THE year my daughter was getting married, I signed up for a yoga retreat. I figured I’d need a large dose of meditative calm (and possibly a set of cool-down exercises) to help me survive the madness. And so it was in a state of mild anticipation, or even slight euphoria, that I drove to Glencomeragh House, the Rosminian Retreat Centre in the hills between Clonmel and Carrick-on-Suir.
Within hours of my arrival I was on the phone to my sister. Phones being somewhat frowned upon, I closed the door of my room, retreated to the darkest corner and hissed into the mouthpiece: "It's a silentretreat, for goodness' sake! It didn't say that on the website! I'm stuck here for seven days with a bunch of nuns and priests! In silence!" "Well," my sister hissed back, reasonably, "just put your stuff in the car and come home." But I had driven all day to get there. And the gardens of Glencomeragh House are glorious, with a river and a labyrinth, and the gentle horizons of the surrounding countryside would offer balm to the soul of even the most nervous mother of the bride. Plus the priest leading the retreat had turned up, reassuringly, dressed in a tracksuit. "Nah," I said. "I'll give it 24 hours. And thenI'll put my stuff in the car and come home." What a difference a day makes. By the next evening, wild horses wouldn't have dragged me away from Glencomeragh.
We human creatures have an ambivalent relationship with silence. Houses or hotels in secluded locations come at a lunatic premium which we pay because, we claim, we want to be undisturbed. We value peace and quiet, we declare. Yet ask us to actually put up and shut up for a couple of days – especially in the presence of others – and we panic. We imagine silence as stern and strait-laced. But it isn’t, necessarily. On the retreat there were sessions where talking – sharing, as it’s called on the spiritual circuit – was encouraged. Silent coffee breaks, meanwhile, were a hoot; lots of nodding and smiling, and gesturing with spoons and biscuits and miming of “after you, sister”.
The afternoons were kept free for long walks, alone or in small, unsupervised groups. What was removed from the equation was not basic human contact, but rather the tyranny of polite conversation. The pointless prattle of the daily soundtrack. Its removal created a surprising amount of space which turned out to be not an absence, but a presence; a healing kind of space.
How to explain it? There's the catch. Silence and words don't necessarily do well together; which is why I'm grateful to Colum Kenny, chair of the Masters in Journalism programme at Dublin City University, who has written a book called T he Power of Silence: Silent Communication in Daily Life.Prof Kenny taught me (or rather, attempted to teach me) at DCU many years ago where he was, I seem to remember, a quiet sort of person. He's also a board member of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, so he's well up to speed on the chattering classes.
His book, as its chapter headings reveal, explores many aspects of silence. Busy silence, silence in therapy, sacred silence. Silence in film, TV and music. Cunning silences and gobsmacked ones. The opening chapter boasts a magpie collection of quotes around the topic, drawing on sources from Menander through Montaigne to Ennio Morricone. He unpicks theories of silence proposed by linguists, philosophers and psychoanalysts.
By the final pages, he has come to muse on what he calls “the silence of God”. “Silence,” he writes, “has no essence. It is not a thing. You cannot cut or bottle it, or pick it up on a radio receiver . . . Silence as we humans know it is like the dark side of the moon, while sound is the bright side. You cannot have one without the other, because both depend on our observation. They are not opposites but complement, or depend on, each other. . .”
Prof Kenny is neither a theologian nor a spiritual guru. He’s not making any particular claims for the efficacy of silence in itself, though he does believe that silence matters, and that by accepting the ceaseless noise of 21st-century consumerist life, we’ve short-changed ourselves somewhat.
As he points out in his introduction, silence is more than simply a spiritual luxury. In everyday life it can be useful, effective, refreshing – and deadly. "A long silence in marriage is sometimes fatal to the relationship. Political silences kill . . ." The Power of Silenceis a compendium of stuff about silence, from chunks of Hebrew poetry to how people from different cultures deal with pauses in conversation. It has its lighter moments, too. There's a hilarious meeting between Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton in which the latter repels all attempts at conversation – a silent classic, in fact. There's an update on John Cage's famous four minutes and 33 seconds of musical "silence"; the story of the 2002 album Classical Graffiti,featuring a one-minute "silent" track by Mike Batt (of Wombles of Wimbledon Common fame) which led to a legal battle with Cage's estate. Batt, unabashed, maintains that his is the superior piece of music: "I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds . . ."
Silence, this book reminds us, is intrinsically interesting. As for my own experience of silence on retreat, it was profoundly enriching and emotionally rewarding and something I'd be keen to revisit. Not that it stopped me from losing the head pretty comprehensively at least once – on Sydney's Circular Quay, as I recall – in the build-up to my daughter's wedding. But that's a story about which I'm definitelygoing to keep silent.