“Miracles are explainable; it is the explanations that are miraculous.”
— Tim Robinson
Ineffable: a word for the unexplainable sacred, the glorious unspeakable, the venerated bits of life we cannot vocalize. My thesis: all experience is ineffable, and therefore the only honest response to existence is silence. But what kind of silence?
The word ineffable prompts images of burning-bush visions, ayahuasca-spawned dreams, the overwhelming encounter with the Sublime, the Absolute, God, Infinity. This meaning rushes down the calcified canyons of our sandstone sulci and gneissic gyri; a flash flood in our brain’s labyrinth of slot canyons, washing away other possible meanings of the word.
Yet all experience is ineffable, not only the transcendent bits. For example, walk down the beverages aisle of a store. You cannot describe the taste of each drink, from orange juice to milk, any more than you can explain the sight of red to a blind person. Your mouth has an arrangement of taste buds no one else possesses, and you have an immense set of unique memories and emotional associations with each taste.[1] Where else have you tasted this flavor? What music was playing? What were you feeling? All these factors and countless more influence taste. For example, many Americans say pumpkin soup tastes like home. A simple broth is wired in the brain to an inexpressible feeling. We have agreed on four letters for this feeling – h o m e – and think we are all speaking of the same thing. Words package experiences the same way containers package tastes. It is important to remember the word is not the experience just as the container is not the taste.
If you are still in the store, look at the packaging. Each branded bottle, from Odwalla to Honest Tea to Coke, contains an indescribable taste. The store is also a package, made of concrete, rebar, and fluorescent lights rather than clear plastic. It is a package for packages. The city wraps the store, the store wraps the fridges, the fridges wrap the containers, and each container wraps a liquid. Words are also just packages upon packages. Like the bottle around the drink, simple onomatopoeias wrap an experience directly: “oof,” “roar,” “agh.” To neologize more, we then wrap these building-block words with drier words, more distant from direct experience. As Nietzsche describes this wrapping process,
“It is this way with all of us concerning language; we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things–metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities.”[2]
All words are flimsy metaphors, wrapping-paper around incommunicable experiences. Attempting to equate your experience with another after hearing their words is like saying two boxes have identical contents after seeing only their drab cardboard facades. At the apex of the packaging of experience, we reach the wasteful white-speak of academia: demonstration, consultation, nonetheless, domain, intersection, paradigm, ultimately. The same drive that makes us manufacture endless plastic leads us to create ever more words as wrapping. Concision is resistance to word waste as recycling is resistance to plastic waste.
To read is to hear the crinkle of wrapping-paper, to feel the dry cardboard we use to wrap up amorphous existence. How do we force the living substrate of experience into inanimate paper? If experience is ineffable, how do we eff it? This is the miracle of language. With each movement of our mouths we create words from a wordless world as a god creates form from formless void. Barrow begins his work with the simple phrase: “deciding on a book’s beginning is as complex as determining the origins of the universe.” Each moment involves trillions of interacting particles, endless emotions we can’t understand or communicate, and the culmination of millennia of biological, physical, and cultural histories. And even as we try to come up with a word, the moment has already passed: words are reactive and reflective, not simultaneous with experience. Just as a cartographer always maps a territory after exploring it, we always describe our existence after experiencing it. In this sense experience is an ever-moving eel and language is our attempt to pin it down. Yet we can almost instantaneously stick labels to our experiences. How do we apply glue and paper to a nebulous, fleeting eel?
All words are labels on the un-labelable, incomplete metaphors. In this sense, all words are lies. This is the draw to a vow of silence. If the sacred is inexpressible, then attempting to express it is defilement. And if speech is not the defilement of some religious or transcendent concept, then at least it is a betrayal the self, a reckless revealing of the sacred internal:
“Speech…is essentially a public act. It is an act necessarily objective and universal. To speak is to give up one’s individuality in order to reveal oneself in the universals of language. One strips oneself of idiosyncrasies, and ultimately, if set on verbalizing all experience, one strips experience itself of any content…which does not fit the structure of language.”[3]
Monastic silence’s appeal is its protection of the sacred and the understanding that comes with freedom from linguistic structure. Just as some call upon God to fill gaps in our knowledge, some monks might argue God occupies the gaps in our speech. In his book The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, Cardinal Robert Sarah argues exactly this: “silence is not an absence. On the contrary, it is the manifestation of a presence, the most intense of all presences.”[4] Sociological research into an order of Benedictine nuns who live by the credo “Silence is a beautiful hymn we sing to God” found that their silence reduces “verbal competitiveness (jostling for attention in conversations) and increases sincerity and empathy in their rare conversations.[5] Silence opens up new routes to unspoken communication.
