Sunday, January 29, 2017

"We Need Not Fear These Silences"

"I am here, and there is nothing to say." ~John Cage, Lecture on Nothing (1949)

The other day, I heard someone say that having a blog scares the heck out of him, because of having to always come up with new content. I told him that it's perfectly all right to have nothing to say. John Cage said it so well: "I have nothing to say, and I'm saying it.... We need not fear these silences."

I learned this at one point in graduate school. It was a couple of years into my coursework, and I had an essay due in a history seminar. I discovered something more fundamental than writer's block: I simply had nothing to say.

When I went to class empty handed, I told my professor that, and she laughed. She'd been there many, many times. "Don't worry," she told me. "Give it some time. Something will come to you."

And indeed, it did. The following week, an idea came to me, and I wrote and wrote. That essay become the core idea on which I would base my whole dissertation. I doubt it would have come were it forced.

Sometimes we simply have to make space for things. Let the silences be.