Silence isn’t something you hear much on the radio. It’s the stuff that could even make Westwood quake in his trainers. That dead air, the interview gone wrong, the pause of doom. So Lucy Powell’s hour-long exploration of silence, Shhhhhhh, was welcome and compelling.
Powell admits to being “enamoured and perplexed” by silence. Her fascination began when a zen master set her a kōan – for those who haven’t spent a lot of time hanging round a monastery, that’s a riddle set in the form of a poem, which needs to be answered in the same way. The big question was “What’s the sound before the bird sings?” and Powell proferred answers from “a yawn of infinity” to “a gap in the remorseless rush of mind”. “I tried to sound like a proper zen person,” she says, refreshingly. Her quest continues in this thought-provoking documentary, which smoothly leaps from one theory to the next with great enthusiasm.
But does silence even exist? While we’re breathing and our hearts are beating, we can never fully experience it. In the increasingly noisy world, the contrast between everyday buzz and the nearest we ever get to silence is sharp. It’s powerful: from a teenage sulk to the two minutes’ silence of remembrance.
Powell suggests that silence reminds us of our own mortality, so it is no wonder many people are running away from it. YouTube videos, like the Bible before them, regard hush with suspicion.
“People are afraid of silence,” argues Tenzin Palmo, an east Londoner who lived alone in a cave in the Himalayas for seven years. She notes that people’s minds tend to become more out of control once the background noise is shut off, before reaching calm. And she’s had a lot of time to think about it.
“It is the stuff of comedy and the end of tragedy. It is as full of meaning and almost as various as speech,” concludes Powell. Happiness, sadness, peace and mortality: who would have thought silence could provoke such a broad investigation? Her passion for silence is contagious, inspiring listeners to switch off and go and find a quiet space of their own. Shhhhhhh!
