imminent storm that will never come. The viewer of such a work, like that of Helen Wilson, is suspended, the eye so totally absorbed in reflection that our consciousness surrenders its usual sense of self-preoccupation.
So we stand before such art in the timeless present, as it is evoked in silent meditation. It's no wonder Proust, with his preoccupation with time, found "View of Delft" the greatest of paintings. He would appreciate these subtle experiments with clouds and color by Helen Wilson.
Looking at this article, which I could not, unfortunately, rip out and bring home with me, I was amazed at all it evoked: reflections on light and seeing, on time and nature, on clouds and the soul of the sky (as the article was called), on stillness and the timeless present, and on reflection itself, in more than one sense.
Who knows what would happen if I stood in front of an original by Helen Wilson? Even with these illustrations to gaze at, my eyes were opened to the richness of much abstract art as well as to the ability of painting to express what Andre Malraux long ago called voices of silence.
Her style is aptly called abstract impressionism. Wilson's canvases show her experiments with varying shades of color as she tries to find the "color within the color," as she puts it, as she tries to capture the subtleties of time as it alters nature. It's as if each color has an infinite number of nuances, as if her brush were a string producing an endless series of notes or a pen creating words with such refinement as to suggest the timeless within time.
This reminded me of my own explorations, in a 2010 article in Cithara, of the relation of silence and the arts. Paintings, in particular, often speak in the timeless voice of silence when time tends to stand still.
I always think of Vermeer's "View of Delft," in which the 17th century Dutch master captured the present moment as it was becoming past, with darkening clouds suggesting an imminent storm that will never come. The viewer of such a work, like that of Helen Wilson, is suspended, the eye so totally absorbed in reflection that our consciousness surrenders its usual sense of self-preoccupation.
So we stand before such art in the timeless present, as it is evoked in silent meditation. It's no wonder Proust, with his preoccupation with time, found "View of Delft" the greatest of paintings. He would appreciate these subtle experiments with clouds and color by Helen Wilson.
Looking at this article, which I could not, unfortunately, rip out and bring home with me, I was amazed at all it evoked: reflections on light and seeing, on time and nature, on clouds and the soul of the sky (as the article was called), on stillness and the timeless present, and on reflection itself, in more than one sense.
Who knows what would happen if I stood in front of an original by Helen Wilson? Even with these illustrations to gaze at, my eyes were opened to the richness of much abstract art as well as to the ability of painting to express what Andre Malraux long ago called voices of silence.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Thin Spaces
This piece is not about slimming down, although that would be something I should do, but about finding places, anywhere, where the distance between heaven and earth narrows so that we can get a sense of the timeless presence of God.
I am grateful to Eric Weiner's travel article in yesterday's New York Times for introducing me to the idea of thin spaces, but the origin of the term, as he notes, is ancient: the early Irish, who did so much to spread Christian civilization in the Dark Ages, have a saying: Heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter.
Like Mr. Weiner, I have my list of favorite places where I have felt the presence of something transcendent, where time seems to stop. One of the major ones happened in Ireland, at the tip of the Dingle peninsula called Slea Head, where I stood on the edge of the world, so it seemed; actually, it was the western-most part of Europe, looking past the rocky Blasket islands toward America, mindful of the vast, wild landscape behind me as well, a landscape marked with prehistoric and medieval artifacts as well as the abandoned cottages of farmers forced to flee during the rough days of the potato famine.
I was mindful of the sad history but was able to transcend it and be, under perfect blue skies on a windy day, aware of only the ocean before me, with its suggestion of infinity. I could not have anticipated such an experience, though I had read a bit about the land and the history; nothing, as Weiner says, gets in the way of genuine spiritual experiences as much as expectations.
When I encounter a quiet courtyard, with a fountain, as in the Frick Collection in New York, or in one of the many palazzi in Florence, I have gained entry into a thin place. And the memory of those places lingers, like the memory of scenes read about or seen in films, like the Venice evoked by Luchino Visconti (with a big assist from Mahler) in Death in Venice.
Usually, as I write in more detail in the journal Cithara (May 2010), silence is the language I use to describe such moments when my relationship with time is somehow altered, extended. This happens often in older churches, especially Gothic cathedrals like Chartres (it's no wonder Weiner includes St. Patrick's in NYC in his list)--places of prayer where the vast space of the nave and vault are intended to be uplifting, even affecting non-believers.
My list of thin spaces is long and includes the experience of reading as well as listening to music and looking at paintings or films in which language becomes irrelevant to having a keen sense of God's presence in the here and now. So for me, travel is not necessary at all, in the usual sense, although seeking thin places is a wonderful reason to travel, to search for unexpected peak experiences, moments that remind us that we are all mystics sometimes, that take us out of ourselves so we can (in Weiner's words) loosen our death grip on life.
