Defining silence

   by    Shaun Lawton 

    First, define sound.  Sound may be defined as vibrations that travel through the air (or another medium) and can be heard when they reach a person's ear. Silence could then be defined as a lack of such vibrations that are picked up by anything remotely equipped with ears. 

   Vision may be defined as the state or faculty of being able to see, therefore seeing should be defined as the state by which visions are observed in real time, but not necessarily recorded. This distinction leads to the question about the difference between a machine's recording of vibrations that may be played back to reproduce the original sounds, and a human being's ultimately having to rely on the mysterious process known as memory. 

   Here in this thin crack where the palest and virtually unnoticeable light drifts like so many infinitesimal specks of pollen dust revealing their eerie echo location music-of-the-spheres to ring and harmonize in correspondence with the full eternity-inducing mobius spectrum of the spectacle we're recording in digital bits and bytes with our Oracular Payload, the James Webb telescope, we're led to realization by a clue.  Whereas full on digital recordings of both sound & vision began rolling live many years ago and continues piling on today with the advent of our technological social media revolution, we can be reminded that the difference between our own self-defined "conscientious consciousness" and sentience from that which our machinery of artificially intelligent software development fails to experience altogether, goes hand in hand with the notion of "experience" itself (an experiential phenomenon, which necessarily shares covalent bonds with the sidereal experience of phenomenological and biological split-mind objectification sensory stimuli processing) and the flat, lifeless reaction of having captured vibrations divorced of their context for analytical purposes which have more in common with the alien than what our own spirits have demonstrated and taught us over many generations. Here, within this easily forgotten sliver of compressed information, a detail which, remember that most of us caught up in the eddies and currents of today's onrushing technological singularity all-too-soon forget about completely, yet it remains flashing amid our periphery of neon stimuli like some lone corporate logo of a salamander which hums quietly with an alluring resonance calling out visually, a fresh new hieroglyph sending out its undercurrent of meaning we can only pick up on subliminally.  It's the out-on-the-plain-field-everyday-right-before-us reality that unlike this and last year's crop of animated artificial robotic apps and doodads, reflects our own plugged-in sensory overload of natural stimuli which just can't be stored on a disc or magnetic tape by its very nature, as if in possession of a random access memory capacity generated from all the background radiation, or something. 

   It's very nature being that which currently exists here and now within our own spacetime continuum.  We may call it what we like, there remains a host of words and synonymous terms all helping us to define the indefinable.  Assisting us  to  glimpse that which cannot ever be seen.  Giving us just enough of a push to make the intuitive leap of faith that the subject of our life and death legacy of murder and birth remains more than we could ever know because there's only so much room in our memory that we can each handle. 

    Now, the collective memory of the human race all told and humming like a livewire even now as we listen to and read these words scrolling by from the effort my mind kept sending to my fingertips, nonetheless remains fully imprisoned within the sealed skull of each individual human being doing the recollecting.  Don't forget, most of us are too busy keeping up with our lives trying to survive in this economy while the world gives off the thermal impression that it's burning under a constantly rotating and evolving wildfire. 

   Here we've introduced the secondary wafer-thin slice of our ever expanding branes, likened to the spermaceti trapped in abundance within a great whale's head, which is to reflect on the echoing trait of membranes expanding like so many skins sealing up the albumens of their collective sunrises and sunsets.  How all of the history of the plant and animal kingdom compresses down to the one eye of a singular elephant, and how this mirrors back the similar reflection of one individual human being's eye staring back in stark recognition after a tidal wave of memory floods into the soul.  

    The entire dynamic as illustrated before with the two fragile footnotes reveals to the keen observer and to the ones who can keep all their notes in order to not be distracted and forget this sharp, bright solitary idea (so much like that boring old philosophical stuff we were forced to learn in school) that the so-called answer to the repeatedly asked burning question whose signifier triggered this essay to be randomly composed out of nowhere on a Wednesday afternoon while I'm sick with a cold home from work lies outspread before us and beyond us as it always has, a simple notion that may be picked up and examined as easily as a sea shell on the beach during low tide. 

  And here comes the first wave of that which becomes naturally poised to overtake and ultimately conceal this small glinting bit of realization, which becomes the eventually taken for granted notion that the priceless secret of the universe turns out to not be so precious after all, at least not really for the majority of us caught up in the ceaseless rat wars played out by the human race.  But where were we?  Oh, yes.  Defining silence. 

   Silence must be a relative thing, and at the very least, sometimes so down low on the register of our scrutiny as to reveal nothing, with no vibrations to pick up on.  Silence may be defined as a simple reminder that nothing may totally exist, and if it weren't for its unfathomably mysterious nature, everything that we've known and will come to know about our existence would not have somehow been brought about for us to question in the first place.  Silence is that space located for a split fraction-of-a-second in between each startling rattle from a Diamondback's sudden warning of attack.  Silence resides in between the concussive blows to a soldier's ears from the incoming shockwave of an improvised explosive device.  Silence may reign supreme in the courtyards of the dead.  Silence remains a blessing in which healing can take place in your head.  Silence has been denied to the human race.  Silence now is just a sign that signifies a memory of how it was before we were born. Silence becomes heightened by the song of a bird.  Silence is but a name given to one of life's missing parts. Silence is actually nothing but a word.  

       ~   dedicated to Jason Bronson 

           and everyone else listening 

       to the silence in between the words