Amplifying Silence

"All mystical writing really is instructions. It is not an attempt to describe the universe, to describe God, to describe ultimate reality. Every mystic knows that cannot possibly be done. The very word mysticism is from the Greek word myein which means keeping silence" (Om, p. 78). 

In “Forerunners of Modern Music” John Cage (1949) wrote “the material of composing is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing” (p. 62). A composing practice built on this premise will undoubtedly involve restraint, detachment, and understanding of the relationship between creative production and sacrifice. 

Only in silence can we begin to let the silence build, and then, thinking like and (doing like) a drummer, we can write it down. In raga music, this phase of creative production is called the alap.

Group heuristics unfold “in the between,” and rhythmic writing seems to “amplify” the silences, and extend the durations of collective attentional focus on the noisiness and interference patterns that bracket these lacunae, which puts what we will (below) call delay patterns into shared space, thereby making it possible and much easier for writers to interupt each other, and jump from one attractor state to another. This process can be experimental and developmental in the sense of rhetorical or imaginative invention, or it can simply help writers find the next word, phrase, or sentence for the sequence under construction.