Jean Arp- Torso of a Giant 1964
Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation… tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.
–Jean Arp
I came across this quote above from sculptor Jean Arp that I shared here back in 2013. At the time, a friend pointed out that she somewhat disagreed, that our anxiety doesn’t subside when silence goes away and passes into legend, as Arp suggested.
At the time, I agreed with her disagreement. I certainly didn’t lose my anxiety in the face of constant sound. But after reading it again after the past ten years, I believe I just wasn’t reading enough into his intended meaning.
I believe– and I might be wrong here– that he meant that as silence leaves us and is replaced by a constant cacophony of sounds, we become desensitized to the noise. It no longer has an effect on us.
Where once it created anxiety, there was now just a void of reaction.
An inhuman void, as Arp put it.
Some of us may have lost our anxiety but they may have also lost something more in the form of basic human feelings such as empathy and kindness and caring. I think this Arp’s supposition has become more evident in the past ten years as our society has been infected with noise and distraction of a bullhorn that carries a constant blast in the form of disinformation, misinformation, unending conspiracy theories, and absolute falsehoods.
The void caused by anxiety’s departure is replaced by anger, distrust, and hatred.
And even more noise.
And as Arp points out, this spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.
In the ten years since I first ran the words from Arp, I believe I now better understand the meaning of Arp’s words now as a result of what we have seen happening here. It makes the ideas of contemplation and meditation in order to not succumb to the void, seem even more vital to our survival.
I wasn’t intending to write anything this morning but reading Arp’s quote again just sparked something. Now, I have to find some silence for a while.
To ease my anxiety– not lose it entirely.
Here’s a piece of music in that spirit. It is a longtime favorite of mine that I have played here a number of times in the past. It played a large part in how I came to view my own work early in my career, establishing what I wanted to take from it for myself. It’s from composer Arvo Pärt and his composition Tabula Rasa. This is the second movement, fittingly titled Silentium.
Redtree Times 