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.