The New Inquiry has a syllabus for crying out loud. The first of many gems I discovered there is this piece on silence.
I wish I could remember where I read it, but I recall someone writing that putting some things in to words renders them smaller, makes of the confusion and chaos something orderly, even as one attempts to capture that chaos and confusion.
There are many things I have written about over the life of this blog (far too may, I think at times). Yet there is far more about which I shall never write, here or anywhere. Some things like love and loss, some experiences and people and emotions are far too fraught, far too complicated to untangle. Sometimes it is best to give them their integrity as confusing and tangled.
Silence not only saves us from lawsuits. It also saves us from taking that which is most precious and rendering it safe, domesticated somehow. Writing about things or people, events in our lives - already we start to pick these things out of the maelstrom of experience, isolate them in a way that is largely artificial. It may make understanding some things better; it might be important for some things to be rendered comprehensible in this way. Others, though, those perhaps closest to our hearts, those perhaps whose strings are still tied around our lives in ways even we cannot fathom - these we should pass over, as Wittgenstein urged of may such things, in silence.