I am grateful to Eric Weiner's travel article in yesterday's New York Times for introducing me to the idea of thin spaces, but the origin of the term, as he notes, is ancient: the early Irish, who did so much to spread Christian civilization in the Dark Ages, have a saying: Heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter.
Like Mr. Weiner, I have my list of favorite places where I have felt the presence of something transcendent, where time seems to stop. One of the major ones happened in Ireland, at the tip of the Dingle peninsula called Slea Head, where I stood on the edge of the world, so it seemed; actually, it was the western-most part of Europe, looking past the rocky Blasket islands toward America, mindful of the vast, wild landscape behind me as well, a landscape marked with prehistoric and medieval artifacts as well as the abandoned cottages of farmers forced to flee during the rough days of the potato famine.
I was mindful of the sad history but was able to transcend it and be, under perfect blue skies on a windy day, aware of only the ocean before me, with its suggestion of infinity. I could not have anticipated such an experience, though I had read a bit about the land and the history; nothing, as Weiner says, gets in the way of genuine spiritual experiences as much as expectations.
When I encounter a quiet courtyard, with a fountain, as in the Frick Collection in New York, or in one of the many palazzi in Florence, I have gained entry into a thin place. And the memory of those places lingers, like the memory of scenes read about or seen in films, like the Venice evoked by Luchino Visconti (with a big assist from Mahler) in Death in Venice.
Usually, as I write in more detail in the journal Cithara (May 2010), silence is the language I use to describe such moments when my relationship with time is somehow altered, extended. This happens often in older churches, especially Gothic cathedrals like Chartres (it's no wonder Weiner includes St. Patrick's in NYC in his list)--places of prayer where the vast space of the nave and vault are intended to be uplifting, even affecting non-believers.
My list of thin spaces is long and includes the experience of reading as well as listening to music and looking at paintings or films in which language becomes irrelevant to having a keen sense of God's presence in the here and now. So for me, travel is not necessary at all, in the usual sense, although seeking thin places is a wonderful reason to travel, to search for unexpected peak experiences, moments that remind us that we are all mystics sometimes, that take us out of ourselves so we can (in Weiner's words) loosen our death grip on life.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Never enough time--or patience
When my aged neighbor rings the doorbell, as she routinely does, late in the afternoon when I am napping or in the middle of a project, I know that she will not say much of anything when I answer the door. Growing weary of these interruptions, I began putting a discreet sign on the door: Do Not Disturb.
Since that has had no effect, I recently moved it so it hangs right over the doorbell, so that she could not help but see it. Yesterday, she rang anyway, ignoring all warnings, and I became angry when she offered, as always, no apology. In the past six months of these interruptions, I have been annoyed and whenever possible let my ever-patient wife handle the neighbor, who is more than "out of it," to put it mildly. She is also lonely and wants some human interaction. So I should be sympathetic and smile. Instead, I fume.
I try to put this minor challenge to my sanity in the context of patience, and I wonder if I am growing less and less patient; I also wonder how I can cultivate more patience. Is asking for more patience akin to asking for more time?
Since the two are related, I guess the answer is affirmative: I fear being robbed of my privacy and my time. Maybe I fear my own future dementia, when I will be the one going around the neighborhood ringing doorbells and never apologizing for disturbing the residents.
This neighbor, 85, has something in common with the boy I tutor: they both test my patience.
The boy, who is 15, has ADHD and seldom listens to me and wastes valuable time as a result of my need to repeat. He wants to rush through every assignment when I want him to slow down. He probably will never be a patient person.
All this leads to my wish for myself in this new year: to slow down, be patient, and repeat the words of St. Francis de Sales that are posted on my study wall: "Never be in a hurry. Do everything quietly and in a calm manner. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsover, even if your whole world seems upset."
This should be easy for me, a retired professor who is home most days writing or reading. But old A-type patterns persist, and my brain continues to burst with ideas and reminders of unfinished tasks. It's no wonder I have become a student of silence, a member of the Friends of Silence.
Or that I appreciate articles like that of Pico Iyer in the Sunday NYTimes, "The Joy of Quiet," in which he describes his need to escape the rush of daily life. For most of us, it's a life in which we keep finding more ways to connect and thus produce more stress. At the same time, he says, we keep finding new (or old) ways to disconnect. Often this involves a retreat to a place where the absence of TVs and internet connections and phones is a blessed relief.
