When silentiaries whacked their pillar in ancient Byzantium
For someone who loves silence as much as I do, it is frustrating to find there is no book on the subject. Thousands of books on sound, naturally; but not a squeak on silence. Indeed, my rummages this week have failed to turn up even a definition of the term. The OED is obtuse. The various encyclopaedias are dumb. There is stuff about infrasonic waves — S-waves, P-waves, L-waves and so on — but no indication that there is such a thing as total silence or, if there is, how it is brought about. Carlyle, in The Life of John Sterling, talks of 'the supreme silence', and Wordsworth in 'Intimations of Immortality' uses the expression 'the eternal silence', but these are inexact hyperbole. It is true that sound levels can be measured: in decibels if they are non-linear, by intensity if they are linear. But this scale is for human use. At 130 decibels with an intensity of 10, sound is comparable to an artillery discharge at close proximity. which crosses the threshold of pain in humans. At the other end is a score of zero decibels and 10-': and it is described as 'absolute silence', but all this means is that it is below the threshold of human hearing. Now, an elephant has a lowerfrequency hearing than a human (16 hertz as opposed to 20) and bats have a higher one (150,000 as opposed to 20,000 for us). So the decibel scale does not cover very highor lowfrequency sounds at either end of the range: we may not be able to hear them, but they exist.
I suspect there is no such thing in our universe as absolute silence. Most of us at some time have shivered in sympathy when Pascal jotted down in his Pensees (ii 206), 'Le silence etemel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie: But the fear is based on an illusion that there is no sound in space. Quite apart from the cataclysmic noises of suns imploding, superstars a million times greater than the solar system disintegrating into trillions of fragments of intergalactic shrapnel, black holes displaying powers so enormous — and ear-splitting — that they can engulf light and sound itself in their colossal jaws, and whose ingurgitatory and digestive spasms resonate across stupendous chasms countless light-years in width — quite apart from these gigantic noise-makers, there is the continuous susurrus of radioactive space. Everything in space, however infinitesimal, seems to emit sound waves, however tiny, and the galaxies hum with this air-traffic. Even with our limited aerospace technology — limited, I mean, by comparison with what will exist in even 100 years, let alone a millen nium hence — we can pick up echoes of events near the beginning of the universe, and soon, I take it, we shall actually hear the noise of the Big Bang itself (if there was one). Was this what the ancients meant by the Music of the Spheres? Did they, in their imaginative ignorance, take a great leap towards the same truth which we are now laboriously creeping to on our scientific bellies? Was the Big Bang the opening fortissimo of this transcendental music, like the first whamming chord of a tinny old Rossini overture? And before the Big Bang invented noise, was the silence truly total? In that case we must expect to live with sounds perpetually, until the being or force which detonated the Big Bang tires of the fireworks and detonations, and abruptly ends the commotion — rather as a fatigued parent switches off the television and, in the sudden silence and darkness, hustles the children off to the dormitory.
But if the external world, empty of life again, then enjoys the total silence which enveloped it before creation. what makes us think the other world will be noiseless? Everyone who has ever tried to conceive of heaven, from Dante and Milton to John Martin, has assumed that music will play a large part in its delights. Angels learnt to sing even before they could fly. St Cecilia is busy teaching Carthusians the uses of their tongues — that is what Gerard Manley Hopkins meant by 'Elected Silence, sing to me' — and paradise, by some accounts, is like a stupendous Albert Hall ringing with the skilled harmonies of a sacred multitude beyond computation.
Conversely, artists like Jerome Bosch and Old Brueghel were certain that Hell rumbled and belched with hideous noises. Infernal engines exploded, farts of a fiendish volume, amplified many times by trumpets thrust up the offending anus, crackled and thundered, emitting poisonous vapours along with decibels well across the pain threshold, and the screeches and wails of the tormented mingled with the hideous shouts of triumph as the diabolical legion wielded their prongs and forks. Mediaeval man was sure that the infernal regions were the home of unbearable noise, as well as heat, and that Hellzapoppin Hades was another name for Pandaemonium. Yet there was ambivalence about the virtues of sound and silence, then as now. Many orders of monks and nuns were sworn to silence in varying degrees of strictness. Words could be enemies of virtue in countless ways, and noise was a diabolical effort to distract prayer. At the
Byzantine court an official known as a loud speaker was employed to amplify official announcements to large crowds, repeating the words of elderly ministers (or preachers). But another official, known as a silentiary, had the duty of imposing quiet on the throng of petitioners and men on the make who infested the antechambers of the emperor. These jabbering or caterwauling Greeks were brought to order by the silentiary whacking a huge pillar in the main hall, itself made more resonant by being encased in metal. He used a special rod and the noise must have been tremendous, especially as silentiaries (often hereditary) prided themselves on their professional din. The cure was worse than the disease, as I note on my visits to Lake Como where the sound police roar continuously over the waters in helicopters in order to pounce on, and fine on the spot, any speedboats exceeding the noise limits.
Since absolute silence is unattainable, and might be horrible if we could experience it, the joys of quietude are essentially relative. When Tennyson wrote, in In Memoriam, 'Then twice a day the Severn fills;/. . . And makes a silence in the hills', he was referring to the hushing of the stream's bubbling to the sea as the reverse tide raced up the river — there was still plenty of other sound. I think Cowper, as so often, put it neatly in The Task when he observed 'Stillness, accompanied with sounds so soft,/Charms more than silence.' In London, delighting in our quiet street, I enjoy the metropolitan hum which underlies the hush, just above the threshold of hearing, because it reminds me of how fortunate I am that it is not louder. In the country, the silence is more intense and there is no background of noise except the wind, but the occasional call of birds, the barking of foxes and the sounds of sheep browsing — I often hear the steady munch-munch as they devour grass — are welcome in that they punctuate the prevailing silence and prove that life in all its forms can comfortably co-exist with aphoniate peace. I like to wake up to the soft clucking of hens in the field below, the hissing of geese, the altercation of ducks on the pond, and even the call of the two buzzards overhead, beginning their morning prowl. Why is it they are preferable to any alarm bell? Why do animated noises have the capacity to soothe, while mechanical ones irritate? You might as well ask the Parsees, who dispose of their dead by placing them on lofty pyres for multitudes of noisy fowl to eat, why they call such structures Towers of Silence. It was always thus.
Previous page
