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| Hampton Beach? CC Jean Stimmell: 1/22/15 |
After retreating to the Book and
Bar Bookstore after a torrential downpour cut short our participation in
last night’s Black Lives Matter Vigil in Portsmouth, I discovered and
read – though soaked to the skin – a mind-expanding essay by Susan Sontag.
Though written 47 years ago, The
Aesthetics of Silence is an amazingly current examination of how
silence is a critical component of modern art: or in her own words, “how
silence mediates the role of art as a form of spirituality in an increasingly
secular culture.”[i]
According to Sontag “art usurps the
role religion and mysticism previously held in human life — something to
satisfy our “craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the
silence beyond speech.”
As such, Sontag connects the path of
the modern artist with that of mystics from time immemorial.
Sontag uses a perfect example: The
Cloud of Unknowing[[ii]originally written by an
unknown mystic in the fourteenth century. It is a literary work of great beauty
offering a practical guide to the path of contemplation. In order to
access a higher spiritual reality, this ancient mystic explains how, first, all
thoughts and concepts must be buried beneath a “cloud of forgetting.”
The holy grail for today’s artist, in
my opinion, is to attain this “cloud of unknowing,” to forge a unity between
art and anti-art in a higher dimension, to heal the split between verbal versus
nonverbal, cognition versus emotion, right versus left brain, mind versus body.
Maria Popova says that, for Sontag,
the way forward from the spiritual satiation that arises from this dialogue
between art and anti-art, necessitates the pursuit of silence. For the
serious artist, silence becomes “a zone of meditation, preparation for
spiritual ripening, an ordeal that ends in gaining the right to speak.”
Pursuit of silence should not be just
a goal for artists but us all. That is the message of modern day mystics, like
Eckhart Tolle: If we connect to the stillness within, we move beyond our active
minds and emotions and discover great depths of lasting peace, contentment,
serenity – and, might I add, creativity.
When you become aware of silence,
immediately there is that state of inner still alertness. You are present. You
have stepped out of thousands of years of collective human conditioning.
xxx
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
1.The
Aesthetics of Silence, pp. 3-34 from Styles of Radical Will by Susan Sontag
2. I am indebted to Maria
Popova’s review of this piece in Brainpickings
https://www.brainpickings.org/?s=susan+sontag%2C+silence
3. The Cloud of Unknowing, edited by William Johnston,
Doubleday, NY: 1973
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