Fido the Yak

As I've been reading The Other Side of Language I've been thinking that I should cultivate a habit of silence. I admire bloggers who maintain silences. Not the long silence of the abandoned blog, but the regular thoughtful silence between posts. I could alter my reading habits, read whole books before commenting instead of doling out commentaries chapter by chapter on several books at once. I could simply say less.

Corradi Fiumara says a number of things that cut close to the bone. She says, "When 'exploration' of inner life is undertaken without silence it is deformed into an involuntary parody of the 'life of the mind'" (p. 105). She says that the "continuous involvement with language might be considered an automatic, repetitive defense against the separation anxiety that silence can represent" (pp. 102-103). She talks about ways of avoiding genuine reciprocity, and says that among these are a saturation of the space of reciprocity with messages and "as a subsidiary avoidance measure, one can fling oneself into extremely rapid passages and ephemeral connections between the various thoughts as they emerge" (p. 103). That sounds like a description of mania, which is undesirable. And yet I must confess to a certain abiding love of the rapid passage and the ephemeral connection. It's a dilemma.

Labels: Corradi Fiumara, silence

posted by Fido the Yak at 9:14 AM.