When Silence Hides A Cry
In silence there is an absence of words, it is true. But silences also imply a presence, the presence of a message that has not been said, but is there. Silences are not void of communication, but rather they communicate something that is not said in words.
Just as there are words that say nothing, there are also silences that say everything. There are silences that accuse and there are silences that kill. Silences that are born of impossibility, fear or bewilderment and silences that express supreme power. There are prudent silences and silences that distress. Silences that are born of repression and silences that they liberate.
In reality, we could speak of a whole language made of silences. But within these multiple forms of silence there is one that is brutal, because it contains a cry. It is the kind of silence that comes after an overwhelming experience, in the face of which no words can describe what it feels like.
The silence and the horror
The silences that hide screams are almost always associated with horror. Horror is not the same as terror. According to the dictionary, terror is an intense fear, while horror can be the same as a feeling of fear, as of aversion. And while terror is caused by a material source, horror comes from an imprecise source.
Terror is experienced in the face of an identifiable object or situation; it can be a mosquito, a dictator, or an imaginary monster. Instead, horror is experienced in the face of a latent threat, which comes from an object that insinuates itself, but does not finish defining itself.
The imprecision that sustains the horror
Precisely, the indefiniteness of these threats is one of the factors that lead to the installation of silence. How to speak of extreme fear, or extreme aversion, if it is not even clear where it comes from, or exactly what damage it can cause? It just feels like “something terrible”, but beyond this nothing is clear.
Terror is what you feel if you find yourself in front of an angry lion, in a lonely place. Horror is what you experience when someone you love and who is close to you dies suddenly. In both cases a kind of stupor appears, but the horror adds the weight of the impossibility of describing, of explaining.
Horror involves those silences that hide screams. Words are not enough to express the magnitude of everything that is felt. Words are in debt. Everything that is said seems useless: it neither frees from pain, nor does it allow others to understand how far it goes.
In those cases, it seems that words are useless. For this reason, verbal communication is replaced by silences, but also by tears, by gestures of displeasure, by sighs … However, these expressions do not allow to overcome the pain, but are its reiteration.
The scream and the poetry
The word is the only force capable of giving a new meaning to our experiences. It is through the word that we can give order to the world in our mind and remove from our interior all the forms of pain that inhabit us. Unblock ourselves, so we can move on.
The cry is our first expression of life at birth. With that initial shout we announce that we are here, that we have passed the first great break of our lives. We have separated from our mother and with the first cry we tell the world that we need the world to continue living.
Sometimes, when we are adults, we feel that only a huge scream can express what we carry inside. Only a disjointed and torn expression would be able to say that we are a defenseless being that needs the world.
However, we cannot go around screaming outrageously in those extreme trances of life. For this reason, the scream that cannot break through is replaced with silence. But both the deaf cry, as the silence itself, speak of the impossibility of articulating a discourse, that is, a coherent testimony about what happens to us.
What is the way out then?
We need to scream and we can’t. We need to speak and words are not enough. What is left for us to process that suffering where it hurts to exist every minute?
When ordinary language is useless, poetry becomes an urgency. And poetry is not only a set of structured verses, but it also refers to all forms of expression that use the figurative senses to become concrete.
Carving, sculpting, cooking is also poetry. .. Cooking? … Yes, cooking. Has anyone read “Like water for chocolate”? There Laura Esquivel shows us a woman who transmits her pain to food and makes others cry with delight.
There where words are insufficient and where the cry is drowned, there is the germ of poetry in all its forms. It is to that place in ourselves that we must turn when pain and horror overwhelm us.
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Images courtesy of Audrey Kawasaki
