Who Made The Silence?

Silence festers like a gangrenous wound to the soul. It fills my home, occasionally relenting to the distant chirping of birds and the predictable grunting of neighbours. The drone of the nearby freeway is so familiar that it becomes an invisible amalgam to the absence of tangible, welcome sound.

But what of this silence? Some revel in it, allowing it to engulf them as a white blood cell carries out phagocytosis, while others grow perturbed and paranoid : every sound is a suggestion of The Others coming to take them. Personally, I’ve become quite accustomed to it – to a point of indifference. For a finite span of time, my sofa may be shared and the television on – yet even in those gaps, silence is forever the background. This leads me to meditate upon the concept brought forth by Beckett in his splendid work ‘Waiting for Godot’. I do feel much like the tramps Estragon and Vladimir, where when confined to the silence – saying anything is better than saying nothing.

At first, this was my modus operandi : hum songs, perform a lyrical disquisition of my neighbours activities to myself, give myself a hearty laugh through snide comments in reaction to the daytime television ghouls that haunt my DSTV decoder. Beckett’s lamentations on silence further suggested that to say anything merely for the sake of saying something is equivalent to saying absolutely nothing. Indeed, as the week passed, I became inclined to save my breath. Silence grew comfortably in my home, breaking at about 6PM when my father’s car rolls into the driveway.

However, at times it is a burden, a great sagging sensation weighing my soul down. It tires me, fills me up and throws my centre of gravity through the hoop of insanity. The walls of my home become a blessed prison, where existence is placed in a contrapuntal relationship with life characterised by the humble breathing noises that neglect the rules of silence. Restless, I pace my home like a lioness in a cage. I read a few chapters and grow bored. I switch the television on but the gormless words fail to serve as anaesthetic to the indefinable mood silence sweeps over me.
…and when it breaks, oh how I long for its sweet return.

Last night, I lay upon my bed, feeling the rain around me and the thunder strike. I thought of my roof, humbly serving its purpose while the gods hurled forth water from the bowels of their grey skies. I thought of how glorious it would be to be immersed in that rain, to lay upon the moist earth and let my bones have a taste of the mud it would soon decompose in, covered by a silky layer of natural water. Indeed, the best way to shatter the reverie of silence is the clap of thunder. So fearsome, so powerful – and so primal.

Bearing that in mind : is silence a natural phenomenon? Or has the modern man devised it by his four walled constructions, blocking out the finer, sensual sounds more closer to home. Closer to Earth and her fertile bosom.