Words are to teeth as silence is to the tongue. When we use words, we are forced to bite down on an idea. Our teeth are tools to cut comestibles up into atoms, break them apart so our saliva can pour into the gaps and begin the analytic chemical dismantling of the object. We crunch the item under the strength of our ivory incisors just as we confine a concept into crisp, monochrome, 12-point words. But we must let some ideas rest on the roof of our mouths, push them with the tongue rather than biting or swallowing. Using the tongue well allows us to explore rather than vanquish. Just as we cannot see the grandeur of the Grand Canyon by breaking it into discrete units of property, drawing lines and ripping it apart in search for extractable resources, we cannot conquer a concept. We must seduce it, and seduction is the art of the tongue. When we use words, we put ourselves in the same hell as Tantalus. His curse was that he needed to eat, to force his mandibles upon nutrients, and never have his hunger sated. Chomping down on ideas will prevent us from reaching filling understanding.
Poetry and silence allow us to abandon the urge to bite and begin to glory in the mysteries and paradoxes of life. Where the logician tortures herself, the poet revels. It is easy to dismiss myth, story, parable, and poetry as unverifiable rubbish, meaningless language that should not be pursued as its referents cannot be demonstrated. But perhaps these forms of expression are just using the tongue rather than the teeth:
“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.”[6]
A monk with a vow of silence does not verbalize her reason for quiet. Doing so would break her vow. Rather, she expresses as the trees: through whispering of aspens, the listening of tranquil oaks, the mosaic of sunlight marbled by the veins of leaves. For her, poetry is not a poem, an iterative list of words. Poetry is a life lived, the ineffable complexity of moment upon moment. As C.S. Lewis writes in Prince Caspian —
“‘Oh, Trees, Trees, Trees,” said Lucy (though she had not been intending to speak at all). ‘Oh, Trees, wake, wake, wake. Don’t you remember it? Don’t you remember me? Dryads and Hamadryads, come to me.’ Though there was not a breath of wind they all stirred about her. The rustling noise of the leaves was almost like words … Lucy felt that at any moment she would begin to understand what the trees were trying to say. But the moment did not come. The rustling died away … Yet Lucy had the feeling (as you sometimes do when you are trying to remember a name or a date and almost get it, but it vanishes before you really do) that she had just missed something.”[7]
This is the same feeling we get when we try to grasp Nothing. We immerse ourselves in the concept, and at moments we feel we are onto something. We might think we have the Absolute in our teeth, gripped and white-knuckled. It is pinned down. Nothing named. The ethereal explained. All systems united into a grand Theory of Everything. Then somehow the silence vanishes, and our understanding goes with it.
Silence is not the mere negation of words, not-speaking. Just as there are many tones of voice, there are shades of silence. We can practice dismissive silence, to communicate rejection: the silence of an angry lover, or an academic who does not speak on unverifiable topics he considers unimportant. There is silence as a symbol of apathy, the silence of a bored student. There is the raised-hand silence of the impatient on the edge of speech. There is the silence of staring at the stars, silence as a symbol of deep appreciation of the natural world. We can use silence to communicate confusion, reflection, sleep, hatred, fear, and countless more. Silence, as it often contains more meaningful content, can be louder than speech. And silence is often more difficult than speech. Even when our mouths are not moving, we squish silence in our brains before it can begin to grow, noticing something, anything, and if it is not there — we generate it.
As modern humans and especially as inhabitants of the academic tower, we are trained in symbolic languages. We learn to write code, uncover literary motifs, dissect art, communicate with multiple languages, to create mathematical models to simplify the world and machines to simplify our interactions with it. In other words, we understand the signifiers, but we rarely delve into the signified. Sometimes we forget there is an ineffable reality beyond the symbolic languages we are trained to manipulate. Silence is the escape from this symbolic economy. Silence does not demand using symbols, applying labels, or biting down on ideas.
This essay argues that all experience is ineffable. As ineffable means inexpressible and sacred, using language to convey experience utters the unutterable and violates the sacred. Silence allows us to avoid this violation, and to communicate and listen in ways that are preempted by the spoken and written word.
To conclude? Conclusion is as impossible as beginning.
FOOTNOTES
Harry T. Lawless, Hildegarde Heymann. Sensory Evaluation of Food: Principles and Practices. Springer Science: New York, New York 1999. Print. ↑
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Taylor Carman. On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings. Harper Perennial, 2010. Print. ↑
Crumbine, Nancy. On Silence. Humanitas, v.XI, no.2 (l975), 147-165. Print. ↑
Cardinal Robert Sarah, Nicolas Diat. The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise. Libraire Artheme Fayard: Paris, France 2016. Print. ↑
Wichroski, Mary Anne. Breaking Silence: Some Fieldwork Strategies in Cloistered and Non-Cloistered Communities. Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 19, No. 1, 1996. Print. ↑
Bohr, Neils and Maria Popova. “Nobel-Winning Physicist Niels Bohr on Subjective vs. Objective Reality and the Uses of Religion in a Secular World.” BrainPickings.org. N.d. Web. 21 Apr 2019. ↑
Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963. Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia. New York, N.Y.: Collier Books, 19701951. Print. ↑