He quotes Nicholas Carr: the average American spends eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen (TV or computer), and the number of text messages maddingly increases daily. So for more than 20 years, Iyer has gone to a Benedictine monastery several times a year, not to pray but to be: to lose himself in stillness, to enjoy nature unfettered by noise, to find something akin to happiness.
What he wants is the happiness that doesn't depend on what happens. This is the idea of joy defined by the monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, a fine spiritual writer. As for me, instead of writing about all this, I should be practicing it daily. I don't need to travel to a monastery: I can create a monastic setting of contemplative life in my home, with my patient, literary wife and my ever-silent cat.
I vow to do more of this, become less busy, and maybe as a result less annoyed when my aged neighbor pushes my buttons.
Since that has had no effect, I recently moved it so it hangs right over the doorbell, so that she could not help but see it. Yesterday, she rang anyway, ignoring all warnings, and I became angry when she offered, as always, no apology. In the past six months of these interruptions, I have been annoyed and whenever possible let my ever-patient wife handle the neighbor, who is more than "out of it," to put it mildly. She is also lonely and wants some human interaction. So I should be sympathetic and smile. Instead, I fume.
I try to put this minor challenge to my sanity in the context of patience, and I wonder if I am growing less and less patient; I also wonder how I can cultivate more patience. Is asking for more patience akin to asking for more time?
Since the two are related, I guess the answer is affirmative: I fear being robbed of my privacy and my time. Maybe I fear my own future dementia, when I will be the one going around the neighborhood ringing doorbells and never apologizing for disturbing the residents.
This neighbor, 85, has something in common with the boy I tutor: they both test my patience.
The boy, who is 15, has ADHD and seldom listens to me and wastes valuable time as a result of my need to repeat. He wants to rush through every assignment when I want him to slow down. He probably will never be a patient person.
All this leads to my wish for myself in this new year: to slow down, be patient, and repeat the words of St. Francis de Sales that are posted on my study wall: "Never be in a hurry. Do everything quietly and in a calm manner. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsover, even if your whole world seems upset."
This should be easy for me, a retired professor who is home most days writing or reading. But old A-type patterns persist, and my brain continues to burst with ideas and reminders of unfinished tasks. It's no wonder I have become a student of silence, a member of the Friends of Silence.
Or that I appreciate articles like that of Pico Iyer in the Sunday NYTimes, "The Joy of Quiet," in which he describes his need to escape the rush of daily life. For most of us, it's a life in which we keep finding more ways to connect and thus produce more stress. At the same time, he says, we keep finding new (or old) ways to disconnect. Often this involves a retreat to a place where the absence of TVs and internet connections and phones is a blessed relief.
He quotes Nicholas Carr: the average American spends eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen (TV or computer), and the number of text messages maddingly increases daily. So for more than 20 years, Iyer has gone to a Benedictine monastery several times a year, not to pray but to be: to lose himself in stillness, to enjoy nature unfettered by noise, to find something akin to happiness.
What he wants is the happiness that doesn't depend on what happens. This is the idea of joy defined by the monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, a fine spiritual writer. As for me, instead of writing about all this, I should be practicing it daily. I don't need to travel to a monastery: I can create a monastic setting of contemplative life in my home, with my patient, literary wife and my ever-silent cat.
I vow to do more of this, become less busy, and maybe as a result less annoyed when my aged neighbor pushes my buttons.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Never Enough Silence
I have just turned down a chance to take on another teaching assignment, a one-day workshop, because, as I explained to the university, I have three editing jobs with deadlines approaching, two lectures to prepare for January-February, and my own work, of course.
I didn't mention that I have Christmas cards to write, packages to wrap, shopping to complete, etc.--the usual pre-holiday rush--even here, in a house without kids or grandkids, where the quiet serenity of the literary life, supposedly, reigns.
And so it was good to see in the e-mail In-box a message from the Friends of Silence. When I see that name, I want to say, We should all be friends of silence.
The newsletter asks (quoting T. S. Eliot): Is there enough silence for the Word to be heard? The answer is "Never"! We don't listen well to each other much less to God, yet for Christians in this Advent season, slowing down and lying fallow, as the earth does, are essential for any kind of spirituality.
As the Friends state, we need "time to be fallow, time just to be, to listen and dream and wait for the wisdom at the center of our being to make itself known to us before we enter again into a busy season of doing."
Perfectly said. When I wish people peace at Christmas, this is essentially what I am wishing for them--and for myself. I wish everyone could develop the habit of silence, of taking time each day to return to the deep silence at the center of our being and wait there for the still small voice of God.
That is what Thomas Merton articulated. And Swami Amar Jyoti put it this way: "The silence within us is the source of all we are."
