Three Meditations on Silence

 

1

Memories of yesterday’s shots still spoiled their peace of mind, waiting aboard Resolution, knowing the Captain was dead. This was the tremendous reason for doing nothing. A great man gone and the turbulent Pacific Ocean now set within the limits of cartography (some of which they themselves had draughted). At anchor in this ferociously beautiful place. Lava streaming from a volcano exploded into the sea, hot red fans of it tossed high above the roaring rock and banks of steam billowing back across the island.

And James Cook no longer alive.

All day, his first day of death, that death was measured by bursts of brilliance and the gasps of a strange land, heaving to create rock. This place of blood where, only two weeks earlier, he had been welcomed with rapturous ceremonies, robed in a feather cape, yellow and orange across the shoulders, and received off his ship like a god from the winged chariot of heaven.

What had happened? No one could guess. But a sullen and mysterious silence locked down on the entire landscape, where even nature habitually erupted in wild exhibitions of destruction. The natives knew something which they could never know, outlandish intruders as they were. Even Cook. So it had turned out. And the deep tolling of some rock bell at earth’s heart marked his passing. All day it tolled. The men heard it, each in the vault of his skull, and knew it for the funeral kettledrums of a new order. Knew that God, with unaccountable nostalgia for the pagan, had allowed the sanctity of His mission to be corrupted.

Meanwhile the ocean thundered out there. Repeated loads of lava mounted and crashed into an alien element while, across the placid waters of a haven best left in hellish obscurity, parrots flew screeching around the mind. The sun already plunged toward the knife when a canoe set out from the shore — two islanders, paddling their way across sinister clear water, dipping into the sudden silence, private eyes absorbed in the privacy of what they were doing, the power so effortless, cleft shoulder muscles the only sign betraying effort, as their tiny craft sped across the inifinity of ignorance between foreigners.

When they swung broadside on, they shared the task of holding up a cloth bundle for Captain Clerke to accept. Their tangled locks and bowed heads told the tale of the occasion, the simplicity and the grandeur. Then their retreating canoe slipped free as a fish, brief wiggles of disturbed water in its wake.

Someone on the shore emerged from hiding to throw a rock in the direction of the anchored ship and the splash of it was heard, as though the recent roaring conflict of elements creating land had been nothing but the silence of grief, that tiny splash deepened to illuminate the lonely terror of men led where they had no mind to go. Men, who stood round on the gently breathing chest of their ship, their only saviour, witnesses to what fate chose to present them with.

The bosun laid the offering on deck, peeled back some folds of cloth and revealed a lump of meat. Pale skin and coarse black hairs. Meat from which the bone had been carved out. Meat delivered, perhaps, as the crew’s due portion of their commander for eating. Part of a leg. A man’s thigh. A thigh seldom exposed to the sun. Sliced along its full length, it opened of its own accord. So then, already, a mindless creature moving by instinct, the meat unfolded like the calyx of a grossly fleshy flower.

2

The doors are open. The folded quilts have been stacked on the cupboards. The wrapping cloths — humble works of art — have been put away in the drawers. Cushions in their loose covers are lined up on brassbound chests. The paper-screened shutters have been pinned open to show polished floors and the scrupulous orderliness of the house. Fallen leaves slide down the tiles, the raked gutters of the roof, blood red maple leaves and the gingko’s little golden fans. They have begun heaping up and clogging the downpipes. The last servant, a cloth mask strapped on to cover nose and mouth, brush in hand, sweeps away her retreating footprints, leaving the gravel yard perfect, even while the embers die and the last wisps of smoke escape the chimneys, leaving the warmed ondol floors to grow cold. This is how a Korean nobleman’s house should look, cloaked and canopied in autumnal glory – the Yeongyeongdang – reflected in still ponds. She has gone. She has left behind her the birdwinged roofs, the whole structure hovering. The perfect openness and silence (her handiwork), she believes, will bring the Japanese invaders to a halt.

