The Said and the Unsaid

Take cover, we're in for election noise during the next twelve months. That quadrennial American carnival, as in carnivorous, is upon us. The hollow man will start to deliver his hokum and hogwash smack in the middle of holiday season.

Rage against the dying of the light said Dylan Thomas but he intoned those words so mellifluously it felt more like a hallelujah. We compensate for the dark days of solstice with festivals of light and high decibels of ho, ho, ho. Silent night lives with jingle bells and the sound of the cash register….no longer the case, of course, but I can still hear it.

I once read that we actually speak for about fifteen minutes a day on average. It is hard to imagine someone going around with a stopwatch to come up with this. That makes about 1,425 minutes in silence; a long stretch to think great thoughts or allow our imagination to sprout wings. How we spend our silence is who we are and perhaps we are vessels more than we know.

The flow of conversation is a wondrous thing but it reaches another dimension when silences are also admitted into the discourse. The vacuum created by the pause is much like the visual space of this white page I’m smudging with words.

We don’t always see the negative space in paintings but we are missing something if we fix only on the paint. And what is music but the marriage of instrument and interval? The subtext may not be written or depicted but lie in between the strokes and sounds.

How many times have I thought of the perfect retort to someone at the party except now I’m in my car on the way home? Timing is all, as Jack Benny famously reminded us when confronted with the ultimate question: Your money or your life, to which he replied after an elongated silence, I’m thinking, I’m thinking.

Consider this Thursday's gathering around the table. An unspoken conversation may be directed toward the chair of the friend or family member whose absence is a major presence.

The 19th century was a time when working-people became literate. Novels were the rage and many authors got paid by the word. It was also an age of pretension and ornamentation. A well-shaped sentence on the page with a preamble and digressions of a dozen commas and semicolons, was considered a thing of beauty. The elegantly crafted phrase at the dinner table got you re-invited. Henry James could separate the subject from the predicate with as many words as it took a Minimalist to write a short story. Lincoln’s four minute Gettysburg Address was preceded by Edward Everett’s two hour oration. 

Now we must brace ourselves against the bluster and bloviations of the humbug candidate. I have vowed to turn a deaf ear to his moral violence. Doctor’s orders.