I didn't mention that I have Christmas cards to write, packages to wrap, shopping to complete, etc.--the usual pre-holiday rush--even here, in a house without kids or grandkids, where the quiet serenity of the literary life, supposedly, reigns.
And so it was good to see in the e-mail In-box a message from the Friends of Silence. When I see that name, I want to say, We should all be friends of silence.
The newsletter asks (quoting T. S. Eliot): Is there enough silence for the Word to be heard? The answer is "Never"! We don't listen well to each other much less to God, yet for Christians in this Advent season, slowing down and lying fallow, as the earth does, are essential for any kind of spirituality.
As the Friends state, we need "time to be fallow, time just to be, to listen and dream and wait for the wisdom at the center of our being to make itself known to us before we enter again into a busy season of doing."
Perfectly said. When I wish people peace at Christmas, this is essentially what I am wishing for them--and for myself. I wish everyone could develop the habit of silence, of taking time each day to return to the deep silence at the center of our being and wait there for the still small voice of God.
That is what Thomas Merton articulated. And Swami Amar Jyoti put it this way: "The silence within us is the source of all we are."
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Why Rilke Matters
I am not about to convince you that reading Rainer Maria Rilke can change your life, though it might. Of course, you have to understand his poems, which can be quite a challenge because it really means understanding the German originals. Even in the various good English translations, I find complexities and would find teaching them impossible (in a way that teaching Dante is not).
Yet I have always sensed a mysterious power in his taut verse, which searches for the ineffable in a pre-modernist mode--he died in 1926--that speaks to the secular world of the early 20th century about matters of the spirit.
Although most people who read them admire his Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, I have a devotion, thanks to Robert Bly's translation, to his earlier Book of Hours, or, as Bly calls it, A Book for the Hours of Prayer. This was Rilke's first major book, written 1899-1903.
Here Rilke shows himself to be the poet of solitude and silence, the poet of darkness, the darkness of fertility and unknowing, as in the mystics of the medieval tradition. Although Rilke rejected the smothering piety of his mother's Catholicism, he was deeply affected by its traditions and by the value of prayer, especially the via negativa.
Rilke is the poet of inner spaces, as if interiorizing the desert image found in other writers. He is also the poet's poet, the careful craftsman who lived largely in isolation in various parts of Europe, waiting for the great outbursts of inspiration that produced both lyrical prose and incomparable verse. Although he can be faulted for seeming self-centered, Rilke speaks with a cosmic voice, as when he says (Bly's trans.), "I have faith in nights."
This poem begins by addressing God or the creative darkness: "You darkness that I come from,/I love you more than all the fires/ that fence in the world...it is possible a great energy/ is moving near me." You see what I mean: the English is uniquely direct, simple in style, yet subjective, elusive and untranslatable. He is like a modern John of the Cross. (I am reminded of T. S. Eliot's statement that we do not have to understand a poem in order to appreciate it.)
The holy in these poems is deep down within, dark and distant yet always close, too, beyond time and place. Bly says that Rilke's final sonnets are essentially poems of praise, so we have poetic prayers of appreciation and longing in verse that is religious despite its rejection of religion in the usual sense.
From his prose, I must quote some memorable lines from his "Letters to a Young Poet":
"Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek answers which cannot be given to you now because you would not be able to live them now. And the point is to live everything, to live the question now."
And: "Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without ever having to step outside it."
Yet I have always sensed a mysterious power in his taut verse, which searches for the ineffable in a pre-modernist mode--he died in 1926--that speaks to the secular world of the early 20th century about matters of the spirit.
Although most people who read them admire his Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, I have a devotion, thanks to Robert Bly's translation, to his earlier Book of Hours, or, as Bly calls it, A Book for the Hours of Prayer. This was Rilke's first major book, written 1899-1903.
Here Rilke shows himself to be the poet of solitude and silence, the poet of darkness, the darkness of fertility and unknowing, as in the mystics of the medieval tradition. Although Rilke rejected the smothering piety of his mother's Catholicism, he was deeply affected by its traditions and by the value of prayer, especially the via negativa.
Rilke is the poet of inner spaces, as if interiorizing the desert image found in other writers. He is also the poet's poet, the careful craftsman who lived largely in isolation in various parts of Europe, waiting for the great outbursts of inspiration that produced both lyrical prose and incomparable verse. Although he can be faulted for seeming self-centered, Rilke speaks with a cosmic voice, as when he says (Bly's trans.), "I have faith in nights."
This poem begins by addressing God or the creative darkness: "You darkness that I come from,/I love you more than all the fires/ that fence in the world...it is possible a great energy/ is moving near me." You see what I mean: the English is uniquely direct, simple in style, yet subjective, elusive and untranslatable. He is like a modern John of the Cross. (I am reminded of T. S. Eliot's statement that we do not have to understand a poem in order to appreciate it.)
