Listened to a meditation tape on the train this morning and felt reasonably relaxed although wasn't able to fall into the full stupor. Still feeling ropey and free of energy.

Kept a low profile today, head down all day. A sleepy sounding MJ called me at lunchtime, with Weezer industrious and cheery in the background. Later I slipped out for twenty minutes and walked by the river. There I saw the exciting business of a Canada goose savaging a gull by beaking grimly onto its wing. Then the same goose beaking onto a duck, and various seagulls beaking onto one another.

Nature is so calming.

Thanks to isthisyou I ended up reading a chapter of a book called Thinking in Pictures by Dr Temple Grandin, who by coincidence I'd heard talking on Radio 4 recently. She is a person with autism, and a prolific inventor who describes how she thinks in pictures which are then translated into words.

This is very interesting to me. I have for a long time failed to finish a philosophy essay on silence, which if I ever finished it I would call An octave of silence.

The difference is that Dr Grandin talks about seeing in pictures, and what is lost in translation, which is something that Shelley describes somewhere. This prelinguistic space has always fascinated me. To address it through philosophy though you have to allude to other philosophers lest you doom yourself to repeating their arguments. Here are some of my notes for the beginning of my essay, talking about Wittgenstein.

"What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence."
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a strutty construction, a bit like an English pier extending into the sea. And because the Tractatus has been bolted together from words, the pier's end is important for this is this point where everything which is not the Tractatus begins. For the sake of argument, we shall in this instance call the stuff which is not the Tractatus "silence".

Silence, of course, is the last word of the Tractatus. I imagine the younger Wittgenstein brooding at the end of the pier, perhaps being nagged by the sense that what is important lies towards the horizon and outside not only his Tractatus, but outside language itself. His readers may have done their best to have followed his description of how "The world is everything that is the case", through his inimitable terse style and oddly obsessive numbering system, until we reach the final point of facing the unsayable.

In the preface to Tractatus, Wittgenstein summarises his ambitions:

"... in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense."

So let's sit down next to the younger Wittgenstein. His legs dangle over the edge, beneath him is the slapping choppy sea. But instead of engaging him in some light philosophical banter about the state of affairs, you have a far more dangerous intention.

You force him to stand up, and then very quickly, without thinking, you both leap unprepared into the bracing, dangerous water. You plunge into the element of silence and -- who knows? -- nonsense.

Silence exists in an indescribable region beyond the realm of everything "that is the case". It cannot yield its secrets to the younger Wittgenstein. The pier of logical speculation cannot extend enough to reach it.

Yet silence has been reached.



Many people sincerely claim to have experienced a state of silence through meditation. And I am one of them. I spent more than two years going to a meditation class. And like many of the people I meditated with had the experience of struggling with a voice chattering in my head. It seemed to me that our brains are tuned by default to some kind of "Radio Self". When you try to be really silent, your mind chatters, and asks tiresome questions like a bored child. With practice at just "letting it go", however, you can at least turn down the volume on this voice.

I'm convinced I got somewhere special with meditation.

Here's what it was like: I suddenly felt physically empty. And I had a clear sense of myself that I can only describe as being like a bell with no clapper. It was not a case of picturing myself as this, but of feeling it with all my senses. The chattering radio in my head had been switched off, and I felt blissfully serene. Oddly I felt as close to the people passing in the street outside, as to the person who was sitting next to me.

This sensation, which I guess must only have lasted for a few minutes, was accompanied by a feeling of intense elation and meaningfulness. While the business of feeling like a bell was extremely specific, and I was reminded of it with some force when a few years later I walked into bell-shaped Buddhist temples in Sri Lanka.

* * *

Of course by now, as a good philosopher the indicator should be in the red on your scornometer. "Mere anecdote", you will be thinking to yourself. But I include this anecdote to let you know that my interest in silence isn't entirely abstract.

Why is silence so central to the experience of Franciscan and Buddhist Monks. What are they supposed to gain from the practice of silence? Is it -- as Wittgenstien says -- is a barrier to something?

Presumably Franciscan Monks distrust language as a distraction, and a barrier to God. Buddhist monks find language a distraction from the emptiness they seek in silence.

* * *

When you paint a shape on a canvas, you cannot help but create a countershape. I think of the later Wittgenstein again and his famed duck/rabbit. The duck is the countershape of the rabbit. It all depends on what you are predisposed to see.

And I am predisposed to see silence is the countershape of language.

Exactly what is meant by silence? Is it merely an absence of noise? I would like to narrow down what I mean with the help of Heidegger. It is the pre-linguistic state. It is the world waiting to be articulated into language. With Heidegger we are the language animal, and we dwell in the house of language. Language is what differentiates us from the rest of creation. So what is contained by silence? Something that is not human perhaps?

My interest in silence is due to a quirk, but not a particularly unusual one I suspect. It's this: when I am trying to think hard about something, I think visually. And when I write, I frequently (but by no means always) have the conscious sensation of translating a visual image into words. My contention is that these pictures I see in my own mind are not nonsense, nor are they language. They are visual in character, and arise in silence.

Bearing in mind the final "silence" at the end of the Tractatus, I would be tempted (with some cheek) to posit this Wittgensteinian utterance:

Silence is not an event in Language. We do not speak to experience silence.