Thanks to the Clamorites who drew my attention to the incomplete, “canorous”-free Robert Service quotation in the last issue. Here is the complete version:
“Silence had raised a startled head and poised there, listening. Then, with crack of pick and boom of blast, man had hurled her back. Further and further had he driven her. With his advancing horde, mad in their lust for the loot of the valley, he had banished her. His engines had frightened her with their canorous roar.” (Robert W. Service)
Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it—the silence—meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came, it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.
He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room alone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.
—Philip K. Dick
—from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
obmutescent /ob-myew-TESS-ənt/. adjective. Willfully silent. Obstinately mute. From Latin obmutescere (grow mute), from ob- (to, toward) + mutescere (to become mute).
“The Finns’ obmutescence seemed especially to go hand in hand with that other most famous Finnish characteristic, their drinking.” (Michael Booth)
“Crimond, who broods over it all like an obmutescent winged avenger, scaring the living daylights out of his friends, is really successful only when off stage…” (Stephen Fry)
“Jud was a monologist by nature, whom Destiny, with customary blundering, had set in a profession wherein he was bereaved, for the greater portion of his time, of an audience. ¶ Therefore, I was manna in the desert of Jud’s obmutescence.” (O. Henry)
Soundscape ecology—and silence and solitude—in Denali National Park (near my old home) → Whisper of the Wild ※ See also, near my new home, the Quietest Square Inch in the U.S.
“Silence, for me, is neither an absence of sound, nor is it uniform. The silences of the river are different from the silences of a desert. Yet both are vast, and they are full of surprises.” → On a Walk Through Busy India, a Nature Photographer Discovers a Craving for Silence ※ Part of the ongoing Out of Eden Walk, Paul Salopek’s 21,000-mile walk tracing the paths of the first humans to migrate out of Africa in the Stone Age, “a decade-long experiment in slow journalism.”
“As I browsed subjects ranging from agriculture to medical mathematics, I noticed a sign hanging overhead: ‘Realm of Knowledge and Silence.’” → How an abandoned lab could show us the future.
One of the better running jokes in Get Smart was the Cone of Silence, which ► appeared in the first episode but featured even before that in the demo reels used to sell the show to the network. The joke got new life in the 2008 film farce starring Steve Carell and then the even shorter-lived farce Scott Pruitt: EPA Director and his top-secret phone booth.
“You and the voice in your head – whatever you want to call it – are pretty much all you have in the end. You have to hang on to it, and listen out for it.” → The Power of Shutting Up and Sitting in Silence
“Cultivate quiet spaces or go mad.” – some of the examples, such as MetaFilter, show how various the ideas of “quiet” can be. → Finding silence online is difficult, but the pursuit is worthwhile. ※ Pairs well with The Disconnect, the online magazine you have to unplug from the internet to read.
“she set to make of nothing most” – I keep going back to some of Olena Kalytiak Davis’ poems because I’m not always sure what is going on, but beautiful. → “SONNET (silenced)” by Olena Kalytiak Davis
Silence for the eyes: Jason Oddy Photographs The Deafening Silence Of Empty Political Spaces ※ Lorado Taft’s sculpture “Eternal Silence” (aka the “Statue of Death”) ※ Jason Oddy Photographs The Deafening Silence Of Empty Political Spaces
Today in 1928, the “Shakespeare of science fiction” Philip K. Dick—and his twin sister Jane Charlotte, who would die just six weeks later—is born in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Among the 44 novels he would write before dying at only 53 are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, adapted for the film Blade Runner, the Hugo award winning The Man in the High Castle, and my favorite, the as-always-mind-bending A Scanner Darkly. Dick was a troubled, often addicted, survivor of multiple suicide attempts who was mostly unknown to readers outside the science fiction world at the time of his death…but whose work has had significant influence on not just science fiction, but speculative and modern fiction of all kinds, not to mention Hollywood.
After considering his request for 16 years, the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps—which doesn’t allow visitors—decided to allow Philip Gröning to shoot a film documenting their lives. After nearly three years of editing, ► Into Great Silence is the (naturally-lit, with no commentary or sound effects) result. ※ See also, a documentary invoking many other kinds of silence: ► Samuel Beckett: Silence to Silence documentary.
► Puddles (and Tongo Hiti) cover Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence”. ※ I’ll just leave this here too: ► All The Small Things (Blink 182 Sad Clown Cover) - Postmodern Jukebox ft. Puddles Pity Party.
Reader B.: “I am so loving the recent Clippings. Without fail I come away with a sense of wonder at this crazy world. Such treasures, such oddities, such disturbances you share with us… thank you!”
Reader M.: “thanks for these weekly gatherings .. always something invites a click .. today little potato and yasmin williams ..”
Another Reader B.: “Excellent Trumbo quote. Reminds me of the antiwar passages in near-contemporary All Quiet on the Western Front. ¶ I’m ambivalent about the Ann Arbor street scene. So beautiful, yet - books sprawled out upon a filthy street? Where they can be injured? Also, a few yards from that very spot I helped move an entire bookstore across the same street. ¶ China: I cannot get Americans to pay any attention to China, most days. Drives me nuts.”
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