The holy in these poems is deep down within, dark and distant yet always close, too, beyond time and place. Bly says that Rilke's final sonnets are essentially poems of praise, so we have poetic prayers of appreciation and longing in verse that is religious despite its rejection of religion in the usual sense.
From his prose, I must quote some memorable lines from his "Letters to a Young Poet":
"Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek answers which cannot be given to you now because you would not be able to live them now. And the point is to live everything, to live the question now."
And: "Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without ever having to step outside it."
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Listening to Silence: Arvo Part
I am grateful for the people at YouTube for posting some beautiful videos to accompany the music of Arvo Part (the "a" should be umlauted; he's Estonian), which had been vaguely familiar to me from past radio broadcasts. Now I am a fan.
The music is transcendent, not only the famous "Spiegel im Spiegel," with its hypnotic piano music sounding like raindrops but the choral works "De Profundis," "Magnificant," "Nunc Dimittis," etc.
This music is radiant minimalism: experimentally modern in a sense yet traditional enough to move me. It evokes silence, which I've tried in several print articles to define as presence (not at all the absence of sound).
I have found the silence of the timeless present in paintings, in reading and in certain slow films, and in music, too, music that leads to reflection, quieting down like the Mahler "adagietto" movement from the Fifth Symphony. It is virtually impossible to listen to such music with a busy mind.
Silence, wherever it is found, produces a mindfulness to the present moment that David Steindl-Rast has called "the now dimension of time," by which he means an idea of time not running out but "rising like water in a well, rising to that fullness of time that is now."
If this sounds too mysterious, I would respond that mystery is exactly what we need. Aren't all the really major issues--God and the existence of evil, the meaning of happiness and love and life itself--essentially mysteries? The mystic is one who embraces the mysteries of the seen and unseeen worlds and is grateful for them.
So today I am grateful for Arvo Part. I know almost nothing about him except that he has a deeply felt spirituality, perhaps a religious fervor, that manifests itself in music marked by simplicity. For me, this simplicity evokes silence.
The music is transcendent, not only the famous "Spiegel im Spiegel," with its hypnotic piano music sounding like raindrops but the choral works "De Profundis," "Magnificant," "Nunc Dimittis," etc.
This music is radiant minimalism: experimentally modern in a sense yet traditional enough to move me. It evokes silence, which I've tried in several print articles to define as presence (not at all the absence of sound).
I have found the silence of the timeless present in paintings, in reading and in certain slow films, and in music, too, music that leads to reflection, quieting down like the Mahler "adagietto" movement from the Fifth Symphony. It is virtually impossible to listen to such music with a busy mind.
Silence, wherever it is found, produces a mindfulness to the present moment that David Steindl-Rast has called "the now dimension of time," by which he means an idea of time not running out but "rising like water in a well, rising to that fullness of time that is now."
If this sounds too mysterious, I would respond that mystery is exactly what we need. Aren't all the really major issues--God and the existence of evil, the meaning of happiness and love and life itself--essentially mysteries? The mystic is one who embraces the mysteries of the seen and unseeen worlds and is grateful for them.
So today I am grateful for Arvo Part. I know almost nothing about him except that he has a deeply felt spirituality, perhaps a religious fervor, that manifests itself in music marked by simplicity. For me, this simplicity evokes silence.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Why are people bored?
In reading a review of Lost in Transition by the sociologist of religion (at Notre Dame) Christian Smith, I encounter again the question faced by David Foster Wallace about the rootless, restless, disspirited nature of so many people's lives. The focus on Smith's book is on adolescent Americans, who are in crisis: they now remain students longer than in the past, just as they depend on their parents longer, and resist marriage as long as possible; they dread the world of work since it has changed: it offers little in the way of long-term stability.
As a result, these young people (by and large) have a certain amount of freedom--including freedom from commitments; and moral boundaries are less clear than in their parents' generation. They might agree that murder, rape, and robbery are wrong, but doubt that cheating on exams (or one one's partner) is always wrong. As I discovered among my own students, their main concern in cheating is whether they will be caught. As to the behavior of others, well, it is up to each person to decide for himself.
"Very few seem to think that right and wrong are rooted in anything outside personal experience," says the Spectator review of Smith's book.
They are into consumerism, drinking, and sex because of peer pressure, in part, but also because of sheer boredom. Why, with all the choices they have, all the opportunities for learning and enjoying life, would anyone be bored? Could it be that they have too many options, too many consumer goods, like the child who is flooded with toys on Christmas morning and turns with relief to playing hide-and-seek?
