~/jeffreymoro/posts/2026-05-01-silence

John Cage wrote: “I am here, and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment. What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.”

Except he didn’t write it like that. He wrote it in four columns, the words and punctuations spaced out so as to guide the rhythm of speech. “I am here,” [beat] [beat] [beat], “and there is nothing to say.” This was Cage’s art: carving time, the space between things, time as the space between things. Tartovsky called cinema “sculpting in time.” Apocryphally, Cage, or Laurie Anderson, or Steve Martin called writing about music “dancing about architecture.” The comparison sounds facetious to anyone who has never written or danced; others know better. Dance especially: dance is not about the arrangement of bodies in space but rather the construction and destruction of space itself, with the body as an instrument. Kazuo Ohno wrote: “To appear on a bare stage with no preparation does not mean that it contains nothing. On the contrary, the vacant space is gradually getting filled and in the end something is realized there. Something happens in the process fills the space up.” Process fills space: nothingness takes work. What silence requires is that we go on talking.

Daniil Kharms wrote: “Today I wrote nothing. Doesn’t matter.” He also wrote: “Enough of laziness and doing nothing! Open this notebook every day and write down half a page at the very least. If you have nothing to write down, then at least, following Gogol’s advice, write down that today there’s nothing to write. Always write with attention and look on writing as a holiday.” By contrast, Gogol wrote: “Aie, aie! . . . never mind, never mind. Silence.”

I bought a special radio tuner to use for field work. On one end it attaches to my computer and another end an antenna, different-shaped antenna depending on what I am trying to pick up. Right now I am trying to pick up the low end of the spectrum. Very low end — extremely low end. Wavelengths so long that they pass over and under you, missing your body entirely. They can pass through water and walls like a knife through soft butter. Last night I was tuning my special tuner and I found around 40.75 kHz a repeated pulsing sound. Nature does not produce even repetitions, not in radio at least. There are other times, sure, that nature indulges herself in patterns: the Fibonacci whorl of a conch shell, the fractal of a fern. But in radio if you find even intervals you are looking at man. I don’t know what the pulsing sound is. I suspect it may be a transmitter in Puerto Rico talking to submarines. What the transmitter is saying is anyone’s guess. Between the transmissions there was silence, but it wasn’t silence, it was static. Noise around the signal, constituting the signal in negative space.

Padmasambhava wrote: “Since, whatever the projected result, there is nothing to be attained, and since one has not fallen under the sway of rejection and acceptance, or hope and doubt, the naturally radiant awareness, which is now spontaneously present, is the fully manifest realization of the three buddha-bodies within oneself.”

In French the word parasite means two things. It means what it means in English. It also means static, like the kind I heard at 40.75 kHz. As you would expect from the French, much hay has been made from this dual meaning. Michel Serres wrote: “What is work? Undoubtedly, it is a struggle against noise.” Except he didn’t write that, he wrote: “Qu’est-ce le travail? Sans aucun doute, il est lutte contre le bruit.” But it’s perhaps close enough for our purposes.

When I stand on my back porch and I look out over my backyard and I look at the plants that are overgrowing the soil, the plants that I need to tame after some fashion if I am to walk from the back of my house through the overgrown back yard and into the back alley where I keep my trash cans, I think about silence. There is no silence this time of year; the air is full of buzzing insects and birdsong and human sound besides. Silence is for winter when all is quiet and sleeping and dead. Mary Douglas wrote: “What is regarded as dirt in a given society is any matter considered out of place.” Auden wrote: “. . . but we, at haphazard / and unseasonably, are brought face to face / By ones, Clio, with your silence. After that / Nothing is easy.” Clio is the muse of history; Auden thought she was the Virgin Mary. In Mass we ask Mary to pray for us now and at the hour of our death. I suppose what happens in the intervening time is our own business.