Listening for the sounds of silence: The power, politics and meaning of silence

"We used to use our culture to understand cancer. Now we use cancer to understand our culture." (From NPR interview of Pulitzer Prize winning author of "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer". I think that is because we understand cancer (what causes it and how to treat it), better than we understand our own culture, which (who would argue?) is like a runaway train or a listing cruise ship, and can be, for some, lethal.

Paul Simon wrote in "The Sound of Silence","Silence like a cancer grows". That is to say, our silence grows like a cancer. That was not his problem. He made sure of that by writing "Sounds of Silence". He was singing out - warning us about the cancerous silence of apathy.

The silence that is "like" a cancer, (the silence of apathy) gives permission for the cancer of ignorance, greed, fanaticism, violence, fracking (!) to thrive and spread. (Footnote: "Cancer is a large group of diseases where abnormal cells grow uncontrollably, with over 200 types".)

Cancer is an opportunist. I saw how much of an opportunist it was after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center came down. Do you remember the silence? The sound of silence that descended on this nation? Not a plane in the blue, blue sky. It was an ominous silence, an appropriate silence, a prayerful silence, a pregnant silence, a dangerous silence.

Within that silence there was a lot going on in the collective psyche. Frankly I think that was the moment when this country became acutely schizophrenic.

Some folks like me were thinking. . . no, . . . we were taking a break from thinking! What an unspeakable tragedy! I remember sliding into a neutral gear. For a lot of us, there was a karmic message in the catastrophe. The overweening monolithic power of the American corporate empire was brought down, if not literally, certainly symbolically.

In the days following there was the dare-we-hope silence of those who entertained the subatomic-scale hope that a different kind of America might rise out of the toxic ashes of the towers. And there was the cancerous silence, that just wanted revenge.

While most Americans were serving vigil, in small or large groups, in their own way, in the reeling aftermath of an event that was too big to digest, outside of the two-tier silence, there was the buzz in the back rooms of Washington, of powerful men trying to figure out how to milk the moment. What they came up with was a blueprint for justifying an endless war on terror. (In America, terrorists = unAmerican bad-guys.)

The war in Vietnam and the draft were the first catalysts for my declaring my moral, spiritual and conscientious independence from my country. How they used 9/11 to justify the honing of a culture of global war-making, was the second catalyst for my distancing myself from the cancerous silence of the masses, the silence that underlies the superficial cacophony and white-noise of our media-driven consumer culture.

How have I not been silent? Read my books, peruse my thousands of poems.

How about you?

Have you been swallowed by the sound of apathetic silence? Are you talking without speaking? Are you hearing without listening? Are you Writing songs that voices never share? Are you afraid to disturb the sound of silence?

Don't get me wrong, there is power and wisdom and choice in silence. There is pregnant silence and mindful silence. But there is also the silence that Paul Simon warned us of: the sterile, mindless silence, the cancerous silence (like the silence in our country and in Israel when Israel was leveling Gaza), that so easily gets filled with stories that don't teach, advertisements to mindlessly consume, and superficial chatter.

You know what often happens with great songs that I've been listening to all my life? They let me know, with some revelation, that I was never really listening! Take "Sound of Silence". It was like, "OK, thanks Simon and Garfunkel. Got it." But I just reread the last two stanzas of the lyrics and I saw something I never noticed before: The red neon sign that the people are worshipping as a god, is flashing a warning in "the words that it was forming". (This is AI folks.) And the warning is that "the words of the prophets (that is, those who see the future) are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls, and whispered in the sounds of silence".

What is unnerving about this song is, it is saying the people are worshipping their neon god, while remaining blind and deaf to the message that it is flashing.