A little bit of quiet

Sorry about the delay in posting. This has been an especially rough week.

My project is going to be about silence.

I come from a talking family- we talk to and through and over and under and around each other. Very fast, very witty, and if you stop to think you’re already three topics behind. And I tend to attract friends of the same sort. But, no matter how fast we talk, lots of things are left unsaid. Those unsaid things seem to make up the bulk of our power/ relating dynamic, and the fast and constant talking is (I think) a mostly unsuccessful attempt to address those unsaid things without actually exposing and talking about them.

My boyfriend’s family, on the other hand, is of the silent variety. His mom talks some, but he and his dad are very quiet. I was barely beginning to get a handle on that dynamic, and to appreciate how their silence operates as its own sort of communication, when his mom was diagnosed with aggressive terminal cancer. She was fine 6 weeks ago, as far as anyone knew, and now they don’t expect her to live more than a few days. As you can imagine, much of my mental energy is tied up in thinking about her and about dying and about what it means for her family.

I am frustrated by all the unsaid things that linger in my own family and friendships but the constant talking mitigates some of that frustration- it feels a little like progress. During all the time spent with my boyfriend’s family, though, I keep expecting them to start talking and trying to get at those unsaid things before it’s too late. But they never do. And I’m wondering if they are communicating all the things they need to, just in a quiet way that I don’t understand.

So… I want to write about, think about, and experience some silence—both as a means to understanding that other family dynamic and because I wonder what I’m missing in my constant drive to communicate everything verbally.

Part of my project will be a period of silence- I’d like to do a month or a week, but I don’t know if that’s possible with work and school. In any case, at least a few days, during which I will endeavor to not speak at all and to write in such a way that I’m not using it as a replacement for speaking. (That is, not just to write notes in lieu of speaking, but also not to write things down/ sort out issues that are meant for later discussion.) In other words: I want to first consider what I am not saying to myself and how that affects my relationships and interactions, and also to figure out what other means of communication are available to me but are overshadowed by talking.

The other part of the project will be concerned with things left unsaid when communicating with other people. Primarily I’m interested in the tacit politics of relating within families/ friendships—the balance of power that we create by the things we don’t say. I think much of what we call communication is transfer of superficial information (most txt, email, IM, etc.) and attempts to be witty or project a certain version of “self” (Facebook, for example, and most conversation). But creative work is more often an attempt to be understood and to express things that are hard to express in words (either because words are not enough, or because convention/ habit makes it hard to say those things to family/ friends/ self). So, for this part of the project I’m going to communicate to my family and friends on actual paper—stories, poems, whatever creative medium seems appropriate—as my only means of communication. No email, txt, etc. I’d like to cease all electronic communication with family and friends for the rest of the semester, but that (again) might be hard to pull off. I think I will choose a period of time for each person and only communicate with that person during that period through some creative medium.