Silence

I was listening to WNRN the other day in the car, to Regina Spektor singing "You're using your headphones to drown out your mind," and I thought about how different it must have been for Dickinson. How silent.

Dickinson was certainly a person with a raging internal life. And she didn't have nearly the resources we have to drown that out. She had reading. And alcohol. And denial. And love, of a certain sort. All those things can drown out what threatens to overcome us from within. But she wouldn't accept one of the great tools available: religion. And so all she had was the "argument with ourselves," as Yeats called it: poetry. And that doesn't drown it. It throws gasoline on it.

So I thought about what silence may have been like to her. To us it's an abstraction. Even sitting here on a quiet Sunday night in my somewhat secluded home up off the road, I can hear the cars going by on the road. If I actually listen, which we've all trained ourselves not to do in order to not be overwhelmed, I can hear the traffic from the larger road a mile away and the many smaller roads nearer. And my refrigerator motor humming. And the click of the heater going on and off. And the sounds of neighbors closer than any Dickinson had. And their dogs. And the keyboard I'm tapping this out on. Should I want it, there's the TV, the stereo, the radio, the Wii, the ipod, the cell phone, the internet. . . what am I forgetting? All tools that have the effect of drowning out my mind for some period of time.

So the silence Dickinson had access to wasn't just auditory. It was a place that could or could not be filled. It was, at times in her poems, a companion: "I and silence/ Some strange race/ wrecked solitary here," as she says. Dickinson wrote into this silence, with this silence, maybe to this silence. She wrote with her mind, not in retreat from it. And I think this is one of the attractions of her work. It speaks as if there is no place to hide, that one must look and confront and experience. And we no longer have to.