Silence - Silence

November 30th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Posted in Consciousness, Creativity, Enlightenment, Illumination, Pain, Silence | No Comments »

Performing Silence

December 22nd, 2006 Fred McVittie

The moment of ‘performance’ signals the silencing of the other voices which obtain during other phases of the creative cycle. At that moment there is no criticism, interaction, dialogue, or communicative exchange of any kind. All this comes before and after.

Posted in Cycle, Performance, Silence | No Comments »

Crying Children

May 8th, 2007 Fred McVittie

When my children were babies they seemed to be sick very regularly. Maybe it was something to do with them being twins, constantly passing germs backwards and forwards between them, I don’t know, but every four or five weeks one or the other would wake in the night with a fever, and that fever, accompanied by other symptoms, would run its course of four or five days. Then just as that child was on the brink of recovery the other baby would go down with it, and the cycle would continue. One of the enduring memories I have of that (extremely happy) time, is of pacing backwards and forwards across the room with a bright red, sweating, wailing baby in my arms, waiting for the Calpol to kick in, and not being entirely sure if I could get through this time with my sanity intact.

A method I found for coping with this experience, and which has become something of a paradigm for other experiences since, was a particular way of being in that experience which I developed. I initially found that trying to cope by actively doing anything was pretty pointless. Beyond the obvious medical necessities, no amount of pro-active invasive ‘caring’ made the slightest difference to the child or to my own state of mind. Also ineffective as a means of sanity preservation was any attempt to ‘escape’, to think of other things or imagine more pleasant times in the past or in the future. Escape was impossible, and the frustration of a failed attempt, being brought back from an ideal somewhere somewhen to the stress of the here and now simply highlighted my own perception of how bad things were.

A much better strategy was, paradoxically, to do the opposite of escaping, and the opposite of pro-active ‘doing’. This was to experience what was happening as closely and as carefully as possible, putting maximum open attention on the actual moment-by-moment events of being with a crying baby. Particularly significant to me was the experience of listening to the sounds made by the child, and the cycle of wails, and cries and sobs. One thing I found, which became very important for me, is that a crying baby is not only crying. Or rather, that there is more to the cry than a simple extended unpleasant noise. The cry of a sick child has structure and organisation and rhythm. It rises and falls in volume and intensity, ebbing and flowing like a tide. I found that there is one particular moment in this tidal flow when the child has emanated a sound and the breath is exhausted when there is a sudden, sharp intake of breath, this is followed by a very interesting phenomenon. Just after the in-breath and just before the next outcrying there is a tiny, almost imperceptible period of calm, a poised moment of elan, empty of content but filled with being and energy and potential. This moment, each instance of which probably lasts less than one third of a second, stands out, or stood out to me those years ago, as an island of sanctuary in a sea of stress and anxiety, the anxiety of a father worried about his sick child and his own ability to cope.

The second thing I noticed about these islands of calm is that, although each one is separated by a period a time, the several seconds of wailing, each island itself is identical. Having no content but being simply a state of emptiness and gathered, poised elan, there is nothing to distinguish one from another. The tide of crying returns to the same high point on the beach each time before gathering itself and returning, and whilst the waters may change the point itself is constant. I found that listening to one point of silence is the same as listening to all the other points of silence; when there is no content, each act of listening is the same as every other act of listening. Furthermore, just as the high tide mark on the beach does not ebb and flow with the tide, but is always there as a constant point of return, so the multiple moments of silence in the crying of my babies , which were really only one single ongoing moment of silence, was always there. I had, and have, an image of the crying as containing within itself this eternal fixed dynamic point of calm and quiet to which the wails return and confirm within the cycle of their distress.

This begins so sound like a father finding intellectual entertainment, even pleasure, in the suffering of his young, and I cannot be happy with that. Looking back I remember this time more as one of intense pleasure threaded through with the necessary desperation and anxiety required of all parents.

My finding of this island, or possibly the high-water mark on the beach of this island, gave me the ability to cope, maybe even thrive, in these quite difficult times. I found that even whilst pacing the floor at four in the morning, arms aching from carrying this hot, screaming babe back and forth, by simply listening, and without taking any action whatsoever, I could hear this eternal beautiful silence. I could enter into this moment and feel it expand around me, filling my consciousness. I felt I could stand in the midst of the silence and experience the calm and the majesty at the heart of my child, and be with him in a way which did not require me to share his suffering, or mirror his cries in my own distress.

This experience has never left me, and I still try to listen for those moments, no longer in the rhythm of crying but in all of the actions and words of my children. Whatever else they may be saying or doing, and however they may change. Whatever separation between us comes with their growing toward manhood, in that place they are always open and with a little effort I can still listen for it, step inside of it, and be in love with my boys.

Posted in Family, Silence, Void | No Comments »

Cross-modal sensory mapping.

April 13th, 2008 Fred McVittie

The analysis of texts which use sensory mode based metaphors, i.e. that refer to ‘touch’, ‘taste’, ’see’, in a non-literal way, shows that there are a number of consistent patterns within this usage, including patterns of relations between the sensory modes. For example, Shen & Cohen (1989) demonstrate that within poetic texts there is a predictable and coherent use of what they refer to as ’synaesthetic’ metaphors, in which the properties of one sensory modality is mapped onto the other. They give the example of phrases such as ’sweet silence’, and point out that in phrases such as this the modality which they refer to as ‘lower’, i.e. closer to the body, in these cases the sense of taste or touch, is mapped onto the ‘higher’ or less proximal sense. Also, the ‘higher’ sense which forms the target of this metaphor is usually less accessible, less easy to ‘grasp’. So, in the case of ’sweet silence’, the higher and more ethereal auditory quality of silence is referred to using the more delineated, accessible, and proximal sense of taste. Although it is not stated in this article, it is hard to miss the metaphor of elevation which is also being deployed in order to give form to our understanding. Not only are the metaphorical senses ordered across the dimension of proximity and distance, (with the access that such proximity entails), and not only are they distinguished in terms of substantiality, with some being easy to grasp whilst others are harder to get a handle on, but they are also arrayed vertically, with some metaphorical sensory modes appearing more elevated than others. Tasting and touching happen locally and at ground level, sight gives us a wider, but less tangible view, and audition (including listening to the sound of silence) extends that view backward and forward and into the future and the past. Shen and Cohen do not make mention of the part played by olfaction in this schema, but it is likely that given the ubiquity of phrases such as ’strong smell’, or ’sharp odor’ demonstrate that it also figures within the overall structure. In these two possible examples the olfactory experience, which has the characteristics of ephemerality and extension which make access difficult, is understood in terms of the tactile, base-level, and proximal senses of strength and sharpness.

Shen, Y. and M. Cohen (1998). “How come silence is sweet but sweetness is not silent: a cognitive account of directionality in poetic synaesthesia.” Language and Literature 7(2): 123-140.

Posted in Cognition, Grasp, Hearing, Knowledge, Metaphor, Proximity, Seeing, Sense, Silence, Smell, Space, Synaesthesia, Taste | 2 Comments »