The great basso profundo Vladimir
Miller explained that the reason
Russia loves the bass voice is that
there are no musical instruments in Church
so that the profoundly resonant singer
holds the sound of the choir together.
When I mention this to Katharine,
she adds that one real cause
of the Russian shock at Pussy Riot
was that they played a guitar
in Church, and I remember
again that quote from Argentinian
Borges that one use of having written
under a dictatorship was his knack
at metaphor. When asked to write
this poem, one of the first
pictures I saw on the internet
was a bright primary monastery garden
in South America with the sign
‘Silencio’ prominent and no doubt
the sounds of a thousand bright
winged things all around it. Meditation
requires some subliminal noise.
Silence is never whole, as Hamlet,
declaring ‘the rest is silence’, perhaps
realised as he heard the military din
of Fortinbras arriving at the last.
And speaking of military din, the Government
has just declared silence, at least
on a weekly basis about arriving boats
of asylum seekers. Outcry ensued
and everyone on Christmas Island
said they would speak out whenever
any boats arrived. General Schwarzkopf in
the first U.S. Gulf War would explain
delay was the very best form
of censorship. Perhaps we should explore
if all silences are tactile with what
I’ve called ‘the violence of waiting’, first
when writing of Winnie Mandela, later
of things like Manus Island. Silence
is well-populated, whether as a choice
or as an imposition. In the Sixties,
pop songs protested silence as cancer,
saw it as lack of care. Chesterton
earlier saw it as virtue, but with limits, as
the ordinary people of England, who hadn’t
‘spoken yet’, but he seemed to hope
would speak if the time was right. That
of course was before many Coronation Street‘s
like boxes of human chocolates
and commercial football wistfully conceived
by Flash Harry as a military endeavour.
At football matches, the English often
observe minutes of silence for those
crowds who weren’t heard dying, some
crush or other, marked by silent
teddy bears and flowers. The silence
of teddy bears is overpowering, like
the silence of mouthless stuffed cat
dolls scattered from people’s houses
near Fukushima. Yeats wrote
‘we have nought for death but toys’, but
he meant playthings for a sick person, not
helpless soldiers at a quiet tomb,
where the winged light still plays strange. I am
wondering now if snow country quietness
isn’t full of pied eucalypts
breathing out air and what we hear
as a silent blanket is just how the ear
classifies that needed intrusive, hence
actually hearing the silence. I often
value my lack of audience (except
for you, of course) in that one
can speak freely in a poem because
no one will read it, which is like
being silent, but with almost none
of the corollary frustration. Prose
is self-conscious with inhibition. Hopkins
begged his ‘elected silence’ to speak
for him and explain his reasons
to him and his readers, but
like Nye Bevan who used to laugh, ‘That
is my truth, now tell me yours’,
without waiting much to listen, I doubt
Hopkins paused from writing, nor
should he have. The human always is
the best song for the divine. Bergman
used God’s silence as a subject
allowing for his best fine images
like manse as wilderness in the black
light from trees or the helicopter-
spider overwhelming distraught Karen.
Silence illustrates well. However,
the silence of Pussy Riot in prison –
even if politically well-planned – is
a problem as that provocative guitar
is as profound as all pleas for attention:
ipso facto innocent. They objected
to the Chuch hierarchy being state-appointed
mostly KGB like Putin, and
as in any Russian Church the human voice
was the first and last thing they heard. Putin
having silenced Chechnya, however, can
luxuriate loudly in peace, outwit
the silent-as-a-drone-in-air Obama
on all from Syria to Snowden. Russia
has profound snow forests of silence, versts
vast enough to exhale resurrection. I like
that Vladimir Miller was born
somewhere in Siberia, whose silence
has uses other than prison. Silence
is a silent stage for the alive, can
not exist except as metaphor.
- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with M Chakraborty and K MacCarter
55: FUTURE MACHINES
with Bella Li
54: NO THEME V
with F Wright and O Sakr
53.0: THE END
with P Brown
52.0: TOIL
with C Jenkins
51.1: UMAMI
with L Davies and Lifted Brow
51.0: TRANSTASMAN
with B Cassidy
50.0: NO THEME IV
with J Tranter
49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH
with M Hall and S Seita
49.0: OBSOLETE
with T Ryan
48.1: CANADA
with K MacCarter and S Rhodes
48.0: CONSTRAINT
with C Wakeling
47.0: COLLABORATION
with L Armand and H Lambert
46.1: MELBOURNE
with M Farrell
46.0: NO THEME III
with F Plunkett
45.0: SILENCE
with J Owen
44.0: GONDWANALAND
with D Motion
43.1: PUMPKIN
with K MacCarter
43.0: MASQUE
with A Vickery
42.0: NO THEME II
with G Ryan
41.1: RATBAGGERY
with D Hose
41.0: TRANSPACIFIC
with J Rowe and M Nardone
40.1: INDONESIA
with K MacCarter
40.0: INTERLOCUTOR
with L Hart
39.1: GIBBERBIRD
with S Gory
39.0: JACKPOT!
with S Wagan Watson
38.0: SYDNEY
with A Lorange
37.1: NEBRASKA
with S Whalen
37.0: NO THEME!
with A Wearne
36.0: ELECTRONICA
with J Jones