TALKING TO SILENCE

From Independence Day in September into the coming year, Mexicans have something to celebrate or get ready to celebrate nearly all the time. This month's Day of the Dead, at least among this area's Maya, lasts most of the month. On November 20, it's the Mexican Revolution; on December 1 the new President takes office; on December 8 it's the Immaculate Conception; December 12 is Virgin of Guadalupe Day; then Christmas, both the gringo one on the 25th and the traditional one on January 6th; and the New Year, beyond which my Frutería San José calendar doesn't extend.

I'm about 4kms (2.5mile) from any settlement, but Saturday night, like the previous Saturday night, super-loud boom-boom music made it hard to sleep here on the ranch, and both Saturday nights the racket carried on until about 4AM. In all these little Maya towns if the decible level isn't deafening and 4AM isn't reached, those paying the fellow with the synthesizer, amplifier and big speakers feel cheated.

Early Sunday morning when the noise finally abated, the silence came as such a relief that it seemed to have substance, like honeysuckle fragrance deep in a June night, or warm honey on the skin. "Thanks," I said to it.

Often during these deep-night periods of waking, I lie thinking about the contents and style of essays normally presented in this spot, but that early Sunday morning the pure, soothing silence brought with it this thought: Silence is so perfect and nurturing that maybe these essays are like boom-boom music, my saying stuff that just as well might be left unsaid.

The idea has been bouncing around my mind lately because I've been correcting typos and other problems with my book Natchez Naturalist Newsletter, which people usually tell me is my best. It was written during my hermit days in the woods of southwestern Mississippi, and I have to agree about it's being my best, if only because nearly everything I've written since then has been paraphrasing what was said then with more spontaneity and immediacy.

With this notion rumbling in my head, one day an email from Chris of Louisiana drifted in, carrying a poem by Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man," which a friend of hers had copied to her, because it reminded her of something I'd written. In a way, it was one of my thoughts bouncing back to me, but in a form stated much earlier by Stevens with his profoundly more developed art and genius. It read:

One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow, and have been cold a long time to behold the juniper shagged with ice, the spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow and, nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.

I felt good reading those words, and it felt good that Chris had sent the poem to me, and that her friend had sent it to her, and that that friend had had to receive it from someone else... feelings and thoughts sparking from one thinking, feeling being to another like electrical discharges among nerves in a brain, as consciousness defines and realizes itself. It all resonates with the concept of The One Thing I keep talking about, who examines Herself with input from us physical entities serving as Her nerve endings.

Beneath the mosquito net just before dawn last Sunday, then, with all those thoughts marinating, I decided that maybe it's OK to keep sending my thoughts into golden silence. OK, if only because once in a blue moon what I say nudges someone to send me a poem with thoughts and feelings from another place, another time, another dimension of thinking and feeling, and that maybe the poem will even remind me, as often I need to be reminded, of the exquisite goal of being he who... nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.