Might it be that boredom is, in my favorite definition, a fear of running out of things to do? If happiness consists only of entertaining activities, it is not hard for an imaginative, intelligent person to anticipate a life without the gratification of more stimulation. We are all essentially restless, in part because we do not find a place for contemplation, solitude, and silence.
Few people have articulated the importance of these three things as memorably as the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton. I began today to look through my "Merton files," clippings of readings sent to me from the Merton Institute for Contemplative Living and other e-mail newsletters, and I find that the two ideas of solitude and silence recur in this extensive body of work more than any other; they are the keys to inner happiness and peace.
Both before and after becoming a monk, Merton, a restless soul, knew the dark side of boredom as a kind of depression. Yet he sought out what to many would seem like the least likely answer: a remote monastery. Once there, he sought out the solitude of his own hermitage in the woods. After being persistent, he was finally (c. 1965) allowed to move to a shed that became "a delight," as he writes in one of his journals: "I can imagine no other joy on earth than to have such a place and to be at peace in it, to live in silence, to think and write, to listen to the wind and all the voices of the wood, to prepare for my own death, to love my brothers and all people, to pray for the world and for peace and good sense among men."
As he wrote elsewhere, all of us need to seek peace within ourselves "because we do not naturally find rest even in our own being. We have to learn to commune with ourselves before with can communicate with other men and with God. A man who is not at peace with himself necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with, and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him." (This is from
No Man is an Island, 1955.)
As Merton makes clear repeatedly, solitude is a true refuge from the depression and restlessness implied in boredom; it is not a negative relationship--the absence of people, any more than silence is the absence of sound. "True solitude is a partcipation in the true solitariness of God, Who is in all things....It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers."
There's much more: Solitude is not, says Merton, something to hope for in the future; "it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present, you will not find it." For Merton as writer, as for all writers, solitude is essential, and the writing does not isolate the one who writes but connects him or her to all the unseen readers he imagines, just as in silence he can feel connected to all those who are at a given moment being contemplative(fully present to the present moment) rather than busy.
Writing, prayer, contemplation, solitude--all of these involve a sense of creative aloneness in which one does not feel loneliness but a sense of connection with the self, with others, and with God. As the contemporary monk Peter-Damian Belisle says, "One is never alone in true solitude. There is the powerful experience of presence that arises out of solitude's depths."
Honest aloneness makes us not alone but awake to God's presence.
The same type of presence rises from the depths of silence, whenever we give ourselves permission to find the freedom that comes in silence. That is one of the paradoxes Merton loves to explore: We are truly free when we "encounter God in our hearts...the truth that makes us free is...the presence in us of a divine person." True religion is a liberating force that helps us find ourselves in God.
Is there a scriptural basis for any of this? St. Paul: "The Spirit pleads for us in our inmost being, beyond words, beyond thoughts, beyond images." The peace and even joy that can come from contemplation, says the mystical tradition of Christianity, is the antidote to boredom and restlessness which afflict our anxious age.
"There is not enough silence," T. S. Eliot wrote. To free ourselves from the noise of too many words, too many thoughts, too much stuff, we need solitude and silence, challenging though these can become.
As a result, these young people (by and large) have a certain amount of freedom--including freedom from commitments; and moral boundaries are less clear than in their parents' generation. They might agree that murder, rape, and robbery are wrong, but doubt that cheating on exams (or one one's partner) is always wrong. As I discovered among my own students, their main concern in cheating is whether they will be caught. As to the behavior of others, well, it is up to each person to decide for himself.
"Very few seem to think that right and wrong are rooted in anything outside personal experience," says the Spectator review of Smith's book.
They are into consumerism, drinking, and sex because of peer pressure, in part, but also because of sheer boredom. Why, with all the choices they have, all the opportunities for learning and enjoying life, would anyone be bored? Could it be that they have too many options, too many consumer goods, like the child who is flooded with toys on Christmas morning and turns with relief to playing hide-and-seek?
Might it be that boredom is, in my favorite definition, a fear of running out of things to do? If happiness consists only of entertaining activities, it is not hard for an imaginative, intelligent person to anticipate a life without the gratification of more stimulation. We are all essentially restless, in part because we do not find a place for contemplation, solitude, and silence.
Few people have articulated the importance of these three things as memorably as the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton. I began today to look through my "Merton files," clippings of readings sent to me from the Merton Institute for Contemplative Living and other e-mail newsletters, and I find that the two ideas of solitude and silence recur in this extensive body of work more than any other; they are the keys to inner happiness and peace.
