The Sound of Silence

Odanglesex fans - and there do seem to be some in the U.S., U.K. and France - I'll return to and finish "the Partnership" next time I'm on. Right now I want to write about something else.

I'm a Quaker. Quakers are a worldwide movement and in some places - notably the U.S. - practices have gone a long way from the original. British Quakers have stayed close to the original in terms of practice and organisation - no clergy, meeting for worship centring on silent contemplation, a great shortage of DO's and DON'T's, just "advices and queries" - but I'm sure some would say that with our ranks including Buddhists, Hindus and agnostics, we're some way from the original theology. But this is not an essay on being a Quaker and still less a piece of proselytisation. It's an essay on silence.

Quaker worship starts with a period of silence we call "centring down" and it can happen a whole one hour meeting is silent. This is evidently very challenging for some people, and we hear the same from people leading meditation or spiritual experience in other traditions: people don't like silence as it makes them uneasy and they don't know what to do to fill it. This seems to be a growing trait. I occasionally attend my local Church of England church and when the priest says, "We will now have a moment's silence", the moment seems to last 5-7 seconds. However, there are still people who love spending hours alone and largely silent, fishing (and say the peace, not the fish, is the main thing) and others who walk alone in the hills as I do given a chance.

We're getting more and more used to instant replies and instant gratification. I hear someone on their mobile phone, perhaps walking along oblivious to the physical world outside, telling a partner or close friend about something that's just happened and is clearly not urgent, and I wonder if anything would be lost by waiting till they met. Many people apparently are really afraid of being separated from their mobile phones, unable to make or receive instant contact. If I'm curious about something factual, Wikipedia will tell me, and that's marvellous; but when do we leave time for calm thought, or beyond that, an emptying of the mind so the unexpected can come into it - or is that precisely what we want to avoid?

Any number of people have told me they find classical music "gloomy", and even apply this to gloriously joyful works like Grieg's "Wedding at Trollshaugen". Do they mean "gloomy", or disturbing because it encourages you to think, or are the thoughts that come to them below the surface all gloomy?

I strive to fill silence myself sometimes. I walk by an estuary or in a wood, and if I have no bird identification tasks before me, I analyse the relegation-threatened end of the football Premiership, or consider Diplomacy moves. That's why the discipline of the Quaker meeting with a common silence is so valuable - that plus the sense of coming closer in silence. I think I should be in silence more often - and if someone finds silence threatening, can they identify the threat and consider if it really is a threat?

Refuted!

Now here is a thoroughly conservative post. I want to fight in the last ditch to rescue the word "refute".


All right - words change meanings. "Nice" once meant "precise", as in the fossilised phrase "a nice distinction". "Horrid" once meant "hairy, prickly". A "revolution" was once a cyclical movement, in politics as it still is in mechanics.

I still want to stop the word "refute" losing its old meaning.

The established meaning is to prove something false. It's being weakened radically to mean "strongly deny", almost certainly because it sounds too much like "rebut", which does mean deny. Well, if "refute" loses its original meaning, we still have "disprove", though that sounds weaker even if the meaning is the same. But the problem is that "refute" continues in its old, strong meaning in a number of contexts. To refute a proposition in science or mathematics is to prove conclusively and for all time that it can't be correct. The proposition that the sun revolves around the earth has been refuted. The contrary proposition was rebutted, not refuted, by the Catholic Church. In chess, to refute a move is to devise a response so devastating that the best chess players, having studied all the possible lines that could follow, conclude that no-one should ever make that move again. Moreover, a "refutation" still seems to mean a proof of falsehood, not just a rebuttal.

"The minister refuted suggestions that his remarks were meant to undermine the Prime Minister". No he didn't - he rebutted them. How could he refute such suggestions anyway? It's not provable or disprovable.

On another note (semi-deliberate pun), I've just listened once more to Nielsen's Fourth Symphony. It draws out my soul on a string. It is brilliant and moving. Too many people aren't aware of Nielsen's music. Another fight I'm a foot-soldier in...

Mood Music

And so to Chelmsford. Until two weeks ago I worked there, but now my visits will be infrequent as there are other large towns nearer to me. Today, though, my car was in for MOT and service in Hatfield Peverel not far from Chelmsford and it made sense to carry on for shopping and other stuff.

I'm not a great lover of piped music (except bagpipes, of course). I don't have any choice over what's played and often it's far too loud to ignore and, moreover, rubbish. I remember Christmas shopping and being driven from three stores in succession by good impressions of scraping a saucepan at ear-splitting volume. Today, though, it was quite discreet, not too loud. In Wilkinson's a bad singer was offering me something beautifeeyul. Only in the American South would natural pronunciation be anything like this, and this wasn't a Dixie accent. A good singer can extend a sound without turning one syllable into three.

On for a pub lunch (The Ship - recommended). Here the singer had quite a good voice and I became a bit puzzled trying to follow the words of the song. I think she was either telling me to "get a haircut" (she would not be alone in this advice, but I resent it: it suggests the army, and from what sounded like a young woman, a bottle blonde dressing up as a Sergeant-major and yelling orders at me (no thanks); or she was requesting, "get a handcuff". Puzzling if it was the latter, as I'd think one handcuff would be useless - a bit like advertising "Breast enlargement - two for the price of one!" At any rate, a less discouraging message than "get a haircut".