Silence in Cacophony

It is a great pity that silence is not a tangible thing, rather than simply an absence. Imagine silence bottled, powdered, weaponized. Imagine riot-police hurling quiet-bombs at political rallies. Imagine immensely silent football matches, after mutually-assured-dumbness exchanges across the terraces by rival fans. Open-mouths endlessly filled with completely soundless curses; bruised lips stretched and tongues tie-twisted around syllables of taunt and chant. World-cup penalty shoot-outs acomplished in a divinely perfect hush.

I am a father, a husband and a teacher. Perhaps I value peace more than many.

I remember once, very early in my life here in Turkey, when I could neither speak nor understand the language, walking down the main shopping street near where I lived. It was possibly the first time I had dared to venture out alone. I remember the faces swarming around me, all human of course, but at the same time all subtley... different. The swells of brow and juts of bone; the curves of cheek and snarls of lip, all slightly alien, just enough to intermittently catch and fascinate the eye. It was like seeing all over again - a strange feeling when you sense your own thoughts quietly adjusting themselves within your skull: to feel them slip and slide like a knot of mating snakes across and around and over eachother as they expand to encompass the newness leaking in through your eyes.

The street was wide and crowded: streams of people all side-stepping and shoving and swerving; head-down and hell-bent; sniffing produce and price with equal fervour; a forest of elbows and knees and handbags and piled-high hand-carts. Little boys tanned deep brown in the sun darting like fishes in and out of the tea-shops with tiny glasses balanced on trays, or warm rings of sesame-bread piled high on their heads. It was noisy, loud like a packed theatre before curtain-rise is loud - hundreds of shuffling feet, coughs, conversational snippets just too juicy to wait, the crunch and crinkle of packets of sweets wrenched open, exhalations, exclaimations, sweat, meat-smell. People.

I walked open toed in brown leather and blue-jeans, long haired amongst the head-scarves, stared at, chuckled over, remarkable and remarked about. As I moved through them, the crowd opened and closed ahead and behind me like some living thing, cautious of this foreign body in its midst. I was acutely aware of how alone I was, how devoid of connection. It was like floating in a warm sea, with nothing but sky all around.

Of course the din was still incredible, both audio and visual (for every building was draped in signs declaring in a riotous confusion of font, colour and style what I could only assume were services and shops), rolling over my senses in great atonal waves. The sheer volume of chatter, street-barker patter, inquiry and retort would have been overwhelming had it been in English, but as it was in colloquial Turkish, and as such completely unintelligible to my foreigner's ear, it became as music, not soothing exactly but not drawing my attention either. And so I felt its buzzing pass, thrumming through my chest, felt the thrill of it in the lamp-posts as I leant against them - the only permanence in a moving world.

Alone and uncomprehending I was at perfect rest amongst a thousand people.

I think of this time when sometimes the baby cries once too often in the night, or my students grow overly restless in the Summer heat. I think of that place, that instant, when I found utter solitude in its absence, and a perfect silence within its total lack.

...Continued...