Both before and after becoming a monk, Merton, a restless soul, knew the dark side of boredom as a kind of depression. Yet he sought out what to many would seem like the least likely answer: a remote monastery. Once there, he sought out the solitude of his own hermitage in the woods. After being persistent, he was finally (c. 1965) allowed to move to a shed that became "a delight," as he writes in one of his journals: "I can imagine no other joy on earth than to have such a place and to be at peace in it, to live in silence, to think and write, to listen to the wind and all the voices of the wood, to prepare for my own death, to love my brothers and all people, to pray for the world and for peace and good sense among men."
As he wrote elsewhere, all of us need to seek peace within ourselves "because we do not naturally find rest even in our own being. We have to learn to commune with ourselves before with can communicate with other men and with God. A man who is not at peace with himself necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with, and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him." (This is from
No Man is an Island, 1955.)
As Merton makes clear repeatedly, solitude is a true refuge from the depression and restlessness implied in boredom; it is not a negative relationship--the absence of people, any more than silence is the absence of sound. "True solitude is a partcipation in the true solitariness of God, Who is in all things....It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers."
There's much more: Solitude is not, says Merton, something to hope for in the future; "it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present, you will not find it." For Merton as writer, as for all writers, solitude is essential, and the writing does not isolate the one who writes but connects him or her to all the unseen readers he imagines, just as in silence he can feel connected to all those who are at a given moment being contemplative(fully present to the present moment) rather than busy.
Writing, prayer, contemplation, solitude--all of these involve a sense of creative aloneness in which one does not feel loneliness but a sense of connection with the self, with others, and with God. As the contemporary monk Peter-Damian Belisle says, "One is never alone in true solitude. There is the powerful experience of presence that arises out of solitude's depths."
Honest aloneness makes us not alone but awake to God's presence.
The same type of presence rises from the depths of silence, whenever we give ourselves permission to find the freedom that comes in silence. That is one of the paradoxes Merton loves to explore: We are truly free when we "encounter God in our hearts...the truth that makes us free is...the presence in us of a divine person." True religion is a liberating force that helps us find ourselves in God.
Is there a scriptural basis for any of this? St. Paul: "The Spirit pleads for us in our inmost being, beyond words, beyond thoughts, beyond images." The peace and even joy that can come from contemplation, says the mystical tradition of Christianity, is the antidote to boredom and restlessness which afflict our anxious age.
"There is not enough silence," T. S. Eliot wrote. To free ourselves from the noise of too many words, too many thoughts, too much stuff, we need solitude and silence, challenging though these can become.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Of Gods and Men
I have just seen a remarkable, unforgettable film, Of Gods and Men (2010), about the final days of a small group of French Trappist monks in Algeria who were taken hostage by Islamic extremists and executed in 1996.
This sounds sensational and violent, yet the film is anything but. The viewer is given no historical context, just a series of quiet, eloquent scenes that unfold slowly, without soundtrack, as we watch these eight monks interact with and serve the villagers at a clinic and perform their daily ritual of work and prayer. Even the bell that is rung for prayer is silent. All we hear is the chant, as they pray in one memorable scene for the God of light to strengthen them as the darkness of inevitable death descends.
They have been warned to leave, have seen local terrorist activity, but have decided to stay in solidarity with the people they serve and in fidelity to their vows. As one of them says, "staying is as crazy as being a monk." They have given up everything already for God and so the coming of death, which forces them to examine their vocations and their lives, becomes the ultimate test of courage for these men of the desert, these Christian outsiders in a foreign land.
They do so with quiet dignity, some full of fear and wishing at first to leave for France, others resigned to stay. That they persist in their faithfulness to the village that depends on them as long as possible is a remarkable display of courage. "We must be brothers to all," the leader, Christian, says. And so they are, nurturing each other with a strong, gentle masculinity that is itself unusual to see on the screen while their continue to care for the Algerian villagers.
A key point made by Christian, the prior, is that they do not forget that the true Islam that they have come to know over the years is not a faith of hatred and violence.
The quiet ending, with the monks going off into the snow, avoids showing us their violent end. And so we are left in a reflective, prayerful mood, having come to know a band of brave men whose faith in God and whose faithfulness to their calling are inspirational.
I could not help but think of people like Etty Hillesum during the Holocaust, who willingly gave up the relative security of her Amsterdam apartment to join her fellow Jews when she knew it was only a matter of time before they would all be taken away, probably to death. Her final words, scribbled on a postcard, as she was taken away by train to Auschwitz: "We left the camp singing."
This is the spirit of hopeful courage that dominates the narrative of Of Gods and Men, filmed in Morocco and widely acclaimed in Europe. Being a French language film, it will unfortunately have limited viewers in the English-speaking world.