3

As he died, the greatest of dying composers on that day and for many a day to come, lay in bed shut off from any word of comfort. All afternoon the mantel clock ticked but he would need to have opened his eyes to know, the hour hand reaching five when a massive storm broke over the spires of the city. Hail clattered across the roof, blocking the drains and dancing on his windowledge. He heard nothing of it. His communications were with memory. His disgruntlements with childhood. After the strings and woodwind dimmed to whispers (and stayed like that) his last resource had been percussion and the greatest of all percussion instruments, the pianoforte. He had stuck his head in under the angled lid like a man submitting to the guillotine. Right by his elbow on a bedside table the dints in a large brass trumpet were dimpled by lightning flashes, a trumpet not for the lips but the ear, a perverse instrument to take sounds in rather than give them out, a humble humiliating detestable and ugly contraption — made in segments so it could be collapsed into its own bell and packed flat for travelling — now wrenched crooked from rough handling, set ready on his bedside table. Set ready for him though he was beyond bothering, beyond being reached.

Other ear trumpets of diminishing size documented his decline in reverse. To think back over that period from this year, 1827 back to 1826 and so through the unwinding of his bonds would be like entering the phenomenon of light: to discover each stage of more things seen, shadows among shadows clarifying to a solid neighbourhood and even unwelcome visitors, arrivals and disagreements in the dim enclosure of a summer garden, to the entrancement of separated colours, distinguishable textures, snowlight and the dance of leaves, to the withdrawal of the cloud of unseeing so that a quiver of visibility expands to the full glare at sunrise and the magnificent orchestration old Haydn gave his creation of light in sound. Not to mention one’s own compliment of trumpets honouring Count Egmont. Back then one had no need of such contraptions for the ear, the blazing spectrum of infinitely variable textures and emotions were everyday fare.

He never missed having a wife. What would have become of him? Making space for somebody with rights? Learning to listen or to not listen despite his own needs? Having his house-space defined and requiring smalltalk comforts at dinnertime? Or worse, much worse: squawling brats, the clinging odour of their mother's milk, strictures on economy and rebukes following each carelessness? How would that have ended? In sign language, that’s how, inanely frantic codes and waving arms.

So he had begged the English people for their sympathy and received a handsome sum, £1,000, from the Philharmonic Society? This was his business only. No artist can afford shame. They couldn't have had much shame themselves because they made it conditional and wanted him to pay them back. With what? From the fabrications of theory, from his games with structure, those adventures into the abstract, scored for string quartet? What would such excursions into privacy earn? Who was going to pay good coin to buy silence of a certain quality or the products of the liberated ear?

Eyelids closed against the clock, which he knew was there, and the storm, which he never suspected, the prying world would find ample evidence of his anger in the bashed and dinted brass of those tormenting instruments fashioned to suck great cataclysms of thunder down their tiny vortex and feed them into his grateful head as cracking crockery. He had had enough. And what could anybody know? He would outlast himself. He  would fill other people’s ennui for them, moulding the periods of their listening to glorious effect. He’d make their heads ring for a hundred years, inhabiting their salons, their churches, their concerthalls and even the odd opera house, now and again. Though maybe not Vienna. He would assault them in their seats and send them out into the night, their numb skulls ringing with his triumphal harmonies.

Half past the hour. The storm still raged and an unnoticed servant brought some candles in — he smelled burning wax. Smell, he realized, eager for the stimulus of a new thought, changes us. Smell is the only sense to invade our bodies, alter our chemistry and make us what we were not before. By concentrating he traced a hint of sorrel escaping the cupboards and a whiff of human anxiety (chemistry to chemistry), then what else?  Was that the clean cut of ice, the stormlight trapped in hail? Yes, and it dropped him back in childhood, wandering the woods and being caught out in something he was not supposed to do. It landed him, at quarter to six, once again on the banks of the Rhine, sticking a finger in his chafing collar and being spoken to by a fisherman who laughed around some broken teeth when teaching him to stab a worm and work his hook deep in its belly. He had it then, approval.