It is another day now and I am sitting in the shade of a tree looking out on a beautiful harbor filled with sailboats. A seagull swoops and sails before me. A strong wind picks up from the west. This water is the playground of the wealthy. Unlike the poor, they can buy outer silence. They seem to have plenty of time to think deep thoughts, such as where did all their money come from. From corporations that are part of the military-industrial complex? By exploiting others? I suspect they use their "free" time to think of other things.
For some reason the rough water reminds me of all those refugees fleeing war and chaos on the Mediterranean Sea. Desperate people. Why must they die seeking refuge? Why must they flee their homelands? Who drove them to the boats? The sea and silence brings these thoughts to my mind? Silent reverie can do that. It can conjure up disturbing thoughts.
I often write about such matters. Most of what I write is serious stuff, what people refer to as "heavy" writing: wars, assassinations, coups, etc. -- a lot of history, social issues, philosophical and theological questioning. And I find that many people find it tough to take. They can't find the time or silent concentration to read it closely and study to see if my analyses are correct. I think they choose not to take the time to enter the cocoon of silent concentration it demands. They will nod or demur, but not delve any deeper. Deeper means danger.
Those hundreds of thousands of fleeing boat people, for example; who is responsible for their fate? Who started the wars that drove them from their homes? Might we be implicated? Do we bear responsibility? Can we be silently attentive enough to hear their cries and explore the facts? Is the noisy busyness a self-imposed distraction from the truth? Do we live in bad faith?
Can we stop talking, stop moving, and stop doing long enough to contemplate such matters?
Can we shut up long enough to listen to what the silence might reveal?
What are we running away from? Are there truths so deep and so disturbing that they must be "silenced"?
I think so.
Slow silence would allow us to understand how the leaders of the United States are pushing the world toward the ultimate silence of nuclear conflagration by provoking war with Russia. Most people are too "busy" and too distracted -- and therefore too ignorant - to notice. So for them it's not happening. It's not happening, as Harold Pinter said of all the countless war crimes committed by the United States while the American people were hypnotized into thinking otherwise: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."
We were too busy to notice. All we could hear was noise, propagandistic bedlam.
A society suffering from socially induced attention-deficit disorder is a society in a state of disintegration. Focused on the noisy foreground of conventional thinking fueled by a mass media spewing out endless distractions and pseudo-events, most people are lost in a cacophonous mental chaos.
I'm not sure if there is any point in writing these words.
But I am sure that the art of writing implies the art of reading. The writer creates and the reader recreates; both demand silence, a not-doing, the cessation of all noise that serves to prevent true thought. Can you hear me?
The machines must be turned off. "Our inventions," Thoreau noted, "are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things."
It is not hard to turn a switch, pull a plug, or press a button; the hard part is wanting to. Harder still, but equally necessary, is the quieting of the mind, the silencing of the incessant internal chatterboxes that accompany us everywhere.
Unless by some miracle we reject the bill of goods of noisy busyness that has been sold to us to sow confusion, we are doomed. That might sound hyperbolic, but it is not. We are being led to the slaughter by crazed elites who are pushing for a world war. We are drowning in lies and more lies, lies compounded by noisy repetition.
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