I was struck by the beauty of this film, by its silence, reminding me of that eloquent documentary about the monks of the Grand Chartruese, Into Great Silence, which is another example of film as a source of meditation and inspiration.
This sounds sensational and violent, yet the film is anything but. The viewer is given no historical context, just a series of quiet, eloquent scenes that unfold slowly, without soundtrack, as we watch these eight monks interact with and serve the villagers at a clinic and perform their daily ritual of work and prayer. Even the bell that is rung for prayer is silent. All we hear is the chant, as they pray in one memorable scene for the God of light to strengthen them as the darkness of inevitable death descends.
They have been warned to leave, have seen local terrorist activity, but have decided to stay in solidarity with the people they serve and in fidelity to their vows. As one of them says, "staying is as crazy as being a monk." They have given up everything already for God and so the coming of death, which forces them to examine their vocations and their lives, becomes the ultimate test of courage for these men of the desert, these Christian outsiders in a foreign land.
They do so with quiet dignity, some full of fear and wishing at first to leave for France, others resigned to stay. That they persist in their faithfulness to the village that depends on them as long as possible is a remarkable display of courage. "We must be brothers to all," the leader, Christian, says. And so they are, nurturing each other with a strong, gentle masculinity that is itself unusual to see on the screen while their continue to care for the Algerian villagers.
A key point made by Christian, the prior, is that they do not forget that the true Islam that they have come to know over the years is not a faith of hatred and violence.
The quiet ending, with the monks going off into the snow, avoids showing us their violent end. And so we are left in a reflective, prayerful mood, having come to know a band of brave men whose faith in God and whose faithfulness to their calling are inspirational.
I could not help but think of people like Etty Hillesum during the Holocaust, who willingly gave up the relative security of her Amsterdam apartment to join her fellow Jews when she knew it was only a matter of time before they would all be taken away, probably to death. Her final words, scribbled on a postcard, as she was taken away by train to Auschwitz: "We left the camp singing."
This is the spirit of hopeful courage that dominates the narrative of Of Gods and Men, filmed in Morocco and widely acclaimed in Europe. Being a French language film, it will unfortunately have limited viewers in the English-speaking world.
I was struck by the beauty of this film, by its silence, reminding me of that eloquent documentary about the monks of the Grand Chartruese, Into Great Silence, which is another example of film as a source of meditation and inspiration.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Silence and Sanctuary
I continue to stumble upon interesting takes on silence both as a respite from an overly noisy, busy world and as a contemplative experience.
Tim Muldoon, writing in Patheos.com, writes: "Silence is a gateway to the soul, and the soul is a gateway to God."
Actually, he is quoting Christopher Jamison, author of Finding Sanctuary, and abbot of Worth Abbey. His statement sums up in one memorable sentence what I tried to say in a long article on silence as Christian mindfulness in last year's Cithara, a journal of St. Bonaventure University. There, as in several shorter articles, my focus was on the contribution of Thomas Merton to the literature of silence.
Muldoon cites St. Benedict's Rule: Be silent and listen. So, of course, does Jamison, who quotes a Buddhist monk as saying pretty much what Benedict and Christian contemplatives have taught: "The silence will teach you everything."
Yet, as T. S. Eliot famously wrote, there is not enough silence; as a result, the word cannot be heard. The truth can rarely penetrate our busy, noisy minds, which today need the stimulation of the internet and other media even while they yearn for quiet.
Thus we remain divided, fighting each day for some time away from voices and noises that distract us from what can be the frightening realities encountered in silence.
Tim Muldoon, writing in Patheos.com, writes: "Silence is a gateway to the soul, and the soul is a gateway to God."
Actually, he is quoting Christopher Jamison, author of Finding Sanctuary, and abbot of Worth Abbey. His statement sums up in one memorable sentence what I tried to say in a long article on silence as Christian mindfulness in last year's Cithara, a journal of St. Bonaventure University. There, as in several shorter articles, my focus was on the contribution of Thomas Merton to the literature of silence.
Muldoon cites St. Benedict's Rule: Be silent and listen. So, of course, does Jamison, who quotes a Buddhist monk as saying pretty much what Benedict and Christian contemplatives have taught: "The silence will teach you everything."
Yet, as T. S. Eliot famously wrote, there is not enough silence; as a result, the word cannot be heard. The truth can rarely penetrate our busy, noisy minds, which today need the stimulation of the internet and other media even while they yearn for quiet.
Thus we remain divided, fighting each day for some time away from voices and noises that distract us from what can be the frightening realities encountered in silence.
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