The Island with No Words
The Island with No Words
Paul J. Pastor
On Remembering Silence and the Creative Life
This essay is featured in Ekstasis Issue 10 Print Edition
“A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak…”
Ecclesiastes 3:7, KJV
I have, at various times in my life, found myself in conditions of what felt like considerable desolation; weighty periods of emptiness. During the formative years of high school, when “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” I found myself in the midst of such a time. I was uncommonly lonely, and routinely bored, living with my family of seven in a 600-square-foot shack in a small town in the somewhat isolated Coast Range of Oregon.
To call it a shack is not much of an exaggeration; it was set on rounds of old-growth lumber, down around which the floors above would bow. When it was cold (it was usually cold), one lit the grimacing furnace in the front room by turning a knob to flood a cast-iron firebox with translucent red fuel oil, then igniting it (you had to be quick) with a long lighter. When we moved in, you could see daylight through a hole in the wall above the bathtub. It was cramped. It was unstylish. My friends all lived an hour or more away and none of us would have cars or cell phones or internet in our houses for several years. Consequently, my social life was limited mostly to church people, dead authors, and Nancy the librarian.
But there were benefits. Daily, I would ride my bike for miles into the deep woods down an abandoned railroad grade, explore the mossy ruins of a vast lumber mill or walk to the river that ran at the foot of our property, where I would take a little flat-bottomed boat out upon the water. I fished there, and wrote many pages of terrible poetry, and taught myself to play a sunburst Epiphone guitar, and thought my thoughts—and they were deep thoughts—and, in my way, made peace with it all. I watched and I waited.
*
The great national epic of Finland is The Kalevala, a collection of ancient folk poetry first published in 1835 by the medical doctor and writer Elias Lönnrot from materials compiled among poetry singers living near the White Sea. The beginning portions poetically recount the early life and adventures of the great bard Väinämöinen. Väinämöinen, who had lain in his mother Air-daughter’s womb for “thirty summers” (poor woman), is finally born. He stumbles around for eight years, tripping awkwardly into the ocean and generally just sort of gawking at his surroundings. Then, when he finally really looks up, seeing the sun and the moon and the constellation of the Great Bear, he seems to get his bearings, and goes to live
on the island with no words
on the mainland with no trees.
On that island with no words, Väinämöinen learns about life; begins to understand things. Before then he had pretty much been, well, a 38-year-old baby. He had no idea what was going on. He couldn’t see past the surface of anything. But there, in the sheer emptiness of it all, stuff clicks. Soon we find him in the glades (for trees have sprung up in the treeless land because of his growing insight), and he is
singing his tales
singing, practicing his craft.
He sang day by day
night by night he recited
ancient memories
those deep Origins
which not all the children sing…
*
Silence is the great and difficult friend of the writer and the artist. Silence—the condition of emptiness. Silence is the unfilled jar. Silence is the frame that holds no picture. Silence is the blank page, blank after you have stared at it for hours. It is the mainland with no trees (impossible and inhospitable). It is the island with no words. I do not mean the pleasantness of quiet, where you go as you like and leave as you like, and which is a privileged vacation from hustle. (Many coiffed pastors and productivity gurus sell little bits of this quiet, but it is all just aesthetics with them.) I mean silence that lasts, for whatever reason, long past the point of your preference. Silence that chills you, that roots you, immobile, for a while. Very often this is a literal silence, but not always. What is always true of such a time, however it comes, is that a fertile interior blankness settles in us.
This condition of inaction usually feels like being stuck, or being numb. And it is precisely what our culture—and our human appetite for creative heroics—would have us avoid. We wish to believe that the source of our creative power is activity rather than inactivity. We wish to believe that we have in ourselves everything we need to do our work, and that it will be our great efforts that haul that work out of us. And yet what brings Väinämöinen, the bard of bards, into the fullness of his power is precisely that condition of emptiness that so disgusts or unsettles us. It is being in the boring-place, the empty-place, the still-place that something happens to him, something so vast that nature itself unlocks her most intimate secrets.
What is the thing that happens? An emptiness happens, sufficient to bring words out of the bard. He begins to sing his tales, to practice his craft of poetry. He plays with slanting rhymes and the beat of words, discovers the magic of language. Because of the emptiness, both days and nights are given to the bard. And the final result? Not only mere creation, or that kind of pseudo-creativity which those who only know the superficial silences may practice. No, Väinämöinen remembers.
It is an ancient memory that Väinämöinen recovers: “those deep Origins which not all the children sing.” The bard is midway through the lifespan of a normal man. But now he has remembered “those deep Origins.” Held in that memory is the nature of things, the names of reality. Held in that memory is all beauty, for beauty is nothing without truth, and all truth, for truth is nothing without knowing, and all knowing, for knowing is nothing without love, and all love, for the bard has lingered in love, has encountered the source and possibility of love in the sheer nothingness of the island with no words.
But what has this to do with you or I, or the lives of any normal people? All well and good for bearded old Väinämöinen, but our island is an island of noise, of lock screens and targeted ads and influencers and platforms and brand ambassadors and wages and McDonald’s and push notifications and Sponsored Content. Silence is a terror to our culture, for it contains an infinity of condemnations for our way of living, or more accurately, our way of avoiding living. There is no mainland with no trees; there is no island with no words. Like so many pure things, such things seem to have passed out of the world.
But no. Who are you, dear reader, to say that you are any less than old Väinämöinen? Indeed, who am I? It is our inheritance to try to plant our feet, like the bard, on that dread and fruitful island. It is our invitation to try to linger there.
*
The Kalevala stresses that it is the bard’s conscious choice to be upon the island with no words. Väinämöinen “planted both feet,” and “lingered there many years.” What do these lines mean for us?
