I learn a lot from silence. Feeling, for me, heightens in that space, there, too.

So it was with pleasure that I came across a book that explores silence.

Here are some morsels from an article about it:

“Smith was looking for a way to get at precisely that unrehearsed language, so the linguist suggested three questions to crack the shell of verbal habit: “Have you ever come close to death?”; “Do you know the circumstances of your birth?”; and“Have you ever been accused of something that you did not do?” Armed with a simple Panasonic tape recorder and dogged dedication to what was at first merely an intuitive insight, Smith made these questions the springboard for her interviews. She eventually stopped asking them, but the questions, she notes, taught her how to listen. She recalls:

After I asked the questions, I would listen like I had never listened before for people to begin to sing to me. That singing was the moment when they were really talking.”

The article begins like an outgoing surf wave that sucks my body and mind in:

“In his exquisite taxonomy of the nine kinds of silence, Paul Goodman included “the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear.” And yet so often we think of listening as merely an idle pause amid the monologue of makingourselves clear. Hardly anyone has done more to advance the art of listening in a culture of speaking more than artist, actor, playwright, educator, and enchantress of words Anna Deavere Smith, founder and director of Harvard’s Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, and recipient of the prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship and the National Humanities Medal.”

The article is How to listen between the lines by Maria Popova, and the book is Talk to me; listening between the lines by Anna Deavere Smith.

And those 9 silences?

Goodman writes:

‘Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.”

There is a recording of Christopher Ricks  reading Goodman’s poetry on WBUR’s Stylus program:

Go to, or as some say, “Listen up”.

M