To plant one’s feet on the island with no words means the conscious rejection of a way of noisy living that makes us neither happy nor productive. To linger on the island with no words means the careful reconciliation of all unreality until we find ourselves able to Remember. Let us consider both of these.
First, there is a state of either desire or exhaustion that makes the common mode of living untenable for the writer or the artist. This is the literal and positive sense of “disillusionment,” an un-illusioning. It comes from the growing understanding that the way things appear is not necessarily the truth about things. There is something deeper and truer, about even the most true things that we can see or handle. It is desire for this, or exhaustion at the superficiality of so much of life, that pushes us from the early stumbling and gazing at the heavens that characterizes our life, and propels us, empty-handed, for the emptiness of the island with no words.
In our culture of extreme noise, including corporatized noise, weaponized noise, and spiritualized noise, this process of disillusionment usually is accompanied by some measure of righteous anger, or feelings of betrayal. Wasn’t someone responsible to show us the way? Why are we being made to figure this out on our own? For the writer or the artist, this feeling is doubled, because there is the sense of a holy burden that we carry—a hunger and a need to seek the face of God behind the appearances that surround us.
This desire or exhaustion is a crossroads, a point of great spiritual and creative danger. We can choose, at this unrecognized point of crisis, either to remain in the world of appearances, and from thenceforward only be capable of superficial belief and superficial sight (singing only what “the children sing”), or we pass through this quiet trial to plant our feet in the silence that allows us to Remember. If we choose to plant our feet, this means that we are choosing to dwell and abide consciously in a state of silence and emptiness. This is countercultural in the most basic way, and it puts us immediately at odds with the entire world system, the Spirit of the Age, and, likely, the majority of our friends and relatives who, we will find, become deeply uncomfortable or confused at anything that begins to dip below the superficiality that characterizes contemporary life.
But still, feet may be planted. Practically speaking, we plant our feet when we decide to allow for silence, to be in a place without words. But this way of being is not easy. This is not an idyllic existence. We idealize silence and emptiness when we are in the world of noises and appearances. When silence and emptiness exist only as desires, or as brief tastes, then they may be objectified and idealized. But their reality is harsh and inhospitable. There are reasons, after all, for Forgetting. It is much more comfortable. Who, after all, would wish to live in the stark land of the North, “on the mainland without trees”? And so this brings us to the second work of the bard: to linger.
In this case, lingering means abiding in the conditions of silence. To plant one’s feet on the island with no words is one thing. To keep them there is something else entirely. “Many years” Väinämöinen lingers. What a useless thing to do! At least, this is how the world of appearances sees it. He thinks and wonders about planting trees but he does not plant trees. He ponders about who is to sow the crops, but he does not sow the crops. He lingers.
For us to linger in conditions of silence and emptiness means that we become accustomed to abiding in a spiritual or inward place that seems to want to push us away. We learn to make a home where a home should, creatively speaking, be impossible. Why should the bard linger on the island with no words? It is foolishness! Let him go to the towns, to the cities! Let him go to build a platform! Let him get on Instagram and optimize his Reels! Let him get an agent and pitch a two-book deal with some plans for a spin-off curriculum! Let him go on the conference circuit! Even let him briefly visit the island with no words with his agenda, let him plant his feet for Silent Retreat or a Writer’s Workshop or whatever, but anything, anything other than this idiotic waste of talent, of lingering.
But here is the pain of it all: there is no other place that we can learn to Remember, learn to know “those deep Origins.” And this is why, in our generation, there are hardly any voices of power, voices who speak with authority. There are many who can parrot what they have heard, but nearly no one who can speak of what they have seen, from such deep wells of love that knowing flows from it, and truth that flows from the knowing, and beauty that flows from the truth. Look! Where is the man or the woman who writes with such power that the world is renewed and remade by the potency of their song?
*
I can see now that the uncommon boredom of my teenage years was a great gift, as have been the significant periods of life-silence that I have experienced in the decades since. I was lucky. Rather than the noise that so easily dominates those years of special formation, an irksome quietness was draped around me. I would not have chosen it, being far too immature, but I see now how many of my present qualities or interests or experiences are rooted in the unique emptiness and frustration of that time. I became a young man who could be quiet. I began to acquire a taste for shutting up. I became someone unentitled, someone good at watching and at waiting, someone who could begin to see beneath the surface of things, to begin to remember the Origins, to begin to pronounce the true names for things.
Only time can do that; time and the frustrations of time. It inspires me to want to plant my feet, still, in silence. It inspires me to learn, all the better, how to linger. And in that I remember that emptiness, from the beginning, has been the canvas of potential:
And the earth was without form, and void;
and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit
of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light.
And I wonder if perhaps it is the depth and duration of one’s silences that determine the height and potency of one’s gift. I wonder if it is our capacity to remain in those most difficult of spiritual conditions for the writer or the artist—silence; emptiness—that determines precisely the span and measure of one’s power.
How many times do we work to avoid the very difficulties that would unlock great gifts for us? How much detriment do we do to our art, to our craft, to our ability to see simply by refusing to plant our feet beyond the world of noise, to learn how to linger there?
And I look at you through this page (yes, I can see you with my inward eye), and I wonder what you will do, and if you will remember, and if, perhaps, we may be lucky enough to meet each other one day, unspeaking, but full of great light, while lingering together in the happy desolation of the island with no words.
Paul J. Pastor
Editor & Writer
Paul is Senior Acquisitions Editor for Zondervan Books, contributing poetry editor for Ekstasis, and author of several books, most recently, Bower Lodge: Poems. He lives in Oregon.
Painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallela
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